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When John F. Kennedy urged Americans in 1961 to ask "what you can do for your country," young idealists flocked to join the newly formed Peace Corps. Designed by Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to help the nations of the so-called third world replicate American-style prosperity and democracy, the Peace Corps sent out volunteers to apply traditional pioneer virtues of ingenuity and hard work to the "new frontiers" of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Based on newly available records, Making Them Like Us explores the dissonance between the straightforward economic development envisioned by Peace Corps leaders and the complicated realities---ill-defined jobs, entrenched bureaucracies, and resentful hosts---encountered by the volunteers who served during the agency's first decade. Trained for a spartan existence, many volunteers found themselves living in well-appointed houses and even employing servants. Prepared to dig ditches or build houses, more than half served as English teachers or worked in offices. Expecting to forge egalitarian friendships, many found themselves regarded as tools of American imperialism. The author describes how most Peace Corps workers eventually became alienated from the lofty aims and liberal ideology of their leaders and revised their goals to fit the specific needs of their host communities, returning to the United States with a more pragmatic, nuanced perspective on how cultures interact.

Contending that the volunteer experience during the 1960s presaged the emergence of multiculturalism in American society, Fischer demonstrates that Peace Corps workers acted as harbingers of change less for the countries they had intended to help than for their own culture's perspective on a complex and diverse international landscape.

 

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Kennedy, the Peace Corps, and Liberal International Development 2. The New Pioneers 3. The Other Side of Training 4. Shaky Relations: The Peace Corps Leadership and the Volunteers 5. The Realities of the Twentieth-Century Frontier: Living in the Third World 6. "Which One Is Really the Underdeveloped Country?": Working in the Third World 7. Encountering the "Other": Relationships in the Third World Conclusion: From Development to Multiculturalism

Introduction

By the 1960s, Americans had built for themselves a very complicated "cultural prison." Americans clung to both a mythical vision of the past and a liberal vision of the future. On the international stage, this cultural background helped create a commitment to "develop" the rest of the world. The Peace Corps, more than any other policy or program, symbolized the desire of the United States to apply liberal ideas and American experience to mold the world's future. In looking at the Peace Corps experience, we can gain valuable insights into American culture and its interaction with the world in the late twentieth century.

The American people have always sensed the importance of the Peace Corps in American culture. The agency reached the apex of its popularity and importance in its first decade, the 1960s. The Harris Poll found that Americans ranked the Peace Corps as the "third most popular act of the Kennedy administration." A quarter of a million Americans applied to be Peace Corps volunteers during the 1960s, and over 70,000 served as volunteers during that decade. Hundreds of newspaper articles and dozens of books about the fledgling agency appeared in the decade, constantly bringing it to the American consciousness.

Until very recently, historians have not given the Peace Corps such a central role, and they have never examined the relationship between the agency and larger ideas within American liberal culture. Since the 1960s stands as the central decade of the Cold War, most historians of American international relations have placed the Peace Corps firmly within the Cold War framework. When they have discussed the Peace Corps at all, they have usually stuffed it into traditional Cold War explanations of post-World War II foreign policy. In the textbook version, the Peace Corps served as "an instrument in the Cold War." Diplomatic historians admit that the Peace Corps seemed more "constructive" than mere Cold War propaganda agencies such as the United States Information Agency (USIA), but "even though the Peace Corps was the program carrying the least Cold Warriorist character, the Peace Corps became part of the game."

These historians focus on the Peace Corps only as an institution, rather than examining how the agency implemented policy. They examine Kennedy's ideas and rarely look beyond Kennedy toward the early administrators of the Peace Corps such as Sargent Shriver. But, as many scholars of American international affairs have begun to realize, "Relations are far broader, more complex, and above all, far more interesting than simply matters of government policy." Merely looking at policy statements by governmental leaders misses too much that is interesting and important.

