Four years ago this month, 15 to 20 persons were working – night and day — in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel trying to establish the Peace Corps. Your President, Father Hesburgh, participated in some of the discussions: so did dozens of other educators, businessmen, labor leaders, churchmen, etc.
But outside the hotel, the overwhelming majority of “experts” on Foreign Affairs were laughing at the idea of a Peace Corps. They and most adult Americans were scoffing not only at the idea, they were openly skeptical, even disdainful of the capacity of young Americans to live and work abroad. “Kids can’t succeed in jobs overseas,” they said, “Even mature men and women and trained Diplomats have failed in this kind of work.”
Today we know they were all wrong. The doubters, the skeptics, the cynics, the faint-hearted, yes, the “experts” were wrong.
But their attitude dramatizes our greatest national problem now: We are our own worst enemies. We sell ourselves short. We lack confidence in our capacity to find new ways to solve problems. That’s why we’re all busy justifying the way we do things now! We seek security within our own group — within the country club set, or within our business group, or professional group — or as members of the “giant middle class”
In 1932, a great American told this country: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Today, I tell you: “The only thing we have to fear is ourselves!”
I mean that I know we are fighting a war — two wars — one against poverty — the other, world-wide, against communism. Still, the real enemy is within! The real enemy is ourselves — the myths we indulge in, the distances we create between ourselves and our fellow man — and our own lack of faith.
Last summer, I read an article called “Keeping the Poor in their Place.” The author, Walinsky, has this to say: “In the present-day America, the middle class is defined largely by the fact that the poor exist. If the present poor should become middle class, no meaning would remain to that phrase,"middle class.” And, he argued, “We still have poverty in this country because the middle class majority does not want to improve significantly the lot of the poor; the middle class actively desires to keep the poor where they are!”
That is an awesome statement — frightening and challenging. But is he right? Do we middle class Americans need to look down on the poor in order to feel superior ourselves? If the fellow next door has a Hi-Fi, do we have to have a stereo — and if he has a stereo with two speakers, do we have to have one with four speakers and a special set of earphones? Do we have to prove that we count by playing the game of “One Upmanship?”
Maybe that’s the explanation for some of the crime and violence in our country. Maybe when an 89-year old woman gets mugged by some teenager, that’s his way of saying: “Look at me, I’m important. I can harm you. I can upset your middle class attitude and values.” I have heard it said — time and again — about Negroes: “Why do they buy those great big flashy cars? Why do they buy a big Cadillac? With the same money, they could fix up their homes and give their kids some books.” But who are we to criticize them, when we use money in the same way? When we try to prove how great we are by outdoing the fellow next door — or the fellow down the street — or the poor.
The true patriot knows that to be an American is more than being in the middle class. You can be middle class and French! You can be middle class and German! You can be middle class and Russian! Was Patrick Henry middle class? Was Thomas Jefferson middle class when he wrote: “We can not expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed.” Jefferson also said: “What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?” “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. That is its natural manure.” Are those good middle class statements? And here at Notre Dame you must have heard that the Catholic Church — that Christianity — grows and prospers — even requires “The blood of martyrs”.
In the Peace Corps, we have found a new way of saying “I am an American.” Last year, a former Ambassador from Bolivia visited our Peace Corps office. He told me —
“Mr. Shriver, I am one of those who predicted the Peace Corps would fail. But you have succeeded in my country far beyond my wildest imaginings. The reason your Volunteers have reached my people is simple – they came to learn! For the first time we were confronted with ‘Gringos’ who wanted to learn from us! They wanted to learn our history, our culture, our language, our way of doing things. And in teaching them, we grew, quite unconsciously, softly, quietly, psychologically, ready to accept instruction from them!”
That’s one way Peace Corps Volunteers say ; “I am an American.” In effect, they say: “Maybe our way isn’t best. We’re here to help you, not to make you do things the way we want you to.” Maybe that’s a new form of patriotism — not exclusively love of one’s country — of the hills, valleys, cities and farms of one’s own land — but love of humanity.
Tom Carter, a Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Chimbote, Peru wrote:
—-"Our school has no roof. It would be a $10 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 my school a roof it would always be that, a gift, the ‘Gringos’ roof. When it needed fixing, no one could fix it. If it takes me a year 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 would 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. It has to be an organization that does not need me, otherwise it would collapse when I leave.”
Tom Carter’s is a new way of being an American. Tom Carter is big enough to accept the pace and the values of others. Maybe true Americanism, true patriotism, is being big enough to admit that we don’t know everything, that we can make mistakes, and that we can learn from others. That’s where we began, after all, in 1787: This country got started — our Constitution got written — because there were 55 men who gathered in Philadelphia who were big enough to admit that things were bad. The convention was originally called merely to draft some amendments to the Articles of Confederation. But the true patriots — men like James Madison of Virginia and James Wilson of Pennsylvania — they knew the Articles of Confederation had to be scrapped — and they had the courage to say so.
