Remarks at City Hall, McKeesport, Pennsylvania

Senator Clark, Governor Lawrence, Dick Dilworth, Mrs. Elmer Holland, Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen:

The first time I came to this city was in 1947, when Mr. Richard Nixon and I engaged in our first debate. He won that one, and we went on to other things. We came here on that occasion to debate the Taft-Hartley law, which he was for and which I was against. Since 1947, which was the first year of the 80th Congress, I have had an opportunity to examine with some care and some interest the record of the Republican Party, and I can tell you, in case you don't know it, that it is opposed, year in, year out, in the administration of Harry Truman in 1947, in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930's, in the administration-in my administration.

In my administration, I can tell you they are still against progress, they are still against those pieces of legislation which make it possible for the average citizen to own his home, to be sure of his job, to educate his child, to have security in his old age. And that's why I am here in this community, 16 years later, still debating Mr. Nixon and his confreres on which party should hold office in 1962 and in this decade. So I come here and ask your help for the Democratic Party.

Now, as I said last night, in the last 21 months Pennsylvania was probably, with West Virginia, the hardest hit State from technological unemployment. Every generation and every presidential administration faces different problems. In the 1930's Franklin Roosevelt's problem was chronic, high unemployment, averaging nearly 9 million out of a relatively small working force. His great problem was how to put those people back to work.

Harry Truman had different problems: the postwar world. And where Franklin Roosevelt's primary concern in the thirties was here in the United States, President Truman's responsibilities ran around the globe. In the 1950's, President Eisenhower had different responsibilities from those of President Truman.

In 1962 our responsibilities are entirely different than they were in the thirties, the forties, or the fifties. Where Franklin Roosevelt worked here at home in the thirties, where President Truman held office during a period of relative prosperity and during a time of nuclear superiority, where President Eisenhower held office at a period when nuclear majority and superiority began to change somewhat, we hold office with Latin America facing tremendous problems, with a wholly newly independent Africa, with the Communists on the move in Asia, with Western Europe beginning to build an entirely different kind of economy, with we in the United States facing the problem of how to keep our people at work during these periods of recurrent recession.

Every generation faces different problems and every generation must come up with new solutions. The question which I ask you, not as a partisan matter, but just as a question of what kind of a country you want, and what kind of actions you wish this country to take, and what you see as the responsibility of your National Government, which party, based not on what speeches I may make or other candidates may make of both parties, during a period of 4 or 5 weeks before election, but which party, day in and day out, year in and year out, for the past 30 years has stood for those things that make it possible for this country to be prosperous. I believe that the Democratic Party does, and I believe the Republican Party--that's what we have to decide.

Can you tell me one single piece of progressive legislation of benefit to the people of this country that the Republican Party has sponsored in 30 years? Because if you can't, I can tell you a hundred pieces of legislation that they've opposed--from the beginning of the right of labor to organize, and social security and minimum wage, and housing legislation, and all the rest that make it possible for us to produce a better life for our people.

That's what this campaign is all about. It's not bands or balloons or cheering. It's a judgment as to what you want this country to do in 1962, because the kind of House and Senate you elect will hold office in 1963 and '64, and will make a judgment as to whether it will accept and support and pass legislation which we need for this State and country to go ahead.

And I think that in this case you have distinguished candidates in this State: Elmer Holland, who wrote one of the most important pieces of legislation in the last 10 years, and that is legislation to retrain men and women who have worked in one industry which has moved away, who are unemployed, who've exhausted their unemployment compensation, who can't find a new job--to make it possible for them to be retrained so that they can work. The Congressman from this district wrote this legislation and passed it, and I was proud to sign it. And he's on the job in Washington today, in the House of Representatives, Elmer Holland.

And Joe Clark, who drafted the Area Redevelopment Act and the Public Works Act, and who has stood on issue after issue of benefit to the people of this State and country. One month ago, just to indicate what I think is the very clear contrast, we had a bill before the Ways and Means Committee to provide supplemental unemployment compensation for the 100,000 people in this country who every month exhaust their unemployment compensation and can't find a job. That bill came up in the committee and every Republican on the committee, joined by 3 Democrats, voted against it and killed it by a vote of 13 to 12. That's what the issue is in this campaign, and I think Senator Clark believes in progress.

This State already has one Republican Senator. Can you tell me why it needs two Republican Senators to speak for Pennsylvania? So I'm confident you're going to elect Senator Clark to serve this State and country again.

And I hope that you're going to elect as a distinguished Governor, a former mayor of Philadelphia, a marine who served in World War I, and who served in Guadalcanal in World War II, who is the kind of progressive, experienced legislator that this State, one of our great industrial States, is going to need.

For example, in the last 10 years Pennsylvania, which used to be one of the great defense manufacturers in this country, found itself washed out, while all the new defense industry went to those parts of the country where industry and universities and government had worked to make it possible for them to secure contracts. Working with Governor Lawrence since 1960, we have increased by 50 percent the number of prime defense contracts that come to Pennsylvania, job retraining, cleaning our rivers, area redevelopment, increasing our food supplies for those on relief--all these measures which can be brought about with a progressive, Democratic Governor, working with all of us.

So I'm hopeful that you're going to elect in this State Dick Dilworth to be Governor of Pennsylvania.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for coming to a rally at 10:30 in the morning. There's a great myth around that all politicians love to go out and make speeches and to engage in politics. It isn't true at all; I come here not because I enjoy driving around the countryside and making speeches, but because I have lived for 21 months with a closely divided Congress, where we have lost measures like medical care under Social Security by a change of 1 vote in the Senate; where I've seen higher education defeated by 28 votes; where I almost saw a minimum wage bill defeated, where I almost saw a housing bill defeated, where I saw a farm bill defeated by 3, 4, and 5 votes, and because I believe that this world will not be strong and free unless the United States is strong and free. And it cannot be strong and free unless the executive, and the President, and the Congress are committed to this kind of progress, and it involves your welfare and the welfare of your children, and most especially those who come after us.

We are the beneficiaries of the New Deal. I want to be sure in the 1970's that there are the people of this country who are the beneficiaries of what we did on the New Frontiers of 1962.

Thank you.