Remarks at the 20th Washington Conference of the Advertising Council

Ladies and gentlemen:

I am glad that so many of you came out this morning. I am also pleased to know that so many members of my Cabinet have been taking part in your deliberations. I should have expected it--in this administration there has been a premium on anything that is free, including free advertising. I really expected my Cabinet to take full advantage of it.

Fred Allen once said that a conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. I hope that is not true of this conference. I think you can do something. That is the heart of a democracy-the conviction that individuals do make a difference, that we can share our world if we only will.

I agree with Harry Emerson Fosdick, who said that "democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people."

Furthermore, I think that together you can decide that something can be done about building a great society in America. Now I am not speaking this morning strictly in terms of profits and investments and capital gains, as important as those things are. I mean in terms of what that society does to provide a full and abundant life to every citizen. The test of a society is not its census or the size of its cities or the number of acres on its farms, but the test of a society is what happens to its people.

I am frankly pleased with the economy. Times are good, as we meet here today. I know someone said that prosperity is the period when it is easy to borrow money to buy things which you should be able to pay for out of your own income. But our prosperity goes beyond that definition.

Almost every day brings more good news about the economy. Some economists and some critics have reacted like the young father who was stationed in the Mediterranean. He received a telegram from his mother-in-law which read, "Twins arrived tonight. More by mail." He was surprised, and so have many people been surprised by what this free enterprise system is doing. It seems there is always more in the mail.

This morning Walter Heller, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me that private residential construction outlays rose slightly in April. These are preliminary figures, but they are estimated to be 10 percent above a year ago, and 1.7 above the first quarter average. That is for April.

I was pleased to see that housing vacancy rates are down significantly from the second half of 1963. Some people had thought that a serious rise in vacancies would be occurring by now.

And there are a good many other good signs. The unemployment rate, as you know, is down from 7 percent of the labor force early in 1961 to 5.4 percent in the first quarter of 1964. But we must not be satisfied as long as one qualified worker is out of work. The time has come to start thinking about and working for and doing something about full employment in America. We had a full employment bill in the Congress a few years ago, and somehow or other we dropped the "full" out of the act before it was passed and we have dropped it out of our thinking since.

Nonfarm jobs are up from 60.8 million early in 1961 to 65.2 million in March 1964, an increase of more than 5 million people working. Working hours are up, too. The percent of labor force time lost in full and part-time employment is down from 6.3 a year ago to 5.8 in March. Average weekly earnings after taxes in manufacturing, for a production worker with three dependents, are up from $86 a year ago to $90 in March.

Corporate profits after taxes are running $31 billion this year--$31 billion after taxes--against $22 billion in 1961. Annual labor income is at about $50 billion more after taxes than it was in 1961, so the corporations are getting 10 or 11 more, the laborers are getting $50 billion more.

So, as I said earlier, I am pleased with the direction that you have headed the economy in, and this is a very important point that I made last year when I talked to you, and I want to make it again this year. I was Vice President then. I have different responsibilities now, but our system is still the same. As long as business, capital and management, labor, and the Government operate in an atmosphere of mutual trust, as friends helping friends, and not as bitter antagonists, I see no reason why this expansion should not continue.

I am concerned, however, with some other aspects of America as we meet here this morning.

You hear a great deal and read a lot about the deadly diseases that afflict men, such as cancer and heart disease and multiple sclerosis and strokes and all the rest. These are tragic, terrible diseases, but the most dangerous sickness that you can imagine, especially in a democracy, the most dangerous sickness is public apathy.

A democracy has no safe depository but the people themselves. As Joseph Story wrote, this is a Government "founded by the people . . . and managed by the people." Once the people stop managing; once citizens--in every walk of life--retreat from their responsibilities, no matter how small they appear to be; once we become "at ease in Zion," our society, any society, is headed for the scrap heap of history.

