The Primary Source Question Set
Please read the primary source at the bottom of this assignment, and then answer the following questions:
- Source the document. That is, who (or what) wrote or produced this source? How do you know? When was the source made? It’s important to know, as precisely as possible, what was going on at the time. List three important events from our history textbook that occurred at about the same time that this document was created.
- In at least 250 words, summarize the key points of the source. Put your answer entirely in your own words. Quote nothing. For this question, do not editorialize, contextualize, or blame. Fasten on the document and tell us in your own words what is being said by the maker of the source. Your goal here is accuracy: be faithful to the source.
- Using only this document and our assigned reading, who was the probable audience for this source? That is, to whom was this document aimed at? Using the document and its context, using the textbook to learn of its context, justify your answer.
- According to this primary source, what is the role of government in building the “Great Society”?
- What Larger Themes of those listed in the “Principal Themes in Our Class” does this source link to and shed light on? List at least two linkages and discuss the connections as persuasively as you can. If more linkages exist, discuss them.
What is most memorable about this source for you – you personally?
The Assignment
Please read the following primary source as a historian might — in order to better understand the past. As you read, answer the questions in the Primary Source Question Set as they pertain to this historical document. Then submit your answers by the deadline in your Initial Post.
Next, respond to the Initial Post of another in your Response Post in ONE Response Post. The deadlines for each type of post are given at the top of this assignment.
[begin
“Great Society” Speec
Commencement Speech at the University of Michigan
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President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and
Hart, Congressmen Meader and Staebler, and other members of
the ne Michigan delegation, members of the graduating class,
my fellow Americans:
It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been
coeducational since 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis
of your accomplishments that a Detroit high school girl said, “In
choosing a college, you rst have to decide whether you want a
coeducational school or an educational school.”
Well, we can nd both here at Michigan, although perhaps at
different hours.
I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student
whose father told a friend of mine that his son’s 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 speak about the future of your
country.
The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the
liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people.
Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.
For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For
half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring
industry 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.
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The Primary Sourc
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Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will
determine whether we build a society where progress is the
servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new
visions are buried under unbridled growth. For 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 we are
totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can nd
knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a
place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and re ect, 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 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, a resting
place, a nal objective, a nished 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 begin
to build the Great Society — in our cities, 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 — four- fths of them in
urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will
double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes,
highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country
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was rst settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build 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 ills is long: there is the decay of the centers and
the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our
people or transportation for our traf c. Open land is vanishing and
old landmarks are violated.
Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time honored
values of community with neighbors and communion with nature.
The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and
indifference.
Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the
frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not
beyond their borders.
New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your
generation to make the American city a place where future
generations will come, not only to live but to live the good life.
I understand that if I stayed here tonight I would see that Michigan
students are really doing their best to live the good 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 begin 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 water we drink, the
food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with
pollution. Our parks are overcrowded, our seashores
overburdened. Green elds 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.
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For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed,
it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with
beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his
sustenance be wasted.
A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of
America. There your children’s lives will be shaped. Our society
will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the
farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from
that goal.
Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population
of Michigan, have not nished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million
have not nished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million — more
than one quarter of all America — have not even nished high
school.
Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates, with proved
ability, do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if
we cannot educate today’s 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. College
enrollment will increase by more than 3 million.
In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are
outdated. Most of our quali ed teachers are underpaid, and many
of our paid teachers are unquali ed. So we must give every child
a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a
bar to learning, 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 in size. 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 nd new ways to stimulate the love of learning and
the capacity for creation.
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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 thought
and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to nd 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 toward the Great Society.
The solution to these problems does not rest on a massive
program in Washington, nor can it rely solely on the strained
resources of local authority. They require us to create new
concepts of cooperation, a creative federalism, between the
National Capital and the leaders of local communities.
Woodrow Wilson once wrote: “Every man sent out from his
university should be a man of his Nation as well as a man of his
time.”
Within your lifetime powerful forces, already loosed, will take us
toward a way of life beyond the realm of our experience, almost
beyond the bounds of our imagination.
For better or for 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
which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or
race, or the color of his skin?
Will 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
in enduring peace — as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?
Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that
our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build
a richer life of mind and spirit?
There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won;
that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We
have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we
need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind
of society.
Those who came to this land 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 work so that in the future men
will look back and say: It was then, after a long and weary way,
that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of
his life.
Thank you. Good-bye.
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