June 4, 1971
Page 18151
SENATOR MUSKIE SPEAKS ON SOUTHERN LEADERSHIP
Mr. GAMBRELL. Mr. President, on April 30, the junior Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) came to Atlanta to speak to the LQC Lamar Society of Emory University on the potentials of Southern leadership in this time of national urban crisis. Recognition by national leaders of the contribution which southerners can make toward solving national problems signals an end to some of the divisions which have stood in the way of finding solutions. I commend his speech to the attention of all Senators and ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
CITIES OF HOPE – A CHANCE FOR THE NEW SOUTH
(By Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE)
Thank you, Brandy, for that kind and generous introduction. As a country boy from Maine I can tell that you haven't lost everything you picked up on the farm.
When Brandy first asked me to join you for this Symposium, I couldn't say, "No." After all, it was to be a pleasant gathering of friendly people like Brandy who wanted to talk about cities. He didn't tell me it was a meeting against Northern cities, which puts me in the position of being the sinner on exhibit at a revival meeting.
It may be, though, that I can help bridge the gap between northern cities and southern civilization. After all, I have spent the last twelve years in Washington, a city president Kennedy said was noted for its southern efficiency and northern charm.
There was a time when I saw some irony in requests that I speak as an authority on cities. I grew up in a small town in a rural state, and I turned down a chance to practice law in New York City.
I ran for Mayor of Waterville, Maine, once, and was defeated. Waterville's gain turned out to be the Senate's loss, and the Senate gave me a chance to learn about cities – among other things.
There are some advantages in coming on the problems of the city from a rural perspective. You know what a sense of community can mean, and you can understand the attraction and the horror of first encounters with a large city.
There is excitement in the life and movement of the city. There is also fear and loneliness.
A city generates a sense of power, while many of its residents feel powerless. The city holds great promise, but too many of those who rush to it feel cheated.
Thomas Jefferson feared the city, and hoped his country could avoid its horrors. We know that cities cannot be avoided, but we have not yet learned how to make them places of hope.
What is it that we want from our cities?
I suspect each of us wants from a city what we all want from whatever community we call our own. We want a place to share with others who care about that place, because they have roots there, because they feel that they belong, and because they believe they will have a chance to grow there. We want to live in a community where we can help shape its future, where we can control our own destinies.
Those feelings are a part of our national traditions. Some of us have experienced those traditions. Some have read about them. Too many have been excluded from them.
I am one of those fortunate ones who experienced the life and politics of trust. If my father forgot to lock his tailor shop, he did not wake in panic, dress and go down to make sure everything was alright. He went back to sleep, quite sure nothing would be disturbed. The ordinary commerce of life: walking down the main street, getting a quart of milk at the grocery, attending the PTA, passing the time of day after church, all the everyday rituals were a series of accidental but pleasant encounters.
In such a world, where the natural environment and the environment man created were comfortable and unthreatening, our sense of family and community grew. We were participants in our community. Even government was not distant and unapproachable.
Everyone knew his town Selectman and state legislator, and many even knew the Congressman. There were familiar faces in the town hall, people we knew, who lived nearby or across the town. And anyone who has attended a New England town meeting knows that "participatory politics" is not a new invention.
I guess it was an attempt to recapture such pleasant memories of an earlier day that led those who could afford the journey on the great crabgrass stampede to the suburbs.
It hasn't worked, and that is as plain to the suburbanites as it is to the armies of strangers left behind in the dying shells of the central city. In an attempt to plant new roots, many suburbanites have found their lives to be rootless, without a sense of belonging anywhere. The poor who have come to the cities find that they have arrived nowhere.
The city is nowhere when it lacks job opportunities, when financial resources are drained to the point where schools cannot be funded, where health programs are practically non-existent, where housing is overcrowded, filthy and unsafe, where crime and drugs rule the scene, and where living is a hazard, not a pleasure.
For many southern communities, this is the nightmare of the future. For too many northern cities, this is the reality of the present.
Your symposium is a timely one, but the time is late.
The South still has a lower density of population than the North, but the pace of in-migration is quickening.
The South still has a fair mix of residential patterns, racial and economic, but the pattern is changing. In the last ten years, for example, southern suburbs became ninety percent or more white as did northern suburbs.
The South still has open space around its cities, but from the air the unmistakable signs of suburban sprawl are scarring the landscape.
And southern mayors and county executives are part of the parade of local officials trying to get the President and the Congress to respond to the desperate financial plight of our cities.
