When your gracious invitation first arrived, I found myself automatically asking: “Is this to be a Peace Corps speech or a poverty speech?” Your president, President Goddard, did not give me very much help in answering that question. In fact, he made life a good deal more difficult by saying:
“There may be some who think that your two administrative assignments are unrelated. I do not. The work of the Peace Corps and the work of your new assignment have a common denominator. “
Only he didn’t tell me what that common denominator was.
But those words did serve as a challenge. They set me thinking about what that common denominator might be.
Historically, as soon as they were announced, both programs were immediately dubbed “political gimmicks.” Both programs were given little chance of succeeding. Both were criticized as too small. Both were challenged as being “nothing new.” Both programs attempt to provide new kinds of assistance for people in need, whether here or abroad. And most obviously, there is a kinship between the Peace Corps and VISTA — Volunteers in Service to America, which is commonly described as a domestic Peace Corps.
Nonetheless, these are only surface likenesses. The more fundamental common denominator emerges when we consider that both programs were greeted, not so much by opposition, as by cynicism and skepticism. The Peace Corps was dubbed the “kiddie korps” in its early days. Similarly, the Poverty Program has been called a “drop in the bucket,” or the “popgun war.”
This phenomenon of cynicism rather than opposition provides and important clue. It suggests that the common denominator of both programs is that they represent a new departure, a quest for some meaningful alternative to what we might call “the numbers game.”
In the Peace Corps, we have been repeatedly invited to play that game—we have been challenged to justify our existence in terms of:
- the number of foreign countries we helped to keep in the Western camp
- the number of Americanizations we introduced overseas in education, in economic planning, in farming, and in government.
- the number of Volunteers dispatched; and
- the number of concrete results we could demonstrate, and I mean concrete—like schoolhouses and roads and irrigation systems.
In the Poverty Program, we are being invited and indeed challenged to play much the same numbers game to justify our existence in terms of:
- the number of people trained
- the number of job placements made
- the number of adults taught to read; and most commonly,
- the number of families removed from the relief roles.
This is the game we have been invited to play. But we find that we must cordially—but firmly—decline the invitation.
We decline—but let there be no mistake. We accept and embrace our obligation to produce in quantifiable and demonstrable terms. We can and we will produce results.
By July of this year, we will be well along in training over 25,000 young men and women in Job Corps Centers.
We will:
—have funded about 400 local anti-poverty programs in cities, rural areas, Indian reservations, for counties and even for entire states.
We will:
—have fielded over 3, 500 VISTA Volunteers serving, like Peace Corps Volunteers, wherever the poor may be found and reached.
We shall:
—have enrolled over 125, 000 teen-agers in a Neighborhood Youth Corps, designed to provide supervised and carefully graduated work experience.
We will:
—have disbursed up to five million dollars in small business loans, ranging from a fruitcake cooperative in Louisiana to a metal fabricating plant in Pittsburgh, and
We will:
—have reached out to over six thousand families on welfare and enabled the head of the household to become a breadwinner.
No. We do not have to fear the verdict of numbers. We welcome it. In fact, within the Office of Economic Opportunity, we are developing a cost effectiveness system modeled on the Pentagon’s method of deciding between rival weapons.
We don’t have to be afraid of the numbers game. But what we insist—and what I think constitutes the real common denominator of both the poverty program and the Peace Corps—is that we are unwilling to justify oar existence or evaluate our programs purely in accordance with the rules of the numbers game. We cannot and should not accept the three basic assumptions which the numbers game has come to stand for:
First, that a program’s importance is determined by sheer dollar volume and magnitude of staff;
Second, that the problems this nation confronts—in communism and in poverty—are purely problems of numbers or of power, of manipulating human beings or nations like counters on a board or beads on an abacus; and
Third, that effectiveness or success is measured purely in terms of numerical output, of changes which, on the domestic front bear the stamp of materialism (the middle class?), and which, on the international front, bear the equally clear imprint: Made in the USA.
The Peace Corps has amply demonstrated that size alone does not determine significance, that dollar input does not determine effectiveness. And in consequence, no one thinks to judge the Peace Corps by the same standards as one judges, for instance, the foreign aid program.
We are making a similar discovery in the Office of Economic Opportunity. Before the poverty program was enacted, there were numerous legislative programs which dealt with poverty in one way or another. Republicans on the Senate and House committees listed 42 such programs and stated that this country is already spending upwards of 30 billion a year on poverty. Other opponents of the program have been more extravagant, estimating the total amount spent on poverty as reaching 40 billion and more. And they cite these facts to say: one new program of 800 million dollars is nothing more than a drop in the bucket. If 30 or 40 billion can’t do the job, what can less than one billion do?
The easy answer to give is that we are just starting, that we will grow and expand. That may well be true. In fact, the President has just indicated his intention to double our budget for the forthcoming year. But that does not begin to be the real answer.
For the poverty program is more than just an education, or a training, or a work experience program. Above all, it is a catalytic force. And the effectiveness of such a catalytic agent is measured not by its own magnitude but by the effects it produces—by the interaction it initiates or intensifies. And we in the poverty program and the Peace Corps have begun to learn that:
- the processes we set in motion are at least as important as the direct results we achieve
- that the energies we release are at least as important as the specific production goals we attain
- that the attitudes we affect and the concerns we generate are at least as important as the number of salaries we pay, directly or indirectly; and that
- the channels of communication we open, the relationships of confidence and mutual respect we create, the sense of dignity we instill, and the spirit of dedication which we engender—all of these are at least as important as the economic wealth we augment.
Let me be even more specific — because this applies on every level.
There are four-year-olds who don’t even know how to hold a book or how to listen to a sentence with more than two or three words. When we teach him those things, we aren’t making him “employable.”
