A year ago tonight, the Peace Corps was just six days old. And just a year ago, at your 1961 meeting, this association had the courage, the faith and the foresight to pledge its support to our fledging enterprise.
So, tonight I especially welcome the opportunity to participate in your Conference on Higher Education. It’s a pleasure to report that you backed a winner.
Three months ago I might have hesitated to make that statement. But when Barry Goldwater endorsed the Peace Corps, I knew we were home free. Do you remember his candid comment?
“I think the Peace Corps is beginning to remove the doubts from the doubters’ minds. I have been impressed with the quality of the young men and women that have been going into it. At first, I thought that it would be advanced work for a group of beatniks, but this is not so. As a businessman, I know that the two years overseas experience will be invaluable and rewarding. I’ll back it all the way.”
He has since been joined by the Republican Keynoter, Water Judd. Tomorrow I expect Charlie Halleck to announce that he has joined the majority of the Republican Party which voted for the Peace Corps when it was first proposed in the Congress. Most people don’t remember that fact -- that the majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for the Peace Corps last fall. They did, and it’s important. Their support made the Peace Corps a truly national enterprise -- not a partisan political endeavor.
The President’s Message to Congress establishing the Peace Corps called for a pool of trained Americans — volunteers to go overseas for the United States government, to help foreign countries meet their urgent needs for skilled manpower.
A particular kind of person was required. That person had to have the physical and intellectual capacity to cope with the demands of swiftly evolving economies, the dedication to put that capacity to work - and to keep it working - in remote villages, in mountain areas, in towns, in factories, and in the schools of dozens of struggling nations. For them, the “age of revolutions” would mean service abroad - the new frontier for international education. The job of the Peace Corps was tough. Some said it was impossible. Yet in the past year, the Peace Corps has recruited, selected, and trained more than 900 Volunteers. They are already at work in 12 countries.
By the end of this calendar year, we expect to have almost 5,000 Peace Corps Volunteers working in 30 countries. That record is ours. But it is also yours.
It could not have been written without the full cooperation of colleges and universities. From the beginning, the Peace Corps organizers knew that our assignment could not...and should not…be undertaken by government alone. To get the job done, to get it done quickly, and done well, we needed the help of experienced hands and minds. So we turned to higher education. This was a decision we never once regretted. American higher education has responded promptly, and expertly, to our needs. Our success has been your success.
But the skeptics are still with us. Even though their initial doubts have not been fulfilled, they still have their nagging questions: ---
“What difference,” they say, “does all this success mean? What you are doing is just a drop in the bucket. In the long sweep of history no one will remember whether the Peace Corps existed or didn’t exist. Its influence will be negligible. Time, energy, and money will have been expended, but the results will be unimportant.
Go ahead with your idealistic ventures,” they say. “Americans, have always over-simplified foreign affairs. The Peace Corps is no exception. Waste your money and your energies, but don’t expect us to attach much significance to your effort.”
Fortunately, all the experts are not skeptics. Last week Arnold Toynbee wrote these words about the Peace Corps:
“Here is a movement,” Toynbee writes of the Peace Corps, “whose express purpose is to overcome the disastrous barriers that have hitherto segregated the affluent Western minority of the human race from the majority of their fellow men and women. And the initiative in this has come from the country that is now the recognized leader of the Western world. Service in the Peace Corps (he goes on) is not an easy option. It calls for adventurousness, adaptability, human feeling, and, above all, self-sacrifice. There is something in human nature that responds to a challenge like this. I believe that, in the Peace Corps, the non-Western majority of mankind is going to meet a sample of Western Man at his best.”
It was encouraging for us at the Peace Corps to read what Arnold Toynbee wrote. We have pondered over his words. Why does Mr. Toynbee say that Peace Corps Volunteers all give an example of Western Man at his best?
I have no private insight into the great historian’s mind, but tonight I’d like to venture a couple of guesses about his thoughts, First, I think that he, like Barry Goldwater, must have been impressed by the quality of the Volunteers he has seen. Mr. Toynbee visited the Peace Corps overseas training center in Puerto Rico. He spent two or three days talking to the Volunteers, living with them, eating with them. In such a time it is possible for a perceptive person to evaluate the quality of our Peace Corps manpower. Mr. Toynbee was visibly impressed.
I think Mr. Toynbee has probably been impressed also by the highly concentrated, effective education which we, with your help, have given to the Volunteers. Fourteen American colleges and universities, - public and private, large and small, representing every section of the United States - have conducted training programs for the Peace Corps.
