Shriver job corps advanced training

28.1. STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY, THE PORT HURON STATEMENT (1962) AND AN APPEAL TO STUDENTS (1964)

In 1962, University of Michigan student Tom Hayden drafted the Port Huron State- ment, the first official document of the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In it, SDS criticized hypocritical and unjust aspects of post–World War II U.S. society. SDS’s presence grew on campuses across the country in 1964 and 1965. Copies of the Port Huron Statement circulated widely, along with appeals to join SDS. The appeal to students appeared on the back cover of the second printing of the Port Huron Statement (December 1964).

THE PORT HURON STATEMENT

INTRODUCTION: AGENDA FOR A GENERATION

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence through- out the world. Freedom and equality for each indi- vidual, government of, by, and for the people—these American values we found good, principles by which

we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the perme- ating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial big- otry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbol- ized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of ab- stract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might delib- erately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too im- mediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the respon- sibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration “all men are created equal . . . ” rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful in- tentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nation-states seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth’s physi- cal resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than “of, by, and for the people.”

APPEAL TO STUDENTS

Students for a Democratic Society! SDS is a movement of young people who study and participate in daily struggles for social change. Com- mitted to change in many spheres of society, SDS members, in chapters, projects, and as individuals:

• Organize the dispossessed in community move- ments for economic gains. During the summer of

1964, one hundred and fifty students provided the full-time staffs for 10 community projects in the urban North—40 of them continuing full-time in the fall. Movements of welfare mothers, the unem- ployed, tenants, and others have been organized around their particular grievances.

• Participate in activity for peace through protest, research, education, and community organization. SDS organized protests and proposed peaceful so- lutions during the Cuba and Vietnam crises; spon- sors peace research among students; and is under- taking pilot efforts to organize defense workers for economic conversion.

• Work for civil rights through direct action, publica- tion, and support of the Student Nonviolent Coor- dinating Committee. SDS projects in Chester, Pa., and Newark, N.J., serve as models for Negro move- ments in the North due to their mass support.

• Inject controversy into a stagnant educational sys- tem. SDS participated in the mass demonstrations and organized national support for free speech at Berkeley; pioneered in the introduction of peace courses into college curricula; and initiated the union organization of student employees at the U. of Michigan.

• Support political insurgents, such as Noel Day in Boston, in the fight for a government that would promote social justice. SDS produces studies of the political and electoral situation.

Won’t you join?

28.2. SARGENT SHRIVER, JOB CORPS COSTS (1965)

Many Great Society programs drew criticism for their high costs. Sargent Shriver, the Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the government’s coordinating body for the War on Poverty, defends the Job Corps, a program designed to employ and train for work poor and poorly educated young people.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR JOB CORPS COSTS

A news report in your paper recently made an adverse comparison between the total costs to the Govern- ment of providing 12 months of basic vocational and citizenship training to our disadvantaged youths in residential training centers under the United States Job Corps and the costs only to the student of an academic year at Harvard University. The dollar costs in these two cases are not compar- able, and not much else in the comparison is relevant. The comparison, in fact, is superficial, invidious and inaccurate. Harvard students are among the most brilliant, self-reliant, and highly trained youth our Nation can produce. Thousands of dollars have been invested in their education before they ever get to Harvard. Most of them come from good schools and good families, and have lived in communities where much training and preparation has been given to them. The very at- mosphere they breathe is helpful to them. They are getting advanced training at the top of our academic system. Job Corps enrollees come from situations exactly the opposite. They have gotten the worst and cheapest training. Very little has been invested in them by their impoverished parents or by society. They frequently come from broken homes and physical environments conducive to everything but good work habits and good citizenship. The fact is that not only are they not qualified for Harvard; they are unqualified for any kind of job with a real future in America today. These differences would lead an objective critic to anticipate much higher costs for producing useful citi- zens out of Job Corps enrollees. Surprisingly, the Job Corps costs are significantly lower, per person, per year than the Harvard costs. At Harvard, according to a study made by Seymour Harris, the noted Harvard economist, in an article en- titled The Economics of Harvard, the tuition actually charged the student is only one third the educational cost to the University. The cost of tuition and room and board to the student at Harvard is $2890, accord- ing to the 1964 Official Register. Add to this cost to the student the factors outlined by Seymour Harris and you get $6410 per annum as the cost of an academic- year Harvard education. On the other hand, the total cost to the Govern- ment for a Job Corps enrollee for nine months is only $4650—about two thirds of the cost of a Harvard education, and this figure includes $1500 for allow- ances, travel, clothing and major medical expenses, which are not even included in the Harvard costs cited above. When these items are excluded, the cost of nine months in the Job Corps is only $3100, less than half the cost of nine months at Harvard. Furthermore, these cost estimates for Job Corps are figured on present enrollment plans and include ini- tial startup expenses. Once the program is in full-scale operation at full strength, these costs could easily drop substantially.

