Today President Johnson sent his message to Congress calling for a war on poverty.
Tonight I have come to St. Paul to ask your help in that war. For the war on poverty is not going to be won from an office building in Washington, nor by a bureaucracy in any far-off city. It will not make progress under a narrow-minded strategy drafted in a distant headquarters and imposed upon hundreds of varied communities and rural areas. It cannot depend upon the resources of the federal government alone.
If it is to succeed, it will demand the energy, the ideas, the resources, and the assistance of dedicated men and dedicated groups throughout this country.
And it is fitting that I present this challenge first to the Farmers Union.
The Farmers Union has been fighting poverty for decades. You were formed for that purpose. You have not only helped those who work on the land, but your experience and ideas have contributed to the knowledge that now makes it possible to draft a nationwide attack on the problems of poverty.
We also owe a special debt to Jim Patton. He was one of the first people I consulted when the President asked me to help prepare this program. He had already contributed much through the organization of the Committee on Pockets of Poverty. His counsel is reflected in the President’s program.
This new program is not an election-year gimmick. If it were, I would have nothing to do with it.
It is not Government paternalism or handouts. Nothing is being handed out but opportunity--for people to help themselves.
It is not a hopeless exercise. Thirty years ago more than half our families lived in poverty, now only one in five. We can get the rest of the way.
There are some who think this cannot be done. They say the poor will always be with us.
I do not believe this. What is more important the President of the United States does not believe it.
For the first time in man’s history we do have the power to eliminate poverty from an entire continental nation.
A nation which has wiped out the great epidemic diseases of malaria and typhoid fever and polio -- which has penetrated the heart of the atom and the planets of the heavens -- that nation can also do battle against the conditions which create poverty.
We have the resources -- the national productivity to attack this problem. We know how to train and educate people for skilled work. We have the technology to increase the production and create jobs. We have the mobility necessary for people to move to places of greater opportunity. We have new knowledge and new awareness of the causes of poverty, and how to cure those causes.
In short we have the weapons we need to eliminate poverty. All we have needed is the desire and the determination. And now we have those.
It was not so many decades ago that men were saying people would always be hungry -- that farms could never produce enough to give everyone a decent diet.
You, on your farms, proved they were wrong.
In the same way we will again prove wrong those of little vision and little daring.
We know, of course, that poverty is not a simple problem. It will not yield to easy answers or pat formulas. Nor will it be solved in a few months, or a few years. And, as we gain experience and knowledge we will reshape our attack -- making it more effective.
But today’s program -- the program the President has presented to Congress -- will offer new opportunities to millions of Americans, and make a substantial start toward the final elimination of poverty.
That program has four objectives:
First, it tries to break the cycle of poverty by offering training and work to almost half a million young Americans.
Secondly, it provides the means to attack the problem of poverty, as it exists, in each American community -- calling upon each community to formulate local plans to meet local needs -- helping them to carry out those plans.
Third, it helps small farmers, small businessmen, and people on relief, to get on their own feet.
Fourth, it calls upon all Americans to participate in the war against poverty -- enlisting those that want to volunteer, placing reliance on local leadership, and giving incentives to business and labor and agriculture.
Those are the four objectives. And here are some of the ways we hope to fulfill those objectives.
We propose a Job Corps of 100,000 young men. These young men will enter training centers across the nation. Many will do work on conservation. All will receive a blend of challenging work experience, training and basic education. These centers and camps will not be dumping grounds for juvenile delinquents, dope addicts, or drunkards. They will be job opportunity centers for the poor, for the uneducated, for all those who have been short-changed by our society. They will be brand new educational institutions which will graduate young men prepared to leave the ranks of poverty.
There are many young people who will not enter these centers and camps, but who need immediate help and education. For them we are establishing two additional national programs: a Work-Study program, and a Work-Training program. These programs will give full or part-timework to young men and women allowing them to continue with high school or college. They will be working their way through school. And although the federal government will finance much of the cost, they will work their way where they are needed, among the public and private institutions of their communities. Those who do not continue their formal education under this program will receive a combination of useful work and on-the-job training to increase their skills and make them more employable for the rest of their lives.
These programs for young men and women will reach 380,000 in the first year of operation alone. They will stop the waste of the brainpower of young men and women who drop out of school because of economic circumstance, depriving the nation of their service, depriving them of the skills and knowledge they need if they are to break the vicious cycle of poverty.
Secondly, we will help each community solve its own problem of poverty in its own way, under its own leadership.
Local leadership will be called upon to study the problem of poverty as it exists in each local area. The local leaders will prepare a plan designed to attack all the social ills which create that poverty. The plan will include such elements as improved health care and education, recreation programs and feeding programs, care for the children of working mothers, and special training for unemployed fathers. It should have all the components necessary to meet local poverty as local leaders see the problem.
When those plans are prepared, and approved by our Office in Washington, the federal government will finance up to 90% of the additional cost--for the first two years.
These will not be mammoth plans put together by bureaucrats in Washington. They will be prepared by those that know their own. problems best. Their success will directly depend on the amount of initiative and effort and imagination that goes into them at the local level.
Although this Community Action program will help rural communities and areas, as well as cities the small impoverished farmer needs special attention. There are 12 million farm families with incomes of under $3,000 -- most of them in the South.
Then we have a most important section of the bill called “Rural Economic Opportunity.” Its purpose is to make farmers self-sufficient on the land, rather than an object of relief in crowded cities.
