Tonight let’s talk about slogans, cliches, myths and public service. The Advertising Council is the tangible evidence that your industry does not neglect its responsibilities to the public welfare. It has helped sell savings bonds, has promoted racial and religious tolerance and has changed a whole generation’s image of the teddy bear. And I know how effectively the Council has worked for the Peace Corps since you took us on as one of your free clients. All of us are sincerely grateful to you for what you have accomplished on behalf of the Peace Corps.
Now I would like to speak with you about another public service you can perform, this time on behalf of the poverty program. Last week a justifiably famous woman journalist visited with me to talk about the program. “Shriver,” she said to me, “before you can do anything about poverty, you’ll have to fumigate the closet in which Americans keep their ideas about the poor. You’ll have to rid America of all its cliches about the poor, cliches like the one which says that only the lazy and worthless are poor, or that the poor are always with us. You’ll have to convince the country that virtue doesn’t necessarily go with an inherited department store and that for millions, America really isn’t the land of opportunity the schoolbooks say it is.”
I think she may be right. Our minds are so cluttered up with myths, slogans and cliches about the poor that it would be a great public service if you would help us clear the air.
Cliche Number One about the poor is based on a misinterpretation of the Bible. This myth maintains that the poor will always be with us or, “like love, poverty is here to stay.”
Cliche Number Two is that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear or that like Spencer, “poverty is Nature’s Way.”
Myth Number Three is that somebody’s always got to be poor or, “where would the Yankees be without the Washington Senators?”
Things are worse in Asia or, “Its lucky to be poor in America” is slogan Number Four, and myth Number Five is Bureaucrat, go home, or, “nothing’s quite so bad that government won’t make it worse.”
Let’s look at these cliches a little more closely than do those who use them so freely, those who are not disturbed about the existence of poverty in America.
St. Matthew would rise up in justifiable distress if he knew how callous people use his words to justify their inaction and indifference towards the poor. Those in every religion who interpret the word of God have always expressed their great concern over the condition of the poor. Pope Pius XII, spoke for every truly religious leader in modern times when he said that the consequences of poverty were “a dying daily, a dying hourly; a dying multiplied, especially for parents by the number of dear ones they behold suffering and wasting away.”
And when the Pope said that every Christian “will be diligent to achieve the betterment of the poor and the disinherited,” he was only echoing the thoughts of the Jewish prophets, the wise Hindu gurus and the Moslem mullahs. What every religion says about the poor is that we must make them our personal concern for, as the Bible reminds us, “He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse.” Religion tells us also that we must appreciate the personal dignity of every person, no matter how poor he may be and that the best way to aid the poor is to help them help themselves.
Helping the poor help themselves is the keystone of the President’s poverty program. It does not offer handouts; it offers opportunities. It is concerned with creating the conditions under which the child born into poverty can have the chance to help himself, to compete on equal terms with those lucky enough to be born into affluence.
Even worse, this myth ignores the fact -- which we take for granted --that modern technology has provided us, for the first time, with the possibility of wiping out physical poverty. This is the miracle of the Twentieth Century but it still needs to be carried out, it needs to be put into effect if it is to be truly a miracle.
Cliche Number Two -- that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear -- is simple nonsense. DuPont spends millions in its advertising budget each year to prove just the opposite, to demonstrate technology’s ability to make better things for better living through chemistry. And DuPont is right. A very serviceable silk purse has been made out of a sow’s ear. At least let us try to make a handsome pigskin bag from the sow. Then, it might even be possible to sell the bag in one of those inherited department stores.
It simply isn’t true that the poor enjoy poverty. Quite the Opposite. They resent it. Wherever local communities have started programs to help the poor help themselves, the response has exceeded all expectations. The poor do want to learn, they do want the equal opportunity to work and they will work hard for their own improvement.
