Remarks in Atlantic City at the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union Convention.

Governor Hughes, President Stulberg, Dave Dubinsky, Luigi Antonini, ladies and gentlemen:

Mr. Stulberg, I had to come here today because through all of my trials and tribulations-and the problems and the burdens-that go with the office I hold, you and your union have stood by my side in day and night, in sunshine and in sorrow.

If you could stay with me during what we have gone through the last few months, you can stay with these folks all through the years until we win what we are after.

I told Dave Dubinsky, I said, "I am glad to be here today with all of my friends of the Old Left."

Some of us can remember the good old days when we were the New Left back there more than 30 years ago when I was first captured by some of your leaders and enlisted in a great cause. I was an up-and-coming young radical liberal from the South.

Three from my State followed the recommendations of the leadership of this union. They were such radical recommendations that two of those three were defeated. I survived.

Some of your leadership got Mr. Roosevelt, who was then President, to send a message to the Congress on May 24, 1937. That message arrived at the House of Representatives just about the time I arrived as a young Member.

Among the things the President said in that message are the following:

"Mr. Justice Brandeis, Mr. Justice Clarke, and Mr. Justice McKenna agreed" with Mr. Justice Holmes. "A majority of the Supreme Court, however, decided 5-4 against Mr. Justice Holmes and laid down a rule of constitutional law which has ever since driven into impractical distinctions and subterfuges all attempts to assert the fundamental power of the national government over interstate commerce.

"But although Mr. Justice Holmes spoke for a minority of the Supreme Court he spoke for a majority of the American people." ¹

¹President Roosevelt was referring to the Supreme Court decision of June 3, 1918, in Hammer v. Dagenhart (United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers' Edition, Book 62, p. 1101).

Upon that message, the Congress enacted into law--I will just read a part of section 6--that radical provision of other years:

"Every employer shall pay to each of his employees who is engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce wages at the following rates--

"(1) during the first year from the effective date of this section, not less than 25 cents an hour,

"(2) during the next six years from such date, not less than 30 cents an hour, And "(3) after the expiration of seven"--should I say long--"years from such date, not less than 40 cents an hour, or the rate (not less than 30 cents an hour) prescribed in the applicable order of the Administrator issued under section 8, whichever is lower .... This section shall take effect upon the expiration of one hundred and twenty days from the date of enactment of this Act.

"No employer shall, except as otherwise provided... employ any of his employees . . . in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce--for a workweek longer than forty-four hours" and so on and so forth.

You did not require that law to protect your people. Your thinking had been more advanced. But you required that law to protect all the working people of the United States. That is what has been so wonderful about your union. You haven't just tried to look after yourself--you have tried to help look after all of us.

But times have changed. Today, we hear something about new politics and "participatory democracy."

So I have come here to participate with you--the very model in my judgment of the Old and the New Democracy.

Whenever I hear talk about new alignments and the new liberalism, I think of my old friends in the ILGWU. You have always had your slogans, too. You were the prophets of liberalism. You preached and you practiced your faith.

Politics--politics, thank God--has long been a religion with you--but never on Saturday.

And I came here today, Mr. Stulberg, to tell you and the members of this great union that the old-time religion is good enough for me. And the old-time liberalism is good enough for me.

Being here in this great hall in Atlantic City, Governor Hughes, brings back many fond memories for me. I guess you all know why this city means so much to me. I don't think there is a man, woman, or child in all of this country who doesn't get a lump in his throat watching the Miss America contest each September.

There is one difference between today and the night I was here in August of 1964 at the Democratic Convention. It is a difference that some of you former cutters, pressers, operators, and finishers may be especially interested in knowing about. You have a chance to look at the only man in the long history of the needles trade who used a speech rather than the scissors to cut off his own coattails.

I must admit that your reception puts me in somewhat of a sentimental mood today. There is something about this union--something about this convention---something about Louis Stulberg--something about David Dubinsky--something about Evelyn Dubrow--that makes me feel right at home. It is something about all of these three and all of you out there that makes me feel right at home.

It is not just that you are my friends and that you have demonstrated your loyalty time and time and time again at the ballot box and in your influence on good legislation. It is much more than that.

Somehow, the ILGWU seems to me to be a model in miniature of the great America that we all seek and we all dream of.

As I look out from this podium today, I see delegates, I see Americans of every race, of every color, of every creed. You work together in harmony because you share a common ideal which is more important than anything else. You are building, and you are running one of the greatest democratic trade unions in all of the world.