This summer we will have some 30 Peace Corps training programs being conducted simultaneously on Campuses throughout the United States. In every one of these training programs the universities of America have marshaled unrivaled resources for instructing young Americans, and older ones, too, in the languages of the foreign countries, in the history, customs, traditions of the foreign countries; in world affairs, in American studies, in physical education and health education, as well as in professional fields such as teaching, engineering, geology, agriculture extension and nursing. No other country in the world could have mounted such specialized courses on such short order. And, we already have dramatic evidence of the effectiveness of this effort made by American higher education on behalf of the Peace Corps.
Yesterday in Washington, the visiting Foreign Minister of Thailand and his colleagues told us that the recent group of Peace Corps Volunteers who arrived in Thailand had stunned the people and the officials of that country by their facility in speaking the Thai language, and by their knowledge of Thai history and traditions. Never before he said, had any group of Americans arrived in his country as well prepared for their work.
The USIA stated that the most effective, single piece of news favorable America in the last months’ in Thailand had been the advent in that country of the Peace Corps contingent, speaking Thai, singing Thai songs, knowing Thai history.
The University of Michigan created this special course in Thai culture and customs and language. For three months our Volunteers worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That’s the reason, why they were enthusiastically welcomed in Thailand. That’s the reason why their work in that country will be successful.
At Ohio State, the Peace Corps trained a group destined for agricultural work in the Punjab region of India. The Dean of the School of Agriculture at that great university told me personally that the fully packed training schedule --- 66 hours a week long -- gave to the Peace Corps Volunteers at Ohio State almost the equivalent of full year’s graduate work.
The Minister of Economic Planning for the Punjab region, a distinguished Indian civil servant, came to this country, spent two weeks at Ohio State, and on his return to India stopped by in Washington specifically to congratulate Ohio State and the Peace Corps on the thoroughness and skill which he had observed in the training program at that institution.
I could easily go on. Our first training program, for example, at Texas Western College where we trained Volunteers for Tanganyika was the subject of much skepticism in this country, and overseas the Tanganyikan government had some doubts that we could actually train people effectively for service in that remote African nation; so they sent the Minister of Communications and Public Works to our country and he spent ten days at Texas Western College in El Paso observing the Volunteers and their study program.
Tanganyika originally asked for 25 people, but after this British Civil Servant saw the quality of the people and the kind of program of training, he came to Washington and asked us to send every one of the 35 Volunteers to his country. Today, in fact, all of those Texas Western Volunteers are in Tanganyika. They have been there seven months, and not one complaint has been lodged against them by the government or by the people of that important African nation.
I think Arnold Toynbee was thinking of these kinds of training programs when he said that the Peace Corps would send to the non-Western world examples of Western man at his best.
Toynbee may also have been thinking of certain other qualities of the Peace Corps Volunteers and the program under which they’re serving. I mean -- some of the psychological factors involved.
A Peace Corps Volunteer arrives in a foreign country not only speaking the language of that country and knowledgeable about its customs and traditions, but he comes ready, willing and able to live the way they live, under their laws.
He does not try to change their religion.
He does not seek to make a profit from conducting business in their Country.
He does not interfere in their political or military affairs.
He works within their system for them.
He helps to fill their needs as they see them.
He arrives on schedule.
In Ghana three of the first 51 teachers sent to the high schools of that country by the Peace Corps were elected assistant principal, or principal, of the schools to which they were assigned within four months of their arrival on the scene. How many times in recent months have you heard of black men in Africa electing white men to positions of authority?
I suggest the Ghanaians were happy to accord these positions of influence to Peace Corps Volunteers because the Volunteers came to Ghana asking nothing, demanding nothing, except an opportunity to serve. They were not hanging around the PX Commissary. In fact, they are excluded from such American perquisites.
They were not concentrated in the capital of that country, Accra. They wore 300 miles up country in Tamale, - 250 miles to the west in Half Assini, - 450 miles Away in Navrongo flush against the border of Upper Volta.
In Sierra Leone, when the Volunteers disembarked in Freetown, they were not surprised to see a small group of officials waiting for them. This has become rather customary. But they were surprised when, as they walked up the streets of Freetown, the local inhabitants came out and stared at them as they went by. Only later did they discover the real reason for the unusual turnout of local inhabitants:- The inhabitants of Sierra Leone had never seen a white man walking up the street carrying his own luggage.
Once more, I suggest that Arnold Toynbee may be thinking of small, but significant, psychological factors such as these.
These Peace Corps Volunteers are clearly different Americans. These facts explain more eloquently than any words I can command why it is that every one of the 12 countries to which the Peace Corps has sent Volunteers has requested more of the same. Over and above these factors, let me speculate for just a few minutes on another aspect of Peace Corps service abroad which may have been in Mr. Toynbee’s mind and which will, I hope, be of interest to you.
