Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Program for Rural America.

January 25, 1966

To the Congress of the United States:

Last year in my message on Agriculture I described poverty's grip on rural America:

--nearly half of the poor in the United States live in rural areas.

--almost one in every two rural families has a cash income under $3,000.

--one-fourth of rural non-farm homes are without running water.

--rural people lag almost two years behind urban residents in educational attainment.

--health facilities in rural areas are so inadequate that rural children receive one-third less medical attention than urban children.

These deficiencies persist in 1966. Their effect is grievous on urban America--the recipient of millions of unskilled migrants from rural areas in the past two decades. It is tragic on the run-down farms and impoverished communities that still house 4.4 million poor rural families.

ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

Last year I directed

--each Department and agency administering a program that could benefit rural people, to assure that its benefits were distributed equitably between urban and rural areas.

--the Secretary of Agriculture and the Director of the Budget to review the administrative obstacles that might stand in the way of such a distribution.

--the Secretary of Agriculture to put his field offices to the task of assisting other Federal agencies in making their programs effective in rural areas.

As a result, the Rural Community Development Service was created and charged with assuring that the Department made that assistance available.

This mission of the Department is now firmly established in practice. Its field personnel are active in informing rural people of their eligibility for medicare, and of its requirements. They work with the Economic Development Administration in planning and encouraging new rural industrial developments. In several pilot counties, concerted projects are underway. The Departments of Labor, HEW, and Agriculture are joined in a common effort to bring social services to poor rural communities. The water and sewer facilities program has been simplified. They have been made more responsive to the needs of small towns and communities.

The Office of Economic Opportunity has increased its efforts in rural areas. Community Action Programs are underway in a number of rural counties

--supporting community action planning, --providing remedial reading courses, vocational instruction, and adult education,

--and assisting small cooperatives to acquire farm machinery. These programs have inspired a new sense of hope among the rural Americans who have experienced them.

More--much more--needs to be done if their effects are to reach the dispersed but very real pockets of rural poverty throughout America.

THE NEED FOR PLANNING

Legislation enacted by the first Session of this Congress, and in prior years, provides the means for a massive attack on poverty in America.

But--even with the help of these great new programs--too few rural communities are able to marshal sufficient physical, human, and financial resources to achieve a satisfactory level of social and economic development.

The central advantage of the city has been a large and concentrated population to provide the leadership and technical capability. This leadership can achieve economies of scale in operations, to provide adequate public services and facilities for its people.

On the other hand, it is difficult, if not impossible for every small hamlet to offer its own complete set of public services. Nor is it economic for the small city to try to achieve metropolitan standards of service, opportunity, and culture, without relation to its rural environs.

The related interests of each need to be taken into account in planning for the public services and economic development of the wider community. In this way the benefits of creative Federalism can be brought to our rural citizens--in small cities as well as its rural neighbors.

WHAT MIGHT BE DONE

The base exists for such coordinated planning.

New communities are coming into being-stimulated by advanced means of travel and communications. Because of these it is possible to extend to people in the outlying rural areas a richer variety of public services, and of economic and cultural opportunities.

Resources must be combined--in larger areas, as well as rural and small urban communities. In a population base large enough to support a full range of efficient and high quality public services and facilities, we can achieve the conditions necessary for economic and social advance.

THE DIMENSIONS OF THE COMMUNITIES

The dimensions of an area within which residents should join to carry out integrated planning are likely to be already marked by the trading or commuting patterns,

In most such communities, the total population will be large enough, with enough potential users of each essential service, to justify employing competent full-time resident specialists in medical services, schools, and the like. In some such communities, where towns of even 10,000 are scarce, it may be more practical to provide major services to people at the outer limits through mobile facilities.

BENEFITS OF PLANNING

Coordinated planning can stimulate economic growth,

It can provide the economies of efficient public services--which attract business and industry,

It can make possible adequate vocational training. Rural workers who lack present job opportunities can become qualified for work in new and expanding industries within reach of their homes or farms.

It can provide the schools to spare young children the fate of their fathers. Seventy-two percent of all poor rural families today are headed by persons who have finished only eight years of schooling or less.

It can greatly enlarge the effectiveness of public and private resources.

It can ensure that programs will comprise a logical and comprehensive effort to solve the community's interrelated problems at minimum cost.

It can bring us closer to achieve a more beautiful, more livable rural America. An increasing combination of local, State, and Federal resources is already beginning to transform the countryside. This cooperation is making multiple uses possible for production, for outdoor recreation, and for the restoration of natural beauty. Planning can help make this beneficence a pan of the lives of millions of urban Americans.

Above all, planning is an affirmative act. It signifies the willingness of rural men and women to make their part of America a place of hope. Rural America need not be a wasteland from which the young, however ill-prepared, flee to the cities. It does not have to be a place where live only those too old, too poor, too defeated to seek other horizons.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT DISTRICTS

I propose that we show how broad-based planning can inspire the people of rural America to unite the resources of their rural governments and small cities.

I propose this union to improve the quality of life for the citizens of both.

I propose that we assist in the establishment of a number of Community Development Districts to carry out, under local initiative, such comprehensive planning.

