The Interpersonal and the International: Development, Volunteering and Grassroots Diplomacy in the 1960s

Abstract This article examines the vexed nature of grassroots diplomacy by tracing the experiences and management of volunteers working in Asia and Africa with Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and the United States Peace Corps during the 1960s. Development volunteering blurred the divide between individual bodies and the body politic and rendered the interpersonal relationships of otherwise ordinary individuals into a form of diplomatic encounter. In theory, grassroots diplomacy encouraged positive cross-cultural encounters and overt displays of international friendship. In practice, however, grassroots diplomacy also provided a space for ongoing international tensions around race, development, and neocolonialism to be contested. This article argues that the quotidian behaviour of Western volunteers provided a site of rupture through which alternative discourses and political positions could be advanced, especially by activists in Africa and Asia without access to conventional diplomatic channels. Although grassroots diplomacy was a celebrated ideal in the context of the Cold War and decolonisation, in practice non-elite agency in international relations came to be increasingly regulated by states and non-governmental organisations concerned with defending their nation’s reputation. It could also have serious impacts for individuals whose personal lives were derailed by international incidents.

was reported as far away as Malaya. 2 It was also extensively covered in the United States; President Kennedy closely followed the latest developments as it became an international incident. 3In the wash up, Nigeria's foreign minister, Jaja Wachuku, claimed that Michelmore's postcard confirmed existing suspicions in decolonising nations that the United States was gripped by 'a general feeling of superiority over the non-White world' . 4ichelmore's personal views ignited an international incident because she was a member of the Peace Corps, the largest and most-publicised international volunteering program of the 1960s.International volunteering broadened the cast of actors in global affairs by positing that non-elite or 'ordinary' citizens (who otherwise had no access to domestic or international politics or governance) had a role to play in ameliorating 'underdevelopment' in the Global South, and the economic and political instability it caused.National programs including the United States Peace Corps and Britain's Voluntary Service Overseas (commonly known as VSO) claimed that volunteers were ambassadors for their nation: as founding Peace Corps Director R. Sargent Shriver had it, volunteers conducted 'grassroots diplomacy' . 5This discourse blurred the divide between personal bodies and the body politic, and rendered the interpersonal relationships of otherwise ordinary individuals into a form of diplomatic encounter.
This article extends recent attempts to overturn the top-down conventions of international history by exploring the role of non-elite actors in international affairs. 6Utilising state and development agency archives, personal papers, media reports and oral history, it focuses on development volunteering to argue that grassroots diplomacy provided a space for ongoing international tensions around race, development and neocolonialism to be contested in the 1960s.Western governments presumed that well-meaning volunteers would counter negative opinion about their nation and claimed that volunteers embodied an idealised national character. 7But in practice, international volunteering did not produce exclusively positive encounters and overt displays of international friendship.More complex encounters, including sexual relationships and a kaleidoscopic range of conflicts, proliferated.The unruly behaviour of ordinary citizens provided sites of rupture through which alternative discourses and radical political positions could be advanced, especially by activists in Africa and Asia who did not have access to traditional channels of diplomacy.
Young, white women were overrepresented in events that flared into diplomatic incidents.For young British and American women, volunteering abroad offered unprecedented opportunities for personal freedom and professional fulfilment.International volunteering represented the most accessible way for Western women to become involved in international affairs during the 1950s and 1960s, especially in countries levelling a marriage bar, or practicing systematic sex and gender discrimination for foreign service employment. 8But the symbolic resonances that had accrued around white femininity during colonialism complicated their experiences in many postcolonial nations.In the charged political atmosphere of decolonisation, even the slightest spark could ignite an international incident.Where official diplomacy emphasised friendship and equality between nations, non-elite encounters provided a space for the underlying tensions around race and the ongoing legacies of colonialism to be drawn out in the early postcolonial period.In response, grassroots diplomacy came under increasing regulation by Western states and volunteer-sending development agencies attempting to prevent further scandals and defend their nation's reputation.The overrepresentation of young women in international incidents led to a distinct gendering of the personal body/diplomatic body quandary, resulting in increased surveillance and policing of female volunteers by volunteering agencies and diplomats over the course of the 1960s.

