Sargent Shriver Speaks in New York About Peace Corps and the War on Poverty

"The big thing today is the desire of people all over the world to participate meaningfully in the determination of their own destiny. In that sense, self-determination, basically, not of nations but of human beings."
New York, NY • December 07, 1965

You know the Herald Tribune this morning on the editorial page has an editorial on the raise in the interest rates - and in the course of the editorial it says that it’s time that people came to the realization that here in the United States that we couldn’t afford to have guns - guns for Vietnam - and butter. Butter being things like the War Against Poverty, I suppose.

Now, a few congressmen and a few senators have said that and a former brigadier general in the Air Force from Arizona, he said it, too. But just thinking from a “Sargent’s” point of view, I’d like to propose to this audience that that’s wrong. I’d like to suggest that we can’t win any military war in Vietnam or anywhere else and lose - lose the war in Harlem or lose the war in Watts. And the reason is that there’s actually only one war going on.

This war has erupted in the African Congo, down in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, down in Panama about the canal, down in Watts. And all of these riots, or wars, are related. Not because they’re communist or extremist or whatever you want to say, ready to exploit every disturbance here or abroad, but because hunger, and ignorance, and disease exist in stark reality for billions of people. And because millions of people have been denied elementary political freedom and political rights.

I say that people who say we’ve got to choose between guns or butter misunderstand the modern world altogether. I believe they’re fighting the wrong war at the wrong place with the wrong weapons against the wrong enemy. I think they’re sort of like the French - after World War I, you know, they built the Maginot Line and they sat in Paris and they felt very safe. And then the Germans came along and went right around the Maginot Line. It was a line built for a different war, a different situation.

We’re in danger of building lines or trying to establish fortresses of some type or other which are designed for different situations, for a different world than the real world of today. Because this war - this single war - in which the Peace Corps is engaged and in which the War on Poverty here at home is a part, is not a war against communism. It’s not against anything. It’s a war or an enterprise or a movement for self-determination. Not just of nations but of people - individual people - and a release of all these people from any form of colonialism or imperialism.

Communism, let it be said, is in many places a form of imperialism or domination. And the War on Poverty here at home could be corrupted if we permitted it to be a method by which let’s say White people tried to impose their ideas on Black people. Or rich people try to impose their ideas on poor people. Or where the standards and values of the middle class were imposed on people who have not participated in middle class America.

The American Revolution had a slogan - “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” You all know that slogan. Well, today we could expand that slogan, I think. And people are expanding it to say that social welfare without representation is tyranny. Education without representation is tyranny. Public handouts without an opportunity to participate is tyranny. Even foreign aid without participation of the country on the receiving end is tyranny.

The big thing today is the desire of people all over the world to participate meaningfully in the determination of their own destiny. In that sense, self-determination, basically, not of nations but of human beings.

Now, that’s a lesson that we’ve learned over and over again in the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps Volunteers have learned to say that maybe our way isn’t the best way for everyone. We’ve come out here to Bolivia or India or Nigeria or Ethiopia or wherever it might be to help you on your terms, not to make you do things the way we want you to do them.

We’ve had numberless cases of volunteers writing and telling us about this attitude and experiences that they’ve had in trying to carry it out. One that came in several months ago from a volunteer in Ecuador phrased it this way - some of you may have heard this quotation. He was working in community development in rural Ecuador and he wrote back and said:

“Our school,” the school in this town, “Our school has no roof. It would be a ten dollar project and about one day’s labor for two or three Peace Corps men to build that roof, yet we don’t do it. If we gave the school a roof, it would always be just that - a gift. The gringos’ roof. And when it needed fixing, no one would fix it.”

“If it takes me a year,” he said, “to talk my neighbors into putting on that roof, it will be worth it because then it will be their roof on their school. It would be a small start but in the right direction. Maybe then we can take on a little harder project and step by step build up a powerful organization interested in progress and strong enough to do something about it.”

That’s community development in the Peace Corps. That’s community action in Harlem. Same thing. The problem is how do you get people interested in putting their own roof on their own school?

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.
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Sargent Shriver
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