Tape Transcript of Address to the National Catholic Family Life Conference

"Let this be our challenge, that no child anywhere shall be denied the full opportunity to learn, to develop his mind and his spirit to the fullest potential."
National Catholic Family Life Conference • June 27, 1964

I am very glad that Father Gilland stopped where he did, because it was in the middle of an introduction similar to that that I had one or the great nervous blows or shakes of my lifetime, in a suburb of Chicago about seven or eight years ago - a lady presenting me to the League of Women Voters was going on just about the way Father Gilland was. She however had gone into my background and found out a few things I wish she hadn’t found out…one of which was that I liked to play tennis, sort of like Bill Scranton, I suppose. At the height of her presentation she introduced me as one of Chicago’s best known racketeers. When I came down to Washington, I thought things would be better, at least I hoped they would, but the city here, as all of you know, is full of iconoclasts. Last winter I went on a trip and when I got back I found out that one of the reporters had subsequently said that when a Southern Protestant President sends a Northern Liberal Catholic. (that was supposed to be me) to deliver a message to an Italian Pope in Jerusalem, that is an election year.

Well, it is true, this is an election year. But tonight I thought maybe we might talk about the only group in society that is not very much involved in the election - children. They can’t vote, they can’t determine the future, but they are the future. And as Father Gilland says, I come to you tonight not as the Director of the Peace Corps or as the Chief of Staff of the War against Poverty, but as the Father of the Year, knowing something, we fathers think, about children.

I hope none of you saw what Art Buchwald said about the Father of the Year. Art Buchwald said that the Father of the Year is somebody who is never home. He said, ‘Who is going to know that you are Father of the Year material if you spend all the time with your family?” So, I’ll say this, that if that is the test - you don’t spend any time with your family – my wife will agree that I am the right person to be Father of the Year.

But just to indicate that I do spend a little time with my family, I have one of those elephant jokes my boy told me this afternoon. He said, “Daddy, do you know why elephants have red eyes?” I properly said no, and he said, “That is so they canticle in cherry trees.” I didn’t laugh as politely as all of you have, and so he came back at me and said, “Have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree?” Then I had to confess no, and he said, “That proves it works.”

Well, even though I have a story from my child, it is true that have spent an awful lot of time away from have, enough time frankly, so that I have seen children all around the world. I have seen them huddled in those junks in Hong Kong, seen them in leper hospitals in Malaya, seen them in the Arab refugee villages in Jordan and in the hills of West Virginia some of the poorest people in our country. And I can tell you something that I am afraid all of you do know that the rights of the child which you advocate and struggle for are violated every day in every part of the world. Two thirds of the world is children de not have the rights that you seek for them. And we can begin right in the United States.

Right here in our own country, nearly a third of all the children in the United States are living in poverty. 16 million children are in families where the income is so low that that there is no income tax paid of any kind, even year after year. Someone might say, well, why are those why are so many children poor and again you might know the answer. Because the largest families have the lowest income. I don’t know if that man is going to go on up to Saint Anne de Beaupre or not, Father, after he hears that story, but it is true. Actually, what rights of the ten that you talk about can children have when his family’s total income is less than $144) a week - that is for 4 family of four. Will those -Children have books and records, or a decent education? The truth is of course they will be lucky to have enough to eat - and perhaps just s shoes and one outfit.

Everybody has been talking about the disintegration of the family since Adam and Eve were bounced out of the Garden of Eden. I suppose -people don’t exactly know how old Cain and Abel were around that time – they talk about them as having started juvenile delinquency, But for the first line, I think it is true that for the first time in our country, we actually have the statistical evidence about the disintegration of the family. And some of the most recent evidence shows that the. Negro family in America is being destroyed, systematically destroyed by poverty. For example, the poorest of all the poor people in our country, in our country in any definable group are concentrated in those families where the head of the household is a woman. And 9% of those families are headed by a. woman who is white. But among Negros, 20%, of the families are headed by women. Why is this? The most significant statistics show that as unemployment among Negro men is the highest of all the groups in our economy, they also therefore do not show up as the head of the family. There is an extraordinary curve on a graph which shows the unemployment of Negro men going up and just one year behind that rising curve comes the curve, graphic curve showing desertion. It just takes abort one year to break a man’s heart and about one year after the man loses a job, he deserts. So much so that it has now become almost a cliche to say that desertion is the poor man’s divorce. And what about the children in those situations? 39% of the Negro children in the United States are now living in families with one or both parents missing. 39%. Now, of the 9 million poor families in this country, only 2 million, Thank God, are Negro, so these family conditions of poverty are not confined to Negroes, but Negro families break down first and most often because the men lose jobs first and most often.