It is gibberish to say that families enjoy living in rat-infested slums or that they want only a poor education. Only an ignorant person would maintain that laziness or some other moral defect is the source of poverty, as if being poor were somehow un-American.
Myth Number Three -- that American Society will always have a second division; that you can’t have the Yankees without the Senators or now, the Mets, -- is a more sophisticated one. It has even attracted to it some people who should know better. Of course, it’s true that there will always be some segment of American population not as well off as the rest. But, this notion has substance only where a welfare state is being debated, only where it is proposed to equalize life’s burdens by handouts. No one connected with the poverty program has any plans to eliminate poverty by handouts, or by taking from the rich to give to the poor. To return to the baseball analogy, we don’t want to break up the Yankees, but just suppose the Senators never got a chance at bat? They might be better off, but not so with the poor. For whether they are on the marginal farm, the closed down mining camp, or the urban slums, they are not getting their fair licks at the ball.
Slogan #4 says, “Things are worse every place else.” Our poor are lucky they’re not in Nepal or Brazil we’re told. Being poor in America becomes, by this kind of verbal hocus-pocus, a sort of lucky break, because there are other countries where things are worse. But those who use this argument aren’t willing even for one instant to exchange their lives with the upper classes--the rich--in the underdeveloped countries. And so if rich Americans won’t change places with their counterparts in Brazil or India, why should the American poor take comfort from their relatively better position? The plain fact is that poverty means much more than a low income, a leaky roof, or kids who stay home from school because they don’t have shoes. As bad as all those things are, there is degradation of the spirit, a hopelessness, a sense of being outcast from society, that comes from poverty in the midst of affluence. Where the national average income of a country is only $50 per year, the pain of exclusion does not bear so heavily on the family which has only $40. But in America technology has provided all of us, poor and rich alike, with a vision of our abundance of a world of new cars, ski slopes and suburbs. We must not compare America’s poor with the poor of Asia, but with the affluence of America.
And so we came to cliche which finds its roots in Jefferson’s dictum that “Government is best which governs least,” and now finds its vulgar expression in the thought that Big Government is bad (unless it comes with big Defense contracts for my state). Shriver, we are told is to be a Czar and the office of Economic Opportunity will be a giant bureaucracy spreading its greedy tentacles throughout the land, releasing a swarm of petty officials to tell. people how to fight poverty. Well, I am here to tell you I am no Czar. I know what happens to Czars. I know also that poverty has many different faces as the different places where it is found. Everyone connected with the Poverty Program knows that. What will work in Cleveland may not work in Los Angeles and a program which Chicago might use to fight urban slum poverty will not take root in the rocky soil of Appalachia. That’s why the heart of the poverty legislation is local community action, and voluntary participation. There will be no poverty Czars. There will be no giant bureaucracy, but there will be Federal assistance for local plans, worked out and presented by local leaders, and most run by the communities they are designed to benefit.
These cliches, slogans and myths have great lasting power. Maybe I don’t place as much reliance on polling techniques as do TV sponsors, but I know that 83% of the American people were reported recently to think the War Against Poverty cannot be won. That is a significant statistic. But I also believe -- and I think you especially will agree with me -- that 50 years ago 83% of the people would have said we could not win the war against small pox or diphtheria or pneumonia. Only 20 years ago the same negative response would have been-given for the war against infantile paralysis. But we won those wars.
And we can win the War Against Poverty in the same way. We have the tools, we have the know-how and we have the will. In the face of that combination, even the strongest myths will melt away.
Now I’ve done the easy part of my job, here tonight. And maybe I should quit while I’m still ahead. I’ve told you what the War Against Poverty is not. I would like to take a few minutes to tell you what it is a key element in it is the Job Corps, made up of 100,000 young volunteers from the approximately one million now between the ages of 16 and 21 who are both out of school and out of work. Over a two year period, it means giving these volunteers an opportunity to acquire the skills they will need to get -- and to keep -- their first job. It means getting them, for the first time in their lives, out of the poverty-blighted neighborhoods in which they roam today, jobless, rootless and potentially dangerous. The Job Corps will give these young people a cut at the ball.
