Executive Order 10924: Peace Corps

Impact

While Executive Order 10924 opened the way for the start of the Peace Corps, neither the executive order nor Congress's Peace Corps Act set the table for the agency. Both delegated that duty to Sargent Shriver, the new director. “Sarge,” a well-traveled Chicago businessman with a Yale law degree, proved to be a buoyant, shrewd, hard-driving organizer and a galvanizing leader. Having advised the president to issue Executive Order 10924, Shriver used Kennedy's and his own charisma to recruit a high-powered administrative board and hundreds of tireless volunteers for his staff. Shriver, aided by Vice President Johnson, who was equally impatient with endless protocol of Capitol Hill, kept the Peace Corps outside the organizational charts of the Agency for International Development and established it as a semiautonomous agency of the Department of State. The Peace Corps then won the approval of Congress and procured a budget of $30 million in contingency funds.

Meanwhile, Shriver had started designing and promoting the agency. Size, speed, and agility were key images in creating and publicizing the Peace Corps. The large scale would impress Congress as well as host countries and would persuade young people to commit themselves to this epic venture. Speed would convey the youthful vigor of the new frontier and the distain of the program for fearful hesitation and strangling red tape. “Our country and our times have had plenty of experience with programs that were too little too late” (Shriver, 1963, p. 700). The Peace Corps would be neither, but flaws would follow from the haste and the magnitude of the agency's birth.

With advertising companies donating their services and his staff developing public relations, Shriver launched a publicity campaign that depicted the gratifications to be found in hard work, daring, and self-sacrifice. Ads featured a shovel and slogans such as “The toughest job you'll ever love” and “The human care package.” The mud hut stood as an icon of the mission. Within months, half of the country could identify the Peace Corps and its purposes, and youth were applying by the thousands. In that sense, the Peace Corps grew out of popular demand. By June a training-selection program was ready and waiting for the 1961 college graduates. When Congress approved the Peace Corps in September, hundred of volunteers were already serving abroad.

The volunteers, an elite 20 percent of all applicants, were generally white, middle-class, college graduates; nearly 85 percent were younger than twenty-five years old. Women made up 40 percent of the corps, and despite intense recruiting efforts, minorities represented fewer than 10 percent of the early classes. The rigorous sixteen weeks of “boot camp” combined academic, psychological, and physical training, including the daunting Outward Bound Program. Many volunteers complained about the overdoses of pro-America and anti-Communist propaganda courses, the stress induced by constant psychological evaluations, and the lack of practical training for teaching. The instruction did not always fit the needs they faced, but the volunteers received ten times the language training and twice the medical training as their counterparts in other countries.

While the image showed Peace Corps volunteers living in the wild and building bridges, most of them were teachers because that was the most available and often the most needed job. Many of them lived comfortably, some even with servants that depended on them for jobs. Based on numbers, the Peace Corps impact was huge. By 1961 America had 2,816 people serving, while Canada had 100 and England had 85. By 1966 the number had grown to nearly 14,000, supported by a budget of over $104 million. Nearly fifty countries were hosting the volunteers.

The Peace Corps paid for its size and haste but would incrementally improve its selection, training, and placement of volunteers. The well-intentioned program also may have suffered from an idealism that needed a harder look at realities. The effective volunteers, however, learned to accept the difference between program aspirations and in-field realities. Just because they meant well did not mean they would be loved or successful. Volunteers soon realized their host countries' people and problems were too complicated and complex for instant, friendly relationships and quick remedies. American policies sometimes seemed to thwart their work. By the late 1960s, for example, many of the volunteers, like young people back home, could not reconcile an America that burned villages (in Vietnam) with a Peace Corps that wanted to build them. Their numbers dropped from 11,210 in 1966 to 5,650 in 1969. They would grow again, especially after 1989 when the former cold war adversaries Poland, China, and Russia started to request volunteers.

In retrospect, the Peace Corps can point to achievements in education, medicine, and infrastructures that continue to serve appreciative host countries. The agency can also celebrate what it did for its volunteers. In the mid-1990s there were 145,000 returnees; 94 percent said they would do it again and recommend it to a friend. As volunteers, they balanced America's power with its moral and humanitarian impulse. In coming home, they brought with them exactly what the founders had hoped for: a deeper understanding and appreciation of other countries, cultures, and peoples. They fostered a new sensitive rhetoric that condemned negative terms such as “third world” and “natives.” They advanced a resistance to racial and ethnic stereotyping. Subsequently, the returnees assumed leadership roles in all walks of life, including politics, education, business, and journalism. Their ranks include the Democratic Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, the CNBC anchor Chris Matthews, the Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and the Levi-Strauss board chair Robert Haas.

The Peace Corps mission continued to thrive in the early twenty-first century, fulfilling President Kennedy's dream and perpetuating the vision voiced by one former corpsman: “If the right men and women are chosen—persons of understanding, imagination, and courage—the Peace Corps' moment in history can become a long and valuable one” (Ashabranner, p. 381).