The Great Society -- So What Happened?

Growing up in the 60’s you could not escape the issue of race.  It was on the news every night.  Living in a suburban county along the Hudson River we were able to sit back with the smug reassurance it was those other white’s that were the problem.  The rednecks of the South were still fighting the civil war and holding the blacks down.

While this may have been a comforting illusion I now know racism in the North was every bit as prevalent and cancerous, it was just more insidious in the social framework.  It has now been 45 years since the freedom march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama, yet race inequity seems as central today as it did back then.  

Back then, led by Dr. King, the southern blacks struggled for equality in participation.  Today, even here in lower Alabama (actually West Florida) blacks have full equality in government participation.  The problem is most choose not to participate unless there is come specific cause or candidate they can relate to.  This choice condemns us all to a segregated nation, where only the extremist voices are heard.

Back then, family was important to their survival in the South, and certainly much more so than in the urban areas.  Today family appears to be generally defined as a single mother and children.  The absentee father is, unfortunately, far too common to all those living on the poverty line, and it is in fact glamorized on TV and in the movies.   I wonder what will be the long term social impact on our society from this evolution away from a stable family group.

Back then, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the majority Democratic Congress, attempted to restructure America to meet their vision of what America should be like.  To make the shining light, the utopian world that every progressive thinks they can make.  I would like to  review the LBJ's April 1964 speech at the University of Michigan where he outlined his vision and see where we are today.

President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and Hart, Congressmen Meader and Staebler, and other members of the fine Michigan delegation, members of the graduating class, my fellow Americans:

It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been coeducational since 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis of your accomplishments that a Detroit high school girl said, "In choosing a college, you first have to decide whether you want a coeducational school or an educational school."

Well, we can find both here at Michigan, although perhaps at different hours.

I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his son’s education had been a real value. It stopped his mother from bragging about him.

I have come today from the turmoil of your Capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak about the future of your country.

The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.

For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.

The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.

Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society - in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.

Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans-four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States.

Aristotle said: "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.

The catalog of ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated.

Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.

Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.

New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come, not only to live but to live the good life.

I understand that if I stayed here tonight I would see that Michigan students are really doing their best to live the good life.

This is the place where the Peace Corps was started. It is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people.

A second place where we begin to build the Great Society is in our countryside. We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.

A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the "Ugly American." Today we must act to prevent an ugly America.

For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.

A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children’s lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.

Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million-more than one quarter of all America-have not even finished high school.

Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today’s youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by 5 million. College enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.

In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our Government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.

But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings-on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.

The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities.

Woodrow Wilson once wrote: "Every man sent out from his university should be a man of his Nation as well as a man of his time."

Within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us toward a way of life beyond the realm of our experience, almost beyond the bounds of our imagination.

For better or for worse, your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?

Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?

Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace-as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?

Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?

There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.

Those who came to this land sought to build more than just a new country. They sought a new world. So I have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision our reality. So let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.

Thank you. Good-bye.

On the surface this is a wonderful vision, crafted by skilled speech writers who attempt to provide the same inspiration they did when they were writing for John F. Kennedy.  So, where do we stand 45 years later?  Have we moved toward that utopian world LBJ laid out, have we rebuilt our cities, have we raised our collective education, have we set aside vast lands for nature, and most importantly have we erased the racial injustice he promised?  

Lets start with our Cities... Clearly we have not completely rebuilt our urban landscape as LBJ said we must.  We have, at best, taken some pot shots at the pot holes.  Where leadership is focused on making the cities habitable and affordable there has been marked success.  For example, if you look at New York City today, compared to what was happening to it in the 60's clearly this is a city being rebuilt in the sense of the Great Society.  Brooklyn is dynamic in its rebuilding programs, Manhattan is alive with the tensions of a metropolis, but in the course of this rebirth we have moved from a manufacturing base to a service base.  Last time I was in NYC I found no evidence that anything but wealth is really made in the city anymore, but there remains a strong business base.  If you look at Detroit I think you see a city sinking deeper in the morass of failure.  Detroit is an example where government has set the conditions for business to leave, and where the population has a fundamental belief it is the governments role to take care of them.  What strikes me on these two examples is Detroit has been managed exclusively by Democratic mayors and city councils, while NYC has not been.   Is race an issue here?  Is this a case were whites are keeping the African-Americans down?  Since it appears all the Democratic Mayors of Detroit since 1974 are  African-American I am not sure how it would be the white-man's fault, but I suspect there is a way show it is.


How about the environment?  Funny thing about themes, they seem to shape the generation that buys into them.  Today we continue to hear about how we are destroying our environment and causing global warming from those same liberal factions.  Why is it now 45 years later we can't reach agreement on even the simplest of acts to begin reversing the catastrophic effects we are causing?  Surely it can't be exclusively the Republican party's fault can it?  Is it that while everyone has opinions about what we should do, there is no clear cause-effect relationship that we can turn to, or is it because we as individuals are unwilling to alter our life styles and sacrifice all the disposable creature comforts we have grown to love.  Perhaps it is because every time someone tries to do something, someone else takes umbrage?  Perhaps this all is governed by Newtons three laws. 

 I.  Every object in a state of uniform motion [or a state of rest] tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied.  

II.  A body of mass m subject to a force F undergoes an acceleration a that has the same direction as the force and a magnitude that is directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass, i.e., F = ma. Alternatively, the total force applied on a body is equal to the time derivative of linear momentum of the body,  and

III. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

It seems to me our federal government is clearly guided by the first and third laws.  For every proposed action there is an equal and opposite proposed reaction that leads it to remain at rest.  So when it is not spinning wildly out of control it is doing nothing.


So, how about education?  Over the past 45 years there has been a tremendous emphasis on better teachers, better paid teachers, better schools where the better paid better teachers can teach and the pursuit of advanced education for all.   Clearly with all the emphasis on this bipartisan issue we much have made great strides in education, and the educational level of our general population.  Apparently not, or at least that is what the vast majority of commercials seem to indicate.  In the past 45 years we have not paid our teachers enough, we have not improved our teacher quality enough and lord knows we still have crappy classrooms, but each year we make the teachers and students stay longer and longer.  Clearly there is just that more knowledge to be had and we can't even keep up.  What we have done is grow a couple of generations of children that will have posture problems from the backpacks and tons of books they carry around each day.  Just as we did back in the 60's we seem to be lagging the less then great world powers in most educational categories.  Yet somehow we continue to lead in innovation and technology.  All I can say is this is very befuddling.


So let's recap... The Great Society vision lays there waiting for the progressive government to implement, but according to the progressive vision, we have accomplished zip, nada, zilch!    Maybe that is what happens when you sit around waiting for the government to do everything for you.