Message Opening the United Community Campaigns of America.

[Recorded on tape and film]

My Fellow Citizens:

My talk has to do with a strictly domestic matter. Between now and Thanksgiving Day the United Community Campaigns of America will be held. In one town the campaign may be called the United Community Chest; in another, the United Fund or the United Crusade. The names differ, but the one word and the one purpose that all have in common is "united."

The campaigns are united in support of some twenty-one thousand voluntary health, welfare and youth agencies--including the USO, and in many cities, the Red Cross and national causes such as Heart, Cancer and Crippled Children. They ask your help, not through twenty-one thousand separate competitive appeals, but through one annual appeal in each city. Together they constitute the biggest single voluntary cause in our nation.

In addition to the many health services they support, these United Community agencies help social scientists study the cause and cure of family break-downs that wreck homes, hurt children, waste life. They work to prevent and thus to end the plague of juvenile delinquency--and adult delinquency too, may I add. And they constantly wage war against the virus of prejudice, bigotry and inhumanity. They are doing their job the united way because man is a united being. Such an appeal calls for a united response.

So, when the volunteer campaigner knocks at our doors and at our hearts, I urge that we all unite to give him a neighborly welcome.

Thank you very much.