Today, one out every 12 children in America is living in a home with only the mother present. That is the lowest, the poorest people in country therefore. The median income of the white people in this situation is $2,600 a year, of the Negroes, it is $1,500 a year...again, for a family of four. And once again, I think it is obvious that these children can’t enjoy many of the privileges and rights that you think they should have - and have bad very little chance of obtaining the glory that you have talked about during your convention.

And there is the problem of illegitimacy * Most people don’t like to talk about it very much. But it is a cancer in our society and it is growing. In twelve years from 1950 to 1962, the rate of illegitimate births to white women in our country, although it was still low, thank God, in numbers, increased 574, in one decade. Among Negro women, it increased 27%. But this means, and this is an appalling statistic, it means that oat Of every thousand Negro children in the United States, being born in the United States, 230 are illegitimate. Now these illegitimate children live on the mother’s very low income and so once again they are in poverty.

Does any American child deserve to live out his life in poverty because he is born illegitimate, or because he was born into a large family, or because he was born into a broken family? I don’t think so, and I am sure you don’t. And that is why one of the principal aims of President Johnson’s new war on poverty is to help these children and their families. Under this legislation, communities could set up day camps as centers, for example, for the children, so that the mothers at the same time could get job training and find work which is also available - the training – under the proposed poverty program.

Day camp centers are frequently criticized, I think, perhaps more in Catholic circles than elsewhere, because it is claimed that they have a tendency to break up the family by Wang it possible for the mother to leave the home, they argue, and go to work. But how can they break up the family when families such as the ones I am talking about have already disintegrated?

Other programs available if the poverty legislation is passed will set up programs to teach mothers better home management, even fundamentals such as cooking, sewing, baby care. Under the adult education features of this program, illiterate mothers can learn reading, writing and arithmetic and thereby qualify to gain better employment. We can reach unemployed adults under this program, those who are on relief and give them work experience so that they can find jobs. Here is another horrible statistic. In 40% of all American families now on relief, the parents grew up in a family where one of their parents was on relief. So those families are now in the third generation of relief and unemployment and of poverty. We used to have that phrase you, know, shirtsleeve to shirtsleeve in three generations. Now it is just permanent shirtsleeves, I suppose, if you are lucky. Yet, despite these tragic facts of poverty, we face outmoded legal restrictions in many cases trying to fight the problem. In 32 states, and here 1n the District of Columbia, families with an unemployed father in the home can’t get relief. There is a law that says that if there is an employable male, even if he doesn’t have a job, in the home, you can’t have relief. And this makes them ineligible for some of the features of the President’s new poverty legislation. Now, that is a tragedy and these states ought to realize it and change that law, because for example in West Virginia alone, a job training program such as we advocate in President Johnson’s program closed out, eliminated from public welfare 6,700 eases in the last 18 months.

These results can be achieved anywhere. And they should be achieved everywhere. In Cook County, Illinois, where I come from, Ray Hilliard, incidentally, a fine Catholic, the Commissioner of Public Welfare there, instituted a program to give job training to unemployed fathers of families where the children were on aid-to-dependent-children. In some states, if a father gets a job under those circumstances, the kids go off relief, so during the period when be is trying to get work and he is just starting they have no income, so there is an incentive for him not to get a job, and try to get the family off relief. Fortunately, that was not tie in Cook County, so in 18 months, Ray Hilliard’s program took 3,000 men, heads of families, who were employable, gave them jobs, gave them training and made the, employable and all those families are now off of relief. That is the kind of a program that we will be able to take nationwide under President Johnson’s war against poverty.

Another problem we are a1l familiar with in combating poverty is lack of education of the people who are poverty stricken. What kind of educational opportunities are we giving these poor children to prepare them for a real place in Our society? I was talking here at dinner with Bishop Spence about a new program that the Archdiocese here is trying to start in one of the deprived areas of Washington, It is a very fine ran. Our new poverty legislation for the first time in history, we will be able to finance part of the type of program that he Is talking about, The federal government will be able to finance 9C of the cost of services related to education, not the curriculum subjects themselves, but such things nursery schools for children let’s say as early as three years of age, up to the first grade, remedial instruction after school hours in reading, writing and arithmetic, recreational programs on the school playground, adult education programs in the school after school hours, programs after school in the auditoriums, even programs which I have heard about that I think are terrific ideas where they take an unused part of the school, or partially used part of the school, maybe a basement area, divide it up into little cubicles so that a boy or girl after school can go and do their homework in that cubicle. This is very important, because many of these children come from homes where there is no electricity maybe, or where there are no books, or where there is no privacy for them to study. And if they could study in the school, they could do their homework in an atmosphere where they could get some guidance. That kind of a program in addition to the others I have just mentioned would be financeable, can be financed with federal money for the first time in history under President Johnson’s new program.