Rural and urban America alike will benefit if we can stem the migration of ill-prepared rural families to the cities. Our cities already have more such families than they can absorb. Too many rural communities are becoming ghost towns through loss of population.
So how do we help low-income farmers stay in farming?
The need, in most cases, is for a little capital. The success of the Farmers Home Administration over the years shows how a small amount of capital can often help a low-income farmer lift his family out of poverty.
Secretary of Agriculture Freeman, who initiated the ideas that make up Title III, has given us some case histories. One young farm family, for instance, had a total net farm income of S800 in 1958. With a loan of $4,800 from FHA, they have managed to raise their income o 33,000 per annum, and increase their net worth from 57,000 to $29,000.
But many of our most needy farm families have to be rejected by the FHA because they are not credit-worthy. Take the case of Charlie Hamlin, for instance. Mr. Hamlin has a 90-acre farm but is not farming it because he cannot raise the capital necessary for seed, fertilizer, and livestock.
He has nine children and subsisted last year on a net income of $715. He owes $2,300, and FHA had to reject his loan application for lack of debt-paying ability. He is an experienced, sober, industrious farmer, but he is flat on his back and unable to lift himself up.
To deal with families like that of Charlie Hamlin, the Bill proposes that FHA be authorized to supplement its loan programs with grants up to$1500 for any one family. With this authority, a grant of $1300 to Mr. Hamlin for the purchase of fertilizer, seed, and 10beef cows would enable him to raise his net farm income to $2,000, out of which he could not only live much better but begin paying off his debts.
Many will ask, isn’t $1,300 a lot of money to be giving away? But the average public assistance grant to a family in Illinois, headed by an able-bodied father, is $250 a month! If Charlie Hamlin and his family lost their farm and drift into Chicago, and wind up on relief, it will take just five months before $1,300 has been spent by the taxpayers.
But if that same taxpayers’ money were spent instead on means of production, Charlie Hamlin could keep his 90 acres, keep his dignity, hold his family together, and with reasonable luck be self-supporting for the rest of his days.
It boils down to this. It is cheaper for the taxpayers to pay once to buy a low-income farm family a cow than to pay for milk for the children of that family day after day in the city.
The bill also takes a leaf from the book of urban renewal, by authorizing loans to non-profit corporations to buy large tracts of land and subdivide them into family farms. As in urban renewal, it would allow capital grants to cover the write-down between the purchase price of the land and its actual value for farming purposes. Purchases will be made only when land becomes available. No condemnation power is sought. And, the Bill would also authorize assistance to low-income farmers to organize and operate cooperatives.
The Rural Economic Opportunities program reflects the views of those who have studied deeply the peculiar nature and causes of rural poverty. It will strengthen the traditional American pattern of family farming which the Farmers Union started defending before most of us were born -- a tradition that goes back to and beyond the Homestead Act of a century ago.
What is more important, these measures will give thousands of American farmers the chance to stand on their own feet, to use their hard-won and useful skills to support their families in dignity.
These are some of the elements of our new bill. But we know the war against poverty cannot be won by government alone. We want to give every American a chance to serve.
Thus we are asking for authority to recruit and train volunteers -- men and women, old and young -- to work in communities across the country. There are many Americans who have skills and dedication, who want to help meet the needs of the poor. We want to give them the chance, in a new organization -- the “Volunteers for America,” – much like our Peace Corps now working overseas.
In addition we will provide incentives to business to employ the unemployed, to labor to step-up training programs, to farm groups to participate in shaping plans for rural areas.
For one thing is clear. This problem will not be solved unless all the resources of the United States -- public and private -are directed to the task.
This program -- The Economic Opportunities Act of 196+ --does not stand by itself. Its objectives will be followed by the many other programs for training, for help to education, for assistance to special groups, which are now on the books or before the Congress.
But this program is at the heart of our war on poverty.
It is not a small program or a pilot program. It will provide, in the next twelve months, new opportunities for millions of Americans. It attacks all the most critical problem areas which underlie poverty in the United States.
It is not a wasteful program. Its cost of 6970 million dollars is fully provided for in the President’s budget. It will not increase that budget by a cent. Every part of the program has been carefully shaped to focus on a particular area of maximum need. Every cent we spend, will be spent to help those who need help. And if any of our programs do not give us maximum effectiveness for each dollar spent, we will change or eliminate that program.
It is not a giveaway handout program. It will give people the chance to develop their own capacities, not make them more dependent on the capacities or generosity of others. Its basic principle is this: if we give people the chance to emerge from poverty, they will work to get out of poverty’s clutches.
If this program -- our war against poverty -- is to succeed we will need your help.
-- You can encourage young men and women in your communities to enter the Job Corps or the other programs which can give them income, work, and education and enable them to prepare for a lifetime of productive work.
-- You can return from this Convention and begin to work with others to develop community action programs for your own local areas. For if these plans are to work, they will need the best of local leadership.
-- You can encourage men and women to volunteer their skills for the war against poverty. We will have a special need for those who understand agriculture and the problems of the farmer.
-- You can shape the programs of your own farm organizations to fit in with our total effort -- with the specific goals of the war against poverty.
-- You can send us your ideas and suggestions, the product of your years of experience, so that we can make our efforts more effective.
This is your challenge.
No one who enjoys the abundance of this nation can be content while millions of his fellow citizens live in poverty.
Our goal has always been a nation in which every American, through his own skills and energy, could aspire to a better life for himself, and his children. We have made this dream a reality for most of our citizens.
It is the task of this generation of Americans to open these same horizons of hope to all our people.
We are now going forward to complete this task.
