I remember when I was last in Texas — I was working with the Peace Corps at that time. I was giving some recruiting talks. In those days, the Peace Corps was looked upon pretty much like the War on Poverty is thought about in some quarters.
In those days, people used to call the Peace Corps a Kennedy Kiddy Corps — or the Children’s Crusade. I remember them saying that it would do more harm than good. One Congressman said the whole idea was frightening. Another man I remember very well — a very distinguished man — said those trained Communist agitators — those spies from the NKVD would corrupt the Peace Corps volunteers all over the world. And one person called attention to the danger from cannibals. Believe it or not, I was worried about those things, too, a little bit myself. I could imagine what would happen in the Congress if something like that happened.
After the third year, I was able to reassure parents, however, that we had had about 15,000 volunteers in Africa — Peace Corps volunteers — and that up until that time none of them had been eaten.
I used to say these things to parents because — believe it or not — we conducted a poll, and it showed that 85% of the mothers did not want their children to join the Peace Corps. And 90% of the fathers didn’t. But the more experienced that a diplomat was, the more sure he was that we shouldn’t send these young people abroad.
Some churchmen opposed the program on the basis that a rival of the U.S. government in work somewhat like missionaries would discourage missionary efforts by the churches. Actually, that has not proven to be true at all. There are now more missionaries and more lay missionaries. They’ve been working with the Baptists, the Catholics, Methodists, and other denominations overseas — many more than when the Peace Corps started, I think the government is becoming interested in this kind of work — they have spurred people to work more ardently for their own religious denomination.
I know that it did change the habits of some people. I know in the early days of the Peace Corps we had a volunteer in Chile who I remember very well. In the early days we didn’t have very much in the way of overseas staff, and this fellow had been sent to a town about 500 miles south of Santiago. He was there by himself. And when the inspector, a staff official, finally got out to visit him, he found this young man in a very small town living in the rectory with the local Catholic priest. And our inspector said, “you can’t do that — that’s a violation of separation of church and state living there in that rectory.” And the young man said, “well, there’s no place to live here — there’s no hotels, there’s not even a Holiday Inn.” And he said, “well, you’ve got to get out of here. You’ve got to get some other place to live.” And the fellow said he’d try to do his best. And about three months later the inspector came by again and this fellow was still in the rectory with the priest. And he said, “I’m ordering you out of there now. If a Congressman came down here, he’d find us in violation of separation of church and state, and we’d be thrown out of existence.” And the kid said, “well, I’m not going to leave.” He said, “you’ve got to leave.” He said, “I won’t.” He said, “what do you mean you won’t? Are you crazy or something?” He said, “no.” He said, “well, why won’t you leave?” He said, “well, I’ve been in this place now for about six months — and everybody downtown calls me padre. And what’s more, I get a 20% discount on everything I buy.”
But the Peace Corps managed to survive most of these difficulties. It’s almost like the FBI. You can get almost anything you want for the Peace Corps in the way of money out of Congress. Everybody approves of it. Parents swell up with pride when their daughter or son joins the Peace Corps. Dewy mists come over the eyes of relatives about the heroic work that the Peace Corps is doing — and I love it. I approve of all of that and rejoice in it.
I only hope that we can get the War on Poverty in the same stand with the American people, because it, too, is very similar to the motivation and philosophy of the Peace Corps. It, too, has gone through a turbulent beginning.
We’ve been involved in all the hot passionate issues of the American life — in the race issue, in the birth control issue. Catholics say we’re doing too much by way of providing money for Planned Parenthood.
Other people say we’re not doing enough. We’ve been involved with arguments with governors and mayors — and with social workers — and with lawyers — and with doctors.
I’ll never forget the argument with the governors. It concerned the governor’s veto. The power which a governor has to say that a proposal which we have made, or that somebody has made to us, shall not be carried out.
Congress added to that proposal the right for the director of OEO to override the governor’s veto. No official of the Federal government has ever been given such a right before, and needless to say, the governors didn’t like it. So, I was invited to speak at the Governors Conference — 50 of them. It was a rather interesting occasion. I came into a hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, into a room where the floor was flat, not an auditorium like this, and the seating arrangement was different. They had chairs in a square and the square was exactly the same on each side so that all the governors had a seat exactly equal to all the other governors.
