Remarks in Springfield, Ill., at the Sangamon County Courthouse

Thank you for this wonderful weather. Thank you for your smiling, happy faces. Thank you for the great State of Illinois, the CWA, the Letter Carriers Local 477, and all you good Democrats that have come out here to help us to victory.

My good friend Governor Otto Kerner, we are going to reelect you Governor by one of the largest majorities any Governor has been elected by in any State in this Union. I am happy to be here on the platform with one of the greatest United States Senators this Nation has ever produced in all of its history--my friend Paul Douglas of Illinois.

And now I have some work for you to do. I just left Des Moines, a great city in the great State of Iowa. They told me we had 200,000 to 225,000 people out there, and they promised me that they were going to send us at least three additional Democratic Congressmen come November.

Now, you have some Democratic congressional candidates here in Illinois, and they ought to cease being candidates and start being Congressmen come next January, so put this down and don't forget it: Let's get out and work and vote and help and pray for Lester Collins to go to Congress--and John Desmond and Bernard Hughes.

Mr. Attorney General Clark, State Auditor Howlett, Miss Dorothy O'Brien, who rode out here on the plane with me, State Chairman Jim Ronan, my old beloved friend Scott Lucas, the former majority leader of the Senate, ladies and gentlemen, fellow Democrats:

It is much warmer here in Springfield today than the welcome that Springfield gave its most distinguished citizen when he arrived here 127 years ago. Shortly after that arrival, Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to a friend, and he said in that letter, and I quote him, "I have been spoken to by but one woman since I have been here, and should not have been by her if she could have avoided it."

I guess Mr. Lincoln didn't realize that all Springfield women are naturally shy, although if those I see here reflect their grandmothers' beauty, I can see why Mr. Lincoln was disappointed.

I have come here today as Lincoln did, on political business. I have come to the American heartland to set the issues of this campaign before the American people, so let us get on our way right now.

Do the American people want to continue the programs that have brought us unprecedented national prosperity ? Do you want to continue the policies that have kept the peace through the most dangerous 20 years in human history?

Well, let me discuss prosperity first.

I began my public life in Washington 32 years ago. In those days we set out to save and to strengthen our economy. Our economy was on the brink of total bankruptcy. In the fire of that crisis we forged a policy for economic strength that has become the bulwark of American prosperity ever since.

For 30 years, five Presidents, from both political parties, have supported that policy. And so do I.

No part of that policy has meant more to the good people of America than social security, and we are not about to destroy it, either, by making it voluntary.

For 30 years every President, Republican and Democrat alike, has supported social security and strengthened it. And so do I.

We built into our economy a system of safeguards to protect the farmer and the workingman, the small businessman and the investor, from forces that were beyond their control.

Leaders of both parties supported these safeguards and supported these programs. And so do I.

When we started those programs, we could only dream that they would lead us to prosperity.

Today the dream has become a reality. Today the American people are prosperous as never before. Today, for the first time in history, over 70 million Americans have jobs. Personal income after taxes has risen by $80 billion since 1961 Corporate profits after taxes have increased over 12 billion since 1961.

The stock market has reached an all-time high, and the people who own the stocks on the exchanges know that the value of those stocks today is more than 100 billion in excess of what it was last November when I took office as President.

We are in a great agricultural State. We produce food for Illinois, the United States, and the world. Our total farm exports have increased 70 percent.

Today Illinois is in the vanguard. Illinois is on the move. And Governor Kerner and Paul Douglas and I intend to keep it on the move. We have one of the greatest public servants ever selected in America running on the ticket for Vice President-Hubert Humphrey--and he is going to help us.

Right here in Illinois today, more people are at work earning more money, living better, than at any time in American history. The unemployment rate in Illinois has been reduced by more than one-third in the last 3 years. It has come from 6.4 in July of 1961 to 4.1 in July of 1964.

Well, that didn't just happen by chance. This happened because the economic policies that we have followed for 30 years under five Presidents, of both parties, those policies represented the consensus of the American people.

But let me tell you today: Those policies are in jeopardy and are in danger.

You have made a clear choice, and you are going to have a chance to go to the ballot box and exercise that choice November 3d. What will that choice be? Are you going to abandon and forget the tested policies that have worked for the last 20 years to go to dangerous, uncertain policies that you know not of? Or will you hold steadfast on the highway to prosperity set by the leaders of both parties over the last 30 years?

But prosperity is worthless unless we keep the peace. The most important thing in the world to every mother, to every boy, to every American citizen, is peace in the world.

And don't you forget it when you get in the polling booth and vote November 3d. You vote for the man or woman, the candidate that in your judgment is most likely to promote the cause of peace in this land and in this world. You vote for yourself. You have judgment. You have conscience. You have knowledge. You can look into their faces. You can hear their voices.

So you go and vote for Molly and the babies; you vote for peace in the United States between labor and business and Government; you vote for peace in the world among all people.

America's policy for peace rests on two foundations: strength and reason.

We are today, as we meet here, the greatest military power on this earth.

We possess 1,100 long-range bombers, nearly half of them on 15-minute alert. And the only nation that contests with us for superiority has only a small fraction of that number.

We have more than 800 intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. That is four times as many as the other fellow has.

We have 256 Polaris missiles on 16 nuclear-powered submarines--far more than the Communists have.

And so long as I am your President we shall never use this awesome strength to start a war. Because we have it, we may never need it.

