Rare are the moments these days when Democrats and Republicans, businessmen and labor leaders, women and men, sun-belters and snow-belters, supply-siders and demand-siders, unemployed and employed, white and Black, gringos and Hispanics can gather to celebrate a Federal Government Program. But this is such a moment. We are all part of it. We can rejoice in-our common achievement. This is one occasion when we can all applaud one another, feel good about one another, and smile! The jury is no longer “out” on the Job Corps. The verdict has been rendered, and the verdict is “well done” -- “well done” U.S. Congress, “well done” U.S. industry, U.S. labor, U.S. philanthropy, U.S. taxpayers, U.S. workers!
My first task, therefore, is to thank everyone... from those who started the Job Corps, to those who sustained it in the dark days, to those who have stayed with it from the beginning, to those who have saved it from the budget-cutter’s knife.
So, thank you Lyndon Johnson, Orrin Hatch, Otis Singletary and Dick Jaffe, Vernon Alden and Bernie Diamond, Thomas J. Watson and Harold Geneen, Bennetta Washington and Edith Green, George Meany and Lane Kirklan Mike Mansfield and John McCormack, Bill Kelly and many, many more, teachers, advisers, trade associations, trade unions, parents and friends of Job Corps Volunteers. You all deserve thanks and congratulations.
First, let’s face it, there was a dream a vision, a thought, that all of us in this country of ours could work together successfully to provide work, and the necessary skills for quality work, to thousands of young Americans who had neither jobs nor skills. The program was “a no-fault program”, -- nobody was blaming anyone for where we, the lucky ones, were, or where they, the unlucky ones, the unemployed, were. Some were even smart enough or wise enough or humble enough to realize we were all lucky -- lucky to be Americans, lucky to be alive, lucky to be healthy, lucky to have a chance to make our country and our people more productive, more skillful, more able to survive in a world full of danger and evil. Many had survived economic depressions, world-wide warfare, family catastrophes, racial discrimination, or other mental, physical, or moral threats to our minds, bodies, or souls.
Yes, we were lucky! But it’s also true that we believed in what we were trying to do. We cared about the poor who were unemployed. I cannot remember even one hypocrite in the headquarters at O.E.O……Not one cynical, self-seeker, not one charlatan. Among those who dreamed the dream there were enthusiasts; there were zealous young bureaucrats eager to make our economic system work better for all, dedicated to the concept of economic opportunity for all. But the Job Corps was not then, and never has been, a Federal government program imposed on an unwilling and uninterested economic system. From the start it was a joint venture by business, labor, private sector, and government persons dedicated to the proposition that all Americans who want to work deserve a chance to prepare themselves voluntarily for a job…… “make work"; not “forced work”, not “holier-than-thou work-fare"; but genuine, voluntary work for a freely chosen employer, under truly human working conditions!
The left-wingers accused us of giving business a chance to make “profits out of poverty” The right-wingers said we were misusing hard-earned, tax-.payers dollars to establish a socialistic, paternalistic boondoggle to spoon-feed the worthless poor. The skeptics said it couldn’t be done. The greedy said it cost too much, -- more than a Harvard education, they loved to say. The Congress said, the President said, and the country said: -- let’s give it a try. The real heroes were: Carl Perkins, Bill Natcher, Hugh Carey, Gus Hawkins, Adam Clayton Powell, Jamie Whitten, Phil Landrum, Neal Smith, John Brademas, Jake Pickle, Jim O’Hara, John Blatnik, Hale Boggs, and other House Democrats joined by Republicans like Silvio Conte, Frank Horton, Alonzo Bell, Ogden Reid, John Dellenbaet, Bill. Steiger, Sy Halpren, “Mac” Mathias, Charlie Whalen, Brad Morse, Margaret Heckler, and others.
Together they said, in effect, America cannot afford to do nothing about teenage unemployment----young men and women standing idly on street corners or lost in the back waters or poverty pockets of rural America. IBM, G.E., I.T.T. Westinghouse, Thiokol Chemical; U.S. Industries, the State Government of Texas led b then Governor John Connolly; Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority; the Y.M.C.A.; the International Union of Operating Engineers under Hunter Wharton’s leadership, -- all saw the need and the chance! All worked together with Government to offer a hand-up, not a-hand-out, to poverty-stricken, uneducated, helpless but not hopeless, young Americans. And their combined efforts succeeded!!
