Many of you here today are businessmen. And I am happy to see some of you are lawyers too.
Many of you are suspicious of big government -- of grandiose public schemes. You are worried, as I am worried, that we may at times, be in danger of losing sight of the need for personal initiative and individual enterprise -- these ideals helped to make this country great and are major sources of its strength today.
If these are among your concerns, you need not worry about the Peace Corps.
For the Peace Corps is an example of free enterprise at work. It is a working model of some of the most basic and fundamental American ideas and beliefs. First, the Peace Corps is based upon the individual -- his freedom, his initiative and his responsibility. We take Americans, give them three months intensive training and set them to work in a foreign land. They do not live in a group or in a barracks. They are sometimes alone, in a strange village. They decide how hard they will work, what projects they will undertake, where they will travel. No one stands over them supervising their every move. No one stifles their creativity or enterprise. They receive enough money to live, are sent to do a job for America and are expected to do that job.
We operate this way because we have faith in the American individual -- his skill and his dedication. We do it because we believe in personal responsibility -- not in corporate anonymity or bureaucratic protection. And this faith has been justified.
Second, the Peace Corps exemplifies and even generates private enterprise. We have no organization men, no protected corporation jobs, no pensions, no coffee breaks. We place the Volunteer down in a new environment and say to him: See what you can come up with. And we often find that they have become the Wright Brothers or Edisons or Fords of the world in which they are living.
Take Volunteer Ron Atwater who works in a small village in rural Colombia. When he arrived, almost two years ago, he found the Indians making decorative, useful woolen ponchos called ruanas. Merchants from Bogota came occasionally and irregularly to the village, bought a few ruanas for $1.00 each, and resold them in city stores for $8.00. Seeing a real chance to elevate the life of the village, Ron improved the dyes, organized a marketing system, convinced the Indians to schedule production and meet their commitments, and established quality control. Business boomed. Village income doubled, and then tripled. The project came to the attention of some Americans, including the head of Neiman Marcus in Dallas.
As a result imports to the United States have been organized and Lenguazaque -- the Colombian village -- is very much in business.
Jim McKay is another example of Peace Corps enterprise in action. Jim was a construction engineer from New York. When he arrived in West Pakistan he discovered that workers on the new hospital were laying about 125 bricks per man, per day. He organized a training course, demonstrated the use of a trowel, and showed the local workers it was possible to lay 125 bricks in five minutes. Under his direction additional trowels were made by a local blacksmith. As a result the hospital -- which would have take months to build -- was constructed in a few weeks.
In Arequipa, Peru, Jesse Hohns -- a chemist -- has found a way to extract lanolin from the wash water of sheep. This lanolin he has used in a face cream which has found wide acceptance among the local Indians, Indian sheep raisers haver turned the discovery into a thriving small business.
These examples could be multiplied a hundred times -- from Malaya to Tanganyika; Brazil to Nepal, young Americans are demonstrating in a forceful, intimate, personal way the power of free enterprise to advance the hopes and the welfare of a people.
Third, the Peace Corps itself is run in the cost-conscious demanding traditions of American business. It does what it says it will do, on time, and effectively. When we began two years ago we promised that we would recruit and send abroad trained and dedicated Americans -- that we would do it on schedule, at the lowest cost and with a minimum of personnel. We’ve done that.
We said we would recruit Americans of all ages from every walk of life, select them on merit alone, assign them regardless of race, color, or creed. And we’ve done it.
We promised that no one would go overseas unless he had a specific skill, was assigned to a specific job and was specifically requested by the host country. This we have done.
We said that our Volunteers would be stripped of all the usual privileges and immunities of overseas Americans, that they would live in local housing, eat local food, and receive no pay, just a living allowance high enough to let them live as their local counterparts are living.
This is exactly how they live. There has been no upward creep in standards or privileges as time passed. In fact, we have reduced allowances and shortened vacations.
When the Peace Corps legislation was first introduced we said there was no need for the amendments offered by conservative Congressman -- amendments which would have restricted us to 285 Washington employees and 16 passenger automobiles the first year.
