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The United States Peace Corps captured the public’s imagination in a way that few international development initiatives ever did. Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy first uttered the words ‘Peace Corps’ in early November 1960; two months later, a Gallup poll found that 89 per cent of Americans had heard of the Peace Corps, with 71 per cent in favour.1 Over the following years, the Peace Corps was the subject of countless articles in newspapers and magazines, and featured on the television and on radio. It also intersected with popular culture: portrayed in plays, novels, cartoons, television sitcoms and game shows throughout the 1960s, the Peace Corps helped introduce America’s agenda for international development to a popular audience. This chapter explores the nature and effects of this publicity during the 1960s. It begins by charting the close alliance that Peace Corps HQ, and particularly its first director, Sargent Shriver, built with the burgeoning corporate industries of advertising and public relations. It shows how the Peace Corps rendered international development into a topic for mainstream discussion and public engagement. It also traces some of the political outcomes of this publicity. Peace Corps publicity explained the nature of international development to the broader public in particular ways. First, by focusing on volunteers’ altruistic intentions rather than the effectiveness of their actions on the ground, Peace Corps publicity portrayed international development as a humanitarian project. By presenting US intervention as a positive expression of American altruism, the Peace Corps helped popularise the view that America had a responsibility to modernise the ‘underdeveloped’ nations of the world. This chapter argues that, by privileging American viewpoints and eliding competing visions, Peace Corps publicity helped normalise a logic of intervention. In 2000, Nick Cullather called on historians to treat ‘development as history’, and to make ‘history the methodology for studying modernization, instead of the other way around’.2 Historians have taken up the challenge, producing some important work on modernisation and aid projects in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Scholars have focused particularly on the Cold War context, and how this influenced policy

‘The most potent public relations tool ever devised’?