PEACE CORPS IN THE 21 ST CENTURY: A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

3today with a pragmatic view of service. This study will analyze the rhetoric of theorganization today to present the tension between the organization’s idealistic past and itscurrent effort to respond a more pragmatic population. By this I mean to suggest thattoday’s volunteers approach their service with a sophisticated sensibility that upholdsservice as a practical convention necessary for self-satisfaction and personal advancementwhile at the same time holding on to the idealism of spreading peace to developingnations. In this introductory chapter, I will provide a historical background of theorganization – a review of pertinent Peace Corps studies and a characterization of thestate of civic engagement in the 21 st century – and after a justification of my study,briefly define the contents of the five chapters of this study.Peace Corps’ PastIn 1961, the Peace Corps hit the ground running. By August of that same year,the first volunteers, selected from a pool of 5,000 applicants, were sent to Ghana,Tanzania, Columbia, the Philippines, Chile, and St. Lucia. In September of 1961,Congress approved formal legislation, making Kennedy’s executive order an establishedlaw. By the end of 1963, 7,000 volunteers were “in country” in 44 different nations, andby June of 1964, over 15,000 volunteers were in service, which to date remains thehighest number of volunteers in service at one time. 5One volunteer recalls theexcitement of that time: “We were the Peace Corps, the shiny new creation that PresidentKennedy had proposed in the last days of his 1960 campaign, his experiment ininternational development. Everyone, it seemed, was impressed. That summer, allacross the country, our names were read on local newspapers . . . . We were on the