California has produced more Peace Corps Volunteers than any other state in the Union. To report on their activities and to discuss the role they would play upon their return, Sargent Shriver in five days addressed twenty college convocations and meetings. This talk was to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on October 7, 1963.
WE ARE, in the Peace Corps, involving people and institutions in the affairs of the world in a new, intimate, and dramatic way, a way which may well have far-reaching consequences for those individuals, for those institutions, for America and the world.
Let us take the private organizations of this country-ranging from the National Grange and YMCA to the Cooperative Association of America and savings and loan associations-the whole array of professional, occupational, and welfare groups which are the foundation of American life. When the Peace Corps began, a lot of people were afraid that we would not only discourage new organizations from getting into overseas work, but begin to edge out those who had done a good job over many years.
We were determined not to do this. We needed the private agencies to help us. And we hoped that we could be of some help to them. When we wanted to help develop cooperatives in Latin America, we went to the Cooperative Association of America for help. We are now working together on projects in eight different countries, and the cooperative movement is spreading rapidly throughout the hemisphere.
We found a great need for the kind of work the YMCA and YWCA were doing. Now we recruit, train, and ship people to work in their programs. As a result, the YWCA in Chile has five times the number of workers it did before the coming of the Peace Corps. The YMCA in Venezuela has increased four times.
The National Grange is the second largest farm organization in the country. It has four and a half million members. Yet it never had a program overseas. Today it is working with us in Guatemala, and we are exploring other ways in which the priceless know-how and experience of American farm organizations can be put to work in developing countries.
CARE is an organization that was overseas long before the Peace Corps was even a gleam in anyone’s eye. Yet today they are working with the Peace Corps, administering some of our projects overseas, and sending men as well as material to the aid of the needy.
This is the opposite of big government and burgeoning bureaucracy. It is government and private enterprise working together, each helping the other to realize its own potential. It is evidence that through the Peace Corps we may have discovered a mechanism to bring the great resources of American private groups to bear on the needs and problems of the developing world, to turn them outward toward the problems of others as well as inward on their own problems. We are helping to provide a new dimension of work, of responsibility, and of rewards.
We would all agree that the quality of our educational system, its ability to train men and women for the rigors of the modern world, is one of the most significant problems in America today. I believe that in the future we may find the Peace Corps becoming one of the most significant shapers of the character of the nation’s campuses-their response to, and their interest in, what is happening across the entire southern half of the globe.
Here is some of the evidence: Recently President Virgil M. Hancher of the State University of Iowa wrote a letter to several Senators, discussing the training program which the university is running for Peace Corps Volunteers going to Indonesia. He said, in part: The Peace Corps project is already having salutary effects upon this University...The members of our faculty are having to come together across disciplines. They are having to think through old problems of education freshly and to tackle new ones. Along with the trainees they are learning-learning how to teach languages in the new method, how to teach new languages, how to teach area studies better…The project is increasing the international dimension of the State University of Iowa. This international dimension is being shared, in various ways, with the people of the State, the Eastern area in particular.
Let me give you a concrete example of what President Hancher means, an example from my own home state of Illinois.
Northern Illinois University is in the heartland of America. It never had an international program. International affairs were not one of the top interests of the twenty thousand people who live in the neighboring town.
Working with the Peace Corps, Northern Illinois has trained three groups of Volunteers for Malaya. Here are some of the results: Six members of the Malayan Government have come there as teachers or lecturers. Northern Illinois is now one of the few places in the country teaching Malay, and five faculty members have visited Malaya.They have begun a Southeast Asia studies program, and the local newspaper now features news from that troubled area of the world. One of their faculty became the first director of the Peace Corps in Malaya.
And other schools are having the same sort of experience. More than fifty American universities, from Puerto Rico to Hawaii, have conducted programs to train Peace Corps Volunteers. More than two thousand faculty members have participated in these programs. And two hundred additional colleges have asked whether they too can participate.
In each of these universities, wherever a Peace Corps program is established, there is a surge of interest in a foreign land, an influx of eager and interested Volunteers, the arrival of groups of visiting instructors and foreign students who are brought to college for the training program. For a few months that college is an international center for studies of Thailand or Tanganyika, Malaya or Tunisia, or any one of almost fifty countries. This is an experience which leaves a mark on the life of the college and often, especially in rural areas, on the surrounding town.
