CHAPTER NINE— ESTABLISHMENT OF THE PEACE 



CORPS 

 I. Introduction 



President Kennedy established a temporary Peace Corps by Execu- 

 tive order, :March 1, 1961/ A subsequent administration proposal to 

 authorize a permanent Peace Corps was adopted with substantial bi- 

 partisan support, September 2. The technological transfer goal inher- 

 ent in ahnost all foreign development programs was, in this statutory 

 agency, to be approached by indirection. Means rather than ends were 

 stressed in its statement of objectives : 



* * * To promote world peace and friendship [by making] available to interested 

 countries and areas men and women * * * qualified for service abroad and 

 willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help [such peoples] 

 in meeting their needs for trained manpower, and to help promote a better 

 understanding * * *.^ 



The statutory program was funded for the fiscal year 1962 at $30 

 million. Both the administration and the Congress viewed it as frankly 

 experimental ; manifestly a few thousand young people, demonstrat- 

 ing and using rudimentary technologies of the developed world, could 

 not produce instant development of many lagging economies. How- 

 ever, the pioneering aspect of a low budget, semistructured program of 

 service abroad might attract a previously untapped and highly moti- 

 vated group, which might catalyze small, local developments — in 

 eilect, create seedbeds of technological, economic, and democratic 

 progress. 



Goals of U.S. foreign aid programs are both political and economic, 

 intended to support both the growth of democracy and, as its pre- 

 requisite, the economic advance of lagging economies. Economic aid, in 

 turn, depends on and supports the transfer of technological informa- 

 tion and hardware. The Marshall plan and the Point IV program 

 relied on the assumption that the preferred route to technological and 

 economic advance was by the infusion of technically trained man- 

 power and massive capital investment. Increasingly, there was a sus- 

 picion that social, cultural, and psychological differences as between the 

 United States and the aided countries were major intervening vari- 

 ables in the effective transfer of technology. The lack of attention 

 given to these obstacles received criticism by the economists, Theodore 

 Geiger and Roger D. Hansen, in their recent view of the information 

 bases of U.S. foreign policy ; they observe : 



Only very occasionally in designing the technical-assistance projects were in- 

 vestigations conducted to evaluate the consistency between the new techniques 

 and methods to be introduced and the existing attitudes, values, and expectations 



1 Executive Order 10924, "Establishment and Administration of the Peace Corps in the 

 Department of State." The White House, Mar. 1, 1961 ; In U.S. Congress, House. Committee 

 on Foreign Affairs. Peace Corps Act ; report of the * * * on H.R. 7500, To provide for a 

 Peace Corps to help the peoples of interested countries and areas in meeting their needs for 

 skilled manpower, S7th Cong., 1st sess. ; House Report 115 (Washington, U.S. Government 

 Printing Office, Sept. 5, 1961), p. 63. 



" Peace Corps Act, title 1, sec. 2. 



(241) 



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