International volunteering as 'grassroots diplomacy'
New heat accompanied the idea that everyday citizens should engage with international affairs by the 1960s.Compulsory education gave rise to publics with an understanding of and interest in international relations, a fact captured by Gallup polls as they spread around the Western world. 9World War II propaganda had driven home the point that personal conduct on the home front could have international ramifications: that getting a war job could speed up victory, or that loose lips could sink ships. . 10Such messages were amplified in the Anglophone West as the Cold War was rendered into a battle for 'hearts and minds' during the 1950s.Christina Klein has shown that middlebrow magazines, novels, plays, films and even advertisements encouraged 'ordinary' Americans to think of themselves as actors in the Cold War. 11In Britain, decolonisation drew a growing constituency of middle-class citizens into international affairs: as Anna Bocking-Welch has shown, for many Britons 'it became a civic duty to engage, understand and intervene to help the shrinking world in which they lived' .This 'active citizenship' extended to political, development and humanitarian causes, and emphasised the role of 'the British publicrather than the British state-as key agents of change in a rapidly shrinking world' . 12he sphere of international development was singled out as a particularly meaningful avenue for citizens' involvement in global affairs.Stringfellow Barr's 1951 pamphlet Let's Join the Human Race sought to educate the 'average American' about the 'staggering human misery of Asia, of Africa, of Latin America' .Barr thought that ordinary Americans would be compelled to action, as 'Most Americans do not want to go on feasting at a table where most plates are empty and most faces gaunt and most eyes hollow with hunger' .Barr's pamphlet was a phenomenal success, running through eight reprints and multiple translations before its reissue as a full-length book, Citizens of the World, in 1952. 13Similarly, British economist Barbara Ward published a string of popular books on the problems of underdevelopment during the 1950s and 1960s.Ward was a prolific journalist and speaker who toured the world encouraging both states and citizens to become more committed to international development.her 1962 bestseller, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in the United States. 14he sense that ordinary people should become involved in international affairs was joined by the knowledge that they could, as disposable incomes rose and travel technology underwent a revolution in the wake of World War II.The speed with which jet planes traversed the earth contributed to a sense that the world was shrinking and added further urgency to the notion that ordinary citizens had a role to play in global affairs. 15The tourism industry actively contributed to this discourse, exhorting middle-class Westerners to learn more about the world, and build bonds of international friendship, through personal travel. 16ll these factors encouraged non-elites to participate in postwar international affairs.Although 'Track Two diplomacy' would not become a commonplace term until the 1980s, all the essential components were in place years earlier.In 1954, the US State Department released a report on 'People to People Diplomacy' , stating its 'conviction that the sharing of ideas through direct personal experience would strengthen genuine understanding and mutual respect basic to the security of the free world' . 17In the United States, the decade from 1955 saw the establishment of People-to-People International and the expansion of educational exchange programs including the International educational exchange Program, Fulbright and the experiment in International Living.The USSR and China also invested in people-to-people diplomacy, inviting individuals and community groups from around the world to experience communism first-hand. 18From the 1950s, therefore, a growing number of individuals became involved in formal or informal attempts to bridge the distance between nations and blocs.Diplomacy's essential ambiguity-the blurring of the ambassador's personal body and the nation they represented-was extended to growing numbers of citizen-diplomats who circulated around the globe looking to make friends for their nation.
Although non-elite diplomacy programs of all kinds proliferated during this time, no initiative attracted more government or media attention, or captured more public interest, than international development volunteering. 19Development volunteering was first established in Australia, but it achieved prominence in Britain and the United States. 20Britain's VSO, founded in 1958, positioned international volunteering as a way to assist developing nations and also improve Britain's national reputation.A 1960 pamphlet claimed that, in one Caribbean territory, volunteers 'have done more than anything else to create a pro-english feeling in the two districts where they are stationed' , concluding that 'Our two boys have been worth more than any Information Service' .In West Africa, it was claimed, 'Their warm and friendly sympathy with the people…has made all the difference in the world and added greatly to the strength of Anglo-African friendship here' . 21When Queen elizabeth II hosted returning volunteers for tea in 1961, her briefing papers emphasised the extent to which they had improved Britain's image in nations undergoing decolonisation' . 22The VSO Council minutes noted that the Queen 'had been clearly impressed by the volunteers' in this capacity; Prince Philip became VSO's official patron the following month. 23he United States Peace Corps, established in 1961 as an executive Agency and led by President Kennedy's brother-in-law R. Sargent Shriver, also balanced developmentalist aims with public diplomacy.In his inaugural address, Kennedy had pledged to 'those people in the huts and villages of half the globe, struggling to break the bonds of mass misery…our best efforts to help them help themselves' . 24But Kennedy and his advisers, including development expert Max Millikan, had also foreseen additional benefits: the Peace Corps would lead to 'a better understanding by the peoples of the underdeveloped countries of American institutions and of the purposes, values and motivations of Americans' , and help build 'a growing reservoir of American citizens with an intimate knowledge and understanding of conditions in other parts of the world' . 25Peace Corps volunteers would be ambassadors for the American nation and its way of life, and by capturing Asian, African and Latin American hearts and minds, help draw their nations away from Communism.For the propaganda benefits to flow to the United States, the Peace Corps had to claim development volunteering as something that was distinctly Americaneven though it was modelled on Australian and British schemes.Kennedy and Shriver made passionate speeches claiming Peace Corps volunteers as representatives of the New Frontier. 26amed anthropologist Margaret Mead stated that the Peace Corps was 'extraordinarily American in its strengths and in its weaknesses' , including 'high intelligence, goodwill, an almost infinite capacity to improvise, an enthusiastic willingness to learn by doing, and a readiness to correct errors that perhaps need not have occurred' . 27In a 1967 book titled The Peace Corps and American National Character, Lawrence Fuchs claimed that 'the Peace Corps taught me more about American values and character and American government and politics than I had learned in ten years of teaching American Civilization and Politics at harvard and Brandeis universities' . 28evelopment volunteers were therefore private individuals but also representatives of the nation: like early Modern plenipotentiaries, their bodies were regarded as simultaneously personal and political. 29Because they cherished the association between young volunteers and the national character, volunteer-sending organisations and governments became increasingly concerned with the question of how volunteers were perceived in host nations.The first Peace Corps Representative in Peru (a paid staff position tasked with supporting and supervising volunteers) wrote that 'This fish-bowl or glass-house in which we all must exist for two years puts a special obligation on us all to be aware of appearance, manners and conduct at all times' . 30essentially, development volunteering demanded a re-negotiation of the public and private spheres.As Sargent Shriver wrote in 1967, 'the high visibility of PCVs [Peace Corps volunteers] in a host country makes it necessary for the Volunteer to realize that much of the behaviour that might be considered in the private domain in the United States enters the public domain abroad.The reputation of our country and the good name of other Volunteers must always be kept foremost in mind' . 31olunteer agencies and Western governments reflexively associated volunteers' good reputations with the sexual purity of white female volunteers.This was in keeping with the symbolic resonance that the image of white womanhood had accrued in the colonial period.For european and American audiences, white womanhood in the colonial context represented sexual and racial purity, and emphasised the fragility of an empire that had to be defended and protected. 32Ann Laura Stoler has pointed to the central role that the regulation of sexual relationships had in the colonial enterprise. 33A similar scenario can be seen in Western development volunteering agencies during the 1960s, usually regarded as the peak years of decolonisation.Regular tensions arose between individuals and agencies, and between agencies and governments, as they struggled to define the boundaries of acceptable interpersonal conduct for women who were not directly employed by the nation's foreign service but were nonetheless thrust into the role of national representative.

