Temple Israel's 100th Anniversary

"We do not yet know all that needs to be known about the job ahead. We don’t know how to go to the moon yet either, but we are going to get there. Twenty-five years ago, we didn’t know how to harness atomic energy, but we found out, by trial and error. The captain who waits until his ship is completely ready never leaves port."
Memphis, TN • May 30, 1964

I am greatly honored that you have invited me here tonight to help you observe Temple Israel’s 100th Anniversary....

One hundred years ago, the War Between the States left on our Nation a deep and livid scar.

One hundred years ago, Memphis, on it beautiful bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, was a part of that scar -- a deeply-wounded town, still stunned by the conflict between brothers.

As I flew in this afternoon over the hundreds of homes and the thriving industrial complex of Memphis, I thought:

Today, Memphis is truly the City of Good Abode. The bitterness of those other years has been erased by men of good will -- working together with reason to solve the problems of a growing civilization.

Temple Israel can be proud of its role in these one hundred years of progress and understanding.

The members of your Congregation have been a vital part of the spiritual life of this great city, of its economic life, and of the total contribution to leadership enlightenment and welfare in the community.

Wherever the need for understanding -- be it Memphis or the World -- I am convinced that it will always be met with faith and dedication such as yours.

Three years ago I would have come here to talk about an idea. I would have told you what a great thing the Peace Corps could be. How much it would do for America and for the world.

I would have been trying to sell that idea --- sell it to the Congress, to the American people and, in particular, to people we hoped would serve.

Around the world--three years ago--our reservoir of understanding was perilously low, and the landscape was getting drier. Looking around us in the world we saw the drab: mud flats of misconception, the muck of thoughtless and ignorant hostility, and stagnant sloughs of unreasoning fear.

It was not our ideals that were in question. Those ideals were respected abroad, perhaps more than at home.

I have seen “Give me liberty or give me death” or “All men are created equal” scrawled on city walls in the new countries of the world.

When in 1955 President Sukarno opened the Bandung Conference he began by saying: “We are meeting on the 180th anniversary of the ride of Paul Revere. The American Revolution is the spiritual ancestor of our own revolution.”

No, it was not America’s ideals that were questioned. What people doubted was our ability to live and act in the spirit of these ideals.

Not all the doubters were foreigners. Many were Americans. They doubted our will and our dedication. They feared that we did not practice what we so nobly preached--They also feared the misuse, the blind use and the dumb use of our great power.

And, sad to say, the actions of some overseas Americans had increased the doubts. So had the failures of our democratic society at home.

However, there were some people--most importantly President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson--who believed that the Peace Corps could help. Risks, yes, but opportunities too. “Fain would I climb for I fear the fall; if you fear the fall, why climb at all?” And so we began.

Speaking to you tonight, I realize how far we have come.

The Peace Corps has the combined endorsement of Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater.

And overseas the clear waters of understanding are beginning to fill the lakes. The freshest which is released by a single Volunteer is small of itself. Together these new springs are filling the brooks, and moving the rivers.

We now have 7,000 Volunteers working in 2,500 locations in 46 countries.

Tennessee -- the Volunteer State -- has responded to this exciting challenge in the Peace Corps. There are 70 young people from Tennessee serving overseas in many of the countries which have asked for our assistance.

From Memphis alone, there are 16 Volunteers:

  • Robert G. Atkins in Colombia
  • James E. Born in Ethiopia
  • Judith Draper in Brazil
  • Charles D. Bowen, Michelle Press in Nyasaland
  • Walter Elkins Jr. and John Harris in Ghana
  • Nancy Kinnebrew in Liberia
  • Littleton Mason and Mary Reed in Nigeria
  • Byron Rozier in Malaya
  • John Teamer and Virginia Warr in the Philippines
  • Lucinda Campbell in Guinea
  • Gloria Jean Finnie in Jamaica
  • David Ivra in West Pakistan

In the first four months of this year we received applications from 22,000 Americans. This is 50% more than applied in this time last year.