"I believe in democracy," Woodrow Wilson said, "because it releases the energies of every human being." He was right, but if people burn that energy on irrelevant and trivial causes, on hates or on purposes that serve only their own narrow interests, democracy will inevitably suffer. The change may be gradual, almost imperceptible, but the turn will be in only one direction, and that direction will be down.

That is why I wanted to talk to you this morning.

First of all, I want to thank you men for donating more than $100 million a year to the advancement of public causes. I want to express the hope that this year you will devote yourselves as private citizens to specific programs which will greatly raise the quality of life in your beloved country.

Our War on Poverty is going to succeed, for example, only if people like you get out there in the front lines and help it to succeed. There is hardly a community in this country where poverty does not have some beachhead. I don't know what you may have seen on the other side of the tracks in your home areas, but I do know that the hardest battles are going to be fought right in your home town.

We have planned this war not from the top down, but we have planned it from the bottom up. We have even put a Sargent instead of a general in charge of it.¹ We want local communities and local leaders, if they will, to plan their own attack and plan it at home. Washington should not be telling your home town what to do to solve its problems of poverty; you ought to be telling us what we can do to help you carry out your plans. And that is the way our program has developed.

¹ The President was referring to his appointment of Sargent Shriver to direct the War on Poverty program.

I think this makes good sense economically, because $1,000 invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime. When Mr. McNamara needs men in the services, and Mr. Hershey attempts to select those people for him, out of every two red-blooded American boys that goes through that draft machinery, one has to be cut back, one out of every two, because o:f lack of mental qualifications or lack of physical qualifications.

It is almost insulting to urge you to enlist in this war for just economic motivations. This is a moral challenge that goes to the very root of our civilization, and asks if we are willing to make public, personal sacrifices for the public good.

I know that every person in this room would not hesitate for a moment, even at your age, to leave your company and put on a uniform if you thought you could save America, and that was necessary. Well, we are attempting to save America. We are attempting to reach down and pick up 10 million people, families at the bottom of the heap, and move them out of the slough of despondency up to where they can become taxpayers instead of taxeaters.

I can say the same thing to you about the equal rights program that is pending before the Congress. Some say this is a "political gimmick," but they are doing gross injustice to the basic convictions of a democratic society; that is, that men cannot live unto themselves alone; that the right kind of democracy is bound together by the ties of neighborliness.

I have known and been associated with businessmen all my life. I am even one Democrat who can honestly and genuinely say that some of my best friends are businessmen.

Surely, enlightened businessmen believe that all members of the public ought to have access to facilities open to the public.

Surely 20th century enlightened businessmen, leaders of great companies in this country, surely they believe that all members of the public should be equally eligible for Federal benefits that are financed by all the public.

Surely enlightened businessmen believe that all members of the public should have an equal chance to vote for public officials, and an equal chance to send their children to public schools paid for by all the public, and to contribute their talents to the public good.

These are the goals of this bill, and these are moral objectives.

Gentlemen, at least nine Americans have died this week in Viet-Nam--10,000 miles away from home. I do not know if they were white Americans or colored Americans. I do not know whether they were Catholic Americans or Protestant Americans or Jewish Americans or if they even had any professed religious belief at all. I do not know if they were from New York or Georgia or Puerto Rico or New Mexico or Texas. I do not know how old they were or what they wanted to do with their lives, but I do know this: I want to wake up tomorrow morning knowing that I have done everything possible to make what they died for come true.

I came over here this morning to ask for your help, for there are few groups who can help more. You are the great communicators of our great land. You are the great molders of public opinion. You are the persuaders. So help us to communicate the urgency of these programs to all America.

For almost 50 days now, from early morning to late at night, we have been talking, talking, talking, talking about this moral problem that I just discussed with you, in the Senate. Some say men from one section want to talk until there is no time to vote. Some say men of certain parties want to talk so that they won't have to vote on other things; that we have a convention or two coming up, and they can postpone facing up to these real sores that face the American public.

