By Admin1 (admin) on Monday, June 10, 2002 - 10:54 am: Edit Post |
The IDPA: Forerunner of the Peace Corps
“The International Development Placement Association is rendering a significant service in our foreign relations. We of the West have too long and too often gone to the East with a domineering, ruthless, and exploitive attitude. If we are to become partners with the Asians in the works of peace, we must learn to go to Asia with humility and understanding. The International Development Placement Association is one of the agencies that meets this high standard. The men and women whom it sends to Asia will work in the villages, helping people there to help themselves. These emissaries will do more to build understanding between these two worlds than all the wealth and all the military might America can muster.”Even if you feel twenty years younger, when you hit your 70’s you occasionally consider how quickly generations of men and women slip away and are forgotten. And if you’ve made some efforts to make things better, you hope some contribution or two you’ve made will turn out to have lasting merit. For me the matter concerns one of the origins of the Peace Corps. Two or more histories of the Peace Corps cite as a forerunner of the 1961 Kennedy creation the “International Development Placement Association,” a national organization which I put together in the Fall of 1951, after my wife Mary and I graduated from Berea College, “where the mountains meet the Blue Grass,” in Kentucky.*
-- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Washington, D.C., December 6, 1951.