Lyndon
Baines Johnson, The Great Society
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 it 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. . . .
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 rebuild the entire
urban United States. . . .
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 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. . . .
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. . . .
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.