I was invited here to speak for the Peace Corps, but in a sense, no one can do that; The Peace Corps Speaks for Itself.
It has spoken already to the heart of a young nation -- a nation which 45 percent of the people are under 25 years of age.
It has spoken to thousands of Americans who have written to say: “I want to serve my country. Tell me what to do?”
A college student wrote from California: “I will go wherever I can help. I’ll do whatever I can.”
A high school student in Philadelphia sent this message: “I don’t care about a salary. This is something I want to do for my country.”
And from the Southwest -- from a young farmer there -- the Peace Corps got this letter. “If you can use my plow, it is ready. If you can use me, I am ready, too.”
The Peace Corps is 17 thousand people and more, most of them young, many of them older, who have already volunteered in letters sent to Peace Corps headquarters in Washington.
It is a Wisconsin reporter, who got a telegram from me during the middle of the night, asking him to come to Washington to handle our public information. He arrived that same day at 4 o’clock -- went to work at 5 -- and has been back in Wisconsin only once since.
The proposal was a response to a need expressed by an African leader who said, “Africa desires to be understood and to be recognized from the viewpoint and perspective of her own people.” It was a response to Gandhi’s dictum that “isolated independence is not the goal. It is voluntary independence, law by nature and love, friendship, work, progress, and security in creative interdependency.” It was a response to the belief that dedicated and disciplined individuals can illuminate the shared dream of the human heart.
Despite its timeliness and responsiveness, the Peace Corps brought the cynics up sharply. “It can’t be done!” they argued. They dismissed it as a romantic idea impossible of practical fulfillment. At the Peace Corps headquarters, we shared all the worries that bothered the critics, and we had a few more of our own. We remembered the African proverb: “Until you have crossed the river, don’t insult the alligator’s mouth.” Our river at that time was full of alligators, so we started by asking ourselves the fundamental, hard questions:
First, did foreign countries really want Peace Corps Volunteers?
To find out, I took a trip around the world. I visited some of the countries represented at this Conference. Everywhere I was deluged with requests for thousands of Volunteers to teach in classrooms, to work in fields, to survey roads, to design bridges, to teach athletics, to do scores of jobs essential in a developing economy.
The second big question was this: Would enough Americans of high quality volunteer to serve? In the first year, 30,000 Americans volunteered for the Peace Corps. Last week alone, we received 859 applications. We are now getting four times as many as at the same period last summer and ten times as many general inquiries through the mails. The quality of these new applications has remained high -- higher in some categories than last year. Two weeks ago we gave a quarterly Peace Corps Placement Test and 4,101 applicants took it -- the largest number in the history of the Peace Corps. Instead of waning in the public consciousness, therefore, the Peace Corps has more ardent applicants than ever -- despite long hours, the low wages and the demanding tasks!
A third question faced us: Could we select the best qualified applicants for service abroad on a scientific, nondiscriminatory basis which would assure success to each individual? I remember what one Member of Congress told me early in the history of the Peace Corps: “Mr. Shriver, I don’t care if 100,000 people apply. Just tell me how you’re going to be sure that you only send the best of them overseas.”
Realizing the crucial importance of this problem, we turned to outstanding psychologists to set up a selection system that would produce the best qualified Volunteers.
An application blank was devised which in itself is a difficult barrier to a capricious applicant. A copy of that application blank is in your packet of materials. Some people say it’s harder to fill out than an income tax return. One man who filled it out said the Peace Corps now knew more about him than either his mother or his wife.
Next, we asked candidates to take a comprehensive placement test. We learn about their language aptitude. We find out what they know about American and world history. We test their ability to think clearly and rationally. When all the examinations are scored, the Peace Corps has a “profile” of the applicant.
After we have received candid references from people who know the applicant, we invite promising candidates to a training program which lasts from ten to twelve weeks. Selection continues through training -- no candidate is ever sent overseas who has not completed a thorough training program.
During training, the applicant is given thorough medical and psychiatric exams. He is observed in classrooms and in field work. Our Civil Service Commission conducts, for the Peace Corps, a full field investigation on each Trainee. The examination is relatively costly -- about $350 each -- but background material revealed about the applicant -- information which dates back to his school days -- helps us to know just how suitable or unsuitable a candidate is for overseas service.
As a result of this continuing assessment throughout training, averages of 15 percent of all trainees are dropped. Some of the reasons are medical, some academic, and some personal.
The final decision about a Volunteer is made by a “Selection Board” which consists of psychologists, psychiatrists, program officers who know the foreign country, and training officers who have watched the Trainee work. I think you will be interested to know that we invite representatives from the host country -- usually from the embassy in Washington -- to participate as members of the selection panel. These participants are not mere observers. They play a full role in evaluating all the information we have accumulated about each applicant. They can have a decisive voice in the selection of those who come to work in their countries as Peace Corps Volunteers.
Out of the first 2,500 to be sent overseas, we have had to bring 25 back -- and only ten of those could really be called “personal failures.” The others were returned for compassionate or medical reasons.
