Well, beginning now on American History tv, we continue with our series speeches that define the presidency. In this episode, well hear from two president S Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Lbj was president of the United States from 1963 to 1969, and during those turbulent years, he often invoked americas better angels in speeches. And he also talked about his vision of a Great Society. And he went to the statue of liberty to sign an immigration bill. After those, well hear fro Richard Nixon, 1969. Richard nixon talked about the great silent majority. And in 1974, he resigned from Office Beginning now. HereS Lyndon Johnson. President hatcher. Governor romney. Senators mcnamara and hart. Congressman meader and stabler. And other members of the pine michigan delegation. Members of the graduating class. My fellow americans, it is a great pleasure to be here today. This universe today has been coeducational. Since 1870, but i do not believe it was on theasis of your accomplishments that a Detroit High School girl said, and i quote, in choosing a college, you first have to decide wther you want a cducational school or an educational school. Well, we can find both here at michigan, although perhaps a different ours. I came out here today very anxious to meet the michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his sons education had been a real value. It stopped his mother from bragging about him. I have come today from the turmoil of your capital to the tranquility of your campus to spk about the future of your country. The purpose of protecting the life of ourion. And preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that purit is theof o success as a nation. For a century, we labored to settle and to subdue a continent for half a century. We called upon unborn added invention and untiring energy to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life. And to advance the quality of our American Civilization in your imagination and your initiative and your indignationd a society wheregress is the servant of our needs, our a society where old values and new s are buried under unbridled growth. So far, in your time, we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society, the Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and Racial Injustice to which were totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find dgto enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is e whe leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where a man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor or a resting place. A final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge. Constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor. So i want to talk to you today about three places where we began to build the Great Society in our cities and in our countryside and in our classrooms. Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be. 400 million americans. The remainder of is century,and urban population will double city land will double, and we wi have to build homes and highways and facilities equal to all those built. Since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years, we must rebuild the entire urban United States. Aristotle said, men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life. It is harder and harder to live the good life in American Cities today. The catalog of ales is long. There is the decay of the center and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enoh housing for our people. Our transportation for our traffic. Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of all, expansion is eroding. These precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and Community Communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference. And our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today, the frontier of imagination and innovation is is inside those cities and not beyond their borders. You experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to makehemerican city a place where future generations wi ce not only to le, but to live the good life. And indstand that if i stayed here tonight. I would see that michigan students are really doing their best to liveheood life. This is the place where the peace corps was started. It is inspiring to see how all of you, while you are in this country, are trying so hard to live at the level of the people. A second place where we began to build the Great Society is in our countryside. We have always prided ourselves on being not only america, the strong and america the free, but america the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The ter we drink, e food we eat, the very air that we breathe are threatened with pollution. Our parks are overcrowded. Our seashores overburden. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing. A few years ago, we were greatly concerned about the ugly american. Today, we must act to prevent an ugly america. For once, the battle is lost. Once the battle is lost, once natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And ce man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will weather and his sustenance be wasted. A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of erica. There are your childrens live will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the fathers for eight years of vote and imagination. We are still far from that goal. Today, 8 million adult americans. More than the entire population of michigan, have not finished five years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished eight years of school. Nearly 54 million. More than one quarter of all erichaveot even finished high school. Each year, more than 100,000 High School Graduates with proved ability do not Enter College because cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate todays youth, what will we do . In 1970, when Elementary School enrollment will be 5 million greater than 1960 and high School Enrollment will rise by 5 million, and College Enrollment will increase by more than 3 million. In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid and many of our paideachers are unqualified. So we must give every chd a place to s and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a r to learni, and learning must offer an escape from poverty. But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows inside. And this means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure, as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation. These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our government has many programs directed at those issues, i do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems. But i do promise this. We are going to assemble the best start. And the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for america. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of white house conferences and meetings on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies, we will begin to set our course hereat society, the solution to t problems, not rest on a massive program in washington. Now, i cannot rely solely on the strained resources of local authority. They require us to create new concepts of cooperation in a create aided federalism between the National Capital and the leaders of local communities. Woodrow wilson once wrote a every man set out from his university should be a man of his nation, as well as a maof hisime. Force is already loosed. Werful will take us toward our way of life, beyondheealm of our experience. Almost beyond the bounds of our imagination. Far better our far worse. Your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead america toward a new age. You have the chance. Never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality and the needs of the spirit can be realized in the life of the nation. So will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality of which god enjoins . And the law requires whatever his beliefs, our race or the color of his skin. Well, you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty. Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live and enduring peace as neighbors and not as mortal enemies. Will you jn in the battle to build the Great Society . Torohat our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life. Our mind and spirit. Are of those tenets. All that say this battle cannot be won. That we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree that we have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your well and your labor and your hearts. If we are to build that kind of society, those who came to this land so sought to build more than just a new country, they sought a new world. So i have come here today to your campus to say that you can make their vision, our reality. So let us, from this moment, begin our heart so that in the future, men will look back and say it was them. After a long and weary wat man turned the exploits of his ni to the full and richmond of his life. Thank you. Goodbye. Mr. Vice president. Mr. Speaker. Mr. Ambassador goldberg. Distinguished memberhe leadership of the congress, distinguished governors and mayors. My fellow countrymen, we have called the congress here this afternoon not only to mark the very historic occasion, but to settle a very old issue that is in dispute. That issue is to what Congressional District does. Liberty island really belong. Congressman farbstein or congressman gallagher . It will be settled by whomever of the two can walk first to the top of the statue of liberty. This bill that we will sign today not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this congress and of this administration. Our it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of american justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the american nation. Speaker mccormack and congressman seller. More than almost 40 years ago. First pointed it out in their maiden speeches in the congress. And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves, both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways. And i have come here to thank personally each member of the congress who labored so long and so valiantly to make this occasion come true today and to make this bill a reality. I cannot mention all their names, for it would take much too long. But my gratitude and that of this nation belong tohe 89th congress. We are in debt to to the vision of the late beloved president John Fitzgerald kennedy, and to the support given to this measure by the then attorney general and now senator robert f nnedy. In the final days of consideration. This bill had no more able champion than the present attorney general, nicholas katzenbach, who was new yorks own manny celler, and senator ted kennedy of massachusetts, and congressman feehan of ohio. And senator mansfield and senator dirksen, constituting the leadership of the senate. And senator javits helped to guide this bill to passage, along with the help of the members sitting in front of me today. This bill says simply that from this day forward, those wishing to emigrate to america shall be admitted on the basis of their skilled and their Close Relationships to those aeady here. This is a simple task andt is a fair test. Those who can contribute most to this cntry, to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit will be the first that are admitted to this land. The fairness of this standard is so selfevident that we may well wonder that it has not always been applied. Yet the fact is that for over four decades, the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustice of the National Origins quota system. Under that system, the ability of new immigrants to come to america depended upon the uny of their birth. Only three countries were alwe to supply 70 of all the immigrants families were kept apart because a husband or wife or child had been born in the wrong place. Man of needed skill and talent, or denied entrance because they came from southern. Our Eastern Europe or from one of the developing countries. This system violated the basic principle of american democracy, the principle that values and rewards. Each man on the basis of his merit as a man, it has been unamerican in the high sense because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores, even before we were a country. Today, with my signature, this system is abolished. We can now believe that it will never again shatter the gate to the american nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege. America would. Our beautiful america was built by a nation of strangers from 100 different places or more. They have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistable, all tied. The land flourished because it was fefrom so many sources, because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditionand peoples. And from this experience, almost unique in the history of nations has come. America has attitude toward the rest of the world. We, because ofhat we are, feel safer and stronger in a world as varied as the people who make it up. A world where no country rules. Another. And our countries can deal with the basic problems of Human Dignity and deal with those problems in their own way. Now, under the monument, which has welcomed so many to our shores, the american nation returned to the finest of its traditions. Today. The days of unlimited immigration are past, but those who do come will come because of what they are and not because of the land from which they sprung. When the earliest settlers poured into a wild continent, there was no one to ask them where they came from. The only question was, were they sturdy enough to make the journey . Were they Strong Enough to clear the land or are they enduring enough to make a home for freedom . And were they brave enough to die for liberty if it became necessary to do so . And so it has been through all the great and testing moments of American History. Our history this year we see in vietnam a man there are dying man named fernandez and jj and zelenka and mariano and mikami. Neither the enemy who killed them nor the people whose independence they have fought to save ever asked them were. They are. Their parents came from. They were all americans. It was for free, man. And for america. That they gave their all. They gave their lives themselves. And by that same question as a test for immigration, the congress proves ourselves worthy of those men and worthy of our own traditions. As a nation. So it is in that spirit that i declare this afternoon to the people of cuba that those who seek refuge here in america will find it. The dedication of america to our traditions as an asylum for the oppressed is going to be upheld. I have directed the departments of state and justice and health and education and welfare to immediately make all the necessary arrangements to permit those in cuba who seek freedom, to make an orderly entry into the United States of america. Our first concern will be whether those cubans who have been separated from their children and their parents and their husbands and their wives and that are now in this country. Our next concern is with those who are imprisoned for political reasons. And i will send to the Congress Tomorrow a request for supplementary forms of 12,600,000 to carry forth the commitment that im making today. I am asking the department of state to seek through the swiss government immediately the agreement of the cuban government and a request to the president of the International Red cross committee. The request is for the assistance of the committee and processing the movement of refugees from cuba to miami. Miami will serve as a port of entry and a temporary stopping place