The intimacy of global politics
International volunteering manifested a fundamental tension between what volunteers did on the ground, and how their actions were variously claimed, used, or rejected by host communities and governments.Romantic and sexual encounters involving white women volunteers were particular sites of friction.Fears that romantic entanglements would lead to divided loyalties bolstered a deeper anxiety that sex would sully a volunteer's reputation-and by association, the nation's.Faced with a striking variety of interpersonal, cross-cultural and often interracial relationships, British and American volunteering agencies attempted to define the limits of acceptable conduct and to police the intimate relationships of volunteers abroad.The personal conduct of female volunteers was of particular concern.hints of romantic relationships formed between British 'girl' volunteers (as they were regularly called) and local men in postcolonial nations were inevitably interpreted through the prism of the woman's reputation as well as Britain's.In November 1961, the Malay Mail profiled heather Making as a globally minded young Briton during her VSO posting in then-Malaya.She was reported as having 'arrived in Malaya straight from school…to do [her] bit for the improvement of Commonwealth relations' by volunteering as a teacher at a Penang secondary school. 34Yet, at the same time, the diplomatic channels were full of chatter about her personal conduct.The British high Commission in Kuala Lumpur wrote to the Office of the Deputy high Commissioner in Penang to warn them that 'Miss Making is apparently having an affair with a Sikh whom she met on the boat on the way to Malaya' . 35A minor scandal erupted.Although Making was never consulted about the alleged 'affair' , nor whether she was indeed conducting it on school grounds as reports suggested, it was decided that she should be removed from her posting and moved to another school (with a British headmaster) at Kuala Kangsar.This would not only allow her to make a fresh start, but also put more miles between her and her alleged lover.This was despite the fact that colonial officials in Penang found it 'difficult to imagine anything more unlikely than [the] allegations against Miss Making' . 36As the Making case shows, even the rumour of an interracial romantic encounter could result in a female volunteer being disciplined or removed from her post out of fear that her reputation, and by extension the nation's reputation, were under threat.
As the largest program with the greatest resources, the Peace Corps was particularly concerned to regulate contacts between volunteers and the communities in which they worked.Staff at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington D.C. devoted a great deal of time to devising detailed and prescriptive policies regulating the boundaries of appropriate conduct.They also hired dozens of Peace Corps Representatives to keep an eye on volunteers during postings, and intervene if they deemed it necessary.The issues of sex, marriage and pregnancy were particularly consuming.As one Interim Policy Directive noted in June 1962, 'Perhaps no question has been more discussed in the Peace Corps, both formally and informally, than that of an appropriate policy with respect to the marriage of volunteers during overseas service' . 37The Peace Corps approved of marriage between American volunteers, but it was much less enthusiastic about romantic entanglements between volunteers and so-called 'host Country Nationals' .In 1962, after fierce debate, Peace Corps Washington decided not to adopt a flat rule terminating all volunteers who married host country nationals.'But' , it warned, 'the Peace Corps is aware-and expects each volunteer to be aware-of the very strong possibility that marriage to a non-volunteer may create so many complications as to make termination of the volunteer's service desirable and necessary' . 38eace Corps policies were significantly gendered on paper, and even more so in practice.Partly, this stemmed from the recognition that women's legal and citizenship status was thrown into question by marriage to a foreign national.however, gendered assumptions about women's porousness to foreign influence were also influential.As the Sierra Leone Representative wrote to Shriver in 1962, in the case of a male Peace Corps Volunteer, there would be some assumption that he intended to retain his US citizenship and probably to return to the United States with his wife when his duty with the Peace Corps was finished.On the other hand, there would also be some assumption that a woman Peace Corps Volunteer married to a non-citizen might not intend to return to the United States.I wonder whether in such a case there might not be some dilution of her loyalties, perhaps a problem of cross-loyalties, which should be carefully considered in determining whether she would retain her ability and willingness to represent the United States as a Peace Corps Volunteer? 39 this case, and more broadly, the assumption that a woman's views and loyalties mirrored those of her husband served to blur the boundaries between the problem of national loyalty and the problem of gender.
even more alarming was sex outside of marriage: as one volunteer training manual had it, the Peace Corps 'expects your sexual behavior to be exemplary at all times' , and this precluded all kinds of physical contact between men and women, with a particular focus on contacts between American women and foreign men. 40A 1967 manual demonstrated 'various types of social misconduct' as part of training for Peace Corps Representatives heading into the field.every one of the manual's scenarios involved a female volunteer, and almost always came back to a smear on her perceived virtue.One of the scenarios of 'misconduct' involved a female volunteer allowing a local man to put his arm around her while they walked, setting local tongues wagging even though there was no further evidence of a sexual or romantic relationship.In managing this situation, the manual referred staff representatives to Transfer, Resignation and Termination policies, suggesting that this scenario demanded a serious response.In effect, female volunteers' bodies were imprinted with national significance, and the sullying of a woman's reputation-whether real or imputed-was seen as a genuine threat to the reputation of the United States and had to be managed as such.