The War on Poverty means 200 thousand community jobs for jobless youths and 145 thousand school related jobs. These jobs will let youngsters stay in school and college who would otherwise have to drop out and deprive us -- all of us -- of their potential contribution to society. When we provide a job for some boy or girl so that he or she can stay in school, we not only help that family stay out of poverty and get an opportunity to stay out -- we do ourselves a favor. When we do this, not only does the community save the high costs of public assistance, but we make possible a further contribution to society through the skills they will acquire, and one day pass on to their children.
This war means creating and encouraging hundreds of community action plans in the places where poverty is concentrated -- plans that bring the well-aimed rifles of local community participation and direction into the battle. It means, as well, loans and grants to potential businessmen -- self-employers, really -- to get started or continue where no normal credit channels are open. It means small cash grants to willing farmers and farm families, who can get the capital they need in no other way, thus enabling them to make it where they are on the farms they like instead of giving up and migrating directly on to the big city relief rolls.
Will these programs work? A better question might be: What’s working now? Local community action programs already exist in many centers of poverty and numerous communities have already prepared plans and await only the signal to go ahead.
In New York City, a special program conducted over the past five years raised the average IQ of 50,000 children in grades three through ten by an average of 13 points. Once there was a Myth that IQs were fixed at birth; today, the educators have proved this wrong and demonstrated that the potential of intelligence is related directly to poverty.
Across the country, in St. Paul, Minnesota, a remedial program at a high school with the highest dropout rate in the city succeeded in cutting that rate down to the second lowest in only five years. Here, too, the relationship between school dropout rates and poverty is unmistakable.
And in Chicago, Illinois, a city where I had some personal experience both in merchandising and education, a basic job training program offered to long-term unemployed parents has had dramatic results. Thirty-two thousand people were able to get off the Cook County relief rolls because of this program. Today these people are driving taxis, working in hotels, restaurants, hospitals and filling stations. Even more important, they have taken the first step toward full citizenship -- they have a job.
In one city, community action programs involve pre-schools, adult literacy classes, homemaking and job training centers, but, in addition, the program established neighborhood legal aid clinics. Here the poor -- many for the first time -- can get desperately needed legal advice on everything from a juvenile arrest to a conditional sales contract.
More than a million young people under 21 have some kind of arrest record. Many of them are unemployable today because of bad or nonexistent legal help. And even worse, we live in a society where crime in the central city becomes just juvenile high spirits out in the suburbs. It is a sober fact that it is only delinquent children with families who can be turned over to their families. For the others, the children of poverty, the only alternative to an overworked police force is the juvenile hall.
The Chicago Adult Education Program will not fit every poverty ridden urban center. Perhaps the New Haven Legal Aid Clinic isn’t needed in your community. The program President Johnson has presented to the Congress clearly represents an understanding that each community must solve its problems in its own way and under its own leadership.
But the stark fact of poverty hits across the whole country. It demands our action, and with assistance from the government and financial help, programs such as these can expand and grow; new and imaginative ones can be created. The problem of poverty in America demands action at all levels.
There has been some legitimate criticism directed towards the program. It is not broad enough, some critics say. I agree. It doesn’t have enough funds, others point out. I agree. And there are those who say it is not correct to describe it as a war. I think they may be right.
Yet what is being proposed in the program is one necessary step towards the elimination of poverty. The tax cut was another. No one in the administration believes that the tax cut alone or the poverty program alone or the Appalachia program alone will win the war on poverty. But we know that together all these programs will at least take us on the first step of our journey.
The country needs your help in winning the war on poverty. Your special skills can be an invaluable weapon in the battle to clear our minds of the cliches that hold us back from seeing and understanding the problem of poverty. I know you will give your help as generously now as you have in the past.
