Remarks in Baltimore at the Celebration of the Bicentennial of American Methodism.

Bishop Lord, my beloved friend Mayor McKeldin, my colleagues and associates in Washington, your very able Senators Brewster and Tydings, distinguished delegates to the Methodist Convocation, ladies and gentlemen:

I am moved by your introduction, Bishop Lord, especially by your reading of the letter from Bishop Coke and Bishop Asbury to our first President, George Washington.

I pray that I may so conduct myself in office that I too may inspire, among the Methodist people of America, a "warm feeling" in their hearts.

The Lord is my witness that I shall try.

I have lived and I have worked with Methodists all of my life. Methodist men and women--including circuit riders much like those brave and hardy souls who stopped by the White House last Tuesday on their way over here--were a part of the early history of my State.

They devoted themselves to making my part of America a much better place to live in, although some people in modern magazines still think it is a horrible place. But they built our schools and our hospitals and they built our homes for our orphans. And somehow or another they had enough energy, and perhaps some cash, left over in the late 1920's to build a football team at Southern Methodist University. And they sent it north, and they gave Army and Notre Dame and Pittsburgh and all the big ones the greatest scare they ever had.

Now nobody has underestimated Texas Methodists since that time.

And looking out in this Methodist audience tonight, I sense in the air the same spirit of good will, the same commitment to good works, that was typical of all of those early Methodists that I knew in the Southwest.

For yours is really a church that was founded on social conscience--that was founded on the dream of social justice for all human beings.

From John Wesley to your leaders of today, Methodists have always believed that works of compassion among men were part of God's will in action.

The Social Creed of the Methodist Church--written in 1940--is a most eloquent statement of that belief.

I want to read aloud some parts of that creed for each of you tonight:

"We stand for equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life . . .

"... for adequate provision for the protection, the education, the spiritual nurture, and the wholesome recreation for every child . . .

"... for the abatement of poverty and the right of all men to live . . .

"We believe that it is our Christian duty to do our utmost to provide for all men the opportunity to earn an adequate livelihood . . .

"We believe that society has a right to expect that every person, not physically or mentally incapacitated, shall be constantly engaged, so far as possible, in some vocation productive of common good . . .

"We oppose all forms of social, economic, and moral waste."

Bishop Lord, it would be very hard for me to write a more perfect description of the American ideal-or of the American commitments in the 1960's. What you have said in the Social Creed of the Methodist Church is what I along with Senator Brewster and Senator Tydings and others in both Houses of Congress are trying to write into the laws of our country today--and in the hearts of all of our people.

For our people--of every faith--have come to believe that the works of compassion are the legitimate and are the necessary concern of the entire Nation and particularly of the National Government, and of the States and of the cities, and of the churches and the schools, and of industry and labor and the private citizen.

It was not always so. It was not so when I came to Washington 35 years ago. Then the question was always, "Should we do this? Where are we going to get the money? Should we commit ourselves to great programs in education, or in employment, or in health care, or in relieving poverty?"

Today the question is--ask yourself, "Are we doing enough for human beings?"

Well, I want you to know that from the depth of my soul I welcome the change of heart that has changed the question.

The answer--because we are Americans-must always be no. No, we're not doing enough, we're not satisfied with the status quo, we're not going to sit still, we're going to keep moving. And so long as millions of little children are poorly taught and poorly fed--Lady Bird has a favorite story of the lady that walked up to a little child and said, "Why aren't you eating today?" And he said, "It's not my day to eat." A member of a very large family, but it was true.

So long as many men live out their lives without useful work, and without any skills, and without any training, and without hope; so long as disease wastes thousands of young lives, and so long as poverty haunts the aged, the answer is no.

But let me tell you this evening something of what we are doing. For even the most astute mind may miss the meaning of what has been happening these last few months. Even the most deeply concerned observer may not sense how powerful are the forces of compassion in America today.

And there is no more dramatic place to begin, than with education.

When the Methodist Church in America was founded two centuries ago, education was--as it had been in Europe--chiefly the province of the well-to-do. Yet our wise men knew that democracy could not endure unless the people were schooled in the arts of citizenship--unless they could read and figure and form their own opinions.