I gave a speech about the governor’s veto. And it was one of the more eloquent speeches of our times, needless to say — sort of a combined Cicero and Demosthenes and other great orators. And when I sat down quite happy with what I had done, there was mild applause as the chairman got up and said, “well, now we’ll have a vote.” And with me sitting right there, they took a vote on the governor’s veto issue. And they voted 49 to 1 against me. We were having elections like that in a number of places around the country.
Then another summer we had lots of riots in the Job Corps camps. People were complaining about that. Then, of course, last summer there were riots in the streets, and nearly everything that went wrong, whether something was going wrong in the race issue or the city streets or Job Corps camps or anything — we got blamed for it.
It reminds me a little bit of the man who went out to the horse races, but only had $2. On the first race he bet on the long shot — 100 to 1 — and won so then the next race came along and he thought “well, this is all gravy you might say — I’ll just bet it all again on a long shot,” and he won again. So then he had about $5,000. He began to get a bit conservative, needless to say, but he overcame those tendencies and thinking this might be his lucky day he took all the money he had won and bet it on the long shot in the third race — and he won again —and in the fourth race. By that time he had about $100,000. And he caught his breath for a little while and laid off for a race or two and then he won the next race — and then he had about $500,000. And along came the last race, and he said, “shall I or shall I not? Since it’s been such a day — I just will.” So he bet the whole wad on the long shot in the last race. And then he took out his binoculars to watch the race — there went the horses around and coming down the home stretch — his long shot was out in front about ten lengths. And he had about a million dollars coming in. And he watched that horse coming down that stretch. And he got about twenty yards from the finish line and he fell dead. And this fellow looked out there and turned to the fellow next to him and said, “damn Lyndon Johnson.”
Maybe I just ought to stop. The truth is, that’s about the way it has been with the war against poverty.
But there are some heartening signs. At a press conference just before we came in here, I mentioned a couple of them because to me they are really more significant than any other opinion polls or comments that I’ve heard, at least, this year.
This year, the United States Senate appropriated about $250,000 and spent about three months investigating the War on Poverty, trying to run down all these criticisms and allegations. And the House of Representatives did the same thing. And after these investigations of about three months duration, the Senate Committee filed a report. The report is about 40,000 pages. They heard from more than 400 witnesses and more than 350 national organizations of all kinds. They took testimony in 12 different cities of the United States.
There were seven Republicans as well as the Democrats on this Committee. And the final report which was issued about a month ago stated that all of these Senators jointly agreed that all of the programs which have been initiated by the War against Poverty should be continued or expanded. They were talking about programs like the Neighborhood Youth Corps, or Community Action, Head Start Programs, Foster Grandparents Program, Legal Services, Health Services for the poor, the Vista Volunteers — all of those programs, they said should be continued or expanded. And then on the floor of the Senate the matter was debated about two weeks ago. And the final vote was 60 to 21 — almost three to one — in favor of what we’ve been trying to do. The. Senators authorized $200,000,000 more for the program than President Johnson had requested.
Senator Dirksen, for example, from Illinois, voted for this. So did Senator Mundt from South Dakota, Senator Carlson of Kansas, Senator Scott of Pennsylvania, who used to be the Republican National Chairman voted for it. Senator Prouty from Vermont and Margaret Chase Smith.
We were very much encouraged by that because these men really know more what’s going on and what’s happened than any other group.
It’s probable that we will have more trouble, however, in the House of Representatives. But with the strong support of the distinguished Congressman from this District, Congressman Burleson and George Mahon from over in Lubbock and many others from the Texas delegation — I’m optimistic this morning that we will get from the Congress something close to what we’ve asked for.
It really won’t be enough to meet the needs of the poor, and we’ll probably be cut, I suppose, at least modestly, the way most other programs have been. But the vote of the Senate and opinion of people like George Mahon and Omar Burleson mean to me, at least, that the leading people in this country have changed their minds about the war against poverty.
The best educators, the best lawyers, the best doctors, the best businessmen, regardless of party, have come to the conclusion that what we’re attempting to do is in the best American tradition. It’s almost in the tradition of early democracy of this country.
Not long ago, I was visiting Billy Graham down in North Carolina. We were sitting on the front lawn of his house and he said, “you know, I’m a convert.” And I said, “a convert?” I always thought that he’d been a Baptist. I said,"convert to what?” He said, “to the War on Poverty.” That made me feel much better.