In practice, the level of vigilance over women volunteers far exceeded that over men, effectively reproducing the sexual dynamics of late-colonial societies. 41Peter Lee, a Peace Corps volunteer in a small town near Bangkok in Thailand from 1965, considered visits to the local brothel a routine part of his work assignment as an english teacher at a boys' middle school.Only three days after his arrival, he accompanied several male teachers to the next town, where they drank for several hours before heading to the local brothels.As Lee recounted, at this point 'I was so grateful' that this issue had been covered in training back in the United States.At the training session, men had been separated from female trainees, and a returned volunteer gave them what Lee called 'the condom lecture' about prostitution.As he recalled, trainee volunteers were told that 'you're gonna make the decision about whether you're going to be a prude about it and not go, in which case you will probably cut yourself off from male companionship, or whether you would just go: "alright alright"' .Lee decided not to be a 'prude' and regularly visited brothels, as did many of his fellow male volunteers.however, Lee remembered that, at the same training session, a female trainee had been 'terminated' from the Peace Corps because of 'her sexual attitudes' .Whether this referred to her perceived promiscuity or homosexuality was not clear-Lee hadn't noticed anything unusual about her-however, even the rumour of either was reason enough for a woman to be immediately dropped from the program. 42This was in keeping with Peace Corps policy on promiscuity, which was directed exclusively at female volunteers and particularly concerned with the consequences of promiscuity on the reputation of the Peace Corps program. 43ale volunteers were, however, closely monitored for evidence of homosexuality, which the Peace Corps regarded a form of sexual perversion even as United States sodomy laws were gradually relaxed from 1962. 44Same-sex attracted personnel could not be hired by the U.S. government under an eisenhower-era executive Order, still in force during the 1960s, and the Peace Corps actively adhered to the law.The Peace Corps included an inquiry into 'a history of homosexual behavior' as part of the background checks performed on each prospective volunteer, and psychiatrists kept an eye out for 'homosexual tendencies' during training.In-country, the surveillance was continued by Peace Corps Representatives.The policy was unequivocal: 'in any case, a volunteer who attempts to or does participate in even a single act of homosexual behavior should be sent to Washington' .even the rumour of homosexuality was enough to get a volunteer terminated.As a 1966 memo noted, whether there was any truth to a rumour was immaterial, as 'the rumors are damaging the effectiveness of the Volunteer whether they are true or not' .The risk was to America's reputation: 'To ignore the problem is impossible; it has the potential of becoming a cause celebre' . 45At a time when homosexuality was still regularly associated with degeneracy, Peace Corps leadership feared that even a single same-sex attracted volunteer would diminish the muscular reputation of the United States abroad.

Microaggression as neocolonial resistance
The linking of personal lives with national reputations rendered interpersonal relations into fraught terrain.In sexual relationships, the personal behaviour of an individual volunteer was thought to transfer to the national reputation.But this dynamic could play out in reverse: sometimes, individual volunteers were treated in a certain way because of their nation's standing.Occasionally, this could mean special treatment.Just as often, however, volunteers confronted suspicion and enmity in communities enduring the legacies of european imperialism and confronting the threat of American neocolonialism.Some 'host Country Nationals' regarded volunteers as spies or government agents; others merely resented the presence of Westerners claiming they alone held the expertise required for a nation's progress.In these contexts, resisting a volunteer's efforts at development, or even making them personally uncomfortable, was rendered into an important and uniquely accessible form of political agency.Tensions arose when host communities, especially those closely attuned to anti-colonial politics, questioned what inexperienced foreigners could teach them about 'development' in their own countries, or suggested that volunteers harboured racist or neocolonial views.These tensions grew into international incidents when linked to the wider assumptions about race and 'civilisation' that underpinned international development and manifested in volunteer programs such as the Peace Corps. 46he official discourse of international development emphasised the goodwill of Western donor nations.But critics held a radically different view.From the late 1940s, dependency theorists argued that the postcolonial global economy perpetuated colonial inequality, and their views gained new traction and publicity during the 1960s. 47Across the non-aligned Third World, Communist parties were vehemently critical of Western-led international development, which they viewed as part of a wider capitalist quest for global hegemony.Their critiques were influential beyond the radical left in many postcolonial nations.The arrival of Western volunteers, and especially the first contingent of Peace Corps volunteers, was accompanied by a surge of negative press coverage, in both communist and mainstream newspapers, in nations including Indonesia, Ghana and Nigeria. 48gain, young, white, female volunteers were subject to particular interest and surveillance.Although British and American volunteer agencies assumed that the interest would be sexual, the meanings that accrued to white womanhood were different for formerly colonised groups.