Now these things are not complete solutions obviously to problem of getting better education to the most poverty stricken of our people. But they are a big step in the right direction, and I might just add there, summer schools could be underwritten under this legislation. This is exceptionally important because 250,000 children and usually the poorest ones, drop out of elementary school, not hi h school, out of elementary school. 40% drop out of high school, and just recently I found out that 45% of the students drop out -of college. Now those are the statistics, and they are. We have to have a massive change in our educational system- to reach these children who are falling by the wayside all the time.

Community action programs could be financed under this program like the one up in St. Paul at a high school where a coordinated program with special attention to children from broken homes reduced the dropout rate in that area from the highest. in the city to the second lowest in the city.

Dr. Kirk at the University of Illinois started programs working with mentally retarded children and the results he obtained with them were extraordinary. For example, he worked with 80 mentally retarded children who were only four years old. In one year, working one hour a day with those children„ he raised their IQs from 72 to 89. There has never been such a dramatic change in IQ achieved with children in the history of this country.

Now, most of the poor people that we are dealing with have low IQs. IQs under 90, but using the kind Of techniques that Dr. Kirk used, and these could be applied nationally these IQs can be changed. Most people have always thought that once you had an IQ you were stuck with it, like having blue eyes - not that that is a bad thing to be stuck with. But the theory existed that if you had an IQ of 85 nothing could be done about it like being 6' tall or 5' tall. That is not true. If you get these children early enough, even the most poverty stricken children, even those who have-one from the most culturally deprived environs, their IQ can be raised, their employability can be raised, they can be , turned from a tax-eater, as President Johnson has said, to a tax producer.

Now, we also hope to bring into the poverty program a great many volunteers. And we can finance these volunteers. Volunteers who will carry into the poverty program the spirit ‘which is exemplified by the volunteers in the Pace Corps working abroad. And this is an Interesting aspect of it because I think it can be very helpful, especially in Catholic circles or example, let’s sty that in Georgetown right here in Washington, there are Students who would like to go and teach in the depressed parts of the City of Washington but they won’t do it because they don’t have the money at least part true have got to work to earn some money to stay in and there are thousands of young people in college these days like that. Under the poverty program they could go to the very high school that or remedial school that Bishop Spence was talking about, they can go there and teach remedial. English in that School and be paid for it under the poverty program, this has never been done before in the history of our country. Usually if you have part time work while you are going through co1ege, the work had to be done on the campus. You worked for a professor, you worked in the library and you got part-time pay so you could stay in college. But under our bill, you could do work of a socially desirable nature in the slums, in cooperation with the efforts of the school in the slums and be paid for that. This would have a two-pronged effect, in that it would be very good for the students to have this experience of working in the slums, and second of course it would help to finance them through college. These would be volunteers.

In addition to that, we would have volunteers working, coming out on a national basis to serve wherever they were asked to. A lot of people don’t believe in volunteers, especially if you’ve got a master’s degree in a subject, any subject. If you have a master’s degree in social work the worst thing is a volunteer in social work. If you have a master’s degree in education, the worst thing is someone who comes in and tries to help around the school, just to volunteer and doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree. But we found out, at least in the Peace Corps, that that is a completely erroneous idea. The volunteer may not have all of the technical qualifications of the highly educated person, trained person, but they have a. spirit and willingness that overcomes many of their technical deficiencies for example out in Turkey, Peace Corps volunteers have inaugurated the first foster home program In the history of Turkey, not because they ore all experts on foster homes but they heard about it, they could see the orphans in Turkey, so they started foster home program. They are too ignorant of the difficulties not to try it. Down in Chile 25% of the rural babies in Chile die before they are one year old, so Peace Corps volunteers, girls down there just started on their own to start, I guess you’d call it Home Economics classes. They got beer bottles the only bottles that were available and they started showing the mothers how to use the beer bottles, to sterilize these bottles and put a baby formula in there, so that they wouldn’t actually be giving a disease to the baby in the process of trying to feed the baby. They taught them how to use powdered milk, how to improve the diet of the kids, and they went through all the things, how to improve the little shacks that they were living in so that they wouldn’t be damp and the kids wouldn’t get pneumonia.