Well, we do have a convention coming up, and we hope that we can pass our poverty and Appalachia program before the convention, that we can pass our civil rights program before the convention, that we can pass our medical care program before the convention that will permit us to take a dollar from each person's pay check each month and a dollar from his employer and nothing from the Government, and take those $2 a month for 12 months a year, $24 a year--if he goes on the labor market at 20 years of age and stays to 65--take $24 a year for 45 years and multiply that by 3.75, as the security statisticians do, and it will give you nearly $4,000 that every person in America will have for hospital insurance after 65. What they may have saved on their own they can pay to their doctor instead of their doctor having to wait until they have paid their hospital and nurse's bill.

A food stamp plan that will bring good foods into the home of our ill-fed--a Poverty in Appalachia program, a Federal pay bill--all of these things are in the budget, in the lowest budget that has been submitted, but we haven't got them passed and there are some people who think that if we can just hold back long enough to get by the convention that they won't be passed at all.

Well, I don't predict when they are going to be passed, but I do predict that the American people are going to ask their Congressmen and their Senators and their molders of public opinion to help us get these bills voted on, help us to persuade the frightened and the skeptical, help us to persuade the cynical that American society is in the balance, and the future of our land is at stake.

Let us not wait for the day when the prophet will say that the harvest is past and the summer is ended, and we are not saved. Let us, instead, work together so that one day we may hear the benediction, "Well done, thou good and faithful servants."

So I ask you this morning to resolve here, now, as individuals, not as a conference, to give us that help that is necessary, to passing this program that will give us a greater and a better society. Determine here that you will engrave your name on that honor roll of leaders of this Nation who in the 20th century sought to give finality to a proclamation that Lincoln issued a hundred years ago.

It is true that a hundred years ago this year a great American President freed the slaves of their chains, but he. did not free America of its bigotry, and he did not free us from the prejudice of color. Until education is blind to color, until employment is unaware of race, emancipation will be a proclamation but it will not be a fact.

As the rest of the world looks upon this rich and strong Nation, let us not only pray and work for peace and good will toward all men, but let us determine that the sore spots here in our own social life can be wiped and washed away and we can set an example for the rest of the world.

You men can help us do this job, not a Democratic job, not a Republican job--an American job. I am going to stay as far away from partisan politics as I can in a political year for as long as I can, because the great challenge that faced this country on November 22d was how could we have continuity and how could we effect a transition and how could we show to the rest of the world that our constitutional system would stand a challenge? How could we unite the people of the North and the South and the East and the West, and the labor and the manager and the capitalist, and how could we keep them from tearing themselves to shreds.

President Eisenhower came down from Gettysburg and he spent 2 hours in my office writing on a yellow tablet his suggestions as to what could be done. President Truman came from Independence. The great corporation leaders of this country came to the White House as the Business Advisory Council. The labor leaders came and made their offer of support, and through this all we have made a reasonably good transition. Those doubtful watchers in the other corners of the world have seen now that our system does work.

I have tried in all of this critical period, when we had to get education bills passed through the Congress, when 10 of the 15 appropriation bills remained to be passed, when the civil rights bill had not come up in the House of Representatives and we had to have a petition to start trying to get it out of a committee, when the tax bill had not passed the Senate, when the library bill was still pending there, when no farm bill had been acted upon at all--during all this time I had to apply leadership and inspiration and evaluate each bill on its merit, and I have looked at it with only one thing in mind, as I looked at the foreign aid bill when we had to call the Congressmen back at Christmas, and ask this question: Is this measure good for all America?

That is the only criteria. That is the only yardstick. If it is good for America, it is good for my party and my people and both parties. We are going to try to function in that spirit. The White House door is open to you gentlemen for your suggestions and your criticisms. Now we get about 100,000 letters a week, and we get a good many criticisms-everything from beagles to speedometers-but we think that we are stronger and wiser for it, and we want you to know that that is your house, that this is your country, that is your Government. It is going to be only as strong as you wish it to be and you help it to be and you make it to be.

Your cooperation, your advice and counsel, the benefit of the experience that you have earned in the world of hard knocks, is always welcome there.

Thank you for inviting me to come. Goodby.