Our Volunteers are working overseas without special privileges, under rigorous conditions, for about 11 cents an hour.

These Volunteers are a visible expression of America’s commitment to fundamental human ideals. They are proof of our concern for the aspirations of developing peoples. They are America’s answer to those who doubt that most basic principle-- that those who dwell on earth, white and black, rich and poor, believing and unbelieving, are all in the same boat.

Now, today, we are facing another need for understanding -- for the same vision, courage and endurance that made Memphis a great city --- for the same faith and dedication that made the Peace Corps work.

Just two days ago, a committee in Congress reported out President Johnson’s bill to wage a War on Poverty in the United- States.

The news is out and people are coming to believe that they no longer need to be poor forever.

The question we face today is:

“Can we, the richest and most powerful people on earth, can we who have been so blessed, bring out the best within us to do what we know we ought to do?” I think we can.

The philosophy of the Peace Corps is action. It is an example of learning by doing. We knew that the developing nations needed our help, needed our skilled manpower, needed our teachers and builders, our mechanics and engineers, our nurses and doctors. We knew that they needed more than our advisors. For years, they had top-flight advice from our Point Four experts or from the United Nations. But there remained a gap between the plans laid at the top and their execution in the field. It was a manpower gap. They needed “doers” as well as “advisors.” They needed Americans who would work with them, who would live with them, who would teach in their schools, in their hospitals, in their villages, who would teach while on the job. They needed young college graduates, able to teach English or math, science or industrial arts, or older Americans young in spirit.

President Kennedy once said that politics is like football. If you see daylight, go through the hole.

That is what happened in the case of the Peace Corps. Late at night, at the University of Michigan, John Kennedy asked a large, waiting group of students if they were ready to work overseas, on modest terms, living with the people they worked among, if they were ready to give two years of their lives to such work in the developing nations. The students’ response was so strong that Senator Kennedy decided to propose the idea to the nation in a major speech in San Francisco. And the response grew. After the election, we received more letters asking to join the Peace Corps, which was then not an agency at all, just an idea, than we received asking for jobs for all other agencies in the Government put together.

The President and Congress saw the daylight, and went through the hole. They decided to try, and it worked.

Now, President Johnson is determined to make a breakthrough in the struggle against poverty. We are going to find the daylight on this age-old problem. If Congress accepts our proposals for a Job Corps, for a corps of Volunteers for America, for community action programs, for a frontal attack on poverty, bringing together all the present efforts for a concerted drive, we will go through the hole.

With the Peace Corps, we have shown how Americans, young in spirit, can get to work to turn an idea into action, a dream into reality. We can do the same in the war against poverty.

President Johnson declared this a war against poverty in order to mobilize the full will of America. In war, we give everything we have. For peace in the world and full opportunity at home, we need to give more of ourselves, as we would in war.

A Peace Corps Volunteer who died in an air accident in Colombia, David Crozier, expressed this in a letter to his parents. “Should it come to it,” he wrote, “I had rather give my life trying to help someone than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them.”

The final test of the Peace Corps and the war against poverty will not be in statistics, not in numbers of countries served abroad, or numbers of jobs found at home, not in the numbers of teachers provided or schools built or slums destroyed or workers trained. Rather, it will be within us: Have we done our best, have we given all we can?

We cannot do everything. But we can do something.

We do not yet know all that needs to be known about the job ahead. We don’t know how to go to the moon yet either, but we are going to get there. Twenty-five years ago, we didn’t know how to harness atomic energy, but we found out, by trial and error. The captain who waits until his ship is completely ready never leaves port.

In the Peace Corps abroad and the war against poverty at home, we will make mistakes. But when we see daylight, we will try for the hole, and we will get through.

In John Kennedy’s words, “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

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.
RSSPCportrait
Sargent Shriver
Get the Quote of the Week in Your Inbox