American business is like no other in history. It is owned by millions, it employs millions more, it serves all 190 million of our people. The promis… - Lyndon B. Johnson

Franklin Roosevelt talked about the one-third that were ill clad and ill fed and ill housed. After working 30 years with your help and your crusades and your radical editorials and all of those things, we have it down to one-fifth, but we still have got 20 percent, 1 out of every 5, that are in the poverty group. Twenty years ago, 5 percent over a 10-year period, coming out from 1942 to 1952, and from 1952 to 1962 it was 3 percent, and now it is 1 percent that is coming out--1 percent a year. From 1937 to 1947 it was 5 percent, 1947 to 1953 it was 3 percent, 1953 to 1963 it is 1 percent. Now it is getting a lot more difficult in this IBM age for those people that have no training, that live on the other side of the tracks--it is getting a lot more difficult for them to get out and cross the tracks and get out of that poverty classification. You have to help them by this poverty program that will provide them with training. Forty-nine percent--1 out of every 2 boys we draft has to be sent home because he is physically or mentally unqualified. That is the kind of folks you are raising. If I had to do that with my calves, I would go broke every year. If I out of every 2 of my calves was born and I had to have rejects, I couldn't make it. So we begin this poverty war from a position of unmatched prosperity, with national abundance. We have just concluded the most productive and prosperous quarter on record. I had the figures here a minute ago. I wanted to give them to you.

We all know that the roots of injustice run deep. But violence cannot redress a solitary wrong, or remedy a single unfairness. Of course, all America is outraged at the assassination of an outstanding Negro leader who was at that meeting that afternoon in the White House in 1966. And America is also outraged at the looting and the burning that defiles our democracy. We just must put our shoulders together and put a stop to both. The time is here. Action must be now. So, I would appeal to my fellow Americans by saying, the only real road to progress for free people is through the process of law and that is the road that America will travel.

Our war on poverty, an unconditional declaration of war against one of the last bitter enemies of a great society, can be traced, I think, in large part to the courage and the compassion and the commitment of the Peace Corps volunteers. Because, by fighting hunger, illiteracy, and poverty abroad, you have shown us that we can and we should and we must fight them at home. So I expect returning Peace Corps volunteers to play a major role in this war on poverty. We need your experience. We need your sense of duty. We need your imagination if we are to win this war. And win it we must.