A great President of the Republic of Texas said, "Education is the guardian genius of democracy"--the guardian genius of democracy! "It is the only dictator that free men will recognize. And it is the only ruler that free men will accept."

John Adams said, in 1765, "The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich in this entire country."

Exactly two hundred years later the Congress adopted and I signed the Elementary and Secondary School Act at the one-room school that I first attended as a child of 4 years old.

Now--in the coming year--almost $2 billion of Federal funds will go into our elementary and secondary schools all over this land.

--almost a billion dollars specifically to help 7½ million disadvantaged children.

--hundreds of millions will go for school libraries, for school textbooks, for educational laboratories where men and women learn new and better ways of teaching.

In higher education--where Methodists have contributed mightily to American learning--more than $300 million will be spent by your Government this year to build classrooms and libraries and laboratories.

Two and a half years ago we did not have such a program.

Sixty million dollars will go to bright students whose needs are great.

Another $100 million will go to needy students on work-study grants.

Loans guaranteed by the Government will aid more than three quarters of a million students.

I am told that any boy or girl that graduates from school today and does not have the financial means--and his family does not have the financial means--can go to college, if they have a transcript from high school of having done good work in that high school, by one of three means--money is not the test: they can get a job that we help provide, they can get a scholarship where we will give them the schooling if their grades are high enough, or they can get a loan that the Government guarantees. But they just cannot stay home, if they want to go to college, because they don't have the money. Every boy and girl in this country that wants to go to high school, that is capable of going to high school, that parents cannot send to high school--in the last 2 ½ years we have provided the ways and means for them to go to college.

Altogether in the 3 years, almost 3 years, since I became President, we have moved from a Federal appropriation of 4.8 billion to 10 billion 200 million this year, from a little under 5 to a little over 10--more than doubled our expenditures for education-increased them this year $5 billion.

Now this is the fruit of compassion. But it is also the dictate of necessity. For we, the strongest, the most powerful, the richest nation on earth, have learned from the Book of Proverbs that:

"By wisdom a house is built,

By understanding it is established;

By knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.

A wise man is mightier than a strong man,

And a man of knowledge than he who has strength."

Your Methodist creed opposed every form of social, economic, and moral waste.

And there is no more tragic and meaningless waste than that of prolonged illness. And in accordance with your creed and my feelings in the matter we are going to do something about that in this country. In the 3 years that I have been President our expenditures for health are moving from 5 billion 100 million to 10 billion 300 million which is more than double. For health, from 5 billion 3 years ago to 10 billion this year.

Two years ago, millions of Americans looked upon their retirement years with grim foreboding. They lacked the means to face the illnesses that come with age.

For most of them, the answer came last year--with the enactment of Medicare. In the year that will begin this June, $3 billion will be paid out under this program to cover the major costs of hospital and medical care for older Americans. And medical care will be supplemented by a grant program to the States for 7 million poor who will receive assistance.

Now there is so much more to tell you about what we are doing about better health in America.

Three years ago we were helping to provide comprehensive health care to 12,000 poor mothers--12,000 poor mothers were receiving care 3 years ago. This year 140,000 poor mothers are receiving care.

Three years ago we were helping to rehabilitate 120,000 disabled persons--so that they might become productive members of society after their rehabilitation. This year we will aid more than 200,000, and we will spend three times as much as we did in the year 1964, shortly after I came to the Presidency.

Three years ago we were beginning a new program of assistance to community mental health centers--just beginning to treat the mentally ill in the communities where they belong. And now we are supporting the staffs in those centers, and by June of 1967 we will have aided projects affording comprehensive mental health services for 28 million Americans!

By next year we hope to begin a great new hospital program--using direct Federal and guaranteed private loans--that will modernize 260,000 hospital beds over a 10-year period. And I am going to announce tonight, we are going to start right at Johnson City, Texas.

Our expenditures for health research have grown by more than a third in 3 years' time. Almost $1 1/2 billion will go this year to the fight against heart disease and cancer and stroke and communicable and other diseases.

