To Prevent an Ugly America THE GREAT SOCIETY BY LYNDON B. JOHNSON I HAVE COME today from the turmoil of your capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak about the future of your country. The purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation. For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century, we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life-and to advance the quality of American civilization. Your imagination, your initiative, your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society LYNDON B. JOHNSON (LL.D. '64), born in a small cottage near Stonewall, Texas, now lives in a large house on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation's most carefully planned and beautiful city. This is President Johnson's commencement address at The University of Michigan on May 22, 1964, at what seems to have been the world's largest academic ceremony and President Johnson's largest audience-about 90,000 people. John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard, concerned as President Johnson is, about cities dying in the middle and spilling into the countryside, has urged that everyone begin by reading this address. The rumor that British economist Barbara Ward had a hand in the writing (Business Week, May 20, 1964) is unfounded. and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice-to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and 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 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. I want to talk to you today about three places where we can begin to build the great society-in our cities, in our countryside and in our classrooms. Many of you will live to see the day, fifty years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans; four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban populations 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. In the next forty years we must rebuild 230
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