There is a lot in a name. Shakespeare to the contrary notwithstanding, The Experiment in International Living is lucky in its name. Experiment is a strong word. We learn from an experiment--we learn what works and what doesn’t work.
Those of us who went out from school into The Experiment learned much more than you learn in any science laboratory. For this was an experiment with our lives. And it worked. It changed us. And it taught us some important truths--about people and about peace and about change in the world. It taught us that any person can change.
Let me say that I was the first Shriver scholar, and it was an experiment: Donald Watt put me down in a German family, on an Experiment scholarship; they didn’t know any English and I didn’t know any German. Looking back over the 30 years since then I can list many lessons The Experiment taught. But they come down to three points: this is one world, the struggles in it are one war, and there’s one way to win it.
First, we learned by first-hand experience the reality of one world. This is a paradox because the first thing we did was discover another country, another culture, another world. We penetrated the barriers of language and customs and became a part- -a full participant--in a different way of life. We learned the language because we had to. We did not what we wanted to do but what the people of our host country did. We sang their songs, played their games, danced their dances. We walked or rode bicycles as they did. We saw the world through their eyes.
And doing this we discovered the common humanity of the human race--the essential equality of all cultures and all men. That phrase “cultural equality” on its face seems to go against the facts of life. But so does the idea of human equality--until you see through the superficial differences to the inner spirit equally present in all men, The Experiment taught us to find and to respect that inner spirit in every culture. And it taught us this in a way we could never forget.
The other day the Prime Minister of Austria came to talk about the Peace Corps. I found I really could still sing his songs. I may not have been in tune but we were in tune with each other. When I was in Vienna with The Experiment a Viennese citizen stopped me on the street to ask directions; he explained that I looked Viennese. And the fact is I felt Viennese. This was a lot more of a feeling for Austria and Europe than my classmates got on their grand tour—the kind of tour that took them into Europe at the top, down through ten countries, three cathedrals and twenty bordellos and spewed them out through the boot of Italy. There was no special virtue in us; it was the situation and the relationship The Experiment put us in. We were not there on tour; we were not there to “observe.” We were not there to display or to sell the American way of life. We were there to work, to study and to live - -to learn- -to participate with the people.
In all this we discovered something more challenging: we discovered that we have common problems. And this is the second point: that there really is one world-wide war going on--in most places fortunately a peaceful struggle, in some a war fought with guns, but one war. This is what Wendell Willkie reported in his famous book One World. After his trip around the globe in 1943, in the midst of war, Willkie wrote that: “Men and women all over the world are on the march, physically, intellectually, and spiritually. After centuries of ignorant and dull compliance, hundreds of millions of people…have opened the books…. They are beginning to know that men’s welfare throughout the world is interdependent. They are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism within their own society than in the society of nations. The big house on the hill surrounded by mud huts has lost its awesome charm. “All around the world,” he said, “there are some ideas which millions and millions of men hold in common, almost as much as if they lived in the same town.
That is what we found in 1935 in The Experiment. It is what hundreds and thousands of Americans have found out in The Experiment in the last three decades. And it is even more the case today. The modern American version of the house on the hill surrounded by mud huts is reversed, but the problem is the same: cities full of slums surrounded by comfortable suburbs. A book on India expressed shock at the situation in Bombay, where educated upper-class Indians lived in beautiful homes on Malabar Hill and drove to modern office buildings over a marine outer drive that sheltered them from ever seeing the mass of poverty-stricken citizens of Bombay. But look around us all over this country. In this city, which drive do you take, the East Side or the West Side? How much of the Other American do we experience firsthand? We do live in the same town, whether its name is Bombay or New York. The separation of rich and poor is much the same and the consequences are the same, whether the lack of peaceful change explodes in violence in Vietnam or the Dominican Republic or the district of Watts; whether outside agitators are there to compound the trouble or not. If every Communist and Ku Klux Klan and Black Muslim in the world took a one-day trip to Mars, the problems here on earth and in our cities would remain about the same.
