I would like to call your attention to a little fact about federal financing, especially about the program for which I now have responsibility. That fact is this: 90% of all the money which Congress appropriates for the War against Poverty is spent through the private sector of American life or through the local government. Out of every dollar that is given to 0E0, 90 cents goes to local private agencies like YMCA, Boys Club, YWCA, Camp Fire Girls, Senior Citizens Centers, run locally, not by the federal government. It goes to business organizations, big businesses, like Westinghouse, International Business Machines, which run Job Corps centers. It goes to a local Department of Public Health, or to a Board of Education. In other words, 90 cents out of every dollar does not go into a federal program. This fact that 90% of our money goes to the local government or to the private sector is one of the reasons why we have maintained from the beginning that the War on Poverty is basically a conservative program.
“Conservative,” someone might say, “it couldn’t be conservative if came out of Washington! " That’s the first strike against it.
Second, it came out of a Democratic administration. It’s got to be a liberal program, automatically.
But if you stop to think for just a few minutes, I think you would come to the same conclusion that many Mayors have come to, Republicans and Democrats alike. The Mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Republican, visited our Regional Headquarters in Austin, Texas, and spent a day there. At the end of his day’s discussion, he turned to the man in charge of our office there and said, “This is a Republican program if you fellows only had the sense to know it.” He must have been right because only last week 22 Republican Mayors petitioned Congress in support of OEO.
This program does partake in many ways of the philosophy with which the Republican party has become identified in recent years. For example, we say that all of these programs must be run locally. In other words, what’s done in Cumberland has to be, should be, should be, at any rate, decided by Cumberland people and not by a bureaucrat in Washington.
What’s done in Mississippi or California must be decided by the people in those states. Who gets hired or who gets fired in Cumberland should be decided in Cumberland, by people who know the needs of the community much better than anybody in Washington could know them.
In other words, ours is a local program, locally administered with local leadership bearing the responsibility for its success or its failure.
I found out something about that. I found out that when the program is a success, it is because the local people have run it so well. But when it’s a failure, everybody wants to know why Shriver didn’t take better care of that situation.
It is an interesting fact of life that all of us respect our own community so greatly that we don’t believe we do anything wrong locally. It is usually somebody else -- and the farther away they are the better.
But the War against Poverty has been based on the idea from the beginning that it was a local program. In that respect we say it’s a conservative program.
It also, believe it or not, is an inexpensive program. Now that’s hard for businessmen to believe, especially, when you know how the cost of living is going up and how strapped you are not only to meet your current bills, but alarmed by the prospect of increased taxation. Yet the truth is that if all of the programs inaugurated under the War against Poverty were eliminated today your tax bill would go down only 1 ¼ cents. So that out of every dollar you pay to the federal government, 1 1/4 cents goes to the poor. It is actually less, considerably less, than we spend in one month in Vietnam.
We have a host of new programs, -- programs like Head Start, Neighborhood Youth Corps, Foster Grandparents, Job Corps, and so on. To give you an appreciation of the cost of these programs, let me illustrate that the entire Health Program for the poor, which we inaugurated, plus the entire cost of all the programs involving Legal Services for the poor, the total cost of those programs for 2 years, -- end up costing less than that tragic fire that occurred on the Aircraft Carrier off the coast of Vietnam about a month ago. You will remember that one of our new ships was there. A plane landed or was about to take off, I can’t remember exactly which. A fire took place, some of the ammunition exploded, a large number of people were killed and there was an extensive fire on the Aircraft Carrier. That one tragic accident cost more than everything we have done for 2 years for the health of the poor or for justice for the poor.
You have heard, also, I am sure, about the alleged waste, inefficiency, high salaries, duplication, overlapping -- words like that connected to the War against Poverty. It was for this reason, among others, that I was very happy this year when the United States Senate decided to have a full-scale investigation of the entire program; and so did the House of Representatives.
They authorized in the Senate alone an expenditure of about $275,000 for this investigation.
Sixteen Senators were on the investigating committee. Six or seven of them were Republicans.
They spent three and one-half months conducting this investigation.
They hired outside economists, businessmen, etc., to help them.
The Senate alone heard from more than 400 witnesses and from more than 100 national organizations including, for example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Labor, women’s groups, church groups, and so forth.
They compiled 40,000 pages of testimony.
They went to 12 or 15 different places in the United States pursuing this investigation.
And at the end of it, all of the Senators from both parties signed a report in which it is stated that everyone of the programs which we have inaugurated in the past 2 years should be continued. Some of them should be expanded, like Head Start. But no member of either party said that any of these new programs should be stopped. Nobody said:
- Stop the Neighborhood Youth Corps
- Stop the Head Start
- Stop Foster Grandparents
- Stop the VISTA Volunteer Program, which is the program like the Peace Corps, only it operates here at home. It’s called Volunteers in Service to America.