In the case of the Peace Corps, we cannot understand the relations between Americans and the peoples in the rest of the world without exploring the implementation of policy. To study the Peace Corps only as it exists in Washington is to miss the entire point of the agency. As one former Peace Corps staffer put it recently, "The real work of the Peace Corps is centered in the field. Most of what goes on in Washington matters little to the volunteers' daily existence." This book is the first history devoted entirely to the study of the volunteers, those who actually instituted policy. Taking advantage of a huge wealth of previously unexamined primary sources found at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the University of Michigan library, and the National Archives, this book seeks to understand the volunteers as ambassadors of American culture in the 1960s. The Peace Corps volunteers were tasked with putting the policy into practice---they were forced to confront the relationship between American ideas about the world and the reality of the world itself.

During the years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, American liberalism reached the height of its power and influence. The specific tenet of liberalism concerned with America's relations with the world, liberal developmentalism, "entered its golden age in the early 1960s under John F. Kennedy's patronage." This book focuses on the early and late 1960s to examine the birth of that golden age. We look to the beginnings to understand an entire era, an era that for many continues to this day. Looking at the Peace Corps in the 1960s helps us understand the fate and progress of American liberalism in the whole period of the late twentieth century.

This book argues that, in the end, the volunteers rejected the ideas of liberal international development so central to American culture and policy of the early 1960s. Volunteers' experiences overseas forced them to break down the bars of the cultural prison. Their relationship with the Peace Corps leadership, their living conditions, their work, and their relationship with the people they were working with all convinced them to reevaluate many previously held cultural assumptions. This reevaluation created a new understanding of the third world and helped point American culture in a new direction in its understanding of other cultures.

Such cultural interactions have recently become a central concern for many historians of American foreign relations. Culture is a protean term, with many different meanings. Drawing from the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, these historians have defined culture as an "integrated and coherent system of symbols, values and beliefs?" American culture provided one such system of beliefs, a system that provided the framework within which volunteers worked. As this book will show, the Peace Corps drew heavily from certain aspects of this American cultural system, and the volunteers struggled to understand how this cultural understanding matched the realities of the real world.

These Peace Corps volunteers began their work as diplomats imbued with a set of American cultural ideas about the nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Americans in the early 1960s knew very little about what was universally referred to then as the "third world," "underdeveloped world," or "developing world." As one historian has so aptly concluded, the real definition of "third world" in the 1960s was "lands unfamiliar to Americans, even those making up the foreign policy elite."(12) Americans knew it was a place of battle with the Soviet Union and had absorbed a variety of images of it from magazines such as National Geographic. In these images, the people of developing countries were portrayed as living in a world that was "unchanging and more primitive than civilized." In the photographs in these magazines, "at many points there appear to be only two worlds---the traditional and the modern." For Americans, the underdeveloped world remained a mystery, a blank slate ready to be acted upon by American policymakers.

Further, the volunteers believed in the ideology of progress they saw depicted in the pages of National Geographic, which trumpeted the inexorable march of "progress from tradition to modernity" in the third world since World War II. Their job as volunteers, then, was to help promote this process of development. As discussed in chapter 1, American intellectuals and policymakers shared the view that development was a straightforward process, a task of moving people in the third world from 2 to 7 or 8 on a development scale of 1 to 10.

Kennedy's policymakers included this notion of straightforward development within the broader concept of "nation building," believing that the Peace Corps would be a principal participant in the process. Invented by the young minds in the Kennedy administration, this concept called for the United States to help third world nations "through the stormy times of economic infancy to economic and hence political maturity."

But neither Kennedy nor his closest advisers had a strong influence on the direction of the agency. Kennedy conceived of it as a new weapon to be used in the Cold War. But as he began work as president, he became preoccupied with other matters and lost interest in building the Peace Corps. The new agency used John F. Kennedy's image and charisma as a starting point, but Kennedy had little to do with setting its direction, a job that he and his top advisers allowed the first director of the agency, Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to take on.

Shriver, and the men he chose as his top lieutenants, designed the Peace Corps to be something completely new. They began with the general concept of "nation building" and invented a specific plan for accomplishing the task, in part by making Peace Corps volunteers into a 1960s version of the mythical American pioneer, helping the inhabitants of the third world conquer their own frontiers.

