and openly.
When others held back, our McCarthy argued that the American people could pass a judgment. And we have seen that judgment passed.
We have seen all that is best in America demanding an end to the immoral war in Vietnam and a full commitment to all those who are ridiculed in our country, to all those who are injured and insulted, to all who go hungry and powerless in the midst of affluence and luxury.
Americans of good faith now realize there is one candidate who has never spoken on the side of repression and violence, one candidate who has never promised more than he could fulfill, one candidate who has spoken quietly and steadily of bringing together black people and white people to make a new start in their country, one candidate who has stood for generosity and humanity toward the smaller nations of the world.
And that candidate is Gene McCarthy.
Fellow delegates, the people of America are watching us now—and indeed the whole world is watching us. They are looking to the Democratic Party to honor their faith in democracy. They are waiting and watching for a new kind of honesty in American politics.
After all that has happened in 1968, after all we have done and all we have learned—can we afford to abandon Gene McCarthy? Can we deny the American people the chance to vote for the one man who has made a difference—in our party, in our politics, and in the direction of our country?
The choice we make will be long remembered. It is not too late to look once more within ourselves. It is not too late to give the best we have.
It is not too late to get ourselves together and to nominate a man who is already one of our greatest leaders—a man who will become in time one of our greatest presidents.
I am proud to second the nomination of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy.
The Warfare State
Bond was not a fiery orator. He was not inclined to raise his fist, and he refused to shut down his opponents. But his measured style of speaking did not mean he wasn’t delivering a strong, clear message—especially during the run-up to the 1968 presidential election.
In 1968 the United States finds itself moving toward destruction.
This nation has imposed 500,000 soldiers on a small faraway country. It has tried to impose American values and American ways on the people of that country, and has nearly destroyed them in the process. It has interfered with a legitimate, localized revolution in that nation, and is destroying that nation in the process.
At home, white and black young people battle policemen for control of the streets, for control of schools, for control of lives, for control of property.
Our Congress, which without difficulty raises more than 80 billions of dollars for war every year, providing guaranteed annual incomes for munitions merchants, cannot bring itself to consider guaranteed annual incomes for the poor.
We black people find ourselves in the curious position of being better off now than we were thirty years ago, but being worse off in every way—economically, educationally, politically—in comparison with white America than ever before.
Black people make less money in relation to white people than ever before; there are more black people out of work—in comparison to white people—than ever before—and there are more black people fighting and dying in America’s armed services in comparison with white people than ever before.
We are paying a heavy price for integration.
Our housing is probably more segregated now than ever before. The United States Commission on Civil Rights has said that if all Americans lived in conditions as crowded as do the black people in some sections of Harlem, then all 200 million Americans could live in three of the five boroughs of New York, leaving the other two and all of the rest of the United States totally unpopulated.
We see the leaders of our nation condemning the Russians for having done what we have done in Vietnam.
“The fact that a small nation lives within reach of a large nation does not mean that that large nation is entitled to move in on it to reorganize its internal affairs.”
That was Secretary of State Dean Rusk speaking, and oddly enough, the large nation was not the United States reorganizing Vietnam, but Russia reorganizing Czechoslovakia.
Four out of every five Americans are more affluent than any other people in history. They have reached that affluence by degrading the fifth person, the poor black Americans, brown Americans and white Americans who have neither the power nor the resources to complain about their lot.
Our welfare system taxes the poor more than our tax system taxes the rich. A poor man on welfare must pay the government 70 cents on every dollar he earns above $30 a month; a rich man pays the government only 25 cents on every dollar he wins on the stock market.
Half of the farmers in the United States—the half who have incomes of less than $2,500 a year—received 5% of the farm subsidies provided by the government; 10% of the farmers in the United States received 60% of the subsidies.
Some Americans of thirty years ago were afraid that we might become a welfare state. Instead, we have become a warfare state. Our nation gives 80% of its wealth to the Pentagon, and 10% to health, education, and welfare.
We have come gradually, I think, to this point in our history because of several factors. Over the years the United States has strengthened, rather than relinquished, its role as policemen of the world.
Over the years racism in the United States has remained, rather than weakened. And most importantly for us, over the years liberals and radicals have continued to argue rather than cooperate, to the detriment of both liberal, radical and reformist movements in the United States.
A good example of the divisiveness and the lack of stick-to-it-ness on the left can be found in the South. Those who began a student revolution there eight years ago—a revolution that spread to Berkeley and to Columbia—are no longer there.
Those who directed the movement from lunch counters to bus stations to voting booths to electoral politics are no longer there.
Those northerners whose concern and whose money helped finance that movement are no longer concerned or financial.
The government we once thought sympathetic to our goals is either no longer the government or is no longer sympathetic.
Instead, there are a few workers plodding the cotton fields of Mississippi and the bayous of Louisiana and the red hills of Georgia trying to organize a movement. Instead, there is scattered student concern at this school or that one, while the millions in the ghetto go uncared for, unheeded and unattended except by policemen and occasionally National Guardsmen.
Instead, a battle some thought was won at the lunch counter is being lost at the ballot box and in the county courthouse.
The battle for the integrated schoolroom seat is being lost, not by the devious legal action or oppressive night riders, but by the cotton picking machine, the runaway textile mill, the right-to-work laws which keep poor men poor, and make children go so hungry they cannot learn, and so naked they cannot attend school.
We are passing now through the annual American political season. The road shows are on tour. There are two main attractions, produced by two companies, but they speak from