He said, “you know, I got off on the wrong foot, in this program.” And these are his exact words: “And I was critical of it. But then a few months ago I began to study the subject of poverty in the Bible. I went through the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelations. I got every passage in the Bible that had anything to do with our responsibility to the poor.
“And I was absolutely bowled over. I had never studied it — to my shame – and I found that it’s one of the greatest teachings in the scriptures. We have the responsibility as a church, as a society, and as a people to the poor.”
I asked him about that statement in the Bible where the Lord is quoted to have said that, the poor you will always have with you. And since that was what our Lord said, didn’t that really mean that it was sort of sacrilegious — blasphemous almost — to think that we could overcome poverty?
And Billy Graham said to me, “well, Jesus did say that, but he didn’t commend it. Jesus said, ‘you’re going to have them but you ought to do something about the condition.”
Two weeks later, he stopped by in Washington on his way for a crusade in London. We had a luncheon for him and about 100 Congressmen came. And, on that occasion, Dr. Graham said, and again I quote from him: “I have visited Job Corps camps and I went to see the Community Action programs at work in North Carolina. I’ve seen what they’re doing with some of these young people. A lot of people,” he said, “they say, ‘the war on poverty — that’s for Negroes.’ and, they say, ‘it’s for other people — minority people.’ But I say, it’s for all Americans. And that’s the reason that this is the first time I’ve testified before Congress for anything.
“I’ve been invited up here for seventeen years to testify on everything under heaven, but I’ve never come because I didn’t want to get involved in politics. But the poverty program is above politics. It oughtn’t to be involved in politics. It shouldn’t be made a political football — it’s a work for all Americans.”
Well, that was Billy Graham’s way of expressing that OEO, the War against Poverty, is based philosophically on the old-fashioned American-style way of doing things.
For example, we try to emphasize that the War on Poverty is a local program. We don’t run it from Washington. Here — seated on my right — are citizens from Abilene, who are in charge of the program here. There’s a similar group of citizens from El Paso in charge of the program in El Paso. And it’s the same way all over the State of Texas and all over the United States.
These people have the right to hire and fire the people who work in the War against Poverty here in Abilene. We don’t hire and fire them. They have the right to pick the program.
Now it’s true that Congress said that some of the programs should be financed with a certain amount of money. For example, they will say, $300,000,000 for Head Start. And these gentlemen and ladies will either have a Head Start or miss out on that amount of money. But there is other money. We call it private local money. Initiative money. Private initiative money which they have to spend as they see fit right here in the town of Abilene. Not the way I see fit up in Washington.
For example, in Texas you have a large number of migrants. And, therefore, in Texas we spend a lot of money through community action on migrants. In Illinois, where I come from, there are no migrants — so there is no money spent in Illinois under our migrant authority. Most of it is spent here or in Arizona or California.
So, it’s truly a local program. It’s local democracy at work. A little bit like a New England town meeting. The kind where everybody got together at the church and discussed the problems of the community. And then they decided upon something as a community and did it as a community. We’re trying to go back to that kind of a democratic way of doing things.
A second thing which I believe the Senators and Congressmen will come to realize is that truthfully, this program is very inexpensive. Let me give you an idea of how inexpensive it is.
If we stopped the whole program tomorrow, each individual taxpayer would save, 1 and 3/4 cents out of every dollar in taxes you pay.
Let me tell you another statistic. Seventy-five cents out of every dollar of taxes that you pay, pays for the cost of past or present wars, military wars, conducted by this country.
Across the face of America there are approximately 300,000 Americans working in the War against Poverty as volunteers — for nothing at all.
We have managed to recruit in the War against Poverty, more volunteers than have participated in any peace-time program in the history of the United States. We can’t draft them. We can’t force them. We can’t remunerate them in dollars. But they find their pay in the work that they do with children, with the elderly, with the poor who need job opportunities or who need schooling. The Senators have come to realize that. It’s a people’s war. Not a political war.
In this war against poverty we’ve tried to emphasize incentives. Incentives to work, we call them. Nobody gets anything for nothing in the war against poverty. There are no handouts. We’re not running a Robin Hood program where you take money from the rich and give it to the poor. Instead what we try to do is to provide inducement which would encourage people to help themselves.