Rather than symbolising racial and sexual fragility, for many, white women's power over 'native' men was the keenest representation of the humiliation and subjugation entailed by colonialism. 49his image retained its resonance even as formal colonialism ended.For some, the young, white women who arrived as volunteers in the early postcolonial years, and who were immediately placed in positions of influence and authority over local populations, were the clearest personifications of the neocolonial dynamic inherent to the international development system.Taking place outside the stage-managed conferences and highly ritualised conventions of formal diplomacy, international volunteering provided opportunities for Asian and African activists, who lacked access to formal diplomatic channels, to nonetheless participate in and even influence international affairs.Volunteers often faced a wealth of conflict in their daily lives.Although some volunteers were disliked for their personalities, others were ostracized because they were regarded as representatives of their nation.In these cases, snubs and slights directed towards volunteers were intended as a form of as resistance towards Britain, or more often, America.Alice O'Grady, a member of the first Peace Corps contingent in Ghana, taught at a secondary school in the nation's far west.Over the course of her two-year posting, O'Grady faced constant and growing hostility from students who resented a new disciplinary regime she had introduced and considered defiance of 'european' teachers to be part of Nkrumahist Ghana's broader resistance against the vestiges of colonialism.The Peace Corps recruited social scientists to conduct in-depth interviews with each member of the first Ghana contingent on a yearly basis.In the course of these interviews, O'Grady revealed the difficulty of her situation.her students 'treated me with a lot of disrespect.And made life miserable for me' .On one occasion, during yard duty, a group of boys threw pebbles at her, and made hissing noises that became louder until O'Grady retreated in tears.As she recounted, 'they knew I was crying, and the ones that I left cheered as I walked away…they were happy that they had gotten rid of me…that they'd won' . 50he students' animosity was directed at O'Grady as an individual, but it was tied to national and international politics.President Kwame Nkrumah's anticolonial rhetoric was well-established by the time the Peace Corps arrived in August 1961.Nkrumah's decision to welcome American volunteers appeared out of step with his political ideology of anti-colonialism, modernism and African self-sufficiency.The ruling Convention People's Party had assumed that Nkrumah would refuse Sargent Shriver's offer of volunteers; the party newspaper, the Ghanaian Times, pre-emptively condemned the Peace Corps as 'an agency of neo-colonialism' . 51In this instance, the need for trained teachers in Ghana's burgeoning education system outweighed Nkrumah's anti-Western rhetoric. 52Overt opposition to Nkrumah's position was impossible once he decided to welcome the Peace Corps into Ghana, but media resistance to American volunteers continued in shadow debates about foreign experts.In August 1961, the same month in which the first Peace Corps contingent arrived, the Ghanaian Times ran an editorial demanding to 'Stop these experts' .It declared that 'Ghana has arrived at a stage in her development when it must pause, look left and right, and find out if all the British expatriates and other foreigners parading in the country as experts are really experts' .Claiming that many were in reality 'greenhorns' , the Ghanaian Times called for the nation 'to be rid of the humbuggery of these fake experts' . 53even the pro-Western Ashanti Pioneer condemned some of the 'experts from abroad' who failed to make a genuine contribution to Ghana, and called on the government 'to see whether something cannot be done about the present policy of allowing our Ghanaian experts to go abroad, whilst we at home go abroad looking for expatriate experts and teachers' . 54esistance also continued at a grassroots level.Alice O'Grady was one victim of this grassroots anti-Americanism.her school hosted a large contingent of Young Pioneers, a youth organization aiming to inculcate young Ghanaians with Nkrumahist principles, with a particular stress on social cohesion and anti-colonial rhetoric. 55O'Grady had fallen foul of the Young Pioneers when she tried to ban meetings during her class times; even though she ultimately apologized and reversed her decision (having been told that 'it's a dangerous thing to do and I had really not thought about what I was doing'), the Young Pioneers continued to target her.Ghanaian schools had been sites of anti-colonial resistance from the 1940s, with strikes and other forms of disciplinary breakdown wielded as a form of protest against colonial oppression.After independence, Nkrumah and the CPP paid particular attention to cultivating an integrated national identity and pan-African sympathies in children and youth. 56Young people in Nkrumah's Ghana formed a particularly significant political cohort; as emmanuel Asiedu-Acquah notes, 'student activism established itself as a fulcrum of the country's evolving postcolonial political order' . 57he resistance of O'Grady's students must be read in light of this broader political significance.And yet, political resentment was amplified by personal aversion; as O'Grady admitted, she struggled to remember African pupils' names, had a short temper, and regularly called students who struggled to understand her english 'stupid' .As she reflected, 'I'm aware that when I say it I perhaps should be more careful.This is a very, really a bad thing to say, or not a bad thing, but it's a very strong thing to say and to be called 'stupid' is really an insult' -an insult only exacerbated by her white skin.Just as significantly, O'Grady refused to learn the local Twi language, which caused conflict with fellow teachers as well as students; everyone, it seems, agreed that 'I'm in Ghana and I must learn [their] language' .even though english was Ghana's official language, the vernacular held particular significance in post-colonial societies.Refusing to learn a local language regularly caused friction between Peace Corps volunteers and host communities. 58'Grady knew that her role as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana merged the personal with the political.As she recounted, 'We had been told that the whole American relationship with Africa [is] in your hands' .She went on: 'we're so intimately involved in real diplomatic relations, and I found it kind of exciting from that point of view' . 59She considered her failingsshort-temperedness, irritability, poor memory-to be personal failings; but her students interpreted them within the broader political context.her perceived haughtiness, inability to remember African names, and unwillingness to learn Twi resonated with a long history of european superciliousness under colonialism and rising American hegemony.In this case, the slippage between personal and political enmity was chronic and fluid, reflecting the ambiguous role occupied by the Peace Corps abroad.O'Grady preferred to think of her work in Ghana as an individual effort, and her relationships as personal.Yet, she also aligned herself with the positive image of the Peace Corps.Concluding her interview in mid-1962, O'Grady laughed as she admitted that, 'when it gets good publicity at home I like to take some of the glory and think: Gee, I'm part of some-thing…President Kennedy's Peace Corps, me and President Kennedy' . 60The essential ambiguity of non-elite diplomacy, in which volunteers were both individuals and representatives of their nation, could cut both ways.