Nobody called for any of these programs s to be stopped, and frankly, this was extremely encouraging to all of us who have been laboring in the War against Poverty to find that all of these Senators, regardless of party, endorsed all these programs.
Just last week, the Senate voted on the new bill authorizing the continuation of these programs. The Senators suggested that $200 million more be spent in these programs than President Johnson asked for. And among those voting in favor of the program and of the additional expenditures was Senator Dirksen of Illinois, Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota, Senator Carlson of Kansas, Senator Prouty of Vermont, Senator Talmadge of Georgia, Senator Spong of Virginia, both Senators from the great state of Maryland.
In other words, despite what you have heard, despite what you have read, the United States Senate spent 3 1/2 months looking at this program in detail.
They spent almost $200,000 of your money to find out if the OEO was worth anything, and at the end of that, a man like Dirksen of Illinois voted for it, not only voted for it, but voted $200 million more for it than Lyndon Johnson asked for!
The conclusion I draw from that is that we must be doing something right because we could not get that kind of support three to one - if what we are doing was wrong.
We have been encouraged, too, to note across the country in recent months the newspapers of this nation changing their tune, so to speak, about what’s being done.
The Baltimore Sun, for example, just last week, published an extremely strong editorial in support of the War against Poverty program. So did “Life” Magazine, “Look” Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, The Kansas City Star, The Atlanta Constitution, The New York Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Louisville Courier-Journal, The Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette.
These editors would not be writing what they are writing if as the result of their observation, as a result of what their own reporters looking at the War on Poverty in their home town tell them, they were getting bad news about these programs at home where they, themselves, know best about the successes and failures.
You say to me, perhaps, “well, if everybody feels this way about it, why isn’t the program more popular? Because it’s obvious it’s not particularly popular.” I think the answer to that might be deep, maybe even profound.
First of all, nobody likes higher taxes, and there is going to have to be a tax increase, I believe, if we are to fight the war in Vietnam and carry on programs like the War against Poverty at home. Nobody likes a war, and we are waging one right now, one of the larger wars in our nation’s history.
The national administration is not very popular. All you have to do is look at the polls in the paper to know that.
You probably heard the story about the fellow who went to Pimlico, or maybe Laurel, and made a $2 bet on the first race, -- odds were something like 50 to 1, -- and he won and he got $100. Then he took the $100 and bet it on the second race, -- the odds were 40 to 1, -- and he won again. Then he took the combined winnings and put them on the third race, -- and he won again! He kept playing the long shot and he won every race. So, finally, when the eighth race came around, he bet the whole wad, a couple hundred thousand dollars on the longest shot and the long shot was coming down the home stretch, ten lengths in front of everybody else. The fellow thought he was going to make $2 million, -- down the home stretch about ten yards from the finish line the horse falls dead. And the guy looks at it and says, “damn, Lyndon Johnson.”
Well, we know that there is that kind of feeling, and we know that the War against Poverty is caught up in that kind of dissatisfaction. Not just dissatisfaction, let’s say, with the Head Start program, -- nobody is against that, -- not dissatisfaction with the new home for the elderly, dedicated here just a little while ago, -- nobody is against that. But dissatisfaction with everything.
You know, throw the rascals out, -- can’t get any worse. Fire the manager, -- somebody in Boston will probably say that this afternoon. But the truth is, and you know as well as I know, that firing the manager has never pulled a team from last place to first place: and this kind of dissatisfaction which you must feel, many of you feel inside of you, really is not going to be solved by firing the team or by closing down the War against Poverty. It really will not help because the problems which brought the War against Poverty into being in the first place are going to be there whether there is a Republican in the White House or a Democrat in the White House.
You will find that the people who are interested in solving the problems that face our country are not necessarily, or basically, motivated from a narrow, political point of view. They are interested in trying to find out how we can do better so that we will eliminate these problems for future generations. Let me illustrate that point by just one story from the Job Corps.
The Job Corps is a program for 16 to 21 year old young men and women. Right now, there are 39,000 young boys and girls in Job Corps camps all across America. There are 125 of these camps. Why did we start the Job Corps? We started it because we learned that there were about one million boys and girls of this age who are out of school, out of work, whose families were on relief, about half of them with no father in the house -- destined to end up living in poverty. They would be welfare cases for which you would have to pay taxes, and their children would be welfare cases for which your children would have to pay taxes. So the question is, should we do anything about it? And if so, what should be done? Nobody has a simple answer to that. But we thought one thing we might try was to organize some residential centers where we could take these young boys and girls out of the environment which frequently makes them what they are, put them into a well-disciplined, well-structured, well-organized, well-regulated environment and see whether we couldn’t twist them around and set them in the right direction. Give them a kick in the “can” and let’s see what happens -- excuse me. Give them a boost! Like a jet assist.
