“In all the years of my husband’s public life,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. “I never once heard him make a remark which indicated that any crisis could not be solved.”
This Memorial Day you have done me the honor of asking me to speak at the lifelong home and final resting place of two people whose lives were a testament to faith in the creative power of man to solve his own problems.
They were the finest products of the nation which they loved and led. Through their work the United States passed successfully through the most troubled and dangerous period of its history into an ear, not less- troubled but with a shape and challenge which is a product of their triumph.
We have before us difficulties as fresh and as grave as those that challenged Roosevelt. But the nature of those difficulties and our capacity to deal with them has been profoundly influenced by his life and his work.
I come here today not as a participant in the Age of Roosevelt--not as a colleague or as a friend--many of whom have spoken in this place --- but as an inheritor of that age and, even more, as the leader of an organization to whose members the name of Roosevelt is a dim memory produced by school textbooks or the stories of parents. Yet the life of the more than 5,000 Peace Corps Volunteers has taken a direction marked out for us by his vision and skill. He was the principal architect of our America.
It is said that Roosevelt’s task was easier because he took office at a time of great national crisis. The normal processes of political debate were suspended, opposition had been submerged by the flood of national misery, and everyone turned to him expectantly for leadership. In large measure this was true. This created a great opportunity, but it also vastly magnified the potential danger of failure. He was given an almost empty canvas to work upon, but it was also demanded that he produce a masterpiece.
The preamble to the Constitution lists among the objectives of the American people to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” In our entire history no leader was truer to that mandate than Franklin Roosevelt.
Under his guidance the United States emerged into a period of unparalleled domestic prosperity and tranquility. He laid the foundations of today’s affluent society and, in so doing, established the principle that the nation was responsible for the general welfare of all its citizens. And although there are many pockets of poverty and injustice still left, we have today, for the first time, the legal and material resources to wipe out these pockets and deal effectively with our social problems.
In our dealings with the world, he thrust America, almost against its will, into the center of the world arena. He strengthened us to defeat freedom’s most brutal and powerful enemies and destroyed the isolationism and parochial outlook which had kept the United States from assuming its responsibilities toward the world.
These achievements eliminated the historic shackled of scarce resources, inadequate material wealth, social unjustices which perpetuated the privileges of a few at the expense of imprisoning the talents of the many, and the unwillingness of the United States to admit that it was part of a greater world community.
Thus, because of him, for the first time in our history, the issue is not whether we will have the strength to deal with our problems, but whether we have the moral courage to use that strength; not whether we will have resources, but whether we choose to use those resources for the world’s welfare; not whether we can, but whether we will.
Thus today’s central issue is a moral issue the issue of commitment. Largely because of Roosevelt we are the first nation in history with the strength to solve its own problems. If we fail, it will be a failure of will, or moral courage, --- a failure of commitment.
We can wipe out the remaining pockets of unemployment and poverty in this country.
We can ensure some measure of security against the ravages of disease or old age.
We can make the Negro a member of American society.
We can harness and use science for the welfare of our people.
We can work for a world in which almost three billion underprivileged will be our colleagues in the task of progress, rather than a constant threat to what we have achieved for ourselves.
I do not say this lightly. I don’t think these are easy problems with easy solutions. I have seen the grinding face of poverty and idleness in the mines of West Virginia. I have come face-to-face with racial hatred on the South Side of Chicago where I witnessed Catholics stoning fellow Catholics on the steps of a church because they were black. And, in the last few years, I have traveled 50,000 miles around the world seeing, at first hand, the deep barriers of culture, belief, prejudice and superstition which divide us from our fellow man.
But I also know something of the power of commitment.
In up-country Sierra Leone a young Peace Corps Volunteer had helped build a road which connected a small village for the first time to the outside world. When I arrived there the village chief said to ire: “Mr. Shriver, we had never even seen a car before. You have shown us a world we never dreamed existed. We had always heard about America, but now we know what it means.”
The Chief Secretary of East Pakistan wrote to me: “The Peace Corps has come to work for us, but more importantly to live with us. When someone comes to share your life as well as your work, it has deeper meaning. I have an entirely new concept of Americans.”
And throughout the world thousands of our people are creating a new concept of America. They have given two years to work with no pay, under arduous conditions, in order to help others realize their own aspirations. The individual commitment of these men and women is doing more than any of us can realize to refashion our relationships to the rest of the world. “Here is a movement,” wrote Arnold Toynbee of the Peace Corps “whose express purpose is to overcome the disastrous barriers that have hitherto segregated the affluent Western minority of the human race from the majority of their fellow men and women... I believe that, in the Peace Corps, the non-Western majority of mankind is going to meet a sample of Western man at his best.”