In fact, in our first year we never had 285 Washington employees. We never had a passenger automobile, except one “Lark” station wagon, which we got by mistake and got rid of pronto. We don’t even have any parking spaces.
We have today, to the best of my knowledge, the lowest ratio of administrative employees to field workers of any organization in the United States -- public or private. In fact, today we have fewer people working for us than we did in June. That’s why our top staff people work twelve hours a day, often seven days a week. They do it because they believe in what they are doing, just as our Volunteers are believers.
We said, more than two years ago, that the total cost of recruiting, training, transporting and maintaining a Volunteer -- and that means all costs from my salary up -- would be $9,000 a year. A few weeks ago our accountants told us the post per Volunteer per year was $9,079.99. This is a record which any company could be proud of -- and it was made in an enterprize which never had any field experience and which was doing something no one had ever done before.
In short, we said when we began that we would not create a burgeoning bureaucracy, and that our standards would not soften, and that we would compete against any business firm for toughness and efficiency of operation.
This has been done. Our books are open to anyone who would like to make his own judgment.
Fourth, we are bringing the know-how and the limitless potential of American enterprise to bear on the problems of development in the southern half of the globe.
I am not speaking merely of the many business executives who work for the Peace Corps -- although we have many of them. For we have highly successful industrial managers and heads of firms directing a number of our country programs abroad. We took our chief of selection on loan from Standard Oil, our head of Public Affairs from Westinghouse Broadcasting, and our Associate Director for Management from an important import-export firm. In fact I had a little business experience myself, running a good-sized office building in Chicago.
But more significant than business working in the Peace Corps, is the Peace Corps working in business.
In Chile, and in the Dominican Republic, Volunteers are helping private citizens to establish credit, marketing and retailing cooperatives. We have sent trained people to Peru to expand and modernize handicraft centers, providing local industry in places where previously the people had to rely on subsistence farming to stay alive.
Throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa we have programs in which Volunteers have had to demonstrate the importance of cash crops, and show how well-managed chicken farms can make money.
In several countries -- particularly in Latin America -- we are establishing savings and loan associations and credit unions -- demonstrating the urgent need for capital accumulation and investment.
We are, together with the Cooperative League of America -- organizing marketing and producing cooperatives as a means of increasing the economic potential of the individual farmer or retailer.
In other words the Peace Corps is not preaching the value of free enterprise, it is proving it. We are not engaged in ideological debates but in practical demonstration -- not abstract discussions -- but concrete results. Thus the villagers and workers of dozens of lands are learning what free enterprise can mean to them in the most direct and meaningful way -- through experiencing its power to improve their lives.
We have done a great deal of this kind of work. We would like to do much more.
but we don’t have the people.
Throughout the developing world there is an urgent need for men with management and marketing skills -- for engineers and bankers -- executives and accountants. We have hundreds of requests from countries that want men like these to help them develop industries and institutions -- to help them move into the modern world of industry and finance and marketing.
We cannot answer those requests. Because the sad fact of the matter is that few Americans with business and management skills are volunteering for the Peace Corps.
There are lots of people willing to make speeches and write articles about the necessity for encouraging private enterprise abroad. There are too few who are willing to go out and do the job.
There has been some talk recently about the need for a businessman’s Peace Corps. We already have a Peace Corps for businessmen. We have an established, proved and tested organization that is read and anxious to train businessmen for work in the developing countries.
All they have to do is Volunteer.
The rules are few and simple. First, learn the language of the people with whom you work. Second, make up your mind that the work of developing nations is worth the price of personal sacrifice. Third, anchor yourself in the customs and traditions of the country where you are serving. Fourth, take your standard of living down near enough to the local level to make it possible to mix freely and easily with the people—get down to eye level with them. Fifth, believe in the power of personal integrity, humility and determination.
