YOUTH FOR PEACE
Reuss, Henry S.
Youth for Peace by HENRY S. REUSS Adozen recent conferences on our foreign aid program have agreed that we must discover ways of sharpening its impact abroad and obtaining better understanding at...
...The authorization for the study became law in June, 1960, and the appropriation was made in September, 1960...
...Some labor representatives talk about a vast foreign legion like a Civilian Conservation Corps, an army of 100,000 or so doing manual labor...
...While the United States should not wait on others for launching its own program, joint activities with other contributing countries, and perhaps some day with the United Nations, are well worth exploring...
...The trouble with such a program is that it is really no program at all...
...To educate some of our young people both for eventual service overseas as a life work, and to lend their future home communities in America a sense of world understanding...
...Five—Should the Corps be public or private...
...Home economists can demonstrate soap making, food handling, child care...
...Recently, Karl Blessing, president of the West German Central Bank, urged a device for enabling German young people to work abroad in the underdeveloped areas, both for the good of their souls and as a recognition of Germany's favorable balance of payments position...
...The letters prove that young Americans want to participate in the war against poverty and ignorance and disease...
...There I saw something that in a flash could cancel out, in its potential, many of the mistakes we had made...
...5[ To furnish a constructive outlet for the great reservoir of youthful idealism in this country...
...For some months Colorado State has been making an on-the-spot study of the feasibility of the project in eight underdeveloped countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...At the other extreme is the view presented to President Kennedy by Professor Max Millikan of Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "The program should be launched on a limited pilot basis with no more than a few hundred members," and the government content itself with coordinating the programs of non-governmental agencies...
...Operation Cross-Roads Africa, conducted by that remarkable Harlem minister, James H. Robinson, which brings 150 students a year to Africa...
...Here again, there are those who advocate that the Corps should depend entirely upon voluntary organizations, and those who advocate that it should be entirely governmental...
...Equally, it seems to me, it does not want those who are so caught up with the rest of the world that they are out of touch with their own society...
...On his return from his three or four years' stint abroad, he more than likely will be twenty-five years old, or married, or otherwise beyond the reach of the draft...
...But there is no reason why a young farmer without a degree, for example, could not give invaluable service overseas...
...The villagers and the young Americans loved each other, and I could only regret that there were four, rather than forty or four hundred, Americans working on the project...
...The response there—and wherever else I have discussed it—was electric...
...Almost everything useful under the sun, the answer seems to be, but teaching comes first...
...Four—What should be the qualifications for membership in the Corps...
...It is argued by some that service in the Youth Corps would be considerably more arduous in most cases than peacetime service in the armed forces —it probably would be—and therefore, the Youth Corps service should provide exemption from the draft...
...Total draft exemption, however, would run into domestic political opposition...
...The three areas of concentration would be a refresher course in American culture and government...
...Within a few weeks Congress will receive the authorative Colorado State University study of the proposal for a Point Four Youth Corps...
...and language training...
...His was the first proposal for a Youth Peace Corps...
...All are agreed that members should be "carefully selected...
...Youth for Peace by HENRY S. REUSS Adozen recent conferences on our foreign aid program have agreed that we must discover ways of sharpening its impact abroad and obtaining better understanding at home...
...Voluntary agencies would be able to expand their programs as they were given aid by the government, such as for overseas travel...
...and the American Friends Service Committee, an old hand at person-to-person diplomacy...
...Too often it is administered by the aloof, enclave-living, red-tape-bound types caricatured in The Ugly American...
...One of the happiest memories of my Army career was teaching "readin' and ritin' " to a group of Navajos and Cajuns at Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Arkansas, for several months in 1943...
...Everyone seems agreed that a well-developed orientation course of at least six months is necessary, divided between this country and the general area where the member will work...
...Too often our aid is short-stopped by corrupt or reactionary rulers before it "trickles down" to the people...
...A few months later, in a talk at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, I suggested the idea of a "Point Four Selective Service for young Americans, neither busybodies nor misfits, with some degree of expertness, and a willingness to serve their country HENRY S. REUSS, Democratic Representative from Wisconsin, has traveled widely through the underdeveloped areas of the world...
...In practice, most members should have a college bachelor's degree or better...
...for a few years in far-off places, at a soldier's pay, in the greatest adventure of the age...
...Much more difficult will be the more subjective type of screening...
...Surely the Administration and the Congress can fashion a bridge to assist their idealism to become reality...
...Sam Bowles, son of Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, just out of Yale, and his wife, are now having the time of their lives teaching in Nigeria, for example...
...In the last campaign, for example, Vice President Richard Nixon called the concept "a haven for draft dodgers...
...A whole series of knotty questions needs to be resolved before the Corps can become a reality...
...Similar moves are afoot in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and elsewhere...
...At the point of origin, much of the idealism which animated the Marshall Plan and the original Point Four concept has worn thin...
...Meanwhile, in June, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota introduced a bill providing for the immediate establishment of a United States Peace Corps, setting forth the legal status of such a Corps in detail...
...Still, encouraging a pluralistic approach requires that the voluntary organizations be considered as part of the total American program...
...Seven—How should Youth Corps members be trained...
...It would therefore seem wisest not to require a college degree...
...Even before the beginnings of a formal program, many young Americans are teaching abroad on their own...
...So I made it my business to discuss and refine the proposal, through meetings and conversations with government officials, religious and welfare leaders, and university teachers and administrators...
...The major nucleus of the Corps would be sponsored and financed directly by the government...
...Letters from young Americans volunteering for the Corps, with an apparent full awareness of the sacrifice it entails, already fill several drawers of my filing cabinet...