The Peace Corps is attempting to communicate, humbly and compassionately, in the many languages of man, — not just the spoken languages like French, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, or Tagalog, — but the languages of poetry, of music, of law, of science, of painting and of teaching, — the myriad methods by which man has learned to communicate his inmost thoughts and sensitivities to his fellow creatures. Let me illustrate what I mean:
We have sent 500 teachers overseas, most of them secondary school teachers. We brought one of them back because he refused to participate in the social and recreational life of Nigeria. He wanted to be only a teacher. But we’re not sending people overseas who want to be only teachers. Formal education is one method of communicating the culture of past centuries to upcoming generations. It is essential. But a teacher whose role is restricted to the classroom is like a fighter with one hand tied behind his back. Our Peace Corps teachers must be human beings who participate in the full life of a foreign country, who communicate the substance of our culture on the playing field, in a social gathering, yes, even at a dance.
When the English said that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, they meant it. The battle of Africa may be won on the athletic fields of Ibadan University, just as much as in the classroom.
We have sent doctors overseas, and nurses, and nurses, aides, and we want to send many more. But we haven’t sent any doctor whose idea of medical practice is restricted to large fees and comfortable office hours. A Peace Corps doctor is a man or woman who has voluntarily surrendered the high income which every doctor in our country can now command and in its place has accepted a different sort of reward. One of them expressed it to me in these words:
“The future of my children may be determined more by what happens in Africa, South of the Sahara, than by what happens in Washington or Cleveland. I want the Africans to know that we Americans are interested in them as human beings, that we are there to help them as human beings, and that we would be there to help them if there were no Communism in the world at all.” None of our doctors goes overseas to wait upon the expatriate community, to hang around the local country club drinking warm beer. Our doctors are all assigned to indigenous medical institutions where they can give an example of what Toynbee called Western Man at his best. In South America we are trying a couple of ventures at which skeptics may well scoff and the sober-minded citizens may wall laugh. But, among intellectual leaders such as this audience contains, hope to find an understanding reception for these projects.
We have contacted some young American poets and have asked them to go to South America as faculty members at universities. We have asked poets to do this because many Latin Americans think of the United States as a place inhabited 100% by businessmen working for Sears-Roebuck, Sacony Vacuum, Anaconda Copper and Pan American Grace, not to mention United Fruit.
In general, they have no idea that ordinary North Americans, gringos like you and me, are interested in music, or poetry, or art. These aspects of life are often more important to many South Americans than economic matters. But they think we are “philistines” preoccupied only with money and profits. And the Communists encourage them to think so.
There is a newspaper published in Colombia for the campesinos-- the small peasant farmers of that land -- most of them uneducated, untraveled and, until recently, ignored.
Page one in the last two issues of this newspaper has been devoted to a poetry contest. Why to a poetry contest? There wasn’t a word on Page One about Wallace’s Hybrid Corn, or Olin Mathieson’s phosphate pill to increase food production. Probably there should have been, but instead there was a poetry contest. Can you imagine how successful a poetry magazine for Iowa farmers would be?
We’ve got to learn to communicate with people who prefer poetry to peanuts; otherwise we will never be able to reach inside of them and get them interested in food production, health, economic development, or any other of the subjects to which we attach so much importance.
Take another example: At Peace Corps headquarters we’re now exploring the possibility of sending a Jazz combo to a specific South American nation. Music is a language which opens many minds as well as many hearts. Jazz is popular, especially with the younger people in South America, and we have been lucky enough to find a group of brilliant young jazz musicians, all of them college graduates, three with who have indicated that they are willing to give up their promising careers here in the United States to serve in the Peace Corps for two years, at $75 a month.
I think these young musicians may well be able to reach into the minds and hearts of young South Americans more effectively than politicians. These musicians would not be wandering troubadours. They would have full-time Jobs on a full-time music faculty. Like all Peace Corps teaching personnel they would be an integral part of a foreign academic community.
Poetry and music and the healing arts of medicine are not the only languages we use. We are now exploring a project with American schools of journalism whereby young Americans with special gifts and training in the journalistic arts can become teachers of these stills in universities around the world. Once again we believe the language of journalism may be as effective as formalized instruction in English grammar or literature. We want classroom teachers of English literature. The world wants them. But we also believe there are many ways to skin a cat -- and journalism may be one way in which to attract and instruct enterprising young people of foreign nations.
Science, too, has its language and we are fortunate at the Peace Corps to have with us already overseas more than 100 Young teachers of science who are using that language as a means of communication between us Western, men and the non-western majority of mankind in the world today.