The real test for both a Harvard education and a Job Corps education is not how much it costs, how- ever, but how successful the graduates are. No one doubts that it is worth the cost of a Harvard educa- tion to produce outstanding businessmen, top college professors and leading Senators. I think it makes just as good sense to take a boy or girl who was born and raised in poverty and, as a result, faces adult life with- out the education and training needed to get a job, and provide that education and training through the Job Corps.

The real question for taxpayers to decide is not whether the Job Corps costs more or less than a Har- vard education, but whether it is worth investing tax

revenues in education and training to keep these young men and women off tomorrow’s relief rolls, and out of tomorrow’s courts, and get them into tomor- row’s ranks of productive citizens and taxpayers. That is what the Job Corps is all about.

SARGENT SHRIVER,

Director, Office of Economic Opportunity.

Washington.

28.4. VISUAL DOCUMENT: ASSOCIATED PRESS, BLACK POWER PROTEST AT THE 1968 MEXICO CITY OLYMPICS (1968)

At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, U.S. athletes Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right) raised their fists in the Black Power salute after winning the gold and bronze medals. Their demonstration led to their expulsion from the Games and subsequent ostracism by U.S. track and field officials.

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28.5. CESAR CHAVEZ, SPEECH AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY (1970)

In March 1970 Cesar Chavez, organizer of the four-year-old Delano Grape Strike, tells an audience at Harvard University of the hardships encountered by the men and women who were trying to organize California’s farm workers.

You know, we have had a long historical struggle in the fields of California to form unions. Very little has been recorded, very little has been written about it, because in most cases this struggle has been waged by immigrant groups. In many cases those groups made very little achievement, but for the last seven years there have been basic struggles to organize, and for seven years these attempts have been thwarted and broken by the overwhelming power of the employer groups. Today in Delano we have a group of men and women who have done outstanding work to try and liberate themselves through their collective action to get those things in life that other workers have had so long. They have gone to great expense and personal selfless dedication and work just to stay alive as a group. We ourselves frequently ask: What causes a man to give up his paycheck for forty-eight months—forty- nine months now—however small it may be, for the right to have a living? Or what would cause a woman striker to picket and demonstrate, peacefully and non- violently, and then be arrested as a common criminal? Or what would cause men and women in the struggle to suffer the painful separation from family and be sent across the country to all the major cities and Canada, to bring the word of the boycott and the struggle of the farm workers? We often ask ourselves: What would cause teenage boys and girls to [go to] school without a new pair of shoes or go to school with the same old clothes and do without noon lunch? What causes this greatest personal sacrifice? Why are they going insane? Or what would cause still little children who are too small to understand the struggle, to do without milk, to do without the basic necessities of life because their

parents are involved in what is getting to be perhaps the longest and, perhaps, we hope, the most success- ful strike of farm workers ever in the history of our country? We say that what causes this is what causes other people in other parts of the world and in our own country—a spirit of independence and freedom, the spirit that they want to change things and that they want to be independent and they want to be able to run their own lives. This is the cause why these workers are so willing to bear the sacrifices and all the personal suffering that go with the strike and boycott.

You know, organizing farm workers is very differ- ent from organizing any other workers in the country today. Here we don’t have any rules, any regulations. We don’t have any prescribed methods, no precedents. There is no law for farm labor organizing, save the law of the jungle. The citizens and their rights for seven years have been ignored and the employers have seen to it that they don’t survive. Agriculture in this country is not a family with a small plot of land. That is not agriculture, that is not where the fruits and the vegeta- bles, the nuts and the grapes are produced. They [are] produced in large factory farms, huge corporate farms. They themselves have adopted a new name: they call themselves “agrobusiness.”

It is against agro-business, in such combinations as they have going now with the Defense Department, that we have to deal. For we had cut the sales of grapes nationally thirty percent. The Defense Department, on the other hand, is increasing its purchases to the extent that they are now shipping to Vietnam eight hundred percent more grapes than they were in the beginning of the boycott. . . .

But it is no joke that the Defense Department is in a deal with agro-business for the sole purpose of breaking the strike. And the eight hundred percent only takes us to the end of the last fiscal year. As the report comes from the first quarter of this new fiscal year; we don’t know what the percentage may be. We can very well guess that it will probably be about a thousand percent. That means they are sending to Vietnam now about eight pounds of grapes per man. Imagine what happens over there when a fellow doesn’t like grapes gets that much!

But in the face of this overwhelming power, enough to wipe out literally any attempt of a group of people to organize, we will continue to work, we will con- tinue to spread our strike and boycott to many parts of the world. We have been able to enlist the support of the transport workers throughout the world, the sup- port of the metal-workers, all the labor movements in Canada and the labor movement here, the church sup- porting us in a manner to be marvelled at, and the lib- eral community. But it was not like this always. There was a time at the beginning of the strike when people

were afraid of us. There was a time at the beginning of the strike when we stood alone with the workers and when no one dared to come near us. No one dared to come near us because we were being red-baited. And it did not come to be what it is today, except for today, thank God—and we thank them a million times—the students who came to our support right from the be- ginning. So there is sympathy of the worker in this struggle for students whoever they may be.

Source: Cesar Chavez, An Organizer’s Tale: Speeches. New York: Penguin, 2008. 88–90.