The postcard incident
The ambiguity attending volunteers' day-to-day lives was writ large in the Margery Michelmore postcard incident.Michelmore's views that Nigeria was 'absolutely primitive' had been expressed in a private postcard to a friend and were intended as statements of personal opinion rather than representing the Peace Corps or the American nation.Many Americans and other Westerners regarded the 'postcard incident' as a clear-cut breach of privacy. 61however, the Nigerian Students' Union, which had played a key role in decolonisation, read Michelmore's postcard not as a personal comment but as representative of American opinion, and their reading resounded with leading political and cultural figures as well as the press in Nigeria and other decolonising and non-aligned nations. 62igerian responses to Michelmore's postcard were passionate and intense.Outrage quickly spread beyond Ibadan.The Western region's ruling Action Group party condemned the Peace Corps as 'international spies' and 'imperialist lions who had invaded our country in the sheep's skins of all forms of peace missions' .The eastern Region's NCNC party demanded an apology from the US Ambassador. 63The broad circulation newspapers Sunday Express and Sunday Post both published the postcard in its entirety, along with the home addresses of both Michelmore and the friend for whom the postcard had been intended. 64The Sunday Post emphasised the emotion evoked by the postcard in a front-page article punctuated with exclamation points: 'Sour!Bitter!These ugly words describe the mood and the temper of students at the University College, Ibadan' . 65he Michelmore scandal drew in a broad swathe of Nigerian society.As Professor of Agricultural economics at the University of Ibadan (and a regular columnist for the Sunday Express) h.A. Oluwasanmi noted, 'wherever two or more Nigerians met last week-at work or in the playing fields, at home or in school-Miss Michelmore's postcard was the topic of heated debate' . 66etters to the editor of the Sunday Express provide a rare window onto Nigerian public opinion on the matter (although of course they were mediated by the editor's choices regarding which letters to publish).Published letters were unremittingly negative, condemning Michelmore's 'anti-black feeling' , which was common to 'white bigots' who refused to see the positive signs of Nigeria's progress, and congratulating the students of University College Ibadan 'for their vigilance' .One reader even called for Michelmore to be 'caned for her practical insult on Nigerians' .Others thought that suspicion and censure should not be limited to Michelmore, but rather extend to all Peace Corps volunteers, as 'heaven knows what the others must have written in sealed letters' . 67any Nigerians, including the authors of these letters, read Michelmore's words as reflecting on the Peace Corps and the American nation, rather than on Michelmore as a private individual.In enugu, the eastern Region's Nigerian Outlook called for 'an immediate re-examination of the Kennedy Peace Corps mission in Nigeria' . 68The image of the Peace Corps as a Trojan horse, or a wolf in sheep's clothing, recurred in numerous reports.The NPC's Daily Mail wrote that 'We want friends but not wolves in sheep's clothing as President Kennedy's spies' . 69The Trojan horse image was also picked up by h.A. Oluwasanmi, who wrote that, 'I am usually tough-minded and septical [sic] about Greeks carrying gifts' , although in this instance, he claimed there was no evidence that the Peace Corps were spies. 70he Michelmore incident played into tensions between Nigeria and the United States, and between decolonising African nations and the West more broadly.It was the latest in a string of incidents that had inflamed Nigerian resentment against Western racism and condescension in the early postcolonial period.Most pressing was the widespread racism experienced by Nigerian migrants in Britain, and racial slights to senior diplomats in the United States.Just days before Michelmore had dropped her postcard, the Lagos Daily Express had published an editorial warning that 'if the West led by the United States of America and Great Britain loses Africa to the east' , it would be because of 'the race problem' and continuing slights to the 'human dignity' of Africans. 71The Michelmore incident, therefore, played into existing postcolonial grievances.As the Daily Express editorialised, it was the 'smugness and mediocrity' of Americans that caused greatest offense, and 'from the hoity-toity way things are now going' , the Peace Corps was 'hoist with her own petard already' . 72In the wake of the postcard incident, an NCNC spokesman reported he was ready to 'purge America of its gross contempt for us' . 73ignificantly, reports of the postcard incident circulated to other parts of the decolonising world.In neighbouring Ghana, reports were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Nigerian point of view, despite chronic tensions between the competing West African nations.In the week following the incident, even the pro-Western Ashanti Pioneer ran stories directly quoting Nigerian, but not American, viewpoints.Reporting on negative receptions of volunteers in Nigeria allowed Ghanaian newspapers to critique the Peace Corps without overtly undermining Nkrumah's continued support for the program, and reports about volunteers behaving badly in Nigeria continued to feature for months after the Michelmore scandal.
