Lyndon B. Johnson photo

Remarks to Representatives of National Fraternal Organizations.

September 22, 1967

Distinguished Government officials, heads of fraternal organizations, ladies and gentlemen:

When Mich Cieplinski told me that we would have an opportunity to meet here today I was very pleased.

Earlier this week on television, Eric Hoffer said: "America is the only new thing in history."

In a great many ways, I think those of us in this room this afternoon prove that. We-or our parents or our ancestors--have come here from every continent.

In my own State of Texas today there are more than 25 foreign-language newspapers and magazines that are regularly published. Many are written in Spanish because of our large Mexican-American population. In Texas--a State that is supposedly far removed from the big-city ethnic groups-there are also publications in German, Czech, Italian, Swedish, and French.

But America is not only different because its people come from so many different places. America has a different view of people themselves. And people view themselves differently if they live here in America. When we talk about the "American way of life" we are talking about the prevalent belief in this country that every man ought to be able to make as much of himself as he can or as he wants to.

It was that belief that brought us here over three centuries ago. Men came to America to see what they could make of themselves. That bedrock belief still motivates every aspect of our national behavior. That is why the organizations that you ladies and gentlemen represent have worked so hard for better education, for better health, and for better security.

All that effort--on your part and to some extent on your Government's part has been toward just one end: to free men from the tyrants who seek to control men. Some tyrants are political; and we take up arms against them. But there are other tyrants: ignorance, ill health, poverty, and discrimination. Each of these tyrants has the power to enslave people. Each must be fought by a decent society. Each can and will be overcome.

We have a tremendous confidence in this country in ourselves--in our capacity to surmount any obstacles, to remove any injustice, to settle any issue.

But sometimes, when violence breaks out in our cities or when a conflict overseas continues without any sign of an early resolution, we have to go back to first principles-and we have to go back to the true history of the American experience.

I have an opportunity to do that this afternoon and I am going to exercise it.

The lesson of that history is that it has never really been very easy to protect freedom. It has never been easy to move forward and to achieve progress for humanity.

In every war that we have ever fought there have been passionate voices crying out that the engagement was unwise, that what we might accomplish was really not worth the price that we were called upon to pay.

A good many of you in this room may remember those voices in the thirties--when the Axis powers were on the march, gobbling up Europe.

You may remember them in 1947, when Greece and Turkey were threatened by Communist conquest.

You may remember them in 1948, when the roads to Berlin were being closed.

You may remember them in 1950, when the North Korean Army smashed across the 38th parallel, and again in 1962 when the missiles were brought into Cuba.

You hear them now as we meet here, as Communist power threatens the life of little South Vietnam.

There are no South Vietnamese fraternal organizations among us this afternoon. They are not represented here.

But I tell you this--and I tell you as sincerely and I believe it as deeply as I believe anything in the world--that the stand that America is making in that little country now is just as important to you as the stand that we made in your parents' and in your grandparents' homelands in the years past.

Of course, there is a great price for engaging in the struggle for Vietnam. There was a price that we paid in Europe, too, in the 1940's. There was a price in Korea in the 1950's.

There were prices paid all through the islands of the Pacific in the dark days of World War II.

The question is always whether it is worth paying the price. I say it is.

I say that the price of Communist conquest in Southeast Asia, of risking a third world war by our failure to stand in Vietnam now, is a far heavier price to pay.

I do not minimize the price that we are paying today. The loss of American lives has brought grief to many homes and dismay to every heart.

Only last night I wrote a letter to a father who had five sons in the service of the United States, two of whom had been taken from him in Vietnam in this battle. He had paid the price. He knew what it was, but he wasn't complaining.

Their sacrifice, I deeply believe, will make the greater war and the far heavier price much less likely in the years to come.

I said that it is never easy or inexpensive to protect freedom. Neither has it been easy to extend the promise of America to all of her peoples and to all of her races.

Your forebears who came to America in the last century knew that as well as any child of the slum knows it today.

At the beginning of this century, when social observers talked about slums, crime, and the tragedy of rural training for an urban life, they were then talking about the Poles, the Jews, the Hungarians, and the Czechs.

Many people feared that the new immigrants who crowded into the tenements and the teeming streets of our cities then-straining our social services, speaking a strange brand of English, certainly doomed forever to the lowest forms of menial labor-just never would make it in America.

There were too many obstacles, too many shortcomings in them, too much resistance among those who had already made it themselves.

And there were some who even said it might not be worth the price you had to pay.

But look what happened. Look at their children today and look at their grandchildren sharing in America's abundance and giving to America's richness.

There were hard times for the early immigrants to the cities. There were terrible, despairing times. But they made it, and we made it, because we did not give way to despair, and to gloom, and to the violence that fosters it.

And just as surely, today's immigrants to modern America--the Negroes, the Spanish-Americans and the Puerto Ricans--are going to make it.

In part, they are going to make it because the rest of us, acting through our Government, or acting privately, are going to help these people get on their feet so that they may make the long march that so many others have made to freedom and prosperity.

They are going to help make it on their own.

That is the oldest and the finest of all of America's traditions.

The Homestead Act gave land to those who wanted it.

The Morrill Act set up the land-grant colleges so that Americans could get an inexpensive higher education.

Sixty years ago, in every major American city, we saw settlement houses and English classes for immigrants. Today, in that identical tradition, your Government presses forward, with your help and your support, for job training programs, Head Start, poverty programs, and many other programs to let Americans grow to their full stature, share in the American promise, and contribute to the common good.

No one, I think, has described our faith better than the Hungarian patriot, Louis Kossuth, back in 1851, when he had this to say:

"We hear a good deal from certain quarters about the greatness of races, the practical energy of this race, the artistic genius of the other, and the great intellectual qualities of another. America disproves all these dogmas and establishes in their stead, the higher principle that all races are capable of noble development under noble institutions."

So, my good friends, let me just conclude by saying this: That is what we are all about. And if it is the only new thing in history, it may very well be also the best.

Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 5:35 p.m. in the East Room at the White House. During his remarks he referred to Michel Cieplinski, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Administration.

The group consisted of approximately 250 heads of national fraternal organizations, many of them established to provide social, economic, and educational benefits for immigrants and their families.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks to Representatives of National Fraternal Organizations. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/237613

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