Remarks at a National Conference of Cooperative Organizations.

Secretary Freeman, Secretary Wirtz, ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate very much your welcome. My coming here brought a great deal of enthusiasm from my Cabinet. They are all rather insistent that I come early and stay late because we have a Cabinet meeting scheduled at 12 o'clock. Some of them want to put it off as long as they can.

It was about 100 years ago when a visitor to our very young country at that time commented on what he believed to be a remarkable American trait.

De Tocqueville said, "The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries .... Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association."

As we meet here this morning, these associations have pervaded every facet of our American life. Some of the best of these associations are referred to today as cooperatives.

I have observed in my years of public service that the cooperatives represent some of the best in America.

They represent initiative at its most creative-groups of people joining together for a common goal, combining their labor together to bring themselves what we all seek most--a better way of life.

They represent a deep belief in the potential of our country, in the future of America, as a land where we want to see no one go hungry, or lack for medical care, or clothes, or be driven off of his land.

In the past 3 years, I am told that 133 cooperative credit unions have been organized by low-income families in depressed rural areas as well as the city slums.

These credit unions are offering fair rates of interest. They are trying to lead and to teach our people how to save. They are helping them take the first steps toward responsibility and ultimately toward financial independence.

In Clarksdale, Mississippi, for example, a young mother came to the credit union with a problem. She had bought a stove and agreed to pay $17 a month on it--one-third of her total income. The credit union officers showed her that she was paying 35 percent interest.

The credit union loaned her the money to pay for the stove, and now she is making payments that she can afford--although it is rather high, at 12 percent interest.

Small farmers are banding together in cooperatives to market their crops, to get fair credit, to buy supplies.

Near Sunset, Louisiana, a co-op was formed to market sweet potatoes. Year before last the average net income was $2,300. Last season, the co-op got the farmer $900 more for his potatoes. That $900 pulled him up barely across the poverty threshhold into our more affluent American society.

These cooperatives are holding open the door of economic opportunity to the family farmer. They are making it possible for some of them to stay on the farm rather than be forced to migrate to a distant and alien city.

In eastern Ohio, 120 farm families were ready to call it quits. Their hills were covered with brush--no fit pasture for their livestock. As a last ditch effort, they organized a co-op. They borrowed money. They bought two bulldozers, a heavy disk and a seeder, and then they seeded their land.

Now these families are trying to stick it out. They are on their way, I believe, to a satisfying and rewarding life.

Cooperatives in cities are assuring more Americans proper medical treatment. Members of the Seattle health cooperative prepay their doctors, so they are not reluctant to consult them early and often. As a result of this preventive medicine, co-op members spend less than half the number of days in the hospital as other Seattle residents.

Cooperatives are instilling a sense of belonging, a sense of proprietorship, a sense of responsibility in all of our citizens.

During the riots in Detroit, two racially integrated housing cooperatives in the center of the burned area were patrolled by their coop members. Not a windowpane was shattered, and not a building was burned.

So, I am glad to be able to take this time this morning to come here to salute you and to participate with you in recognizing and in celebrating Co-Op Month, 1967. The cooperatives play a vital part in building a better land, in building a better country, in building a better America.

"The highest and the best form of efficiency," as Woodrow Wilson once said, "is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people."

We get spontaneous cooperation nowhere better than we get it from a co-op.

It leads in many directions--in a better spiritual life, better health, better education, better bodies, and better minds.

We join them because we want to get more for our dollar when we buy, and we want to get more for our product when we sell.

When we borrow, we want to get it at as low a rate as possible.

All of those things motivate us to belong to the cooperative.

But after we do belong, there are many fringe benefits. From those fringe benefits come a stronger country and a better country.

And with all of our martyrdom, with all of our complaints, with all of our sufferings, our inconveniences, our discriminations, our setbacks, our reverses, and our frustrations, I think that all of us have good enough judgment to know that we are on the way, that we are moving, that we are getting better every day. Things are really relative after all.

Where is the society, where is the plot of land, where is the form of government that you would like to exchange on even terms for ours?

Sometimes our country is like our family. We reserve the right to express ourselves quite freely. But when we come to finding someone better in the kitchen, or a son or a daughter that we would like to trade for someone else, it is another matter.

So, I say to you that I am very proud of the cooperative movement in this country, and not just what it gives us in immediate dollar benefits, but in the fringe benefits that have contributed a great deal, I think, to making this Nation and this system the envy of all the world.

Go back and get with it, and keep at it.

Thank you.