Beyond Africa, the postcard incident was evoked by opposition groups mounting campaigns to expel Peace Corps volunteers from their own countries.In Indonesia, the Communist Party's Harian Rakjat (among the largest-circulation newspapers in Sukarno-era Indonesia) conjured the Michelmore postcard scandal, which it represented as 'an insult to coloured people' , as part of its campaign to oppose the entry of the Peace Corps to Indonesia in 1962. 74It claimed that the entire Peace Corps was composed of people like 'the racist Margery' , who look on the people of Nigeria and other developing nations as 'second class humans' . 75One report directly cited the Ghanaian Times, arguing that 'the American Peace Corps is an instrument of neo-colonialism, an instrument to destroy the new developing countries and put them under the domination of American imperialism' . 76ot every postcolonial nation seized on the Michelmore incident, however.Malaya, which had gained independence in 1957, remained closely aligned with the Western bloc throughout the 1960s.In Malaya, early attitudes to British VSO and American Peace Corps volunteers were decidedly more positive, and media reports considered Michelmore's infamous postcard an expression of personal, rather than national, opinion.The wide-circulation english-language daily Straits Times reported on the postcard incident, and even published a large photograph of Margery Michelmore.Unlike Nigerian, Ghanaian and Indonesian newspapers, it didn't represent Michelmore as a diplomatic representative of the United States, but rather as a private individual who had fallen victim to misdirected postcolonial resentment.Rather than surveying African responses, the Straits Times syndicated its reports from London newspapers that conveyed Western appraisals of the postcard incident.In November 1961, for example, a Straits Times report written by Briton David holden represented Michelmore as 'the American girl…who innocently wrote a postcard' , and fell victim to an 'exaggerated' and 'youthful militancy' that had no clear political agenda. 77Malay-language media, meanwhile, overwhelmingly ignored the Michelmore affair.
Although the postcard incident represented one of the most direct threats to the Peace Corps in its first year of operation, Sargent Shriver and other Peace Corps personnel were personally sympathetic to Margery Michelmore, regarding her postcard as a personal item that should never have been publicised.Coverage in American newspapers tended to follow this interpretation.John Updike reported on the 'strange case of Miss Margery Michelmore' in the New Yorker in October 1961. he claimed that 'it affords us some relief…to encounter a story in which America's cause is just' .Updike rested his case 'on the international right of postal privacy' , claiming that 'Miss M. did not sin in saying in a personal missive that she was startled…And the fellow-student who picked up the dropped card &, instead of mailing it, handed it to the local mimeographer seems guilty of a failure of gallantry' .The fault, in Updike's view, lay with the Nigerian activists who had forced Michelmore's private opinions into the public sphere, as 'one does not read other people's mail & then demonstrate because it is insufficiently flattering' . 78argery Michelmore apologised and was quickly withdrawn from Ibadan.In the following days, the slippage between private and public proved politically productive for both the United States and Nigeria, as leaders from both nations insisted that Michelmore's opinions were private and did not reflect on the Peace Corps or the United States.Nigeria's Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, joined the chorus condemning Michelmore's attitudes, but after her departure he called for restraint.Michelmore must be 'unequivocally condemned' he said, but 'not all people are alike and the remark of an individual like the girl could not be taken as representing a whole nation' . 79A government missive doubled down: the 'friendly and cordial relations between Nigeria and the United States…must not be jeopardized or affected by the foolish writings of one adolescent schoolgirl' . 80Christian students from the University of Ibadan called for forgiveness, claiming that 'It is apparent that the views expressed are not shared by the other members of President Kennedy's Peace Corps who are now in Nigeria, and that the American embassy deplores this irresponsible act by a young American citizen' . 81A letter from a group of Nigerians who 'were directly involved in the training of the Peace Corps Volunteers' expressed concern 'should the Nigerian Teachers' Project be misunderstood because of a foolish and thoughtless act of one girl' . 82This rhetoric stripped Michelmore of her role as a representative of the United States.
Michelmore's youth and gender were emphasized in order to further remove her from the diplomatic sphere; although she was a university graduate in her twenties, Michelmore was routinely rendered into a young schoolgirl-if not an 'adolescent'-in sympathetic coverage.Politically, this strategy was effective: by 1964, Nigeria hosted the single largest Peace Corps program and the largest contingent of British VSO volunteers, as well as volunteers from Australia, Western europe, Israel and Japan.It remained one of the major hosts of development volunteers until the outbreak of the Biafran War in 1967.
The postcard incident was neutralised as an international incident by pushing the fault onto the shoulders of Margery Michelmore the individual, rather than Margery Michelmore the US Peace Corps volunteer.Although it recovered, the incident had bruised the Peace Corps, and demonstrated the dangers inherent to rhetoric that claimed volunteers as ambassadors for the American nation.Discussions about the best ways to mitigate the reputational threat posed by volunteers' misdemeanours, already underway in 1961, accelerated following the postcard incident.Comprehensive policies regulating volunteers' behaviour, including those relating to marriage, pregnancy and sexual relationships discussed above, were implemented in its wake.By the mid-1960s, Peace Corps training courses featured multiple sessions on 'acceptable social behavior' in the understanding that 'the Volunteer, who is often the most identifiable (and frequently the only) American in the local community, must present a picture of his country, the Peace Corps, and himself which is fair and representative' . 83VSO also paid close attention, and began to brief departing volunteers on the need to look and act like a respectable representative of the British nation during their time abroad.In the wake of the postcard incident, development agencies increased surveillance of volunteers' behaviour in order to avoid further bruising international incidents.