These men looked around them and said: Our country is in bad shape. We’ve got problems, and we’d better do something about them.
Back then — it was toll roads and tariffs and barriers to trade. Now, it is toll roads and barriers to opportunity — to education, to jobs. But the solution — the basic solution is the same.. We have to be big enough to take stock — to admit our failures
—The failure of our school system to prevent drop outs
—The failure of public housing projects to solve the human problems of the poor
—The failure of urban renewal to eradicate slums
—The failure of an expanding economy to provide jobs for youth and growing numbers of hard- core unemployed
—The failure of our welfare programs to break the cycle of poverty which goes on from generation to generation
—The failure of all our social programs, taken together, to stem the rising tide of delinquency, crime, poverty, and alienation.
Yesterday, President Johnson, said to the Congress in his Poverty message:
From the very beginning, this country, the idea of America itself, was the promise that all would have an equal chance to share in the fruits of our society. As long as children are untrained, men without work, and families shut in gateless poverty, that promise is unkept.
In Detroit, in Chicago, in New Haven — in every city and every state, patriots are rising to their feet and saying: Let’s face our problems. Let’s eliminate the tariff barriers and toll roads to opportunity. The old Articles of Confederation are no good. In 1787, the word was “Union.” Today, the word “Coordination” is more fashionable. But the problems are the same — our schools, our, hospitals, our family counseling services, our mental health clinics, our legal service agencies — all of these are as separate, as divided, as the 13 colonies were. To get from one to the other is as difficult for the poor as it was back in 1787 to go from colony to colony. We need now, in each community — a more perfect union — a union which will work — which will keep the promise — “To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
The ability to admit failure — to face up to it — that is the first mark of the patriot.
The second mark of the patriot is the ability to learn from others — to admit that we don’t know everything— that others can teach us something. That’s what we have done in the Peace Corps. And that’s what we’re doing in the Poverty Program. We’re learning from the poor. We’re listening to them.
Listen to these words from Mrs. Janice Bradshaw from Pueblo, Colorado — a woman who never finished grammar school! She said: “Poverty is a personal thing!”
Poverty is taking your children to the hospital and spending the whole day waiting there with no one even taking your name — and then coming back the next day, and the next day, until they finally get around to you.
Poverty is having a landlady who is a public health nurse — who turns off the heat when she leaves for work in the morning and turns it back on at 6 when she returns. It’s being helpless to do anything about that because by the time the officials get around to looking into it, she has turned the heat back on for that day — and then it will be off the next.
Poverty is having the welfare investigators break in at 4 o’clock in the morning and cut off your welfare without an explanation — and then when you go down and ask, they tell you it is because they found a pair of men’s house slippers in the attic, where your brother left them when he visited last Christmas.
Poverty is having a child with glaucoma and watching that eye condition grow worse every day while the welfare officials send you to the private agencies and the private agencies send you back to the welfare officials, and when you ask the welfare officials to refer you to this special hospital, they say they can’t. And then when you say it is prejudice because you are a Negro, they deny it flatly. And they shout at you, “Name one white child who we have referred there. And when you name twenty-five, they sit down — and they shut up — and they finally refer you. But it is too late then, because your child has permanently lost 80 percent of his vision — and you are told that if only they had caught it a month earlier, when you first made inquiry about that film over his eyes, they could have preserved most of his vision.”
That’s the voice of the poor! And being an American is learning to listen.
The “experts” also told us that poverty-stricken youngsters didn’t want to work, because if they did, there were plenty of jobs and no one ever applied for these jobs. And they told us that city kids would never volunteer to go to a Job Corps Center out in the woods away from the bright lights! Well, during the first 50 days of Job Corps, 188,000 young men and women have volunteered! They write us on postcards, on letters, on torn pieces of paper. They write to “Job Core” and ‘Job Choire” and “Job Chore” — But they all say — We want to go to work. We want a new chance to learn.
And I remember what one of the first thirty boys said when he walked into the Job Corps Center, in Catoctin, Maryland. He said he thought it would be a camp with barbed wire around it — like the concentration camps he had seen on television. And when he was asked why did he come if he thought that’s what it would be like, he said, “This is my last chance to do something good.”