With the history of urban blight in the North, the signs of blight in the South, and the trials and tribulations of the South, is there any hope for the future of southern cities? I think there is.
If we are looking for signs of hope that our Nation can deal with its enormous social problems, we will find some of those signs in the South. That may sound like a sardonic statement to many of you who have been through the agonies of the past fifteen or twenty years. But the history of the South during the past decade offers proof that it is possible to achieve fundamental social change in this country. Customs and practices which seemed fixed in concrete has been overturned.
The changes in the South have proved that personal courage, among whites as well as blacks, can make a difference. Out of a troubled and tortured past, you are creating a brighter future for yourselves, and you have a chance to show the way for the North.
You still have a chance to prevent a new economic stratification.
You still have a chance to structure your communities in a way which will make equal access and equal opportunity and advantage for all.
This is not to say the South can or must solve her urban problems by herself The Nation has an obligation to help relieve the fiscal burdens of the cities. We have an obligation to correct those national policies which encourage the destruction of innercity resources. We have an obligation to help cities and metropolitan areas improve the efficiency of their public services. We have an obligation to increase Federal assistance for education, health services, public safety, public transportation, environmental improvement, and the stimulation of healthy economic growth.
I do believe we need to go beyond the traditional, categorical grants-in-aid, to provide general budget support for social services in the cities. Such support, designed to help cities meet the operating costs of fire and police protection, sanitation, health and – where appropriate – education, would lift an enormous burden from local taxpayers.
The Federal government can provide that kind of assistance only if we put more of our resources to work for the building of our society, and less of our resources are invested in weapons of destruction. Our commitment to the well-being of our citizens will be measured by the steps we take to end the war in Vietnam – not someday, but now. That commitment will be measured by the moves we make to end the upward spiral of the arms race – not someday, but now.
I have been in Washington long enough, however, to know that neither I nor anyone else in the Nation's Capital has all the answers to our urban problems. We can supply money, we can identify national priorities, and we can provide support for certain approaches to the problems of the cities. But we cannot, and should not, pretend to have the solution.
Urban renewal was supposed to answer the problem of city slums. Urban renewal has torn down slum buildings, but it has not restored the life of the city.
Our housing programs were supposed to end shortages in middle income and lower income housing. We have built housing, but too many of the middle income houses have been in the suburbs, contributing to the flight from the city, and too many low income housing units have been in new ghettoes of isolation.
Our highway programs were supposed to end traffic congestion. They have increased the flow of traffic, accelerating the flight to the suburbs and destroying houses and communities in the city.
Our farm programs were supposed to keep the farmer on an equal footing with his counterpart in the city. But instead of improving and enriching rural life, we have forced people off the land and into the cities totally unprepared for new jobs and new lives.
Now, in our effort to overcome the crisis in urban finance, in our attempt to control pollution and improve the environment of the cities, and in our search for better ways of governing metropolitan areas, we are trying new ideas for metropolitan government.
These suggestions – for annexation, for regional pollution control agencies, for metropolitan- wide land use controls for regional school systems, and for more comprehensive law enforcement jurisdictions – all these suggestions make sense. After all, one small jurisdiction cannot hope to control pollution in a metropolitan area. Pressures to zone businesses in and low income families out to broaden property tax bases cannot be resisted very well by one small jurisdiction.
Restricted school districts cannot meet all the demands for high quality, equal opportunity education. And limited law enforcement jurisdictions cannot begin to handle highly mobile criminal activities.
Arguments for efficiency can drive us inexorably toward dependence on larger units of government, just as arguments for a massive attack on slums drove us to dependence on urban renewal. That approach alone will not lead us to the sense of community we so desperately need.
We are confronted with a paradox, a seeming conflict between the needs of efficiency and community, and none of us has the answer to it.
But I have an underlying faith in the intelligence and good sense of the American people that they can resolve that paradox, if given the opportunity and the right kind of leadership.
Almost two hundred years ago, a group of American citizens met in Philadelphia to resolve a similar paradox. The weak and quarrelsome confederation of American States was confronted with international threats, domestic disruption, economic chaos and governmental inefficiency. Big States and small States were suspicious of each other. Regional pride ran high, and mutual confidence was low. They wanted a more perfect instrument of government, but not at the expense of local control.
The result of their labors was the Constitution of the United States, a remarkable instrument of government which has survived the test of time, has survived the test of time as a framework for endless adjustments in the body politic.
