Just last week -- the distinguished Senator from Mississippi, Senator Stennis, rose on the floor of the Senate and said in effect -- that this nation was faced with the choice between guns and butter.
That we couldn’t fight both the war in Viet Nam and the war on poverty because we could not afford to divide our strength and resources.
Others have echoed him: Republicans Jerry Ford, Melvin Laird, and your own distinguished Senator Richard Russell.
Well, speaking from this lowly Sargent’s point of view these are not two wars. There is only one war -- the same war -- a war for the self determination of peoples, and of individuals.
A war that has erupted in brush fire after brush fire -
-- in the African Congo
-- in Panama
-- in the Dominican Republic
-- in Los Angeles, this summer
-- and New York, Philadelphia, Rochester and other cities last summer.
All of these riots and wars are related -- and not because there are Communists ready to exploit every disturbance but because of hunger, ignorance and disease, and because many people have been denied political freedom and political rights.
The advocates of the guns or butter theory misunderstand the modern world. They are fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, with the wrong weapons against the wrong enemy. They have erected their own Maginot Line -- like the French did in World War II -- only to find the enemy has attacked in a different place with a different strategy.
Our obsession with Communism has produced a kind of hemospheric (and I would add, global) paranoia. Instead of being a dynamic, revolutionary force, as President Orlich of Costa Rico pointed out, democracy has been put on the defensive.
Orlich is right -- now -- but he doesn’t have to be right tomorrow. This war -- this single war -- is not a war against communism -- or against anything. It is a war for self-determination -- for the liberation of all men from hunger, pestilence and ignorance -- for, the liberation of all men from all forms of colonialism - political, social, economic -- and yes, professional too.
Our revolution -- the American Revolution -- started with the cry: taxation without representation is tyranny.
Today, we could expand that slogan -- welfare without representation, education, housing, counseling, handouts without representation, without a chance to be heard and respected -- that is tyranny.
And foreign aid without self determination is tyranny too.
This war we are fighting, this single war for the self-determination by all men of their own destiny -- cannot be won with a Maginot Line mentality. In fact, it can be lost by that kind of rigidity -by being out of touch with reality. Nothing can hinder a military commander more than a poor intelligence system. Yet here at home we still do not know -- we have just begun to know where the pockets of poverty are -- and where the enemy’s strongholds are.
What is worse our intelligence systems -- the experts, the cynics, the prophets of doom -- they have misinformed us as to where battle can be joined, and who our best allies are.
We were told at the onset of this war on poverty that southern congressmen would not support it. Yet, I am proud to be here today-for one special reason -- to pay tribute to one of our bravest and ablest allies, Congressman Phil Landrum. A year ago -- in the early debates on the anti-poverty act -- some of our opponents tried to embarrass Phil Landrum by making the Economic Opportunity Act look like a Civil Rights Bill -- for negroes only! They tagged it the Landrum-Adam Clayton Powell Bill. And this is what Phil Landrum stood up on the floor of Congress and said:
“I want it clearly understood with reference to this Bill under my name that I’m proud to have my name on it, that any assistance that it may provide toward eliminating the blight of poverty affecting Americans of all races is a source of pride to me and I’m not ashamed of it. I come from a section of the country that has been bombarded with a great deal of demagoguery. There are many, many negroes in all sections of the country who are poor. There are many, many white people in all sections of the country who are poor. I want it clearly understood that my efforts are directed toward relieving poverty that affect both white and negro Americans. I want the record made crystal clear on that point. And you will not lessen my enthusiasm for the Bill. As a matter of fact, your continual reference to that fact that the Administration Bill bears my name is only going to intensify my enthusiasm.”
Well, we have other allies today -- in the Senate the vote was 61 - 29. And the Governors of the 50 States must not be overlooked. They have had 4300 chances to veto projects. And they have used that veto only four times -- that’s less than one tenth of one percent.
One of those Governors was Governor Faubus -- no one ever accused him of being a radical. At the opening of the Ouachita Job Corps Center in Arkansas, he said, speaking of the entire war on poverty:
I believe (this program) will salvage more people and make them better citizens, of more use to America for the strength of the free world than any program that has been devised in recent years.
He ended with the pledge:
We are going to give you “every cooperation in Washington” -and he has met that pledge!
Every county in Arkansas has participated in the War vs Poverty; “Head Start” operated in every one of those counties.
And the same has been true in West Virginia; in most Georgia counties -- and we have reached the poor in the poorest counties of all. In 114 of the 182 poorest counties in America, we have projects going. Per capita income in those counties runs between $400.00 and $750.00 a year. Twelve of those poorest counties are right here in Georgia -- and we have programs going in eleven of them.
Two hundred sixty three counties in the South have organized local antipoverty agencies. 156 of those have received grants -and your State tops the list with 26!
Forty percent of all Job Corps enrollment is from the South.
60,466 Southerners are participating in the Neighborhood Youth Corps.
93 VISTA Volunteers are from the South and 194 are serving there.
And this Summer 97 Head Start grants totaling $28 million were Southern grants. Arid 1/3 of all Head Start children were in the South.
We’re just getting started a national demonstration program called Upward Bound.
Arthur Flemming, the President of Oregon State University and ex-secretary of HEW under President Eisenhower is quarterbacking this effort to get between 85 and 100 universities operating special remedial programs on the junior and senior high school level. We started this Summer with 17 projects.
One such is Project APEX. New York University went into the inner city schools and picked 60 boys who were performing way below grade level. These kids have been at NYU all Summer. We were told it would take these kids five years to get through college -- one to catch up and the remaining four of regular college. They said they could make it in four. And the director of the program told me last week that the average reading gain in the six weeks of the program has been three years.
--At the Community College of Manhattan, at your own University of Georgia, at Syracuse University, at Berea College, Kentucky, young people are being trained to work in local anti-poverty programs. And other pilot projects are in the works such as a program where talented but impoverished high school graduates are placed in slum schools as junior artists or scholars-in-residence and given a chance to really develop their talents while earning money to support continued college and graduate school training.
It is this development of the talents of our youth which is the critical test, the ultimate test, of all we’re trying to do as a nation.
In December 1961 President Kennedy visited Columbia and in the streets of Bogota he was met with an overwhelming reception.
The crowds and the confetti were thicker than any that had ever greeted a chief of state. The President was astounded by the welcome. After leaving the motorcade, He asked Columbia President Lleras-Camargo to what he had attributed this emotional and enthusiastic reception.
“They think, Mr. President, that you are on their side.”
And that’s what we have to show them -- we -- you and I – this nation -- that we are on their side. The side of the poor.
If the school -- which stood for failure and rejection can become the gateway to opportunity and self-fulfillment, not just for students, but for the entire community; if that old police station can become the sanctuary of justice – real justice, social justice; -- if all the institutions which the poor have learned to distrust can become places where help is extended without condescension; if we can banish words like “culturally deprived” from our minds as well as our jargon.
If we can begin to see the children of poverty as possessors of that special gift of warmth and wonder and spontaneity that all children have -- then we will have done far more than set a single myth to rest -- we will have made of the two Americas -the America of the poor and the America of the more fortunate one America - one nation indivisible -- we will have ceased to draw false security from total reliance on a useless Maginot Line.
We will have rejected the unrealistic choice between fighting either the war on poverty or the war in Viet Nam. For we will have found that they are both one and the same. And in finding out, we will have turned the tide in that war, that single global contest for the minds and hearts and allegiances of men everywhere.
-- Now is the hour of decision. And here, on this battlefield, the decision is yours.