But the second foundation of peace is reason-willingness to use our minds and our hearts as well as our muscles and our strength. This has been the policy of all the Presidents of your time and my time in both parties.

These Presidents of both parties have used our strength with resolution, but never recklessly. They have never been afraid to stand up for freedom, and they have never been afraid to sit down at the council table to seek an agreement. They have been resolute, but they haven't been reckless. They have been courageous, but they have never been careless. True, they have not built a perfect world, but I can tell you this: They have achieved a safer world.

Today we celebrate the first anniversary of the signing of the limited nuclear test ban treaty. Next week I will report by nationwide television so that every home and every mother and every child and every son in this country can hear that report. I am going to tell you what has happened in the first year of the nuclear test ban treaty, and how successful that treaty has been.

A year ago, when Senator Douglas and other great men ratified that treaty, our beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said, "In its first two decades, the age of nuclear energy has been full of fear, yet never empty of hope." Today the fear is a little less, and the hope is a little greater.

Well, so long as Lyndon Johnson is your President, I will continue to nurture and to strengthen that hope.

I can tell you that the air you breathe is not as polluted, the milk that you drink is not as dangerous, and the unborn babies do not have the problems that they would have had except for the nuclear test ban treaty. And I hope that every mother in this crowd, every citizen of America, every student here today will listen in on the television next week when I talk to you on the accomplishments of the first year of the nuclear test ban treaty.

Those policies of power plus reason are wise. They are strong. They are tested. And they have worked.

I don't believe that you want to give up those tested policies. Do you?

I don't believe that you want to start off on a dangerous, uncharted course where you don't know where you are going. Do you?

I believe that you want to continue to guard freedom's gate with strength, and to guard it also with good judgment and good sense.

Well, that is the choice in this election. I don't want just 95.9 percent of the labor force of Illinois at work, as it is today. The Democratic administration wants every man and every woman that is willing to work to have a job.

We don't want prosperity for just 85 percent of Illinois families who enjoy it today. We want to wipe out poverty along the line so that the 15 percent of Illinois families that live below the poverty line can have a better standard of living.

We are already on our way to greater prosperity. The tax cut, enacted by this session of Congress, will, when effective, put over $500 million into Illinois wage-earners' pockets. It will create 130,000 new jobs in Illinois. It will generate an increase in total income of almost $2 billion. It will boost State and local revenues by over $160 million.

Next year, with your help, I am going to ask the Congress to cut our excise taxes. I am going to ask the Congress to improve and to extend our social security. And depending on how successful we are in this election November 3d, we may ask the Congress to act on social security earlier than you think.

Four years ago we promised to get America moving again. We have honored that promise: America is moving.

Your vote in this election November 3d will decide whether to keep the engines of progress roaring forward or whether to throw them into reverse and turn sharply from the course they now follow.

I have faith in the American people. I believe that 3 1/2 weeks from now you will keep America steady, you will keep America safe, you will keep America on the high road to peace and increasing prosperity for all of our people.

We live in a world with more than 120 other nations. We live in a Nation with 50 States. We have our differences and we have our problems, and we never settle those differences or those problems with ultimatums. We don't intend to bury anyone in the world, but we don't intend to be buried, either.

We have stood firm with the Communists in the Tonkin Gulf and at Guantanamo. You will remember not many months after I took office when I was trying to unite the American people and asked them to come and help me carry on the job that President Kennedy had left. I was trying to bring neighbor and neighbor and brother and brother together, and Mr. Castro went out and cut off the water to our Guantanamo base. I got emotional appeals from all over the Nation. I got this wire from this section and this wire from this section, and people advocated moving immediately. One man even said, "Send in the Marines."

Well, I know a lot about the Marines. There is one of the greatest ones in the world right there on the platform--Paul Douglas. But we tried to evaluate the situation and carefully consider it, and we finally concluded that it would be wiser to send in one admiral to cut the water off instead of a bunch of Marines to turn it on.

We believe that communism is the wave of the past, and freedom is the wave of the future.

In Latin America communism has been on the run--in Chile, in Brazil. And the rest of the hemisphere has isolated Castro in Cuba, and more than 350,000 of his people have fled their homeland.

No, we must have peace and prosperity in this country. Arthur Vandenberg worked with President Truman for a two-party foreign policy and a bipartisan foreign policy. Lyndon Johnson, as Democratic leader, worked with Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican President, to present a united front before the world. Bourke Hickenlooper worked with John Kennedy to try to make our foreign policy nonpartisan.

And I ask all of you, Democrats and Republicans, and whatnots--and, if you please, good Americans first of all--to realize that we are living in a critical era, in a difficult period, which will test our patience and our judgment. And we must keep our guard up, but we must keep our hand out. We must be strong enough to defend America and that flag wherever it may be challenged, but we must not go around over the world rattling our rockets and threatening our bombs.

So realize that you have one of the most priceless privileges that human beings anywhere have. You have the right to vote. Now go exercise it November 3d. Go vote for peace and prosperity.

I could spend all afternoon recommending myself, but I am not going to do that. I am going to recommend this to you: You study this matter, you look at the record, you listen to the statements, and then you go and do not what is best for the Democrats, not what is best for the Republicans, but you go and do what you know in your heart is best for America.

This has been a delightful afternoon. I want to thank all of you for your wonderful courtesy. I want to ask you to give me your help, give me your hand, give me your prayers in the job that I am trying so hard to do. If you will do that, we will have the greatest victory for good government and for all the American people on November 3d that you ever read about in all American history.