So we tried. But what did we find out? Those of us in the program were shocked, to begin with. We found out that 30% of the youngsters who volunteered for this program are illiterate.
Now they’re all right here in the United States. They’re all your fellow citizens and mine. They average about 17. They’re going to live their lives in this country whether they like it, or you like it, or I like it. They’re going to. They’ve all been in our schools, but they can’t read or write. They come to us illiterate and those who are literate come to us performing at the fourth grade in arithmetic and English. Many of them -- the vast majority of them -- have never been away from home. They don’t know anything about the businesses you work in. They wouldn’t even know how to fill out a job application in your business. They don’t know anything about labor unions. They never heard of labor unions.
We get youngsters out of the city of Chicago living five blocks from Lake Michigan that have never seen Lake Michigan. We get them out of New York that never heard of Mickey Mantle. Now don’t ask me why they are the way they are. I’m just telling you the way they are.
Faced with this group, we said, “Well, who can do something about it?” We asked educators to do it -- universities. We asked boards of education -- public schools. We asked American industrial concerns. We asked women’s sororities. Groups like the YWCA, too. We asked men’s groups. Would you try to help us do something about these youngsters? We gave them a plan -- a little bit like when the government wants a new kind of airplane. They give specifications to the manufacturers. They say, “design us an airplane that’ll do these following things: -- go this fast, carry this much weight, go this high, etc.” And then they come in and compete for that contract.
We did the same thing. We said, “Here’s the material - the raw material, we want you to tell us how you would set up a plant, so to speak, to process that material. To get this raw material - this human raw material at one end, and put it out at the other end of your assembly line capable of working in your company.”
Well, nobody ever did that before. So it stands to reason that we made plenty of mistakes trying it. Most of you were in the Army, Navy, or Air Force, I assume. I was in the Navy and we made plenty of mistakes. I was in the Submarine Force when we had the torpedoes that were so great -- that were so terrific -- built by the best manufacturers in the world -- I fired them and had them hit an enemy ship and not go off. That doesn’t make you feel too good when you’re down underneath. Somebody made a mistake building that torpedo. So we made mistakes building this Job Corps. We fired some duds. We had some dry holes, as the oilmen say.
But today, 25 American corporations are running these institutions. They’re the best of our American corporations -- General Electric, Westinghouse, IBM, U. S. Industries, Litton Industries, Graflex, etc. Here’s what they’re doing. I was in one on Saturday in San Francisco.
Seventy-six per cent of these boys and girls now come out of those places not only able to work, but into jobs. And they make $1.76 an hour. They have been twisted around from a tax-consumer into a taxpayer. They come out performing at not less than the eighth grade now. I’ve seen kids at 17 years of age who were illiterate when they joined the Job Corps and nine months later were reading at the third or the fourth grade level. Now there are many reasons for this. I won’t begin to try to explain why. Impossible to do it. The fact is that it’s being done.
It costs quite a bit of money. These kids come to us twenty pounds underweight. They come to us with, on an average, of four cavities in their teeth. We had a boy at Catoctin, Maryland - a youngster from Kentucky. Was very quiet. He didn’t eat very much. The counselors watched him for a day or two -- thought he was just homesick which most of them are. But then they saw him continue not eating. So one of them started talking to him. And he said, “why aren’t you eating anything?” And he said, “Well, my mouth hurts.” And so they took him to the local dentist in Thurmont. The dentist pulled 12 teeth out of that child’s head. Abscessed teeth. And practically the first thing he ever ate with any comfort was the birthday cake made for him in that camp when he got back there.
You didn’t make these kids. Neither did I. Lyndon Johnson isn’t responsible. The point is that they’re out there. They’re all over this country. And they’re going to be there, and they’re going to get married and they’re going to propagate more people pretty much like themselves. And you who are earning your living and paying taxes are going to have to pay for them. The question is -- do you pay something now -- even if it’s a substantial sum of money -- and get that off your back for the future, or do you just dilly-dally with the problem and not only have it as a problem for yourself but for your children.
We elected to try to spend some of your money, we hope with some degree of intelligence and with some carefulness, to get rid of the problem now.
Every one of the programs we operate is exactly the same in motivation. Some of the things we have started have been big breakthroughs, almost gushers -- like an oil well. That was Head Start. Everybody loves Head Start. And we talked about it like a lawyer who won his last case.
