Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Remarks at a Reception for the New Democrats in Congress.

December 09, 1964

I AM PROUD to welcome you tonight to your house--the house of all the people.

You are welcome here, not as partisans but--always and only--as Americans. I confess, however, that it is gratifying that the American people, in their wisdom, have chosen to send to the Congress so many able, outstanding, forward-looking Americans who happen also to be Democrats.

You have had a busy day. I am sure you are ready now to relax and enjoy your evening. But I must inform you now that is not the purpose of this meeting.

When the cherry blossoms are in bloom, we hope to have you and your wives here with us for a sociable evening. Tonight, however, we have planned a working session-because you and I and all of us are here to work, to work for 190 million American people and free men everywhere.

In coming to Washington, as you are now, you are tracing steps I myself once walked-as a 27-year-old new Member of the House. From that experience, under President Franklin Roosevelt, I acquired a lasting insight into the great importance and value of close associations and understandings between the newest Members of the House and their President.

I am hopeful that from this night forward many strong and warm friendships will grow between us--that we here at the White House and in the executive branch will be able to help you in an understanding way-and that you might be of some understanding help to us, from time to time.

Will Rogers once made a very wise observation. He said: "We are a funny people. We elect our Presidents, be they Republican or Democrat, and then go home and start daring 'era to make good."

That has been true in the past. I hope that is less true now. I believe all of us-whether public servants or private citizens-recognize that we are all on the same team together, that the issue of our times is not what a President accomplishes but whether America succeeds or fails.

Today our system, our society--and our Government, of which you are soon to be part--stand as the most successful in the history of man.

Our task--yours and mine--is to assure the continuation of that success, for all times to Come.

This is no small challenge. Small men with small horizons could never be adequate to that challenge. For the times we are entering require of us all a largeness of vision, a largeness of spirit, a largeness of goals and aims that have not been required since the first Americans.

On January 20th, when I shall be privileged to take the oath of this office, we will be closer to the year 2000 than to the year 1929. Through most of my career--and through most of your adult lives--the thrust of our public policies and attitudes has been dominated by memory of the stock market crash, the great depression, and the events of the 1930's that led back to recovery.

In the next session of the next Congress, I believe our thrust and emphasis must change--and will change. We must begin to think about the future--about the year 2000--about the foundations we must put in place for a larger, more complex, more challenging America for our children and our children's children.

Your first Congress will be an historic Congress.

You--as much as any legislators since this Republic began--will be part of vital history for this land.

As Woodrow Wilson said, in his first inaugural, we shall not be writing on a clean sheet of paper. We have trusts to keep. We have obligations to honor. We have continuity to preserve. But, at the same time, we cannot fulfill our trust merely as trustees and executors of decisions made before by other Americans in other times.

We shall need to be--as Americans have always been--prudent and practical in what we undertake. But we shall also need those qualities always so much a part of American success--the qualities of courage, adventure, confidence, and a willingness to explore new domains.

For we shall not always be able to walk along marked trails or follow guideposts others have put in place for us. In a new day of new dimensions and new opportunities, we shall need to be trailblazers and pioneers--in the oldest and finest of our society's traditions.

I welcome this opportunity to work with you in this historic period. I hope this will be the first of many useful, profitable, and friendly meetings we shall have together-and that the separation of powers under our Constitution will not apply to our personal relations and understandings.

If I may quote him again, Will Rogers also said that "A Democrat never adjourns--he is born, becomes of voting age and starts right in arguing over something, and his political adjournment is his date with the undertaker."

So I don't want to adjourn this meeting of Democrats, but before I conclude, let me repeat for you a viewpoint which I think is a classic in the history of the House you are soon to enter.

More than 50 years ago, on May 6, 1913, a new Congressman from the State of Texas stood in the well of the House and spoke for the first time. The journal of that day records his words as follows: "It is now my sole purpose here to help enact such wise and just laws that our common country will by virtue of these laws be a happier and a more prosperous country. I have always dreamed of a country which I believe this should be and will be, and that is one in which the citizenship is an educated and patriotic people, not swayed by passion and prejudice, and a country that knows no East, no West, no North, no South, but inhabited by a people liberty-loving, patriotic, happy and prosperous; with its lawmakers having no other purpose than to write such just laws as shall in the years to come be of service to humankind yet unborn."

That philosophy served that Member well--and served this country greatly. For the man who spoke those words was the man who meant so much to me, to Speaker McCormack, to John Kennedy, and to many generations of American leaders. That man was the gentleman from Bonham, Tex.--the late beloved Speaker Sam Rayburn.

Note: The President spoke early in the evening in the East Room at the White House.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks at a Reception for the New Democrats in Congress. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241307

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