The burdens of grassroots diplomacy
Margery Michelmore had a more difficult recovery.Despite calls for her dismissal from the Peace Corps, Shriver and Kennedy came out in support of Michelmore.Michelmore returned to the United States and faced what Life magazine called 'a time of anguish and self-recrimination' during which she castigated herself as a 'destroying force' that had threatened the viability of an entire organization. 84The media interest faded, but Michelmore's distress did not.Michelmore tried to put the incident behind her, and married Frank heffron, a lawyer, the following year.The marriage offered her a new name, and the promise of anonymity this entailed; it also allowed her to resign from the Peace Corps and take up a new role as a wife and mother to three children adopted in quick succession.Now Margery heffron, she cut off contact with many former friends, moved town, and tried to forget the Peace Corps.
But the emotional toll remained.According to her husband Frank heffron, the postcard incident 'affected her life a great deal.A great deal' . 85For years, Margery Michelmore was ridden with anxiety and self-recrimination.As she recounted near the end of her life, 'I felt that I had let down the president; I possibly thought I might have wrecked the whole Peace Corps idea, and I let down my friends in the group and actually put them in some jeopardy' .Mostly, she felt shame: 'From the beginning I felt it was a stupid and insulting thing for me to do, and I was ashamed of it' .Because of this, 'I never talked about it-ever-to anybody, even my best friends' .This bought additional anxiety, as 'I never knew whether they knew about it, because of course my name had changed' . 86Margery was unable to talk about the Peace Corps for almost forty years.her husband remembered the emotional impact as 'devastating, just devastating.She just felt so guilty…it was almost like having a tumour in your stomach, you carry on, but it was always there' . 87argery heffron built a new life for herself, but the imprint of the past remained.Margery cut off all contact with the Peace Corps until 2001, when she made the surprising decision to attend a forty-year reunion of her Peace Corps cohort.She faced the event with some trepidation, but found her fellow volunteers profoundly welcoming.Far from blaming her, Margery's cohort told her that they had always felt nothing but sympathy; as fellow volunteer Clarice heller Berman told her, 'it was something anybody could have done' .The reunion took on a great significance in Margery's life.As she recounted, 'it was just so warm and welcoming.That healed a lot of the pain I've always felt about the whole thing' . 88In her mid-sixties, Margery finally began to talk about the postcard incident, including in a single interview with her university's alumni magazine. 89But a lifetime's pain was not easily healed; when Margery heffron died in 2011, her obituary made no mention of her connection with the Peace Corps, nor of her maiden name, in a final attempt to overcome the international incident that had, in many ways, defined her life. 90

Conclusion
By the mid-1960s, political scientists agreed that development volunteering agencies such the Peace Corps had 'evolved a new people-to-people diplomacy as a regular dimension of American foreign policy' . 91Though largely ignored in conventional diplomatic history, the arena of international development, and particularly volunteering programs including Britain's VSO and the United States Peace Corps, broadened the cast of diplomatic actors by positing that non-elite citizens could participate in international affairs.Britain and the United States initially claimed volunteers as ambassadors for their nation, blurring the divide between personal bodies and the body politic, and rendering the behaviour and interpersonal relationships of otherwise ordinary citizens into a form of diplomatic encounter.The hazards of such a diplomatic strategy were quickly realized.Romantic relationships formed by British and American volunteers initiated long and complex debates about the extent to which young women's sexual behaviours sullied the national reputation.Meanwhile, activists in decolonising nations including Ghana, Nigeria and Indonesia interpreted quotidian tensions involving American or British volunteers through geopolitical lenses, and seized on moments of interpersonal friction to publicly challenge ongoing Western intervention in postcolonial nations.
The blurring of interpersonal and international relations moved the diplomatic encounter away from the careful staging and ritual performances of international summits and conferences.In broadening the arena for international relations, grassroots diplomacy expanded the opportunity for groups who lacked access to conventional diplomatic channels to become involved in international affairs.This brought in thousands of Western volunteers brimming with goodwill, but it also provided access to activists opposing Western dominance in a postcolonial global system.Volunteers' actions that reflected colonial hierarchies, or suggested neocolonial ways of thinking, were seized upon by grassroots critics of Western development intervention.As symbolic indices of racial and gendered power, young, white women were overrepresented in incidents that grew to be international scandals.Sometimes, as with Alice O'Grady's student rebellion, this involvement remained strictly local and had limited impact.At other times, minor events struck a wider chord and, with the help of skilful grassroots activists and an interested media, grew to become major international incidents.In response, volunteer agencies constructed a wide-ranging system of surveillance and policing that focused particularly on female volunteers.The personal freedom and professional fulfilment that attracted many British and American women to volunteer for VSO and the Peace Corps was gradually limited over the course of the 1960s in an attempt to prevent further damage to national reputations.
The consequences of grassroots diplomacy could be particularly burdensome for individual volunteers at the heart of international incidents.Volunteers' liminal position, as a private citizen engaged in diplomacy, limited the financial, professional and even emotional support extended by the state.Although the glory of a volunteer's success was thought the accrue to the nation, Margery Michelmore's story reveals that the shame of perceived failure was the individual's alone to bear.The fraught relationship between the personal and political was brought into stark relief for volunteers such as Michelmore.While grassroots diplomacy promised a boost to national reputations, and was often co-opted to great effect by postcolonial activists, it could have deep and long-lasting consequences for those individuals whose personal lives were painfully co-opted by diplomacy.