So it is one continuing war, this struggle for human rights and economic opportunity and peace, whether it was in Nazi Germany or conquered China or colonial Africa and Asia a generation ago -- or is in Santo Domingo, Saigon or Saint Louis today, whether it is being waged by the Indians in the Andes or in the United States--or on the Indian subcontinent- -whether it is colored people seeking an end to racial discrimination or poor people seeking an end to poverty.
To be sure it’s a strange, mixed-up war, much more complex than the struggles in the 19th century, where there were front lines or barricades. The network of struggles is all around us, the ground of battle is under our feet. There’s no front and no rear--and victories are hard to measure.
What we are seeking is victory not for one nation or group of nations, but victory for the process of persuasion, victory for the process of peaceful change, victory for the idea of government by the consent of the governed.
There will be no easy victory for that idea in Vietnam, and there will be no easy victory for that process in Harlem or Birmingham or Watts. We cannot win the war in Vietnam and lose the war in Watts. But if we find the way to win in Watts we will have a better chance of finding the way to peace and freedom in Saigon.
This is the third main lesson that The Experiment taught: that there is a way to bring about peaceful change and it works. This way is by focusing on people, by making people the target, by reaching the minds and hearts of people, and by doing all this through the direct participation of the people.
In the long run, General Westmoreland and all the armies fighting there cannot win the war in Vietnam for the minds and hearts of people any more than Chief Parker and the police can win the war in Watts. Guns are sometimes the only stop-gap possible, and we need a world police. But a strategy of peace must be based on the mobilization of people to solve the basic problems dividing and frustrating them. And such a mobilization requires the maximum possible participation of the people--and the use of volunteers on the widest possible scale.
On a significant but still pilot scale has The Experiment demonstrated that the vicious circle of alienation can be broken if people will cross cultural boundaries to meet each other, to listen and talk to each other, to live and work with each other. Above all, the communication must be two-way. The foreign volunteer, the outside social worker, the policeman from downtown, must lose their paternalism. They must above all learn--learn about the complexities of the culture in which they are working, learn what the people in that culture feel and think and suffer and hope for.
The Experiment has proved that this can be done. The Peace Corps, now with 12, 000 Volunteers in service, is proving that it can be done. So what do you do with an Experiment that works? You apply the lessons learned on the full scale required, in our own society and in the world.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant, has been so impressed with the potentiality of people volunteering to work for peaceful change that he has called for the universal adoption of this idea. He recently called upon everyone everywhere to “consider that one or two years of work for the cause of development either in a faraway country or in a depressed area of his own community is a normal part of one’s education.”
Let’s join in making that call--and let’s join in responding to it. The Peace Corps is doing its part. It is seeking to grow in numbers to the level of 20, 000 Volunteers requested by President Johnson so as to be able to meet as many as possible of the increasing requests for Volunteers from other countries.
The Experiment, too, I am happy to see, is expanding its operations. And I am delighted and honored by The Experiment’s new fellowship program, which will enable outstanding participants in community action programs in America to participate in similar programs abroad. Peace Corps Volunteers with whom they live and work will benefit by the insights brought by these Volunteers from our home front; and The Experiment fellows will bring back with them new perspectives on the work to be done at home. This is an excellent way to spread the idea of volunteering--and to demonstrate that this is in fact one war.
But tonight I want to propose a new move in this war--a Reverse Peace Corps--under which foreign volunteers would work in our communities or teach in our schools. This idea of an Exchange Peace Corps to America is in the air now the way the Peace Corps was in 1960. It is a natural application, in reverse, of everything we have learned in the Peace Corps--and of everything you have done in The Experiment. Foreign volunteers serving here will bring the world into our classrooms, our local programs, our homes; they will contribute new ideas and be a source of stimulation, as our Volunteers are abroad; through them we will learn about other peoples; and they will learn about us and learn about the process of peaceful change. The future leaders and community workers and teachers of other nations need the same kind of first-hand experience crossing cultural boundaries that we need. They, too, will discover it is one world and one war.
