| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 233 words from this article are provided below; about 354 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Making Them Like Us: Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s. By Fritz Fischer. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. viii, 237 pp. $27.95, isbn 1-56098-889-4.)

This book examines the original cohort of Peace Corps volunteers during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. As such, it is a history of ideology and political policy confronting culture and personal experience: the intentions of the agency's leaders versus the motivations of the recruits; a heavy-handed training regime versus life and work overseas; how the volunteers changed and, very tentatively, how they changed America. 1

The ideology of the Peace Corps represented the blend of good-government idealism and progressive imperialism characterizing Cold War liberals before the Vietnam War. As policy, it was a high-profile bauble, used by John F. Kennedy in 1960 to signal youthful vigor and ignored afterwards. What made the Peace Corps more than a Potemkin village was the crusading sincerity of its first chief, Sargent Shriver, and his deputies, who recruited white, middle-class "B.A. generalists" as a new generation of pioneers. As Fritz Fischer underlines, the actual work done by these supposed jacks-of-all-trades (a grab bag of teaching, neighborhood fix-it projects, and community organizing) was secondary to their presumably inspirational presence in the Third World. Where the Soviets, Chinese, and Europeans sent doctors, engineers, and other experts, we deliberately sent unskilled youth, as if to prove the superiority of American life and culture. . . .

There are about 354 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.