Out in Malaya Peace Corps volunteers are running a child health clinic. They get themselves an old 1934 Ford and, they visit villages in this Ford. They go to nine villages, they are serving 50 000 people. I have seen these Peace Corps volunteer nurses working in hospitals. When we started the Peace Corps, people talked about culture shock., that you were going to get a culture shock to go, let’s say, from United States culture to an western culture like Malaya or Thailand. The worst shock, I have come to think, is What I call the health shock, that the nurses go through, OW nurses work in hospitals where there is no Soap, no hot water, no diapers for babies, not even a piece of paper to write a note on to the doctor. I saw the first nurses from the Peace Corp arrive in Tanganyika three weeks after they were there and they were practically white and it wasn’t because of the feed or the deprivation. It Was because of the shock they were going through, They’d see a nurse in a Tanganyika hospital pickup a needle that you inject people with, and, just go down the line of beds sheeting everybody with the same needle. One of our nurses in Malaya had the terrible experience she happened to be a Catholic girl, of being present in the operating room when the doctor killed a perfectly normal baby right after delivery. Killed it right there, because the parents did not want that child. That gave a tremendous moral shock to that girl. From nurses that have been brought up in this country with a great idea, Our idea, of the sanctity of life, to see it snuffed out like that is a horrible shock. As one of them said to me in Tanganyika, “You know, Mr. Shriver, it is safe to get sick in Tanganyika if you get sick at the beginning of the fiscal year. At the end of the fiscal year, you’d die.” And it is simply because there is no medicine. And our girls go down an aisle and they see patient after patient dying in the bed, and even the nurse knows how to cure them-just for shortages of medicine. But, at least at the beginning of the fiscal year now our nurses there, volunteer nurses, can take care of the situations.

There are six African nations where today the Peace Corps supplies over of all the qualified teachers in those countries. Today in Ethiopia for example, you cannot get through high school without being taught by a Peace Corps volunteer, sometime during that period.

Now this same spirit which has sent nurses out to Malaya and other places I think has sent teachers to Ethiopia and other nations in Africa can work right here. There is no reason why the same kind of a spirit east go into the halas as they call them of West Virginia, depressed parts a Appalachia, and other parts of our country, into the alums. There are ten Ex-Peace Corps volunteers teaching right here at Cardoso High School in Washington, one of the most difficult schools in the city. This year 3,000 Peace Corps volunteers will come back from abroad. 83% of them in the first poll we made of them said they td like to go to work as volunteers in the poverty program. I think our society has a tremendous opportunity, but also a great responsibility not to crush the spirit of those volunteers. What happens to these people who have this spirit of volunteering, 3,000 5,000, 10,000 of them a year? 1 don’t know where they are in our society when hey are 30. 1 don’t find that kind of spirit among most of the people I see. And the great danger, think is that we will somehow or other through our organizational structure crush the spirit of these returning people. That is one thing we must guard against.

Nov there is a rising concern all over the world for what can be done about children and what can be done about education. Everywhere you go on any continent the desires and the ambitions and the fears are the same, It is true that here in America we have made tremendous progress. Since 1947 we have reduced the amount of poverty in our nation tremendously. But we still have a long, long way to go. It reminds me of that story about the fellow in the Irish Revolution who went to Make his Easter confession during the time of the rebellion against the English, And he said, °Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, 1 blew up four sections of railroad tracks. And the priest said, “Well God bless You, My son, that is a very good confession and for your penance, go back and do the stations, Well, that is about the way it is about poverty here in the United States, We have done a very good job, and GOD bless you all, But go back, I think that is the message, go back and do the stations.

The war against racial injustice in our country seals to ‘be moving ahead very rapidly and with great success, And one of the essentials in it was the moral solidarity behind it, the fact that the Catholics and the Protestants and the Jews all got behind the moral issue involved in that, The fact that those ministers and priests and others stood vigil outside the Lincoln Memorial waiting for Congress to pass the Civil Rights bill, that was a dramatic reminder, I think, that we cannot believe in God and condemn our fellow man. to servitude and injustice. We can’t believe in God and condemn our fellow man to poverty or lack of education of the type that I have been talking about, these two problems are together and they must be solved together.

And tonight therefore I would like to say not only to go back and do the stations:, but that all of us Might acknowledge that in addition to the four freedoms Of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and so on, that there might be a fifth freedom, the freedom to learn. Let us commit ourselves to the proposition that the right to lean is precious to be sought as diligently as other honored rights of man. Let this be our challenge, that no child anywhere shall be denied the full opportunity to learn, to develop his mind and his spirit to the fullest potential. St. Paul said that he who plows should plow in hope and he who threshes in hope of partaking of the fruits, Let all of us give in such a way that all of the people in our society will not only have the hope but the reality of partaking of the fruits of Our abundance here in our blessed America. Thank you.

Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.
RSSPCportrait
Sargent Shriver
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