But we will have supplied that missing ingredient—the catalyst—so that our regular school system won’t lose that child along the way. With that child, that four-year-old, we will have set in motion a, process, a possibility, a chance which in our time, in our generation, can spell the end of poverty.
The same is true when we train a teenager in one of our Job Corps Centers. Suppose we teach him how to repair a car engine—or operate a tool cutting machine. We can’t guarantee that next year’s cars won’t change to turbine engines—or that that particular machine will always be in use.
But we can say that that boy will feel different about himself and about work. He’ll have a new sense of dignity, of self-confidence—because for what may be the first time in his life, he’ll have proven that he can learn, and that he can succeed.
That’s a form of “poverty-proofing” that won’t wear off. And this catalytic effect works on communities as well as individuals.
When we fund a local anti-poverty program—like the one submitted by Human Resources Development Corporation here in St. Louis—there may be about fifteen or twenty or thirty parts—pre-kindergarten classes, literacy classes, consumer education, job training, counseling, placement, legal services, health services. We don’t know and they don’t know if every single one of those programs will work. Or if that particular assortment of programs is exactly the right combination to eliminate poverty today, or tomorrow or the next day.
What counts, what really counts, is that there is an organization like that in St. Louis.
- That for the first time, an entire community has, pulled together to worry about the poor, and to find out about the causes of poverty;
- that for the first time government has pooled resources with private agencies in a very special kind of partnership;
- and that for the first time, the poor have a forum in which they are represented, in which their voice will be heard.
Finally, let us be frank to admit that the passage of one act and the appropriation of 800 million dollars does not, by itself, assure victory for this year, or the next year or the year after.
What is important is that the poverty program is the product of an aroused national conscience. And that conscience, that commitment, that determination constitutes a tide which nothing can withstand.
These are some of the reasons we cannot equate dollars with significance, or dignity with digits. This is why the “numbers game” does not reveal the significance or impact of the War against Poverty or the Peace Corps.
No audience should know this better than yourselves—for, some two thousand years ago, a voice cried out, alone, a voice in the wilderness. And then, there was One who dwelt among us, Who refused to accede to the numbers game when He spoke of the dedication of God to the one lost sheep.
And in His final act of sacrifice and affirmation, He provided us all with an eternal answer to those who would compel vision to justify itself today or tomorrow in terms of immediate results—to those who would compel faith to submit to the judgment of numbers.
He left, for you and for us, the continuing challenge—the challenge to decline the numbers game. This is the challenge which unites both the Peace Corps and the poverty program.
But what about you, and the colleges and universities you represent?
Can you say, in candor, that your institutions have not succumbed to the numbers game? Have you maintained your special heritage as the repository both of this culture’s most precious values and of a unique religious heritage?
Or have you too become consumed:
- with numbers
- with building programs
- with fund raising drives
- with raising the minimal college entrance score of your freshman class
- with measuring the average earnings of your alumni
- with the number of students you can place in medical school, in law school, in graduate school?
On January 2, the New York Times published a news story under the headline “Scholars Sold at Slave Market!” The article reported the “successful” auctioning of 1,000 literature professors at the Modern Language Association convention. One professor “slave” is reported to have commented: “It is rather embarrassing in a field that used to have such a human touch to be organized on such a vast scale.
We are trying to retain that “human touch” in the Peace Corps—even though we keep getting bigger and bigger.
And we hope that the same bonds that unite the Peace Corps and the poverty program, the same common denominator, the refusal to accede to the numbers game would extend to this Council and to each of your institutions. I would hope that it would draw you and us closer together in bonds of fellowship, of vision, and of dedication.
The Gospels record that Christ was asked: “And who is thy neighbor?
What is the answer which Christian colleges have given in this age to the modern Pharisees?
Is he only the middle class youngster who can qualify on college boards? Is he only the minority group member whom you admit by lowering your standards as an act of noblesse oblige?
Could the good Samaritan have joined your faculty? Or would you have preferred the highly educated Levite who passed by on the other side? And if your answer is: “That all depends,” then are you really imparting the most precious part of our Western Heritage?
Who is thy neighbor? I don’t know what your institution would answer—but I find it disturbing that we, in the poverty program have received more proposals to run Job Corps Centers from American business than we have from American Universities. And we have received none from any university which claims a religious affiliation and mission. Last June, at New York University, and later, at Georgetown University, I appealed for their participation in the poverty program, for their help in designing and administering a new laboratory of learning. This was not a request for money, for donations of facilities, or faculty. The poverty program pays 100% of the cost. This was a request for guidance from the institutions which house our nation’s scholars, which are the guardians of our culture’s highest aspirations.
Yet, neither of these universities came forth. In fact, no private college or university has done so as yet. Only Oregon and Rutgers Universities—both state institutions—have agreed to participate in this major educational experiment.
We, in the poverty program, are not just imparting skills. Are you just running trade schools for the socially and financially elite.
Will you turn your back on those who cannot play the numbers game adroitly, who never even had a chance to learn due to accident of birth, or race or geography.
Will you join with us—and with your communities
- to plan anti-poverty programs
- to search out the causes of poverty
- to devise new ways to enlist the conscience of the American people
- to take an active role in the quest for the dignity of man?
There is not a portion of our program where institutions such as yours could not contribute and contribute mightily.
We need you
- to help us recruit volunteers, for VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps
- to help design and administer Job Corps Centers
- to help communities design comprehensive anti-poverty programs
- to devise new methods of combating illiteracy among adults
- to teach your students and this nation about poverty, not from books, but from life.
Will you, in short, accept the same common denominator which binds the Peace Corps and the Poverty program together. Will you join with us in declining to play the numbers game—and ask, as Another did two thousand years ago:
“For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?”
