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Introduction: Peace Corps Volunteers as Intermediary Agents in the Global War on Poverty

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Abstract

After covering the historiography around to the Peace Corps, the chapter discusses the book’s main contributions and central arguments. In particular, it highlights the thesis that the Peace Corps Volunteers acted as intermediaries who occupied a kind of “middle ground” within the framework of the global war on poverty. In contrast to unidirectional narratives about the Peace Corps that focus exclusively on volunteers in terms on objectives designed in Washington, D.C., analyses of experiences on the ground show that actions designed and implemented within the so-called Third World led volunteers to mediate between objectives proposed both in Washington and South America.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    David C. Engerman and Corinna R. Unger, “Introduction: Towards a Global History of Modernization,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, N. 3 (June 2009), 376.

  2. 2.

    Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War. A World History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 1–17.

  3. 3.

    Peace Corps Volunteer, Washington, DC, November 1962, Vol. 1, N. 1, 4. On the existence of other programs on a global scale, see also Peace Corps Volunteer, Washington, DC, December 1963, Vol. 2, N. 2, 7.

  4. 4.

    Agnieszka Sobocinska, “How to win friends and influence nations: The international history of Development Volunteering,” Journal of Global History, Vol. 12, N. 1 (March 2017), 49–73.

  5. 5.

    Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 1–14.

  6. 6.

    Letter of Janet Boegli to Richard A. Graham, Director of Recruitment, Río Negro, Chile, May 1, 1962. National Archives, College Park (hereafter NARA), Record Group (hereafter RG) 490, Country File 1962–1963, box 22, folder “Chile.” As examples, Boegli mentioned the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Health Service, the Catholic Church, and the Institute of Rural Education, as well as the work of volunteer university students.

  7. 7.

    Gerard T. Rice, The Bold Experiment. JFK’s Peace Corps (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 20–22.

  8. 8.

    Stanley Meisler, When the World Calls. The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and its First Fifty Years (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 5.

  9. 9.

    Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 109.

  10. 10.

    Peace Corps. Congressional Presentation Fiscal Year 1972, Washington, DC, June 1971, 1.

  11. 11.

    Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need Is Love. The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 262.

  12. 12.

    Look, Vol. 30, N. 12, June 15, 1966, 40.

  13. 13.

    National Geographic, Washington, DC, Vol. 126, N. 3, September 1964, 297–313.

  14. 14.

    National Geographic, Washington, DC, Vol. 126, N. 3, September 1964, 302.

  15. 15.

    Gerard T. Rice, The Bold Experiment…, 303.

  16. 16.

    Hoffman, All You Need Is Love…, 257.

  17. 17.

    Michael R. Hall, “The Impact of the U.S. Peace Corps at Home and Abroad,” Journal of Third World Studies, 2007, Vol. 24, N. 1, 53.

  18. 18.

    Stanley Meisler, When the World Calls…, x.

  19. 19.

    Cecília Azevedo, Em Nome da América. Os Corpos da Paz no Brasil (Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2008).

  20. 20.

    On the historiography of the Cold War and Latin America, see Vanni Pettinà, Historia mínima de la guerra fría en América Latina (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2018).

  21. 21.

    Molly Geidel, Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

  22. 22.

    The work of Walt Whitman Rostow was especially influential in the formulation of theoretical postulations. See The Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960) and Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1958). A good study that traces the origin and the evolution of the idea of development and its connection to US foreign policy is Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

  23. 23.

    David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and The Construction of An American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 114–225. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology…, 21–68.

  24. 24.

    On the Alliance for Progress, see Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2012).

  25. 25.

    David C. Engerman and Corinna R. Unger, “Introduction: Towards a Global History…,” 377.

  26. 26.

    Christine Hatzky, Cubans in Angola: South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).

  27. 27.

    Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 21–54.

  28. 28.

    Fritz Fischer, Making Them Like Us. Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 61–76. Gerard T. Rice, Bold Experiment…, Alyosha Goldstein, Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action During the American Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 77–110.

  29. 29.

    Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7.

  30. 30.

    James Scott, Seeing Like State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).

  31. 31.

    Sheyda Jahanbani, “One Global War on Poverty: The Johnson Administration Fights Poverty at Home and Abroad, 1964–1968,” Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence (eds.), Beyond the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson and the Challenges of the 1960s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 97.

  32. 32.

    Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).

  33. 33.

    Marc Frey and Sönke Kunkel (eds.), International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

  34. 34.

    A.G. Hopkins, “Introduction: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local,” A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Global History. Interactions Between the Universal and the Local (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5.

  35. 35.

    Anthony G. Hopkins, Global History. Interactions Between the Universal and the Local (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5. On decentralization and global perspectives, see also Fernando Purcell and Andreas E. Feldmann, “Presentación: Espacios y circulaciones. Nuevas miradas desde las ciencias sociales en América latina,” Revista de Estudios Sociales, Vol. 61, July–September (2017), 8–12 and Fernando Purcell and Alfredo Riquelme (eds.), Ampliando miradas. Chile y su historia en un tiempo global (Santiago: Ril, 2009).

  36. 36.

    Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 396.

  37. 37.

    Nick Cullather, “Development? It’s History,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 24, N. 4 (2000), 641–653.

  38. 38.

    See Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception. The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2008); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development…; Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development. How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent: Kent University Press, 2006); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  39. 39.

    On the synthesis of development projects as part of foreign policy and the Peace Corps, see Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology…, 109–150.

  40. 40.

    The bibliography on the Peace Corps in South America is scarce. See Cecília Azevedo, Em Nome da América…; Molly Geidel, “Sowing Death in Our Women’s Wombs: Modernization and Indigenous Nationalism in the 1960s Peace Corps and Jorge Sanjinés’ Yawar Mallku,” American Quarterly, Vol. 62, N. 3, September 2010, 763–786; James F. Siekmeier, “Sacrificial Llama? The Expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia in 1971,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 69, N. 1, February, 2000, 65–87 and Glenn F. Sheffield, Peru and the Peace Corps, 1962–1968 (Ann Harbor: Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1991). For Chile, see Javiera Soto-Hidalgo, Espía se ofrece. Acusaciones de intervencionismo contra Estados Unidos en Chile. 1964–1970 (Santiago: Acto Editores, 2015).

  41. 41.

    Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, In from the Cold. Latin America’s New Encounter with The Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

  42. 42.

    Patrick Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), Benedetta Calandra and Marina Franco, La guerra fría cultural en América Latina: desafíos y límites para una nueva mirada de las relaciones interamericanas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2012).

  43. 43.

    The presence of the Peace Corps required bilateral diplomatic accords. The United States privileged poorer countries with a real threat of communism. Countries such as Mexico and Argentina did not receive volunteers during the 1960s due to a combination of factors. Lack of interest in these countries, which felt they had reached higher levels of economic development than other countries in the region, was crucial.

  44. 44.

    Moritz Thomsen, Living Poor. A Peace Corps Chronicle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), ix.

  45. 45.

    “Some Definitions of Community Development,” 1965. Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Peace Corps Collection, box 4, folder “Training Guide to Basic Components.”

  46. 46.

    Nick Cullather, “The Third Race,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, N. 3 (June 2009), 511.

  47. 47.

    David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission…, 2.

  48. 48.

    Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small…, 40–65.

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    Fernando Purcell

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Purcell, F. (2019). Introduction: Peace Corps Volunteers as Intermediary Agents in the Global War on Poverty. In: The Peace Corps in South America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24808-6_1

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