You will note that’ the word “young “Americans slipped-out just then. There’s no doubt that most of us in this room tonight consider someone 25 years old to be young. That’s our tough luck. The 32 year old Minister of Economic Development for Tunisia, however, does not share our feelings. Nor does the 34 year old Foreign-Minister of the Congo, Justin Bambalo; or the 31 year old Party Leader in Kenya, Tom Mboya; or the 32 year old Secretary General of the Labor Congress in Ghana, John Tettegah; or the 33 year old Prime Minister and King of Morocco, Hassan II; or the 33 year old Prime minister of Tanganyika, Rashidi Kawawa.
Youth is not a liability for the Peace Corps or for our country. It’s a great asset. The Peace Corps is fortunate to have placed instructors of approximately 25-26 years of age on the faculties of various universities around the world. We now have 10 teachers on the faculty of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok; 30 teachers on the faculty of the University of the East in Venezuela; and soon we shall have 8 teachers at the University of Huamanga at Ayacucho in Peru; 20 additional teachers at the University of the East in Venezuela; 25 teachers at the University of Ife in Nigeria; 25 teachers at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City and Los Banos.
All of these Volunteers, on the job, and others like them, have done more than anyone else to dispel the skepticism at home and even the skepticism expressed by some people abroad. When the Peace Corps came into being many foreign officials thought they had enough Americans in their countries. What they did not know then, but what many of them know now, is the fact that the Peace Corps provides a “new American,” the sample of Western man at his best, to which Toynbee referred.
It would be foolish for me to leave the impression with you that, everything has been all sweetness and light at the Peace Corps during the first year of operations. We have had our problems. But it’s extraordinary how understanding nearly everyone has been.
I’ll venture the guess that no one in this room knows that a Peace Corps Volunteer driving a jeep in the Philippines a couple of months ago struck and killed a native of that country. Nobody in this room knows that fact although we made no effort to conceal the information. The extraordinary reality is that in the Philippines the newspaper stories describing that accident features the news that a Peace Corps Volunteer has been injured. They almost buried the news that a Filipino had been killed. What a change from the stoning of Embassy windows. Nobody in this room knows that a near psychotic was discovered among the early Peace Corps trainees. We had to escort this particular young man home from a Peace Corps training center in a strait jacket.
No one in this room knows that three girls in training for Peace Corps service smashed up a car in the middle of the night in the Pennsylvania Mountains and nearly killed themselves. No one here knows that we’ve had four emergency appendectomies, 5 cases of infectious hepatitis, 30 cases of dysentery, and other routine illnesses.
Fortunately, we have not lost even one person. But we will. The actuarial statistics disclose that if all these Americans who are now in the Peace Corps had stayed at home, five of them would have died over the next two years. So, we’re going to have our cases of Peace Corps Volunteers coming home in wooden boxes. And we’re going to have other tragedies which will be harder to understand and to forgive.
Sometime, somewhere, some Peace Corps Volunteer is going to do something disgraceful to himself, to his parents, to the Peace Corps and to the United States. The President of every college or university in this audience knows that this is going to happen. Tonight I can only say that when it happens, I hope that the sober-minded, experienced, intelligent and informed people in this audience will be among the first to understand and reply to the inevitable critics who will cry havoc. And now for a few closing points.
1) The total number of people volunteering for the Peace Corps in February was the highest of any month in our history. More than 3,000 new Volunteers responded in February alone to the President’s challenges: “Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
2) The head of our Selection Division, Professor Lowell Kelly, Chairman of the Department of Psychology of the University of Michigan, has reported to me that the quality of the men and women volunteering for the Peace Corps today is as good, and in some cases, better than those who first responded to the President’s call. We are in no danger of running out of qualified Americans of high character and ability to serve in the Peace Corps overseas.
3) Every state in the Union has already produced members of the Peace Corps. Every race in our country is represented, - every creed. There has been no discrimination on the basis of race, color, or creed in the recruitment, the selection, the training or the assignment of Peace Corps Volunteers.
4) Overseas, the Peace Corps Volunteers have been received everywhere by the people of foreign lands and by government officials with enthusiasm, warmth and generosity. In Nigeria, where expatriate university teachers have been present in large numbers for over a quarter of a century, the government staged an official reception at the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos when the first small Peace Corps contingent of 35 Volunteers arrived, and more than 1,000 civic leaders and government officials showed up to welcome this small but pioneering group. In Ghana, the Foreign Minister, the Minister of Information, the Minister of Interior, and other Cabinet members said of the Peace Corps: “That’s one thing your country is doing properly.” In Colombia, the distinguished President of that country, Alberto Lleras Camargo, said: (The Peace Corps) “is the finest way in which the United States could prove to the humble people of this end other lands that the primary purpose of its international aid program is to build a better life in all of the free world’s villages and neighborhoods.”