—And he was only 17! The “experts” told us that white boys from the rural South would not mix with Negroes from the slums of Northern cities. They predicted race riots in the Job Corps Centers. But already for more than a month such boys — Negro and white from Kentucky and Georgia and Virginia have been studying together, eating together, and sharing sleeping quarters — with negro boys from the slums of Baltimore and Philadelphia — without a single incident. We still have a lot to learn — even from teenage boys with a third grade reading level, and police record. Are you prepared to learn from them — to find out what is wrong with our schools, our employment service, our welfare agencies? If you are, then you will have found a new way to say: “I am an American.”’ And you will have given a new meaning to patriotism — because the third mark of the patriot — the true patriot is that he is willing to make a commitment. He isn’t afraid to make the plunge. He doesn’t have to play it safe by staying in his own small social group.
Right now, there are a lot of people who call themselves patriots, true Americans. But really — they’re afraid to get their hands dirty with poverty at home — and they’re also afraid to go abroad — to Africa or Asia where people have a different color, speak a different language, eat different food.`
The other week, I got a letter about helping the poor. The writer said: “I feel we should go ahead and send them money.” Do you know what those words “send them” really mean? They mean that the poor are somewhere far away — and that our contact with them should be confined to the U. S. mails.
Such people want to help the poor — but not have any human contact with them. We do the same thing overseas.
Back in 1961, President — then Vice-President — Johnson was visiting Africa for the independence ceremonies in Senegal. He rode through the streets of Senegal with our Ambassador. Typically, President Johnson reached out of the official car to shake hands with the Africans. But when he did, our Ambassador grabbed his arm back. He offered — he almost insisted — that Johnson put on gloves — so that our President’s hands, his flesh would not be contaminated by touching the flesh of the Africans. President Johnson rejected the gloves — and it may not surprise you that that gentleman is no longer Ambassador to Senegal: The true patriot isn’t afraid to shake hands — and he doesn’t have to wear gloves either. You can’t fool the poor. You can’t fool other nations. If you trust them, if you are willing to make the plunge, to commit yourselves, then you will know what it means to be an American.
It means that in that other America — the America of the poor, you will be welcomed with an outstretched hand and a level gaze. It will mean that when you are thanked, you will not be secretly despised! It means that you will be trusted — because you have been willing to trust them.
That is what a patriot is. That’s what an American is. As Andrew Jackson said, “I would to God we had less professions and more acts of real patriotism.”
We need patriots like that — I said it at the start of this speech — and I’ll say it again. We need patriots like that because, right now, our biggest enemy is ourselves - our sense of smugness, our superiority. And right now,the biggest struggle we face is a struggle with the false patriots — the ones who say “I am an American” by looking down their nose at the poor, by looking down their nose at other countries and other people, by seeking security within their own little groups. Fortunately, that kind of false patriotism, that kind of phony Americanism is under attack. On one flank are those 188,000 kids who have applied for the Job Corps. They weren’t afraid to take the gamble. On the other flank are the thousands flocking into the Peace Corps, into the domestic Peace Corps, called VISTA, into the Papal Volunteers, into dozens of private volunteer programs in their local communities. Last week, the American Bar Association passed unanimously a resolution calling for the legal profession, to enlist in the War Against Poverty. And each day brings more into the ranks.
We are seeing now beginnings•of a giant pincer movement — those two flanks gradually closing in to crush and eradicate the enemy that lurks within — the enemy which is ourselves. Will you join the ranks of those true patriots? It won’t be just fun and games. This new patriotism is a patriotism.
—Defined by service
—Tried by rejection and hardship
—Tempered by disillusionment and frustration
But will you take that first step? Or will you hang back?
—In the security of your parents’ homes
—In the assured prestige that comes with education
—In the respectability that comes from graduate work
How many of you will retreat from that commitment?
How many of you will join Peace Corps, or VISTA, or Papal Volunteers?. How many of you will help four and five year olds through Project Headstart — or give poor teenagers their first break by working in Job Corps Centers?!
And how many of you will blow neither hot nor cold — but lukewarm? That is your choice — between an Americanism based on false feelings of superiority and snobishness — and deep down, on hidden fear. Or an Americanism based on committment — humility — and eagerness to learn.
Before you seal off your heart — before you take the easy way to success, to security, to superiority here at home — recall to mind the words of St. John in the Apocalypse where he quotes our Lord as saying:
“I know of Thy doings and find they are neither cold nor hot’. I would Thou were one or the other! Being what Thou are, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, Thou wilt make me vomit you out of my mouth!” I’m sure you men of Notre Dame are not lukewarm. Notre Dame, with its great endowment of priests and scholars, and that new library, stands for much more. And your fathers and mothers and the saints — have struggled for more than sons who are lukewarm, tepid. For to be lukewarm in this time of crisis —`to abstain, to play it safe — is worse than to err. It is to join the enemy.