And weren't you thrilled and aren't you praying for that poor man down in Houston, Texas, where they had that miraculous breakthrough, and made that installation? And that Dr. DeBakey, who is head of that skilled team of surgeons, has headed up my committee on heart and cancer and stroke-and we are going to do something about these killers in America.

And I want to remind all you good Methodists that had enough money to get to Baltimore that it is on the poor that the burden of ill health falls most heavily.

You stand in your creed "for the abatement and prevention of poverty"--the abatement and the prevention of poverty!--"and the right of all men to live."

So does America on this April evening in 1966.

We are not concerned just with the appearance. We are concerned with the achievement. We are not just concerned with a promise in a platform. We are concerned with the performance when you get in office--and that is what we are going to do.

So we shall continue to try to uproot and destroy the causes of poverty--the lack of skills, the lack of jobs, the lack of basic education, the lack of decent housing--that challenge the conscience of an affluent America.

We are fashioning our tools as we go. We will make mistakes. We are making them now--many of them. You will read about most of them. Few ever escape the poison pens. Our yearly budgets will never seem sufficient. We will arouse hopes that cannot be quickly fulfilled. But the alternative is to put your hands in your chair and sit and fold your arms and say, "Let the rest of the world go by," and "I'm not going to do anything about it." Well, we are going to do something about it!

We are moving--we are moving with a program that was only a dream 3 years ago. We will invest this year $1 billion 750 million in the following:

--in Head Start, for little children,

--in Job Corps, for unemployed youth,

--in community action programs,

--in the Neighborhood Youth Corps,

--in adult basic education,

--in work-experience programs,

--in VISTA volunteers.

We can, we will, and we must do more. We are learning much from the experiences of these years--how to make our commitments more effective, how to call out the best efforts of the poor themselves. We shall not be stampeded into unwise programs-neither shall we swerve aside in our determination to strike the bonds of wretched circumstance from 9 million American families.

One of the great problems I have--I have some that don't want to go at all and I have others that want to go all tonight. And in these programs you have to have plans, and you have to have personnel, and you have to have substance, and you have to have direction, and you have to be sure that you are trying to get a dollar's worth of value out of a dollar received.

You just cannot mash a button and set up a big organization and have them trained. And I am not funding all the programs that I got authorized last year. And the reason I am not, it would take $3 billion more extra this year. But more than that, it would take trained personnel that have not had the experience that I want, to come and learn and think before they talk sometimes.

We are going to do something about these 9 million American families, though, at the bottom of the heap, for we have heard the call of Isaiah, to

"Seek justice

Correct oppression,

Defend the fatherless,

Plead for the widow."

Of all that we do, as a people, for social justice in America, nothing is so powerful a force for good as a strong economy.

Tonight, the unemployment rate is a third lower than it was 3 years ago.

Tonight, the number of nonfarm payroll jobs is up 10 percent above that of 3 years ago.

Tonight, the gross national product is 18 percent higher than 3 years ago-at current prices.

Tonight, personal income after taxes in America is 18 percent higher than 3 years ago. Tonight the farmers' income for the first quarter is a substantial increase over the first quarter last year. And we expect a very fine year for the farmer.

These are not the product of one man's wisdom, or of a thousand. They are the visible signs of a new national will in America:

--A will to forge a more bountiful America for all of our people;

--A will to offer each man and woman and child the opportunity to share in that bounty;

--A will to break the grip of disease and ignorance and discrimination and poverty from this land--in our time--now!

And I ask you, is this too much to ask of ourselves? Is the task so great that we are foolish to attempt it?

Do you want to have it said of you? And have your grandchildren point at you and say, "You were the one that looked forward and said, 'Let's move and let's do some of these things,'" or do you want them to say that you were satisfied to just let matters go as they are?

I do not believe that John Wesley would have thought that we were foolish to attempt this. I do not believe that the founders of American Methodism would have thought so. At least those preachers that I listened to as a boy down in Johnson City did not think so. I do not believe that their descendants gathered to celebrate two triumphant centuries of service to America. I do not believe you think so tonight.

