The Politics of the Peace Corps

Abstract

The Politics of the Peace Corps David Burner (bio) Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman. All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. vii + 306 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $27.95. Fritz Fischer. Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. vii + 239 pp. Notes and index. $27.95. Elizabeth Hoffman has given more than a critically sophisticated history of the Peace Corps and of the volunteerist commitments that at the same time moved contingents of people in other countries. (Australian youth, acting outside of government, had beat the Peace Corps by several years, and the Canadians purposely got a program going just before that of their southern neighbor.) All You Need is Love is a sensitive and rounded study of the cultural and intellectual phenomena and contradictions of the age. One of the most interesting portions of the book discusses the ethos that at the dawn of the sixties motivated Peace Corps volunteers and their counterparts abroad. It drew upon a rendering of existential philosophy that in place of a formal system of ethics prompts individuals to find and create their identity through active involvement in the world. The result may be proportionate to the difficulty of the action. The author centers on this way of thinking as it inspired Peace Corps volunteers. But a whole history is to be told of the humane ethos of self-discovery in action and community as it also appeared in the early Students for a Democratic Society as well as in the Mississippi civil rights movement. The early Peace Corps, then, embodied a persuasion at radical odds both with Soviet and Maoist ideology and with the left politics that later were to define race, ethnicity, and gender as ultimate categories of self-identity and political discourse. The Peace Corps was founded in a belief that human beings should be concerned for one another. The idea did, of course, include the notion that participation would bring self-definition and fulfillment to the volunteer: yet that is a realm of self-concern that is ordinarily ranked as virtuous. But you cannot sell Congress and the opportunistic portions of the public on the [End Page 491] notion that the government should—even inexpensively—do anything for anyone for no reason beyond the doing. Nor can you quickly sell the public on the idea that Americans should undergo discomfort, or that they are capable of it. All You Need is Love quotes an inquiry from one State Department official: “We feel confident that it is not the intention that Americans should have no special privileges . . . and should live on African standards” (p. 65). That particular query the supporters of the program could dispose of as abruptly as it deserved. The larger problem was that of reconciling to national goals the altruistic ambitions of the Peace Corps. At first, the reconciliation was clear enough. The founders, notably President Kennedy and the first director, Sargent Shriver, were aware that in building good will toward the United States, the effort would be a counterpoise to Communist influence in the Third World. To that extent, the Peace Corps was in accord with the Kennedy policy that combined militancy toward the Communists with some openness even toward the nonaligned nations hated by the American right. At the same time, the Peace Corps could make its contribution to the waging of the Cold War only insofar as it remained aloof from the vocabulary of that combat. Most important was that it refuse any information gathering that cold warriors might wish it to do. Possessing with some notable exceptions a fairly benign dedication to a democratic development of society and economics, foreign as well as American, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations could allow the Peace Corps to forego such combative activities. In the disastrous years of the nation’s extended war in Vietnam, however, the American left—a logical source of volunteers and support for the Peace Corps—became accustomed to seeing all policy coming from Washington as prosecuting the Cold War. They also decided that the Western objectives in that war were...