But we started some others that are duds. But we don’t talk about them any more than Mr. Ford talks about Edsel. He likes to talk about the Mustang. So I like to talk about Head Start. But we had an Edsel. We had something called “Loaves and Fishes.” I’m glad none of you’ve ever heard of it. You watch the television in the evenings, and you know just as well as I know that with all the brains they’ve got at CBS and NBC and ABC -- they bring out programs every year in which they put a lot of money, and they’re duds. For every man from U.N.C.L.E. or Bonanza, they’ve got something that’s off the tube three weeks after they’ve started it. So we’ve had our failures, but let me tell you that they were not failures of lack of motivation or lack of desire to spend what money you were able to give us intelligently.
For all of these reasons I have been describing, and many others, we say that the War against Poverty is a hand up, not a handout! In fact, we don’t hand out a dime! Nobody gets anything in this program unless he, himself, does something first. That youngster with the bad teeth had to volunteer to leave his town in Kentucky and come to Catoctin, Maryland. Now you may say to yourself, “That fellow is lucky. I wish I had some chance like that when I was a kid.” But the truth is, that kid is not only lucky, but he is scared to death! He has never been out of some little town in the mountains of Kentucky. He doesn’t know where he is going or what he is getting into. You or I may look at his house and say its a terrible place to live, but let me tell you something, its home to him, and he likes living with his family and his mother. The biggest problem he has got in the Job Corps is homesickness. So it takes courage to begin with to leave his home at 16 or 17 and go 500 miles away.
It takes courage to preserve because you are in a life you have never led before. Instead of being able to do what you want to do, the way a lot of kids in the ghetto run the streets in a Job Corps camp you’ve got to be up at 6:30, and you have got to go and have certain education, and you have got to go and get physical education, and you have to do manual labor, and you are doing it 10 hours a day, and you are doing it 6 days a week.
Nobody is drafted into that program. Nobody is drafted into any of these programs. Nobody is compelled to get into any of them. They have got to do something themselves. They’ve got to sign up for a job, or for school, or for training. They didn’t get anything for nothing. That’s why we say it is a hand up, not a handout.
And that’s why we say it’s a conservative program. We are trying to conserve the human resources of our nation just the way we spend money to conserve the natural resources of the country. We are trying not only to conserve them, but we are trying to expand their potential economically, socially, and morally. We say that it is better to get rid of some of these burdens now than to have to live with them for another generation.
Some people, of course, say this is dreaming, it’s an illusion, it’s sort of sweet, nice, and all that, but it’s not hard business. Well, the Harvard Business School made a study of whether it was hard business or not. The study was conducted by Litton Industries, the president of which is a fellow named Charles “Tex” Thornton. He is one of the most successful businessmen in the country right now. From 1953 to 1967 he had made himself about $150 million which is pretty good income. He studied it and he said that if he could get the same payout from his business you get from the War against Poverty, he would put all of his money into that kind of payout because it all comes back in five years.
So it is hard business as well as spiritual good business. As somebody said, it’s the kind of business which not only gives you some peace in your heart, but also peace in the city, peace on the streets, because every kid that we’ve got in the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Job Corps is exactly the kind of kid that was in the riot in Detroit, Newark, or wherever they occurred, or wherever they will occur in the future. Senator Murphy of California said, maybe the answer is to take all the kids out of the city and put them into the Job Corps. We couldn’t do that today if we wanted to. We don’t have the managerial capacity to do it. But maybe it is what we should be doing, and maybe it is what we will be doing if all of us can keep our eyes open and our chins up, and not get discouraged about this country even with taxes and even with the war, and even with bumbling bureaucrats like me in Washington.
This nation, I’ve been in a hundred of them in the past seven years, this nation is so far the best nation in the world regardless of our problems that there isn’t even a close second best nation. And we can keep it that kind of a nation if we are willing to spend, as I said, 1 1/4 cents out of every dollar for these kind of programs dedicated to the betterment of our people. You do have to be a bit of a visionary. You do have to say to yourself, it’s going to be better for my boy than it was for me.
John Kennedy had a phrase he loved and frequently used. He said, “Some people see things as they are and ask why. But I dream things that never were and say, why not?” America has been built. Cumberland was built by people who made a very difficult trip to get here because they were willing to say, well why not go out to the mountains. Why not open up that land to the west. That’s the spirit that made this city and made this country. We are unified geographically now. The big challenge is to unify ourselves humanly in the next 50 years, the way we unified ourselves geographically the first 150 years. The way to bring about that kind of unity is to work together with that same kind of spirit that Kennedy talked about when he said: “I dream things that never were, and say why not?” Why not here in Cumberland, why not here in Alabama, or California, why not here in America which is still the last best chance for the hopes of mankind.