This, of course, is because you have always asked the right question when admitting people to your membership. You don't ask: "Is he white?" or, "Is he Jewish?" or, "Is he Catholic?"

You simply say, "Is he--or much more often she--a garment worker?"

I have been involved in national politics now since 1931--almost 38 years--and as I am about ready to go back home, I think I would like to leave one message with my dear friends here. I would like to leave this message behind me. I would like to carve it in rock. "Ask the right question."

And I would add that in both your experience and mine, the right question is usually how?--not what?

Back in the first decade of this century, every social reformer knew what was necessary to eliminate the terrible sweatshops, the Triangle firetraps in which the garment workers were literally held in wage-slavery. There were economic treatises.

There were politicians out with sonorous speeches.

There were catastrophe-mongers who wanted to destroy the whole system to eliminate its abuses.

There were alleged intellectuals who were talking about us.

But what do the intellectuals know about us?

There were innumerable answers to the question, "What should be done?"

The system we knew had to be changed. But when it came to "How?", there was only one group that had an answer that made sense. They didn't say, "We will meet in Union Square daily and we will carry signs and we will make speeches and we will give our treatises and our lectures and our seminars until there is a change in the system."

If so, they would still be there.

They said, "We will build a union."

Of course, all the professional cynics-- they had them then, too--said it was impossible--you couldn't beat the system--the men and women, mostly immigrants, didn't have the staying power.

Then, in 1909, when I was 1 year old, out came the waistmakers in a strike that "couldn't last."

But it did, and those girls--there may be a few here today, no longer girls, but still committed unionists--put the world to shame and brought a wave of support from decent Americans throughout this land everywhere.

So, a great union was born. And it grew because a few dedicated Americans----often with strange accents--took the ideals of our society at face value and said, "How can we put them into practice?"

It has not been an easy half century. You had your extremists with a vested interest in catastrophe who argued that destruction was the road to construction.

But your leaders--men like David Dubinsky and Louis Stulberg--and to those of us that were on down the line--Evy--they knew that you cannot build a utopia on ashes. And, after a terrible struggle which almost broke your union, these false prophets were defeated.

Since then, we have had wages and hours from 25 cents an hour to $1.60 applied to all the working people in this land.

In this last half century, we have passed four comprehensive far-reaching civil rights bills from the right to vote to a right to equal housing--and on all four of those measures you and I have led the way.

We have junked and discarded our archaic immigration laws. And we stood with pen in hand in front of the Statue of Liberty in this administration and wrote a new immigration law that permits families to again be reunited and puts another humane statute on our books.

We have passed meat inspection, auto safety, truth in lending, and we have just begun with a long list of more than a dozen other consumer measures that will be written into the law of this land because of your help.

For almost 200 years, we shunned our responsibility of national leadership in educating our children. But in the last 4 years we have declared it our national policy that every boy and girl born in this country has a right to all the education that he or she can take.

And we are--I am here to tell you-practicing what we preach.

While others have written their learned treatises and flourished their rhetoric from coast to coast, we have put them from Head Start at 4 to adult education at 74. And the ILGWU has had among its most cardinal principles performance instead of promises.

And as we meet here today, those Head Start kids at 4 and those adult education grandmas at 74 are learning to read and write in the classrooms of this country.

We have inaugurated the greatest conservation programs since the days of Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And this year we are putting more land for recreation back in the public domain--for the first year in decades--than we have taken out with highways and freeways.

We are putting that land not out in Montana or Wyoming where you can't get to it unless you have got a jet. But we are putting it near the centers of population where you can get to it in your flivver in an hour and a half.

We talked about Medicare from the time Harry S. Truman--that great President-proposed it. We talked about it and thought about it and dreamed about it for more than 20 years.

But we wrote it into law. And you got your Medicare payments. Twenty million of you have your Medicare cards. You don't have to go and consult your son-in-law before you go to the hospital when you need it.

And I am telling you something else. This may not have been done with charisma or style. But it has been done.

I will tell you something else. What this great union has done with Medicare I am charging you with the responsibility of doing with "kiddie care."

The blush of shame ought to come to the cheeks of every proud American who talks about the most powerful and richest nation in the world when it realizes that in infant mortality the United States ranks not one-but 15 down the list.

Just as we have tried to cope with the problem of our aged, we have got to cope with the problem of our babies. We have got to get to them before it is too late. We have got to correct the deficiencies of their eyes, or their teeth, or their ears, or their bodies due to lack of proper treatment to their mothers.

You have got to have her examinations at critical periods. They have got to have treatments of doctors when they need them.