Right here and now I issue a standing invitation to American industry and business: send us skilled men who are willing to work under difficult conditions among the people of a foreign land to demonstrate through deeds and accomplishments the enormous motive power of free enterprise. Send us these men and we will train them and put them to work in productive projects overseas -- projects which will make full use of their skills and experience -- projects which will, in fact tax their abilities, imagination and energy more rigorously than ever before.
The Peace Corps door is open to all those who are willing to enter.
I also call upon American enterprise to adopt policies which will make it possible for top flight men to Volunteer without loss of position or chance for advancement. When America went to war, those who left to fight for their country were assured of position, rank and advancement when they returned. This was the least we could do for those who were willing to give their lives for America. Today, we are also engaged in a war -- a long, arduous unspectacular war to demonstrate to an inquiring and restless world that economic freedom and progress walk hand in hand, that man’s material wants can be satisfied without stripping him of spiritual and personal dignity. Those who go out to wage these battles are entitled to the same considerations.
There is much that can be done.
Corporate policies should be established to permit older persons to retire into Peace Corps service without loss of benefits or security. When most of us were young 40 was middle aged. Today modern medical science has made a man of sixty and more who can combine vigor and good health with a wealth of experience and know how. These, after all are the men who built today’s America. We need them to help tomorrow’s world.
Business should permit young men to take leaves of absence for Peace Corps service without forfeiting benefits, opportunities, seniority or advancement. In fact this is a negative way of putting it. Companies should not only permit -- they should encourage and stimulate the best of its younger men to go overseas in the Peace Corps. In so doing you will be serving your country and the ideas you believe in.
And by so doing you will get back, after two years’ service, men who have had the experience of working with important responsibilities in foreign lands, amid alien cultures and peoples. This experience will, in the long run, make them better executives and make companies which sent them more vigorous institutions, better able to cope with today’s growing challenges of international markets and world-wide competition.
These are some of the reasons why I believe that the Peace Corps is a credit to the free enterprise system which produced it. It is based on the most enduring of all American values -- the belief in the limitless creative power of the free individual. It is proof, if proof were needed, that deeply committed individuals, prepared to work and sacrifice, can have a profound impact on the most difficult and intransigent of problems. And through people like this, through our Volunteers, we are discovering that we do not have to be defensive or apologetic about the American way of life. We do not have to hide our values or our beliefs. We do not need to be afraid of propaganda or of enemies.
We can be proud of what we have done in this country -- proud of the values which have created this nation. And if committed Americans carry these values abroad, we will find that our product is what the world wants.
In the past two years I have traveled 300,000 miles to thirty countries -- and I have seen the truth of this.
From countries in which, only a few years ago, “Yankee Go Home” was a popular slogan and our Vice President Nixon was being stoned and spat upon, we are receiving requests for this new breed of “Yankees” which far exceed our capacity to deliver.
Recently, in the Dominican Republic, a group of young Dominicans were painting the slogan “Yankee Go Home” on a stone wall, while a Volunteer watched quietly. When they had finished, he said, “I guess that means I’ll have to go home.” The leader of the group turned to him in dismay and said: “No, we mean Yankees, not the Peace Corps.”
These Volunteers are the “new Yankees.” The men and women who are proving that the great American traditions of individual initiative, of personal responsibility, of deep commitment to the ideal of building a better society, have not been lost in an era of bigness, affluence and a hunger for security. These Yankees do not believe that the problems of the world are someone else’s problems. They are their problems -- and they intend to solve them.
This type of American is, I believe, illuminated by a letter which a Peace Corps Volunteer wrote to his parents shortly before he was killed in an airplane accident in Colombia.
“Should it come to it,” wrote young David Crozier, “I would rather give my life trying to help someone than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them.”
After his death, when his parents sent me this letter, they added a postscript. They wrote: “Mr. Shriver, we are not sorry David joined the Peace Corps.”
And last week David’s sister entered training for the Peace Corps. This ray of light illuminates the kind of America which we have always believed in -- an America whose ideals and philosophy, dedication and commitment, institutions and individuals are equal to the challenges and opportunities which face us in this, the most dangerous and hopeful era of man.