When I was on the Board of Education in Chicago, I wanted to get African and Asian and Latin American cultures taught in our schools. But we didn’t have the teachers. In 1963 when I last talked to President Nkrumah about the Peace Corps I asked him to send us his Peace Corps in return--to send us Ghanaians who would teach our students about Africa, The Peace Corps is a success in Ghana and that government is asking for more volunteers. But Mr. Nkrumah has attacked us in his recent book. So I repeat the invitation: If he doesn’t believe we understand Ghana, let him send us some volunteers who will enable us to understand first hand.
We already have five volunteers from India working here, alongside of VISTA Volunteers. One is right here at the Henry Street Settlement House. They taught Hindi and Indian studies to Peace Corps Volunteers going to India; now they will work for a year in American community action programs; and then they will go home to apply what they’ve learned in their own community action program.
Several years ago I asked the Superintendent of Schools in Chicago: If we can get 150 teachers of Spanish and Latin culture from Mexico or Argentina, how many could you use in Chicago? He said, “I’ll take all 150.”
The State of California now has a law requiring the teaching of a foreign language to all students in the fifth and sixth grades. Most schools have chosen Spanish. But where are they going to get the thousands of Spanish teachers they need? We send thousands of Peace Corps Volunteers to Latin America. Why can’t we arrange to receive a thousand Spanish-teaching volunteers from Latin America--not only for California but for New York and Illinois and other states?
It is time to try this Reverse Peace Corps on a large scale. Let me say one more thing about peace and war. Here is the final paradox: that it is only by waging this struggle for change as a war that we can hope for peace. I am glad that President Johnson called for a “War” on Poverty. With that name we cannot forget the urgency of large-scale action. The logic of a war is that all the necessary resources are mobilized.
Here, too, we can learn something from The Experiment. The Experiment had courage--courage to begin, courage to continue even under the shadow of World War, courage to go to Germany when that was unpopular, courage to go to Yugoslavia when that was unpopular, courage to send young Americans to live in Russia and to bring Russians here when that is still controversial. We need this kind of courage at home and in the world—courage to accept controversy as part of the price of change; courage to accept the direct participation of people, to invite the maximum possible participation of the people--of the poor and disfranchised; and courage to volunteer to live and to work with and to learn from the people--whether in Harlem or in Santo Domingo, whether in Salisbury or Saigon or Chicago.
Father Daniel Berrigan, a poet and a pioneer in overseas service, has described the final courage that we need. “What if we had the courage to summon that Other America to face the Other World,” he says. ''Is there indeed a more deprived man anywhere, to stand before the mirror of humanity, than a Mississippi Negro? Or for that matter, a New York or a Jersey City Negro? . . . Would not our mirror show, in comparison with the Other World of Asia or Africa or Latin America, not a contrast, but a horrifying and exact counterpart; filthy street by street, sordid room by sordid room, wasted life by wasted life!’
Do we have this kind of courage to face ourselves and to act on what we see? If we do, then we can hope to win the war in our own society and bring closer victory for freedom throughout the world.
Perhaps after all our far-flung modern struggles are not so different from the vast battles Tolstoy described in War and Peace. The fight there seemed disorganized and disconnected, each sector a war to itself. But Tolstoy showed that it was one battle--that a mysterious tide went back and forth, with each sally and retreat, each success or failure, affecting the whole line. Each Experiment that works, each Peace Corps project or Community Action project that succeeds, each Job Corps graduate that moves up from hopelessness, each city that moves forward, each example of people solving their problems through their own participation--each victory may be small in itself but it affects the whole tide of human freedom.
All of which is to thank The Experiment for giving me such an early education. You didn’t turn out a Tolstoy but you gave me a good education in international living. And I want to thank you, too, for continuing and expanding The Experiment. It works. Its principles must now be applied on a thousand fronts of this one war--in order to make the common dream of people all over the world, the dream of one world, a lasting reality.