A great French writer wrote about John Wesley:

"Such was the preponderance of this man, who had not so much ruled, as weighed down on his people and stamped them with his massive imprint, that when we lowered him into the grave we seemed not to be burying our head, but laying a foundation stone,"

On that foundation stone and on that ideal of compassion for our brothers on this earth, let us--you and I and all the children of God in this land--let us build a temple that is worthy of the blessings He has given us.

The thing that we want in this world more than anything else is peace with our fellow man. But no doctor can cure a disease unless he finds the cause, and you must deal with the cause. And what are the causes of misunderstandings, what are the causes of differences, what are the causes of war, what are the causes of all this bloodshed? Ancient feuds dictated by illiteracy and by ignorance and by disease, and diseased minds and diseased bodies dictated by hungry children crying for food that they do not get--hunger and disease and illiteracy and ignorance--these ancient enemies of mankind.

Now we cannot do it all in a night, but we can have our goal. And we can keep our eyes in the stars. And we must keep our feet on the ground. But in this country, in the time allotted me, I'm going to, from every pulpit that I am permitted to speak from, try to appeal to my fellow man and remind him of the Golden Rule of do unto others as he would have them do unto him.

I do not want to confiscate business, and I do not want to expropriate property, and I do not want to weaken our free enterprise system. It is the greatest in all the world and it has brought us all the power and all the wealth and all the advantages, taught us how to explore the stars. But I am going to say to all of us who are beneficiaries of it, that we have an obligation to our brother and we have an obligation to every American child that he shall have an equal opportunity to learn to read and write, to have food in his stomach, to have his body free from disease.

And while we are doing that I am not going to confine our efforts just to my own children or just to my own town or my own State or my own Nation. I am concerned with all the 3 billion human beings that live in this world. I was concerned with the people of Europe when a dictator was marching through, gobbling up selfless countries and helpless countries. And we came late. We were tardy. Churchill's voice held things until we finally waked up, and got there.

But just as I was concerned then--the human beings that were in concentration camps--I am concerned now with the little brown men in Southeast Asia whose freedom they are trying to preserve--and others who want to engulf them and overrun them, and dominate them, and by power and by force subjugate them, too. And those people die at 35--and earn the magnificent sum of $65 per year.

When a man said to me the other day, "Now this is not our sphere of influence and these are not our kind of people," I thought I had heard those strange words in some of the racist doctrines that I had heard as a child. My kind of people are human beings wherever they are--all 3 billion of them. And with your help and with God's help, we are going to strike body blows and make advances on doing something about the causes of war, as well as winning those wars after they come.

We do not want war. We want peace. We have gone to every capital seeking it. I have sent Ambassadors to more than 40 nations in person to plead for it. We have said: We will talk to any government anytime, anywhere. We will stop our fighting if you stop yours, but do not ask us to stop doing everything we are doing while you pound us. And do not ask us to stop everything we are doing while you march and advance and conquer helpless men, women, and children.

We think that in due time the policies and the programs that are good for America will be good for other people in the world. And when they relieve themselves of their illiteracy and ignorance, when they conquer the disease to the extent that we have--and we are making great progress. One country in Africa, the head of state was in to see me not long ago, and he said, "I do not know how long our men will have a high regard for the United States and like them, but our women will always love your country." And I said, "Why, that's interesting--I'm interested in women that feel that way about us." He said, "Because one out of every three of our children dies every year with measles--out of every three children born in our country one of them dies with measles." He said, "You sent the Navy machine over there and you vaccinated them for measles--and you vaccinated 750,000 last year and we haven't lost a child." And he said, "our mothers appreciate your saving our children."

And when I wandered home about 11 o'clock that night--for dinner--I kind of appreciated myself for having been the instrument of yours in saving, instead of destroying, saving 250,000 lives.

Mayor McKeldin, I want to thank you for being here. You are a source of inspiration to me. I don't know whether you understand this or not--you're a Republican and I'm a Democrat--but I have always observed that you don't know how to spell either word when the interests of your country are at stake, and you put your country ahead of your party.

I couldn't come to Baltimore, though, without saying to the 'people of Baltimore I am so grateful for the help and the comfort and the encouragement they give me in the burdens that I try to carry as best I can. And I am especially grateful for the two fine United States Senators that are there helping me do it. And--I am grateful, too, for the mayor!