There was yet a fourth question we asked ourselves: Would our Volunteers be able to work effectively overseas?
The answer -- after 18 months -- is an overwhelming yes.
Fifty-one Volunteers were invited to Ghana. In one year they came into contact with some 5,000 secondary school students. In Ghana this is almost 40% of all the students currently attending secondary schools. Volunteers also organized sports programs at many of the schools -- one of them even coached his team to victory in the secondary school championship. Another Volunteer developed a school farm to stimulate interest in vacational agriculture.
One hundred Volunteers went to Colombia to work in rural villages. They are helping to build schools, aqueducts, bridges, roads, libraries, cooperatives, parks, and wells.
Last year in Nigeria, Peace Corps Volunteers taught between 8,000 and 10,000 secondary school students and almost 500 college students. They organized science and art clubs, sports, and singing groups. One Volunteer teaches a night course in American history and government for a class of about 100 teachers, government workers, and other professional people.
In Tanganyika, our Volunteers have full-time jobs running surveys and helping with on-the-job training of Tanganyikan fellow workers. They have also tutored students in engineering and math and one Volunteer has helped to organize a youth club.
In Malaya, we are serving as teachers, nurses, and surveyors. In Sierra Leone we are teaching in secondary schools. In St. Lucia we are teaching and working in health and agriculture programs. One of the teachers in St. Lucia wrote me: “I consider that I have indirectly taught every 12 - 13 year old girl on the island through the weekly lesson guide I wrote in home economics.”
These are just examples of what Volunteers are doing in 40 countries. They are but part of the story.
One of the fundamental reasons we have been able to come so far in so little time is the response we have received from every segment of American life.
Private industry has cooperated by granting employees leaves of absence to serve in the Peace Corps. International Business Machines, American Telephone and Telegraph, and General Motors are just three examples. Caterpillar Tractor Company helped train our Volunteers who went to Tunisia to serve as mechanics.
We have had tremendous support from labor unions -- organizations like the Communications Workers of America and the United Auto Workers are sponsoring leaves of absence for Volunteers. American agriculture is helping also. The Farmers Union, the Grange, and the 4-H, for example, are administering programs for us overseas.
Private agencies like the YMCA and CARE and foundations like the Near East Foundation and Heifer are operating Peace Corps programs overseas.
The vast community of education has mobilized to help the Peace Corps. We have trained Volunteers at forty universities -- from Harvard in the East to the University of California at Berkeley in the West. Universities like UCLA are administering programs in partnership with the Peace Corps. Others like Ohio State are giving academic credit for service in the Peace Corps. Boards of education which control public schools are giving leaves of absence to teachers who want to volunteer (New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles are among them), and they have already approached us about hiring other Volunteers when they come home from Peace Corps service. In a sense, therefore, the Peace Corps provides a genuine sabbatical for teachers and professors who are of very high quality indeed.
This great response to the Peace Corps by Americans from all areas of our population is one exciting reason we believe the United States is benefiting as much and perhaps more from the Peace Corps than countries which receive Volunteers.
There is another reason, however, why this is true -- and it lies in the realm of what Peace Corps experience ultimately contributes to our country through the individual Volunteers who go abroad.
An African Poet has written:
“Go up-country, they said,
To see the real Africa
You will find your hidden heart
Your mute ancestral spirit.”
Our Volunteers have gone up-country to live and work, and they are seeing the real Africa and the real Asia and the real Latin America. They will return to the United States with the significant and profound experience of having lived among the people of foreign lands not as “expatriates” but as persons who have eaten their food, lived in their houses, lived under their laws, spoken their languages, and shared their work. More importantly, they will have a new understanding of the aspirations and the wants of the people with whom they share this turbulent globe -- an understanding gleaned not from books or newspapers or hurried trips to capital cities -- but the deep understanding which can only come from being a part of the society which you seek to know. Each year 5,000 of these Americans will come back into government services and private industry, continuing their work in foreign affairs or simply entering the mainstream of American life. Wherever they go they will enrich the life of their communities, they will help create an America more profoundly aware of world problems and world responsibilities. They will bring back with them the second American Revolution -- a revolution of knowledge and increased capacity to work with other free men.
The Peace Corps movement in my country, therefore, has taken on a significance far beyond the number of Volunteers in service or the number of countries in which they work.
These numbers do not really explain the Peace Corps -- the remarkable response of the American people to a demanding and difficult call to service -- or the capacity of idealistic citizens to surmount the barriers of dozens of foreign cultures and languages and societies. For that answer we must look to the mainstream of the American tradition -- the course that runs from the farms of Lexington and bullet-streaked Bunker Hill to the shadowed streets of New York and the turbulent campus at Oxford, Mississippi. It is the tradition summed up by Lincoln when, at Edwardsville, Indiana, he admonished his countrymen: “What constitutes the bulwark of your own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements or bristling sea coasts. ... Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in lands everywhere.”
