Established by President John F. Kennedy in March 1961, the Peace Corps called on young Americans to volunteer in community development projects during two years in urban and rural areas of the so-called Third World. Some 20,000 volunteers arrived to South America in the 1960s, the era Kennedy defined as “the Development Decade.”1 These volunteers took up the challenge of helping different countries to diagnose their needs, addressing social and economic problems, and promoting the image of the United States abroad. In practice, the Peace Corps was one of several modernizing interventions that sought to bring underdeveloped nations closer to societies that had already reached the peak of development. But these modernizing efforts did not happen because of the goodwill of a collection of people and institutions; rather, they were inspired by deep ideological factors. Indeed, they were directly related to the great battles of the Cold War, the global confrontation between capitalism and socialism that reached its apex from 1945 to 1989. It was a conflict in which the United States pushed a universal and exclusionary ideological vision predicated on the assumption that capitalist economies were the essential motor of modernity. The vision was opposed to communism, the particular type of socialism pushed by the Soviet Union that centered on the logic of state control and rational planning.
The Cold War entailed a series of economic, social, cultural, technological, and environmental effects that appeared globally in varying types of spaces and contexts. In particular, this book approaches one of the most important layers of the Cold War—the global efforts to overcome poverty—by examining how it played out in the local spaces and communities privileged by the Peace Corps.2
The Peace Corps was built and promoted as a unique, exceptional project. Its creators conceived of it as a beacon of light that would, symbolically and concretely, meet development challenges in the world’s poorest communities. The image of selfless volunteers willing to sacrifice themselves as they improved the quality of life of impoverished peoples in distant lands was fundamental to the Peace Corps’ identity. With titles such as “Peace Corps Idea Weighed by 43 Nations,” the official newsletter Peace Corps Volunteer celebrated the institution as a model for the world. This view aligned with the global reach that the United States aimed for with its varied Cold War endeavors. The featured article noted that representatives from several nations had chosen the conference on “Human Skills in the Decade of Development,” organized in Puerto Rico, as the site to “announce that they are beginning Peace Corps-type programs of their own.”3 This type of egocentric assumption that other countries were imitating what the Peace Corps had been doing since 1961 infused references to similar initiatives in different parts of the world.
In fact, as an institution dedicated to different initiatives and types of community development, the Peace Corps was far from exceptional. Agnieszka Sobocinska situates the program with institutions such as Australia’s Volunteer Graduate Scheme or Great Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas as initiatives within the broad colonial discourses translated into ideas of development. Accordingly, Sobocinska argues, national frameworks of analysis cannot grasp the scope of these institutions that proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s.4 As Daniel Immherwahr shows in Thinking Small, the United States was one of many countries involved in these initiatives. For years, the United States had been working with an ambitious program in the Philippines, and in 1954 it established the Community Development Division within its international collaboration agency. In 1956, it included 47 programs in 23 countries across the world. Although the Community Development Division did not incorporate volunteers, efforts elsewhere did. Indeed, the burgeoning of hundreds of initiatives and projects aimed at small-scale community development that would complement larger structural efforts characterized the mid-twentieth century.5
Although this global reality attenuates the exceptional nature of the Peace Corps, the institution’s policymakers managed to transmit the notion of uniqueness to volunteers and the American public in general. The Peace Corps, in this view, was creating an entirely novel, even revolutionary, type of community action. Volunteers such as Janet Boegli, stationed in Chile, were surprised to discover that many people had already been working in community development. As she wrote in a letter, “I often feel it is a mistake to speak of the Peace Corps as if it were the only organization concerned with the underdeveloped peoples.” Referring to people with whom she met who were engaged in combatting rural poverty in southern Chile, she added, “Chile has many such organizations, many such people.” She mentioned officials from the Agricultural Ministry, the National Health Service, and the Catholic Church’s Institute of Rural Education.6 Nonetheless, other volunteers as well as the American public genuinely believed that the Peace Corps was special, different.
Even before the Peace Corps came into being, Kennedy conferred the institution an epic aura. In his famous October 1960 speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the final stretch of his presidential campaign, Kennedy planted the seeds of what was to come in his typically charismatic style.7 “How many of you who are going to be doctors,” he asked the assembled college students, “are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?” A clear expression of freedom and bravery, which Kennedy attached to young Americans’ involvement in the Cold War world, complemented his words: “On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.”8 From its inception, the Peace Corps rose upon epic, heroic values. The Kennedy administration described it as “a unique agency, a force that transcended political and strategic interests to embrace a passionate idealism deep within American culture.”9 The profound impact these values had on the country explains why thousands of young people responded to the call. As a measure of the program’s enormous popularity, by December 1970, almost a decade after the program’s inception, around 50,000 volunteers had served.10 The Peace Corps had received 305,399 applications—a truly impressive demonstration of how far interest had surpassed capacity.11
Local and national media gave wide coverage to the program. Testimonies by volunteers spread across the country. The Peace Corps caught a 1966 cover story in Look magazine, with portraits of volunteers by Norman Rockwell, the famous illustrator, painter, and photographer of the era.12 National Geographic and other outlets with a global reach helped reinforce the exceptional and epic aura. In a 1964 article titled “Ambassadors of Good Will: The Peace Corps,” Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps’ first director, declared enthusiastically that “no one had ever tried to put together a Peace Corps before.” He highlighted the volunteers’ presence across the world, the warm welcome they received, and the many accomplishments in cities and villages. The article’s map used blue markers to indicate the presence of volunteers. By 1964, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Western and Eastern Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia, Central Asia, and Oceania, were covered in blue.13
The important actors in this wide media coverage, though, were the thousands of “self-sacrificing” volunteers scattered across the globe. As National Geographic noted, “Peace Corps Volunteers have all given up opportunities to live comfortably at home. They go into distant countries to work for mere subsistence pay under difficult, sometimes hazardous conditions.” Nothing, the piece added, was “more astonishing to people abroad than to see young Americans choosing to leave America—especially the America foreigners know from the movies—to share their lives.”14 While Kennedy’s Peace Corps speeches emphasized the “self-sacrificing” quality of volunteers, a similar tone underlay interactions with Third World poverty. During the early decades of the Cold War, the popular discourse of sacrifice left its imprint on a variety of community-oriented volunteers. These included revolutionaries willing to risk their lives among suffering populations, elite Catholic volunteers who abandoned comfort to combat poverty, and fervent community developers who insisted that their interactions with the poor in far-away lands helped contain communism and contributed to world peace.
As the popularity of the Peace Corps grew, the program became associated more wit...