The boundaries of Community Development Districts will correspond to the normal commuting or trading patterns of the rural and city residents.

Planning activities for the District will be performed under the direction of representatives selected by each of the participating county or municipal governments. They will be responsible for planning the coordination of all governmental development and service functions within the District.

Federal grants would be provided:

1. For District-wide planning of public services and governmental functions where other Federal planning assistance is not available; and

2. For District-wide coordination of local planning activities with Federal programs and private initiatives, in a comprehensive attack on rural community problems.

The Secretary of Agriculture will certify that the area has met the requirements for designation as a Community Development District. Selection of the pilot districts will be made to afford experience in a representative variety of geographic, economic, and social conditions. Funds will be requested to augment those presently available for planning grants.

Federal assistance would help to support:

--coordinated and comprehensive planning for all public services, development programs, and governmental Junctions within the District,

--a continuing liaison with Federal and State agencies,

--a comprehensive survey of resources and needs within the District, such as labor skills, industrial sites, land and water resources, health care, education, cultural opportunities, and public services.

Thus the scope of planning to be supported would extend beyond physical development. It would encompass as well the social and economic needs of the area, and its potential for growth.

Each agency of the government charged with administering a program relevant to these needs will be requested to cooperate with the Community Development Districts. For example, a comprehensive survey of medical conditions in the area would be undertaken by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The Teacher Corps-which I again urge the Congress to support at a level commensurate with its promise-would be asked to make teams available for the Districts. The Department of Agriculture will offer a concerted emphasis in its resource development programs within the pilot Districts.

The purpose of the planning effort I recommend is to assist these Districts to achieve significant economies of scale and rational use of resources. This achievement can lift them, and their peoples, above their present level of development.

Our purpose is to demonstrate how a common effort can provide the needed district vocational school in one county, the hospital in another, the police training in a third, industry or an adequate library in a fourth. This effort can avoid the waste of duplication--or worse still, the total lack of such facilities or services because of a failure to pool common resources.

Our purpose is not to supplant present efforts of local, State or Federal governments. Our purpose is to supplement them. Then we do not forsake the small community, but help to avoid under-representation in decisions that affect its life.

MEDICAL NEEDS

Rural families share with the urban poor a greater need for modern medical services. Infant mortality and infectious disease rates are higher, life expectancy is lower, and the need for chronic illness care is just as prevalent. Yet rural families have had less access to physicians, with rural States averaging only a third the number of physicians per person as the heavily populated urban States. The continuing decline in the per capita number of physicians, therefore, strikes harder at rural families.

The beneficial effects of recent legislation, providing for more extensive professional relationships between rural hospitals and urban medical centers; the improved schooling that will soon be available in rural areas; improved roads and transportation--all will reduce the difficulty in recruiting physicians for rural areas by increasing the professional and educational opportunities available to them.

Nevertheless, we are not recruiting sufficient numbers of medical students from the families of the urban poor and rural areas. We need a financial incentive that will make it possible for children of these families to undertake a medical career. At the same time we need to draw upon medical students from other areas to settle in rural medical practice.

I shall soon propose, therefore, that a loan forgiveness program modeled upon the National Defense Education Act Amendments of 1965 be applied to medical students who choose to practice in poor rural areas.

RURAL POVERTY

The efforts of five Administrations have provided some relief for hundreds of thousands of poor families who remain on small farms and in rural communities. Yet the old task remains undone: to end the travail of unemployed and under-employed men; to teach their children the skills they must have to prosper in a competitive society; to provide enough food, adequate shelter, and decent medical care for their families, and to help them achieve freedom from want and fear in their later years.

I do not believe we should stand idly by and permit our rural citizens to be ground into poverty--exposing them, unassisted and unencouraged, to the neglect of a changing society. Few other elements of our population are so treated by our humane and progressive people.

Yet I believe we need the counsel of those best qualified by experience and understanding of rural America's problems, to help us chart our course of assistance to her poor.

Consequently I shall soon appoint a Commission on Rural Poverty, whose task it will be to make recommendations to me, within one year of its appointment, on the most efficient and promising means of sharing America's abundance with those who have too often been her forgotten people.

Rural poverty has proved an almost intractable problem in past decades. Its abolition may require a journey of a thousand miles.

But the first step in that journey is the pooling of the common resources of rural Americans--joining them in a common planning effort that will magnify the resources of each.

In the program I propose, I ask the Congress to take that step with me today.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

The White House

January 25, 1966

Note: The text of a draft bill, transmitted with the President's message and entitled "Community Development District Act of 1966," was also made public. It is printed in House Document 367 (89th Cong., 2d sess.). The bill passed the Senate and was reported out favorably by the House Agriculture Committee. No final action was taken by the House (2 Weekly Comp. Pres. Does., p. 1547).

On September 27, 1966, the President approved Executive Order 11306 "Establishing the President's Committee on Rural Poverty and the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty" (2 Weekly Comp. Pres. Docs., p. 1373; 31 F.R. 12769; 3 CFR, 1966 Comp., p. 153).

For the President's special message to the Congress on agriculture of February 4, 1965, see 1965 volume, this series, Book I, Item 47.

See also Item 29.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Program for Rural America. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/238711

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