But the Constitution provides a national framework, and a statement of common objectives. It provides no blueprint for the governance of metropolitan areas, whose growth and complexity the Founding Fathers could not foresee. If we are going to make it possible to govern these areas, we must do it ourselves.
There are those who have suggested another constitutional convention – one they call an "urban convention". I think the time is indeed ripe to pursue new ideas and new relationships between State and local governments, and between people and their State and local governments. No single solution will meet the varying conditions in all parts of our country. But new ideas can stimulate a variety of solutions, adapted to local needs and consistent with our objective of a humane, responsive and responsible society.
Your Symposium marks one of the most hopeful signs in the struggle of thoughtful Americans toward the creation of cities – and communities – of hope. I suggest that you carry your discussions beyond this point; that you explore the possibilities of "urban conventions", within your region and within your States.
These urban conventions could bring together Governors, legislators, mayors, county executives, and other leaders from public and private life, all dedicated to the goal of cities of hope in the new South.
The agenda at such conventions would be full, but your work would be given direction and purpose by your goal – the goal of planning the basic changes in government needed to create humane, livable cities of tomorrow.
You could tackle the problem of creating and implementing a State urbanization policy, in which zoning authority, land use and building regulations, and other fundamental determinants of the quality of urban life would be shaped to serve public needs.
You could go to work on building a high quality State-local tax revenue, efficient in its capacity to raise revenue, efficient in its administration, and fair in its impact on the tax-paying citizen.
You could deal with the question of disparities in public services between neighborhoods of different economic and social character, and you could consider the development of enforceable minimum standards designed to achieve fairness in the provision of services in education, sanitation, and other areas of fundamental human need.
In your urban conventions, you could go to work on that paradox I mentioned a moment ago – the paradox of efficiency and community. Perhaps this would be the most important task of all. If we are to make our cities places of hope, we must have more than efficiency, important as that is.
We must insure that in our cities, as in smaller communities, individual citizens have a measure of control over their lives. They must have a real voice in the shaping of their neighborhoods, the patterns of transportation, the educational opportunities for their children, and the exercise of law enforcement authority. They must have a direct relationship with their elected representatives, and those representatives must have an effective voice in the governing of the city.
And so, as we consider expanded, simplified metropolitan-wide government, we must also consider new ideas for neighborhood government, to overcome the alienation between big city government and its citizens. It has been suggested that state legislatures authorize city and county councils to establish neighborhood sub-units of government, each with an elected council, and with power to undertake self-help projects and to influence city actions having special impact on the neighborhood. Each neighborhood district could also elect its own representatives to the overall governing body of the metropolitan area, and each could serve as the focus of community and social contact. These ideas, their promises and their problems, are all part of the agenda for your urban conventions.
You have before you, then, an opportunity to make the South a laboratory for the future, rather than a reminder of a troubled past. Your urban conventions can be the preparation, and the inspiration, for national urban convention, which could mobilize our energies to build the new America of the third century of our history.
In making this suggestion tonight, I speak for the millions who live and work in the cities of this land, who have witnessed the death of civility and the loss of a sense of belonging. They are the millions of Americans who suffer from loneliness in the midst of crowds, while their retreats of privacy are destroyed.
I speak for them when I appeal to the people of the South – and through you to your city councilmen, and mayors, county executives, legislators and governors – I appeal to you to make this region, in this decade, a great laboratory for the creation of the humane city. You have the tools and the talent, and I believe you have the imagination and the will. I know you have the leaders, from my contacts with your mayors and many of the members of this society.
But make no mistake, it will not be easy. It will not be the meek who inherit the southern land before it is bulldozed and buried under miles of concrete.
It will not be the timid who control the instruments of government which shape the future of the South.
It will not be one class or one group which determines how the South shall grow.
What are the choices? And who shall the South be for? Will you abandon your cities to development by the random, insensitive blades of the bulldozers, fueled and piloted by short-term promises. Bulldozers and highways do not vote. They feel no pain and have no sense of community: neither do they need privacy.
Privacy, hope, love and trust, dignity, kindness: an eye for beauty, an ear for laughter, sympathy for the sorrowing – these are human traits, not the desires of economic man or political man, but man, period. Cities must be built and governed by those who put those traits first, for every man and woman, not those who put economic gain and political power first.
I believe the people of the South can find the way. That is why I came to be with you and to listen to you this week. I believe you will make the urban environment yield to the necessities of man, not to his machines. And if the great urban laboratory of the South succeeds, as I think it can, then you will have discovered something you can present as an example and a gift to the Nation.