We have already seen this happen with foreign language training. We have trained more people in more exotic languages than the entire National Defense Education Act. We have trained hundreds of Americans to speak Thai and Malay, Singhalese and Nepali, Twi, Kri, and Hausa-languages taught to not a single American under the NDEA. And in each case we have left behind on the campus new interest, new knowledge, sometimes even new dictionaries and textbooks opening up a fresh field of language studies for the college and, sometimes, for the country.
These are some of the results of the coming together of the Peace Corps and the colleges, the Volunteer and the professors, the government administrators and the college deans. It fore-casts a Peace Corps influence on American education which will make it better able to meet its responsibilities to its students and the country.
Probably the most important development in the future of the Peace Corps will be the impact of returning Volunteers on American society. Before long five thousand Peace Corps Volunteers a year will be returning from having lived and worked overseas, under difficult conditions, among strange cultures, lands, and people. They will be a new breed of Americans, or rather the revival of an old breed of Americans-the Americans who believed everything was possible to the man of determination, the Americans who believed some things were more important than material affluence or personal success.
They will be coming back to teach in our schools, man posts in our government, work in our industries, participate in the affairs of nation and state, town and precinct. And from what I have seen of these men and women, none of the institutions to which they come will be secure behind a wall of complacency, indifference, or self-satisfaction.
The first several hundred Volunteers are already returning. They are a happy augury for the future. Let me tell you about some of them:
Cardozo High School is located in the midst of the worst slums of Washington, D.C., and the slums of Washington are bad and violence-ridden indeed. Last week ten former Peace Corps Volunteers, men and women who had taught in the barrios of the Philippines, began teaching the underprivileged students of Cardozo High. Each will teach two classes, and help to develop special programs for teaching the disadvantaged. They find in this job the same outlet for dedication and energy they first uncovered in the barrios of the Philippines.
“My Peace Corps service made me aware of the unity of man,” said one. “It doesn’t matter whether one is Filipino or American, we do the same things for the same reasons.” “I had planned to return to Alabama to teach,” said another, ‘but the Cardozo project is so similar to the Peace Corps, so creative, that I had to join it.” And Cardozo is just an early tangible contribution of some of the more than 15 percent of returning Volunteers who want to make teaching their life’s work.
Teaching, however, is only one of the beneficiaries. Fifty of the first 278 returnees will go to work in the Federal Government. Others will work in state and local governments. Many have already come to work in the Peace Corps; and I hope, in the not too distant future, that every office in the Peace Corps will be occupied by a returned Volunteer.
Nor is the Peace Corps the only agency to benefit. Returning Volunteers will go into the Foreign Service, USIA, into the AID programs and into other aspects of our overseas operations. I don’t think that it is bragging to say that their work, their combination of idealism and concrete practicality, their experience with frustration and with satisfaction, will prove a new source of vigor and imagination to our bureaucracies.
Not all the returning Volunteers will go to work. Over half will continue their education, more than a third on special scholarships and fellowships. They have learned from their Peace Corps experience that knowledge and learning are needed to cope with the complexities of today’s world. As a result, the; they will be more valuable citizens for the future, to say nothing of what their presence in classrooms will do to spur on and challenge teachers and other students alike.
Private industry will be another beneficiary of the returning Volunteer. If I were the personnel director of a major American company, I would look hopefully to the pool of returning Volunteers. They have been selected by a rigorous process from the cream of the nation’s youth. They have survived a demanding training program. They have displayed qualities of high motivation, capacity to adjust, and skills which have enabled them to spend two successful years working with the people of a foreign country. All of this is becoming obvious to alert companies. More and more are asking for the chance to interview returning Volunteers. When Caterpillar Tractor trained some Volunteers for Tunisia, the head of training for the company told me, “There are six of those men we would like to hire right here.” And they hadn’t even gone overseas.
I believe that our Volunteers can be of real importance to American business as business becomes more and more involved in world trade, the opening up of new markets, and plant expansion overseas.
This is only a little of the evidence, the growing indications, of the effects that the returning Peace Corps Volunteer will have on American society. It is all we can talk about now. But there will be more. In two world wars Americans went overseas to fight and, when they returned, brought with them ideas and experiences which profoundly shaped the course of our history. Today Americans are going overseas not to fight but to work, not to resolve conflicts but to maintain peace, not to destroy tyranny but to build for freedom. They are the veterans of the sixties and the seventies. I hope, and I predict, that they will be the advance guard of the new America.