I would be the first to admit that we have not always been true to this tradition. We have not always supported freedom abroad nor fully realized it at home. At times we have been aggressive in our attitude toward others or unjust in our attitude toward our own citizens. We have sometimes failed to understand the aspiration of people in other lands or to fulfill the hopes of our own people.
Yet -- if I may be permitted to speak so about my own country -- throughout our history we have retained a steadfast dedication to certain principles -- a dedication which has let us regard our lapses from these principles as temporary aberrations, mistakes, departures, from what America should be -and do -- and stand for. And today, behind the acts of diplomats, the words of politicians, the tortuous and hazardous conduct of the affairs of a powerful nation in times of danger, these principles are still deeply embedded in the lives of those who live across our land. And it is because the men and women of the Peace Corps are the inheritors of these beliefs, because they have absorbed them in the schoolrooms and churches, on the farms and cities of our country, that they have been able to cross barriers of language and culture, religious faith and social structure, to touch the deep chord of common hope and principle which belongs to all men.
The first of these principles is the conviction that the goals of the American Revolution against colonial rule were universal goals. We were not simply fighting for American values; we were part of the greater revolution of man as he struggles to be free. It was expressed by Thomas Jefferson when in a letter to George Washington; he wrote “Everyman and every body of men on earth possess the right of self-government. They receive it with their being from the hand of nature.” There are those who scorn such simple words as freedom, self-government, and the rights of man -- as too simple and superficial for our complex, modern age. But the opposite I believe, is true. For these words represent the basic, revolutionary forces which are re-shaping all continents. They also represent deep American convictions. And we are grateful that other current strugglers for liberty have reawakened American dedication to this our own tradition.
It is because our Volunteers believe that no nation has the right to impose its will on others -- that every individual should be free to follow the quest of his own mind and heart subject only to the loose restraints of a free society -- that they welcome the opportunity to go out and help others carry forward this great work. Our debt of gratitude to the developing and emerging nations of the world is that you have reminded us of our own traditions, and given us a treasured opportunity to sacrifice and work once more for those principles which created our own nation. We were in danger of losing our way among the television sets, the supermarkets and the material abundance of a rich society. By letting us participate in your struggles you have given us a chance to find ourselves.
The second of these principles is our deep belief in a pluralistic world society. We built a country out of many lands and from people of a hundred different backgrounds and beliefs. Today our President is the grandson of an immigrant to Boston. His predecessor came from the rural heartland of America. Our original states warred against each other for commerce and territory. And today there are still frictions and difficulties between regions and faiths and colors. But the success we have had in building a free nation lies in our confidence in a society which contains many societies. Our strength lies in the richness of our differences. And thus we do not fear the liberating discords of a pluralistic world society. We welcome what Ghandi has called “the creative interdependence” of different lands, each free to follow and develop its own way of life, its own culture and its own beliefs. We do not seek to impose a monolithic creed or system on the rich diversity of humanity. Thus our Volunteers go out, not to change peoples but to help them build their own societies as they themselves desire to build them.
The third of these principles is the belief in the power of individual moral conscience to re make the world -- the belief, as Abiseh Nicol, a poet of Sierra Leone, has said, that “freedom is really in the mind” -- the belief that was so well expressed in the writings of men like Thoreau, that man has a higher duty than his obligation to party or state: a duty to conscience and common humanity. This belief in man’s inner moral conscience not only makes the welfare of the individual the first concern of ‘man, but compels men to dedicate their energies to the service of others. In the last analysis it is not governments or organization which will bring fruition to man’s hopes but the energies and talents of millions of individuals working across national borders and dedicated to the service of mankind. A great American philosopher expressed this when he wrote: “Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions.” That, of course, is what this Conference is all about. And that same belief is the root of the Peace Corps idea.
The last of these principles if man’s optimism -- the belief that all things are possible to men to determination and energy and a willingness to toil. This belief came naturally to those who threw off the bonds of colonial rule and succeeded, with their own efforts, in subduing a wild and rich continent. But this same sense of man’s limitless capacity is also moving now in Africa, in Asia, in Europe and Latin America. It has brought freedom to millions and inspires tireless efforts to build new societies.
These principles, of course, are not just American principles. They belong to all lands and people. They are fundamental human beliefs. On them rests the strength of nations. There have been times when the United States has lost sight of these principles, but they remain at the moral heart of the universe. They have now stirred us to action in sending out thousands of Americans dedicated on a world scale to the same cause which build their nation. In giving us the chance to work with you, you are helping us to preserve the finest qualities of our own tradition. As we help you to build your societies, you help us to strengthen our own.
My nation is greatly encouraged by the announcement that several other countries will begin Peace Corps efforts of their own. We welcome these efforts and stand ready to assist them.
Here in Puerto Rico we have discussed the great difficulties and problems which beset the task of world development. But we also realize that man has the tools to overcome these problems. And I think that the spirit with which we leave this meeting was expressed best by Franklin D. Roosevelt in words written the night before his death for a speech that was never delivered:
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”
