We have asked you here to join in creating a powerful new instrument for national unity--The Job Corps. National unity is the highest mission of national government. Never was that unity more desirable and needed than today. We hear and read too much about divisions and separations within our American society -- too much division along regional, racial, religious, and party lines. We must recall and re-emphasize what unites us. Unity was never more important than at this time.
Part of the answer to violence in our streets and in the minds of angry, frustrated people, is action to restrain those inciting violence or engaging in it -- action against all extremists, whether black nationalists or white nationalists, whether Communist or Ku Klux Klan. But action for new economic opportunities is a larger part of the answer.
Putting on the lid is clearly not enough. What is required now is dramatic, effective, action to end the poverty and hopelessness that bread violence--action to create new opportunities and new hope.
That is what the War on Poverty is all about. This is what the Job Corps is going to do. That is why you are here. There are nearly a million young people who are out of school and out of work and out on the streets. Last week, we heard from some of these young people--in Harlem and Brooklyn and Rochester.
The Job Corps according to our plans will ultimately take 100,000 of them off the streets -- 40,000 in the first year alone. It will provide a new environment where these young men and women can start new lives, where they can begin their education again, where they can learn to do a job and learn to become productive citizens.
Some of the Job Corps centers will focus on conservation work on the great public lands of our country and in state forests and parks. These will faintly resemble the CCC camps of Franklin Roosevelt’s day but we have added special educational and training opportunities to the old CCC camp idea. Even more important will be the residential education centers in the Job Corps. These will be different from anything that has existed in American educational life before.
These education centers will not be vocational schools. They will not be colleges. They will not be military camps. They will be an innovation that brings together all the new techniques of teaching we know--all the new methods of raising IQ’s, of teaching reading and writing and arithmetic, of teaching job skills.
These schools and camps would not be make-work places where people are just doing jobs to keep themselves busy. They would be places where, on a year-round basis, in a residential community, genuine work would be done. And to that work would be added a heavy component of education. We would look forward to providing the right kind of food, the right kind of health education and health practices. They will experience a good job, clean clothes, regular hours, a sense of belonging to a community where the leadership of the community wants them to improve themselves and to become respectable self-supporting citizens.
We must provide the best curriculum and the best teachers and the best counselors and the best job experience that can be put together. You are here to help us plan how to do this.
The Job Corps centers for women are only part of the Job Corps, and the Job Corps itself is only one part of the President’s program for economic opportunity. But it is the cutting edge. It will be what a revolutionary-minded Latin American once said about the Peace Corps: “The Punta de Lanza"--the Point of the Lance. It will penetrate to the young men and women caught in the hard core of poverty. It will penetrate to the streets of Harlem and the slums of this nation. It will go to its target--it will reach 100,000 of the very people who need help most, who still have the most to offer their country if opportunity can be opened for them.
The Job Corps is one answer this nation can give to the hopelessness of the young men and women now taking out their frustration in violence. The War on Poverty is the answer this nation must give to what is happening in Harlem. The Senate of the United States has already endorsed this program. And the action of the Senate in approving the President’s proposals by a vote of nearly two to one demonstrated that this national attack on a national problem promotes national unity.
In that vote we boxed the compass--with support from North and South, East and West, Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Conservative. From Republican Presidential candidate Margaret Chase Smith in Maine to Southern Democrat George Smathers in Florida, from a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Senator Hugh Scott, to the bill’s sponsor, Senator Pat McNamara of Michigan, to Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina, from Senator Tom Kuchel of California to Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii- -you can’t get any farther West than that--we saw the kind of unity that makes American great.
There was a roll of honor in that vote, and on it go those ten 20th century Republicans who voted their conscience – who could not in conscience follow the negative course of their Party’s nominee. Also on that roll of honor go the Senators from the South who voted for the bill. In the early debates on the bill some of the Republicans tried to make the Poverty Bill look like a Civil Rights bill. They tried to embarrass the Congressman Phil Landrum of Georgia, co-author of the bill. Since the Chairman of the House Committee reporting the bill was Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, these political-minded Republicans started calling it the Landrum-Powell bill. They stressed that the bill would help poor Negroes.
Finally, Congressman Landrum made this statement:
“I want it clearly understood with reference to this bill under my name, and I am proud to have my name on it, that any assistance that it may provide toward eliminating the blight of poverty affect Americans of all races is a source of pride to me. I am 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 affects both white and Negro Americans. I want the record made crystal clear on that point.
“You will not lessen my enthusiasm for the bill. As a matter of fact, your continual reference to the fact that the bill. As a matter of fact, your continual reference to the fact that the Administration bill bears my name is only going to intensify my enthusiasm.”
Now that came from a Southerner under attack for sponsoring a bill that would help Negroes. It took courage for him to say that and it took courage for each of the Southern Senators who voted for it. They were not voting to help one race, they were not voting to help President Johnson, they were not voting to make political points, they were voting to help America solve one of her great problems. They were voting for national unity.
This week the bill goes to the House of Representatives, where I am confident conscience, common sense and courage will prevail. The President has proposed a national partnership of moderation. That means partnership for constructive action. For in Lyndon Johnson’s language, “Come let us reason together,” means “Come let us work together.”
In this War on Poverty we are going to translate that into the broadest and most effective partnership of city, state, and Federal governments, and of the people and their voluntary civic organizations working together that this nation has ever seen. We are counting on you to join us in this partnership.