We meet our first volunteers in the second chapter. The Peace Corps leadership designed a training program that, although short, was designed to mold raw American youth into this new brand of American pioneer. From its heavy emphasis on Outward Bound to its reliance on the newest methods in social science, volunteers entered a training program that attempted to forge a tight-knit cadre of tough, like-minded recruits. A few volunteers lived up to this image, becoming "hero volunteers" or "supervolunteers." Scrutinizing their work delineates the ideal pioneer image and clarifies the intent the Peace Corps leadership had for the agency.

In the third chapter we see how cracks opened up between the volunteers and the Peace Corps leadership during training. From the beginning, many volunteers felt alienated from the leadership due to the training regimen and an overzealous program in psychological testing and selection. As chapter 4 points out, conflicts continued in the field as volunteers disagreed with the ideas of the Peace Corps leadership. That leadership never understood its own volunteers or the work they tried to accomplish. Often, they treated the volunteers as immature youths, creating a generation gap that mirrored American society during the 1960s. From political to religious issues, the Peace Corps leaders and the volunteers disagreed. The agency had special difficulties dealing with "unique" volunteers, be they women or volunteers from minority groups. Most volunteers ended up feeling alienated from the agency in some way or another. The result was an independent cadre of volunteers, open to crafting their own set of ideas about the third world and the people living there.

Upon arriving in the third world, most volunteers immediately learned the inappropriateness of American cultural preconceptions. The Peace Corps leadership, often referred to by volunteers as Peace Corps Washington, expected them to live a spartan existence, in isolated mud huts in the jungle, if necessary. Actually, many lived in comfortable houses, often employing servants and occasionally living in luxury. Some volunteers felt pangs of guilt because they failed to live up to their preconceived image of the life of a Peace Corps volunteer. Rather than finding their country and its people mired at 2 on the development scale, most volunteers placed their countries on a completely different scale, hovering somewhere near point Q. The living situation of volunteers forced them to abandon the notion of straightforward development.

As they worked, volunteers began to recraft a philosophy of how Americans should relate to the third world. Chapter 6 begins by exploring the unexpected working environment they encountered at their projects. Peace Corps leaders demanded constant toil from volunteers, who would earn friends for the United States and develop the third world by the sweat of their brow. The work of most volunteers failed to fit this description. More than half of the volunteers in the 1960s served as teachers, a job strikingly different from any work performed by mythic American pioneers. Even jobs seemingly better suited to the image, such as community development, failed to live up to that image. While on the job, nearly every volunteer dealt with tensions between a faith in universalist values and a desire to teach the locals something useful. After rejecting the image, the volunteers found two ways to justify their work. First, they decided their specific jobs were important for their own sakes----completing a specific task helped volunteers fill a role in their new society. Second, volunteers realized that through their work, they could get a better understanding of their hosts and begin to redefine American understandings of the third world.

Chapter 7 examines the relationship between the volunteers and their hosts. Many faced tension over how far they should push the locals to change. Peace Corps Washington believed volunteers would make friends easily, but many found any sort of positive interaction with their hosts next to impossible. Some never overcame the problems they had dealing with their local counterparts, and they could not resist the temptation to group their hosts into a negative stereotype.

In the end, the volunteers failed to resemble either Kennedy's vision or that of the founding leadership of the agency. Rather, they struggled to create a new way for Americans to interact with the third world. They never crafted a universal ideology for themselves---they were too independent for that. Yet, in, the end, new ideas emerged from the experiences of many volunteers. Democratic, egalitarian, individual, these ideas formed a different kind of understanding of how cultures interact. Volunteers developed a new way for Americans to understand the rest of the world. Their "ideology," purposefully ill defined, viewed the rest of the world in almost surrealistic terms. This new understanding had a slight impact on formal American foreign policy making, especially during the Carter administration. More importantly, it represented a profound shift in American cultural views of international and intercultural relations. With this new understanding, some Americans began to break down the walls of the "cultural prison" described by volunteer John Freivalds.

Many Americans feel the Peace Corps is a valuable program, yet they have difficulty explaining why. The idea strikes a positive chord in most, yet few know exactly what the agency does. Even the name contradicts itself, trumpeting peace in military terms: a warlike corps of soldiers. Analyzing these "soldiers" helps us to understand American cultural ideas about the rest of the world and international relations in the 1960s.

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