I speak of the Peace Corps not because it is an organization which can solve all of the problems of American life, but because it is proof that deeply committed individuals, prepared to work and sacrifice, can have a profound impact on the most difficult and intransigent of problems. It was not so many years ago that “Yankee Go Home” was one of the most popular slogans of the underdeveloped world, or that our Vice President was being stoned by the same people in Latin America who cheered and venerated the name of Roosevelt. Yet today almost every nation in the world is asking for these same “Yankees” in the form of Peace Corps Volunteers, and the requests we have far exceed our capacity to deliver.
Recently, in the Dominican Republic, a group of young Dominicans were painting the slogan “Yankee Go Home” on a stone wall, while a Volunteer watched quietly. When they had finished he said, “I guess that means I’ll have to go home,” The leader of the group turned to him in dismay and said: “No, we mean Yankees, got the Peace Corps.”
The Peace Corps represents the real Yankees. These young men and women have, proved that we have not yet become so submerged and blinded by the pursuit of material wealth -- the suburban houses, the chrome-covered cars, the opiates of television and Hollywood that we have lost our capacity to deal with the harsh realities of our society. Individual Americans still have it in them to make, and carry out, deep personal commitments to building a better society. If we did not believe this then we would have nothing to do but wait quietly for the decay and destruction of our civilization.
When I speak of the need for commitment, I do not mean commitment by the President of the Cabinet or the Congress. We already have that. We have a government of deeply committed men. But we wrong the heritage of Roosevelt if we draw from his administration the lesson that our problems are going to be solved by a few men in Washington, while the rest of us wallow in the luxury of personal satisfactions.
For it cannot happen that way. Presidents, courts and legislatures alike are helpless in a democracy without the commitment of all the citizens. They are conductors without an orchestra. Many volunteers realize that. They take upon themselves the burden of the world’s problems. They are willing to labor without recognition because they feel responsible for this country. They do not believe America is someone else’s problem. It is their problem and they are committed to its solution.
Take civil rights, for example. This is, without doubt, the central issue of our society. Yet for a decade we have left the problem to the sadly inadequate machinery of the courts. We have sat in our living rooms, sipping beer, and watched violence in the streets -- in our streets -turned off the television sets and criticized the President for not acting quickly enough, or acting too precipitately.
After spending the day making money, and shopping at the supermarket, and ordering the new car, we have given a few precious moments to bewailing the lack of action of the leaders whose only support from the mass of American people has been the half hour it took them to walk to the voting booth.
Civil rights is not a legal problem or a Presidential problem. It will not be solved by new bills in Congress or ordering troops to the scene of struggle. It is a pervasive illness which tears at the fabric of our society. And it will not be cured until that society wakes to its responsibilities.
What can we do about it, you ask? There is much you can do.
Citizens can organize groups to finance and support those who are in the front line of the struggle.
Businessmen and financial interests can make their colleagues realize that investments and commerce will not be safe in areas of racial strife --and lend their weight to peaceful solutions as did the negotiators of Birmingham.
Homeowners can band together in societies for the integration of housing -- seeking out Negro homeowners for their neighborhoods, helping to breakdown the awful housing ghettos which disgrace the North.
Volunteer groups can be formed to do social welfare work, job training and the many tasks which are necessary to give the Negro the social and economic tools to achieve equal opportunity.
Congregations and individual Ministers and Priests can actively recruit Negro members for their congregation, admitting them to their fellowship of God and the society of their members.
These are only examples of what can be done. The need is not merely for laws or edicts, but for the self-organization of society on a large scale to solve the problem which, more than and other, threatens the integrity of America. The proof of this is in the North -- in Chicago and New York and Washington -- where our books are full of high-sounding laws and regulations, but where hypocrisy and racial hatred -and the apathy of decent citizens has made a mockery of social justice and equal opportunity.
If we, as citizens, and as a nation, can commit ourselves to the solution of this problem, then it can be solved. If we don’t, government can never solve it.
The Peace Corps and civil rights are only examples of the challenge and opportunity which Roosevelt’s accomplishments have given us. He provided us with the foundation of a stable society at home and strength in world affairs. We must now show that we have the moral courage -- the personal commitment to use that stability and wealth and strength in the cause of justice and the construction of a good society at home and throughout the world.
Are we up to the task? Well, I believe that the answer is to be found in a letter written to his parents by a young Peace Corps Volunteer shortly before he was killed in an airplane accident in Colombia. “Should it come to it,” wrote young David Crozier, “I would rather give my life trying to help someone than to have to give my life looking down a gun barrel at them.”
After his death, when his parents sent me this letter, they added a postscript. They said: “Mr. Shriver, we are not sorry David joined the Peace Corps.”
This ray of light illuminates the America Franklin Roosevelt believed in and which I believe in -- an America whose latent dedication and commitment is equal to the challenges and the opportunities which have grown out of the Age of Roosevelt.