For example, the Job Corps has a slogan. The slogan is “work, learn, and earn.” A boy or girl, 17 years of age, in order to join the Job Corps has got to look at that slogan. Has got to decide that they are individually willing to work, learn, and earn. That they’re willing to go away from their home, frequently hundreds of miles away from their home. To get up at 6:30 every morning and work 10 hours a day. Mental work, school work, physical work, job training, physical education. They’ve got to lead a very ordered life, six days a week. They get two weeks off per annum. How many of us here who are students at the University would look forward to a full 10-hour day completely planned, six days a week for the next year?
It takes a lot of courage for a youngster to leave home and go into an environment as rigorous as that. And it takes even more courage to persevere. To have the fortitude to stay on. We have hundreds and thousands of youngsters who want to get into the Job Corps, who want to work, who want a second chance to learn, who want to earn something. We’re not yet able to accommodate them because we do not have a large enough program. But they are not lazy or shiftless.
The fifth thing that the Senators, I believe, and many Congressmen have come to realize, is that we have actually administered this program in a non-partisan way. Sometimes it has been so non-partisan that it has caused me trouble. For example, some people in my party — I’m a Democrat — found out that states with Republican governors actually get more money than states with Democratic governors — except, of course, for Texas. Some Democrats didn’t like that. Governor Reagan of California attacked us pretty badly about three weeks ago. I happened to be in San Francisco — and when someone asked me what I thought about it I said, well, it’s an oddity that the Governor should attack our program in a state where it’s actually being run by a registered Republican.
That was lucky, wasn’t it? But it’s true. People have very high positions in our program who are not chosen on a partisan political basis and we put money into states without regard to whether they are Republicans or Democrats or even without regard as to whether the Congressmen or Senators from those states vote for us.
For example, we put $50 million into Mississippi last year. We don’t get a vote out of Mississippi. But the Jackson paper of Jackson, Mississippi — the capital of Mississippi —had a story in there about four or five months ago that we were now the third largest industry in Mississippi. We passed cotton.
We do that not because we get a Congressman’s vote out of Mississippi, we do it because Mississippi’s got more poor people in it for the population than any state of the union. And therefore, if we’re going to do anything about poverty, we’ve got to work in Mississippi if it’s at all possible for us to do so. And so we’ve done it because we’re interested in poverty and not in politics.
I’d like to say too that many people couldn’t believe that at the beginning because after President Johnson, the greatest politician of the century, had started this effort, lots of people were suspicious. They’d say, “well, there’s that great politician from Texas. The great wheeler-dealer politician from Texas. If he started it, it’s got to be politics.” But to President Johnson’s great credit, he’s never made any political demands upon us. He’s never said appoint a certain person to a job or don’t appoint somebody else to a job. He’s never said put so much money into this state or take so much money out of that state. Never once, despite the terrific pressure on him has he ever called up or dictated or tried to get somebody else to carry a message to us dictating or suggesting some position on how we should spend the money.
The program has really been run in a non-partisan way. Next, this program is really a patriotic program. It’s patriotic, I believe, because today our country is not soft in Vietnam, it’s not soft from a military point of view.
The Green Berets are not going to defect. General Westmoreland is not going to quit. If we’re soft anywhere, we’re soft at home. We’re the soft “underbelly” as Winston Churchill used to phrase it. The soft underbelly of America is in Chicago or Detroit or Los Angeles or maybe in Laredo or El Paso.
It’s here — at home. And the soft underbellies are caused by lack of jobs, lack of opportunities, ignorance, disease. The poor say America used to be called the land of opportunity. You read in the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But what life do I have as a poor man with no education, illiterate, no chance for a job. What liberty do I have when I can’t live where I want to live? We’ve made billions and billions and billions of dollars available abroad. Fifty billion probably to France, for the rehabilitation of that country. I say that now is the time to spend dollars here at home for the rehabilitation of people in our own country.
The question is how do you do it in 1967 or 1968? In the West in the old pioneer days people got together for a barn raising, or they got together for a joint harvest of crops. But what do you do today to help your neighbor?
How do you put into practical action that phrase “love your neighbor as yourself?”