We can no longer go on in the days ahead as we have gone on in the days past--and our next goal is on to "kiddie care" now that we have got Medicare.

Oh, I wish I could talk all day. But I can't. I have other things to do and so do you. But I just want to summarize by saying to those of you who abhor colonialism and to those of you who have fought and bled and died to reject totalitarianism that neither colonialism nor totalitarianism has made any advances in these 5 years. They have retreated instead.

And aggression--wherever it has reared its ugly head--has been stopped in its tracks. And freedom has not retreated an inch. Every foot of soil that freedom held in 1963, freedom holds in 1968.

But I did not come here to give you a history of your union or of the last 5 years. I just wanted to point out a few of the high spots.

There have been more than 200 major basic measures enacted to better humanity that will compare favorably with all the measures enacted in the previous years in the social field.

But I think you know this story maybe far better than I do since you helped build this organization and since this organization gave the leadership and answered "aye" on every roll call that advanced these measures.

I have drawn upon your history this morning because I find when I study it and I look upon it that it is both valuable and comforting to me in a time of stress and anguish. To the officers of this great union, Louis Stulberg and your retiring president, David Dubinsky--men that will give loyalty to principles and give loyalty to me as they have during every day of this 5 years--will give loyalty to you.

There is a great deal of rhetoric in the air these days. And as is natural in an election year, there is a speaker on every stump-and some places where they can't find stumps.

As I conclude--and as one who will shortly be a private citizen--I want to give you some advice. When you listen to the speakers, draw upon your own experience--draw upon the collective wisdom that you have accumulated in the years that you have been building this great union.

When men---or women, or boys, or girls-come to you and give you their prescriptions for America, listen to what they think is the matter with America.

But before it is all over, you demand from them an answer to the crucial question, "How, how are they going to do anything about it?" It is not "What?" It is "How?" It is not the promise. It is the performance.

For the essence of politics, like trade unionism, is the ability to put a cutting edge on abstractions, to find an administrative remedy for a rhetorical dilemma.

And power--power as my old friend, Eric Hoffer, puts it--just does not "come in cans." You can't go down to the corner drugstore or the supermarket and pick some of it up in a basket.

Power for the ideals that we cherish has to be created by little, by the small and the seemingly insignificant decisions of dedicated, courageous men and women--most of whom are invisible, most of whom never make speeches, most of whom never issue manifestos, and most of whom never get on the television or get their pictures in the papers.

It is these people--people of this caliber-who have made the ILGWU a model--a model--of democratic trade unionism in the world.

It is your kind of people who make it possible for anyone to be President of the United States.

I want to conclude with this little note. I want to thank every member of this union here and those that can't be here.

I particularly want to thank Louis Stulberg for his fidelity and his dedication, his loyalty and his leadership.

Sitting there on the banks of the Pedernales, I am going to see how--how--he does it in the years ahead because I know that he and you and I are going to do it.

I also need not tell you how much I owe to you or how long I have admired your union and your great leader and crusader, David Dubinsky.

In these days more than ever I can envy him. He has made me wish many, many times in the last few days that our Founding Fathers had established another union--the AURP--the American Union for Retired Presidents. If that had happened, then I could look forward to a retirement plan like David Dubinsky's.

How would you like the sound of "Honorary President, Lyndon Johnson?"

Talk about liberal, how about these fringe benefits:

--a weekend in Atlantic City or Chicago,

--invitations to a dinner at the White House,

--a warm place in the hearts of all of your people, and

--a sure place in the spotlight of every convention?

But a greater satisfaction and more fringe benefits than all of those can come to an honorary president, has come to your honorary president because the man who picked up the leadership where he left off is carrying forward, onward to new and greater and far-reaching heights and benefits that will better humanity.

If I could have one hope today, it would be this: that whoever may be President, wherever he may reside, whatever party he belongs to, he will look at the social record of the last 5 years and say, "We have just begun."

As your union is dedicated to carrying forward on the slogan, "We have just begun," I hope our next President will have just begun and will continue as you have to build, to heal, and to unite the greatest nation in all the world.

Destructive people, mischievous people, ambitious people, and folks who look to what we have, and want to take what we have got, and envy the liberty and freedom that is ours, can destroy this Nation. But they will not.

The reason they will not is out there in front of me in the form of the constructive, dedicated members of this union, who are builders instead of wreckers.

If I don't get an invitation to your next convention, I am going to reach back in that closet of mine where we pack our souvenirs and I am going to pull out an old badge that says "Honorary President" and I am going to invite myself to come back here.