...At the end of 1960, I sponsored a meeting in Washington of representatives of more than sixty interested organizations—business, labor, religious, welfare, university...
...studies of the culture of the underdeveloped area...
...Eight—How much would the program cost...
...They want to involve themselves in the affirmative evolution of the have-nots...
...A more sensitive objection to the complete draft exemption idea was advanced by the Reverend James H. Robinson, of Operation Cross-Roads Africa, who pointed out that Youth Corps members might be suspect abroad if it were known that draft exemption was a possible motive for their signing up...
...Here, there is a great variety of opinion...
...The annual cost for each member of the Corps, including transportation and living facilities, is estimated at around $5,000...
...President Kennedy received more letters on the Youth Corps, according to Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, than on any subject he raised during the campaign...
...and to utilize the services of those properly trained, on the new frontiers of humanity—to aid in building dams, teaching schools, operating hospitals, establishing irrigation projects, and generally to help other people to help themselves...
...Three—How big should the Corps be...
...Two—What types of jobs should the Corps do...
...To make available a much larger pool of United States overseas technicians...
...Farmers can demonstrate crop and livestock improvement, irrigation, conservation...
...From these essentially similar proposals will, I hope, emerge legislation sufficient to bring the Corps into being before the end of 1961...
...Army officers to Turkey and Iran and Viet Nam and Pakistan to train soldiers, surely we can afford to send a small number of young Americans to train farmers and teachers...
...By the end of 1959, the legislation calling for an official Congressional study was ready...
...A sensible way of handling the problem has been worked out in practice by International Voluntary Services...
...During the campaign last fall, candidate Kennedy asked "that some appropriate way be found to take advantage of the skills, the talents, the devotion, and the idealism which are inherent in America's young people...
...At a very simple level, there is a tremendous demand for teachers of English...
...As every Congressman knows, voters who once thrilled to the vision of West Europeans striving to restore their economies, of primitive peoples making the desert bloom, now ask embarrassing questions about Laos and Korea and Iraq...
...In the jungles of Cambodia, I saw a team of four young American schoolteachers who were going from village to village setting up the elementary schools that the French had neglected to provide in a hundred years of colonialism...
...On that basis, it would cost $10 million a year to send 2,000 young Americans abroad —less than one one-hundred-fiftieth of the sum we are now spending on our current foreign economic aid program...
...The Youth Corps idea should not be limited to United States participation...
...But, based on the quick acceptance by Congress last year of the study, I am highly optimistic that the Corps will be established by law...
...The idea of a Point Four Youth Corps first came to me on a Congressional mission to Southeast Asia in the fall of 1957...
...The exact bill on which Congress will be asked to act will undoubtedly be hammered out within the next few weeks...
...At the point of destination, so the criticism runs, our aid program relies too much upon military hardware, or upon grandiose steel-and-concrete projects that have little meaning to native peoples...
...Here are the main questions we asked ourselves: One—What is the Corps' purpose...
...And Congress can be relied on to make some modifications...
...While the young person is serving overseas, he is deferred from the draft just as is a university student...
...Perhaps the best solution would be to lodge the Corps, at least initially, in the agency which has been handling our technical assistance programs, the International Cooperation Administration...
...There is great need for people trained in medicine, nursing, and public administration...
...A few hundred participants are now being furnished by such organizations as International Voluntary Services, which carries on excellent programs in agriculture and community development in such places as Viet Nam, Jordan, and Ghana...
...Four main purposes appear: ^1 To add a human element to our programs of economic and social development...
...A program on the order of 1,000 to 2,000, consisting of both voluntary organizations and a government-sponsored component, sounds to most observers like the most sensible way to begin...
...The Corps certainly does not want members who are suspicious of foreigners...
...The study was authorized in an amendment to last year's Mutual Security Act, sponsored by the late Senator Richard L. Neuberger of Oregon and myself...
...Pay and allowances should be comparable to those of a soldier, something like expenses, plus $80 a month, which is the amount the rifle-toting counterpart of Youth Corps members would get in the Army...
...If we can afford to send many thousands of U.S...
...In practice, IVS reports that so far not one member has been drafted upon his return...
...This spring, the Kennedy Administration and the Eighty-seventh Congress will be overhauling the foreign aid program...
...In this overhaul, there will figure prominently the idea of using a corps of young Americans overseas to try to rekindle the flickering flame of idealism...
...Agencies such as these are the first to say that their resources are wholly inadequate for the size of the task presented...
...Representative Bar-ratt O'Hara of Illinois, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's African Subcommittee, reports that dozens of newly independent African states are desperately anxious for American technicians of all kinds, particularly teachers...
...It is envisaged that members sign up for at least three years...
...But this approach overlooks the fact that unskilled labor is something of which most underdeveloped countries have a considerable surplus...
...To have esprit de corps, you must first have a corps...
...Selective Service Director Lewis B. Hershey has indicated he would go along with this kind of approach to the Youth Corps...
...All I had for a text or a teacher's guide was an Army "poop-sheet", but the iridescent smiles of the Navajos and the joy of the Cajuns at establishing contact with home through the parish priest showed how easy it is to be a success at this...
...Six—Should Point Four Youth Corps members be draft exempt...
...An ultimate expansion to perhaps 10,000 could be envisaged...
...Top coordination could perhaps be handed to an undersecretary of state...
...The problem is too big for the voluntary organizations alone...
...Young Americans with some engineering training can help plan and build schools, clinics, irrigation projects, roads, and community centers...
Vol. 25 • February 1961 • No. 2