Well, one definition of how to do that today is to put yourself into the skin of another man. To be weakened by his burden and to be heartened by his joys. To put yourself into the skin of a black man, into the skin of a Jew, into the skin of a leper or into the skin of a convict. That was the idea of the Peace Corps. The idea of the VISTA program — the Domestic Peace Corps —Volunteers in Service to America.
I’ll never forget, for example, going to Malaysia for the Peace Corps. Visiting our volunteers out there. We had some nurses in Malaysia. And one of them said to me “come on, Sarge, you’ve got to see my ward.” And I said, “sure, what is your ward?” And she said, “I have the leprosy ward.” And then I didn’t feel so good about seeing her ward. But I couldn’t say “no, I won’t go,” when she was in there every day. So she took me into her ward.
I suppose there were 50 patients in there. They had on those blue denim nightgowns that they wear in hospitals. And she had them all sitting up in their, beds and we went down the aisle between the beds, and everybody was smiling and happy and she was patting them on the back and introducing them to me and I could see their sores and their stumps and their feet and at about the fourth bed one of these lepers stuck out a stump at me to shake hands. And I grabbed that stump and it felt just like an electric poker. I was scared. What could make that girl go there? We couldn’t draft her to go there. She went out there for love. Love of her neighbors. She put herself into the skin of a leper.
On the Fourth of July of this year, I went up to Nome in Alaska. We have about 200 VISTA’s in Alaska. Nome is a real ramshackle town. There isn’t a paved street in it. But even in that place, there’s a slum worse than the rest of Nome.
About 500 fishermen, King Island fishermen, live in this slum. And right in the middle of this slum, there was a VISTA Volunteer living there. A boy, his house was as big as the area occupied by the organ here. It was out of plywood and tin. He had one small, steel stove, a wooden bed, and a desk, and a chair. One window. He was there for eight months. During six of those months, the temperature averaged 40 degrees below zero. He had nothing to eat but smoked salmon and caribou meat. I saw this situation and I said to myself — why? Why is that kid there? What’s he trying to prove? About himself? About those fishermen? About us? Suddenly I realized that for me at any rate, that the youngster was a witness, he wasn’t anything more. He was a witness to the interest of all the rest of America in those fishermen.
If he didn’t do anything more, he brought me up there to that slum and with me some other officials of the Federal Government. And we saw what was happening there. And back in Washington we set up a sort of special little task force which got money and medicines and additional volunteers up there to that slum in Alaska. God knows what we did was very little. But that youngster, by sitting there, surviving, and witnessing probably had done more for the people than all the rest of us put together in the country.
That’s what love your neighbor is today. Putting yourself into the skin of another person. Being weakened by his burdens and heartened by his joys. We have 200 VISTA Volunteers in Alaska, 350 of them out on Indian reservations. We have 150 in the hospitals for the mentally sick in West Virginia, 300 in Job Corps centers. We have thousands of requests for additional Americans. Not just young people, but older people too, for VISTA.
I think that the challenge before us in our country today is not to become richer — we are already infinitely the richest country in the world. We don’t have to become bigger — we’re really big enough. We don’t have to become stronger — we’re five times stronger from a military point of view than any nation or any combination of nations in the world. Our challenge is to become more human. To become more united, humanly.
Early in our national history, we sought political unity, we fought for it and we got it. Then we worked for geographical unity — with the help of the pioneers who came out to this part of the country and all the way to the West Coast, we got that. But human unity is harder to achieve. It’s going to take the energy of everybody in this room, particularly —for example — the people who are working together on a community action agency in the town.
But we need people who want to build people. We can build everything else in this country — planes and highways and computers and buildings and spaceships – but what we need are architects for humanity. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish in the war against poverty. That’s what we’ve been trying to accomplish with the Peace Corps.
There’s a true story which exemplifies what we’ve been aiming to do. It seems that out in Africa — maybe 400 miles up country in Africa — an African mother was sitting with her child on the wayside. Late in the afternoon of a hot day and striding down the dusty road came the figure of a young man. The child, who saw the young man, turned to the mother and said, “Look Mother — there’s a white man.” And the mother looked down the road at the same figure and said, “No, darling—that’s not a white man. That’s a Peace Corps volunteer.”
We’re looking and working and trying to achieve the day when with your help no one will say, “look — there’s a white man,” or, “look — there’s a black man,” or “look — here’s a rich man,” or, “look — there’s a poor man,” but only, “look — there’s a human being who needs my help.”
