Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties

Critical American Studies

by Molly Geidel

To tens of thousands of volunteers in its first decade, the Peace Corps was “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” In the United States’ popular imagination to this day, it is a symbol of selfless altruism and the most successful program of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. But in her provocative new cultural history of the 1960s Peace Corps, Molly Geidel argues that the agency’s representative development ventures also legitimated the violent exercise of American power around the world and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. In the 1960s, the practice of development work, embodied by iconic Peace Corps volunteers, allowed U.S. policy makers to manage global inequality while assuaging their own gendered anxieties about postwar affluence. Geidel traces how modernization theorists used the Peace Corps to craft the archetype of the heroic development a ruggedly masculine figure who would inspire individuals and communities to abandon traditional lifestyles and seek integration into the global capitalist system. Drawing on original archival and ethnographic research, Geidel analyzes how Peace Corps volunteers struggled to apply these ideals. The book focuses on the case of Bolivia, where indigenous nationalist movements dramatically expelled the Peace Corps in 1971. She also shows how Peace Corps development ideology shaped domestic and transnational social protest, including U.S. civil rights, black nationalist, and antiwar movements.

Genres: Politics

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2015

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bit of a mixed bag. To get the down side out of the way, the writing is cluttered with academic jargon and Geidel writes with the assumption that you know both the terminology and the inside arguments. Coupled with a perspective that claims a certain kind of revolutionary superiority to everything that doesn't already agree, the reading can be an irritating slog at some points.

Fortunately, that's not the whole story. Geidel has an important point to make and she provides compelling evidence in its support. Focusing on the vision/propaganda/ideology of "development," she argues that the figure of the heroic Peace Corps Volunteer (imagined as male) played a key role in shifting arguments about the future of the decolonizing world from economic justice to modernization. She's equally convincing when she argues that the particular view of modernization--pioneered under the Kennedy administration--is unremittingly masculine, offering "masculine brotherhood" as the solution to broad social problems. Finally, she makes the case, also a strong one, that the logic of development was absorbed by many ostensibly oppositional movements, including the Black Panthers, SDS, and the anti-war movement.

So, while the book's not a good read--I could have done without some of the cultural studies style over reading of particular texts that are asked to carry far more weight than they can bear--I'm certainly glad I read it. It deepened my sense of the forces leading to the emergence of feminism in the later years of the decade, and of the tangled motivations embedded in the American presence in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through much of the reading I struggled with what the thesis of this book was supposed to be. There is much discussion about the formation of Peace Corps and how it addressed the assumption that American men were becoming soft without a war to fight. And suddenly I was reading a chapter about the Black Panthers and though it was interesting could not determine where it all fit in, though I later understood that the author steered us to the attempts to use the Peace Corps as a means of re-directing activist passions into development work overseas.

The Peace Corps doesn’t come off all that well here, which is hard to take as a former volunteer. But the author has some compelling examples where the government had different intentions for volunteers than what we would see-as advertised goals. In particular the damage done to relationships between countries because of the Peace Corps or at least the actions of individual volunteers, with Bolivia being a documented debacle here.

What is less clear in here is the theory on why then females were even admitted to the Peace Corps since they did not fit the original vision all that well. I think the other topic the author touches on a bit but is relevant is how the volunteers as individuals viewed their role or talked about their own motivations for joining.

It is an interesting book that puts the Peace Corps organization and US development work in a very different light.

[Michael Skora · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found the fourth chapter, “Bringing the Bonds: Development in the Black Freedom Movement,” quite weaker than the rest of the book, especially because it unquestionably accept arguments from Michelle Wallace’s controversial book, “Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman,” while ignoring other black feminists’ opposition to Wallace’s thesis.

However, I believe that “Peace Corps Fantasies” warrants five stars as a whole. As I expected, Geidel delivers in her analysis of the Peace Corps as a developmentalist and imperialist tool meant to preserve US global economic domination. However, she also insightfully informed me how much the Peace Corps was the product of male anxieties among John F. Kennedy and other members of the political elite in the 1960s. Fearful that the suburbanization of America was “softening” white men, Kennedy and others saw the Peace Corps as a outlet for male elite to embrace their rugged masculinity with the non-communist Third World as their playground.

With the 1960s being her focus, I did not expect Geidel to cover how the Peace Corps have shifted since the Kennedy and Johnston administrations, nor how the Peace Corps became so woman-dominated, which first started in the following 1970s. Thus, there is a significant gap in critical literature on the Peace Corps. Nonetheless, I really appreciate this text. It will make great use for my Race, Humanitarianism, and Development final.

[Gus Breymann · Rating 1 out of 5]

This dissertation is a very badly researched and painfully written diatribe against the idea of development from the feminist perspective. The Peace Corps deserves a good history of its early years, but this definitely is not it. The author should have read George Orwell's essay on language and politics before she put her fingers to the keyboard.