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
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