The Job Corps has survived (at least through the 1982 budget) and has served our nation well. You all know the statistics of its success. You all know the sociological research, the economic studies, the testimony of religious leaders whose statements bear witness to the Job Corps’ past triumphs and future potentials.
Yet, today, all this -- is not enough. Even the support of Job Corps enthusiasts like Senators Pete Domenici, Dan Quale, Harrison Schmitt, Barry Goldwater; the National Association of Home. Builders, numerous other labor unions, the business corporations, the Women in Community Service, Joint Action in Community Service. All these are not enough.
We live in times when strengthening our national security by enhancing and ennobling the status and skills of our own poor may well be classified as “good”, or even “excellent”, but not essential to national survival in war or economic prosperity in peace. There are those who say we cannot afford programs like the Job Corps no matter how successful or worthy they may be. Programs like Job Corps, are ok, if “the market” says they are ok; if they can make ends meet in the free competitive economic system, or better, if they can actually make money, turn a profit out of training people for work. But if training programs for peaceful work cannot survive the marketplace, they have no place in our economic system. The arguments against the Job Corps continue at the philosophical level as well as in budgetary terms!
These arguments deserve attention, and need refutation, in the midst of our new romance with our old love, Adam Smith. For it is Adam Smith, the logician, the Professor of Ethics and Philosophy, as well as economics, with whom we have to contend today!
This occasion is neither the time nor the place to bore anyone with a heavy detailed analysis of Adam Smith’s economics and the threat some of his ideas as now interpreted by some of his followers, present to the Job Corps. But he, and some of his ideas, are part of the threat, and no one should minimize the power of that threat nor its popularity in our national, intellectual and political life.
Our struggle is not just a struggle about budget figures, or even balanced budgets. Budgets can be balanced at many, different levels. Balanced budgets are created by matching income produced by taxes to expenditures for Governmental services. If we are willing to pay high enough taxes we can have increased military expenditures and successful programs like the Job Corps. In the richest country on earth we can have tanks and butter. But to have both we must be willing to pay for both. And there’s the rub.
Are we willing to pay for the Job Corps just as we pay for the Marine Corps or the Air Force?
As a political society of free men and women founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, what importance do we attach to saving uneducated, unemployable young Americans by training them for peaceful work. Or should we train them only for war (hand written notes)
Is such training a luxury item we can do without -- like air conditioning in our cars, or 450 cubic centimeter engines? Or is it essential to an equitable, stable, productive social order?
Adam Smith might say “no” It’s not essential. Let the free market, the invisible hand, decide, who shall be trained, for what work and at what cost, under what conditions. Government interventions cause havoc in the orderly, even if sometimes, seemingly cruel decisions of the marketplace. But life is not and never has been fair.
Thomas Aquinas, and many, many others say, we all as a community must share, -- our opportunities, our expertise, our future. That’s the ultimate foundation of any just society, they argue,-- the kind of society to which we can pledge our sacred honor”.
We cannot fully describe the opposing philosophies of government and society on a joyful occasion such as this. But let us not be naive, or unaware of the substantial matters and possible conflicts we are confronting.
The Job Corps is only one program!
I hope it survives the budget cuts to come. But its future should not be looked upon as just a single issue, a one-line item in a vast budget. Its future -- whether it lives and grows, or whether it is slowly strangled and dies will tell us much about the society we are building or wrecking. Adam Smith, Thomas Aquinas, Jeremy Bentham, Jacques Maritain, Rousseau, von Hayek, Pareto, Ludwig von Mises, -- these all may be murky names from a distant and even murkier past -- but they are still with us, .influencing our decisions.
Our pasts fill us with the belief that we must be true to our traditional strengths, even as our dreams encourage us to hope for more just and peaceful societies in the future. In that contest between faith in our past successes, and hope for an even better future, the Job Corps and its fate, will tell us much about our selves; our courage, our vision, our sense of equity, our trust in God and His providence.
May we all prove worthy of and competent to confront the challenges of these times.
Let us resolve that the Job Corps will not become a victim of our selfishness, or the narrow scope of our vision for the future of our country.
