First of all, I’m in favor of free speech. Even the initials F-S-M don’t scare me. Back in Washington, my enemies say they stand for “Fire Shriver Monday.” But LBJ says they stand for “Find Shriver Money.” I’m so much in favor of free speech I’ll stand right here and tell you one of my favorite 4-letter words — KERR. And I’ve got a good 8-letter one, too — MEYERSON.
But here on this campus, I want to talk about today’s challenge to the young, to the American university student of the ‘60s — of what I think might be called a “free service movement!”
I’m not talking about the service a stallion renders when he’s standing in stud. I mean the kind of service represented by students from the Berkeley campus, which has produced more volunteers for The Peace Corps than any other college or university in the entire U.S.A.
For four years, I’ve been talking about The Peace Corps, and trying to define both the spirit that animates its volunteers and the attitudes they reflect.
But a Berkeley graduate of the Class of 1962, Bob Rupley, said it best just two months ago.
These are his words:
“Apathy, ignorance, and disorganization are the things we want to eliminate in cooperative, community development, education, and in all of the areas in which we work. Clearly no volunteer can hope for absolute success, nor can he even expect limited success to come easily. Clearly the Peace Corps is not the responsibility of every American, and it shouldn’t be! In many ways the life of the volunteer who sincerely seeks to effect progress is miserable!
“That may not seem to be a very hearty recommendation for the Peace Corps, but if we as enlightened people ignore the moral and economic poverty of the unenlightened, we really slight the challenges and needs of the modern world.”
The author of that letter, Bob Rupley, was shot to death in Caracas, Venezuela, still serving with the Peace Corps, just three weeks after he wrote it.
Bob Rupley may have learned in classes and written in his notebook, about the apathy, ignorance and disorganization of underdeveloped societies while here in California. But it took his two years’ service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru and six months as a Staff Associate in Venezuela to build it into his bones, to make it a living, breathing part of his daily life, and a burden to his conscience!
The moral and economic poverty of the unenlightened became a fact of life to him. He smelled poverty with his own nose. His own hands got dirty with work. His friends were people with no shoes, few clothes and less food.
And he knew them by the thousands. And he knew all this, not as an intellectual enterprise to be given back on a final exam, but as a part of his own experience.
Bob — and ten thousand Americans like him — are proof of the Navajo saying: “To understand a man, you must live in his shoes.”
All over the world — in the Peace Corps, in other voluntary organizations like the Papal Volunteers or the Friends Service Committee — and here at home, whether in the Anti-Poverty Program, Job Corps Camps, VISTA Volunteers, special schools, or in various parts of the Civil Rights Movement, young Americans are understanding their neighbors by living in their shoes and not, to twist the metaphor, by buying them a new pair.
What kind of people are we talking about? In his “Revolutionist’s Handbook” from Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw wrote of the reasonable man and the unreasonable man.
“The reasonable man,” he wrote, “adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man!”
Well, I’m an unreasonable man. Ask anyone who works for me. The Peace Corps and the War on Poverty need and want the services of the unreasonable man and woman, to work at the unfinished business of our human society, at home and abroad.
You have demonstrated your leadership in the generation of the ’60’s, the generation which will not take “yes” for an answer, which has shown an unwillingness to accept the pat answers of society, — either in Berkeley or in Selma or in Caracas, Venezuela.
In his historic address to Congress last month on voting rights, President Johnson said of the American negro: “His actions and protests — his courage to risk safety, and even to risk his life — have awakened the conscience of this nation.
“His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform. He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery and his faith in American democracy?”
You can be proud — we are all proud— of the role which students, black and white, have played in that protest movement.
Once in every generation, fundamentals are challenged and the entire fabric of our life is taken apart, seam by seam, and reconstructed. The 1930s, under the spur of economic disaster, was such a time, and our economic and political and social life was never again the same. Such a time is now at hand again, and it is clear, that many of you are unreasonable men, restless, questioning, challenging, taking nothing for granted. And I agree with you. But protest and demonstration are not enough. President Kennedy once said that “one way to stand “up” for your rights is to sit down...” But that’s only one way — and the next step is service.
One of your professors, Dr. Philip Selznick, has written of the student movement at Berkeley, that:
“These are among our very best students. They are not thugs or scoundrels, neither are they caught up in any impenetrable ideology. They are acting out what they have learned, without the patience and restraint of maturity. The students had a just cause and they yearned for affirmation of it. If there was an excess of zeal, it did not forfeit their claim to our sense of fellowship.”
And it did not forfeit their claim to a sense of fellowship with the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty — “the free service movement.” For some of these students were acting out what they had learned — to take ideas, and ideals, seriously, and to use the lessons of building democratic institutions. In the war on poverty, we’re not afraid of pickets, we expect them! In The Peace Corps, our community development projects depend on organizers — agitators, if you will — to work with local leaders in organizing the poor and the outcast.
Mahatma Gandhi insisted that the other side of the coin of civil disobedience was constructive service. Along with jail-going and resistance to injustice, he said, must go positive action to create the conditions of justice. For Gandhi, this meant a program to end untouchability and caste by personal action to achieve integration; by taking an untouchable into one’s home or office, by eating together or working together. It also meant the formation of village cooperatives and basic education for the poor. Gandhi spoke of the vote, the prison, and the spade. The vote, as an expression of parliamentary democracy, the prison as a symbol of non-violent protest, and the spade, as this indispensable element of service.
We call it the politics of service.
Bob Rupley, and the thousands of Peace Corps volunteers abroad and who have returned, know the politics of service. They have lived it. In Africa, the Far East, the Near East and in Latin America — they have lived in their brothers’ shoes. They have not merely taken the untouchable — the outcast and neglected of society — into their home or, office or factory — they have gone to live and work in his. They have formed village cooperatives, they are educating the poor. In India itself, they have doubled egg production through village poultry projects.
When Peace Corps staff members and ex-volunteers — on their own time — joined last week in the march from Selma to Montgomery, they carried a banner reading, “The Peace Corps Knows Integration Works.” So we ask you — all of you who have taken what you have learned — about our society and tried to make it live — to join us in the politics of service, to demonstrate by doing, to the poor and the forgotten of the villages and slums of America and the world, what you have learned of Democracy and freedom and equality. The times demand no less.
It is time not just to speak, but to serve.
