![]() Goldwater laid the blame for all the problems LBJ enumerated right at the feet of big-government Democrats. In his now legendary acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention, Goldwater famously said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." His acceptance speech advocated the polar opposite of LBJ's Great Society beliefs. Even fellow Republicans cringed at his extreme far-right philosophy. ![]() Now the Arizona senator wanted to bring his fiscally conservative, small-government, anticommunist policies to the White House. Goldwater's 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative laid out his own hard-liner stance on, well, just about everything. An unapologetic ultra-conservative, Goldwater criticized the Great Society as a tyrannical intrusion of Big Brother into the lives of freedom-loving Americans. ![]() Goldwater was LBJ's dream opponent in the 1964 election. ( Source)įortunately, raising a ruckus was right up LBJ's alley. "There is no realistic hope for the abolition of poverty in the United States until there is a vast social movement, a new period of political creativity," Harrington wrote. (All this is starting to sound sickeningly familiar, unfortunately. Technological developments drew starker lines between the haves and have-nots. Millions of Americans fled the cities for the new suburbs, leaving decaying wrecks behind. In the rest of the country, the growing consumer culture emphasized style over substance. Unable to change the circumstances around them, the poor were stuck in an endless cycle of dead-end jobs, inadequate education, and general despair. They lived, Harrington said, in a culture of poverty. Harrington, a sociologist and a card-carrying Socialist, pointed out that the post-World War II economic boom had been very good for America, but plenty of Americans missed out. Shortly before his death, JFK talked with his advisers about "doing something" to alleviate poverty in the U.S., and LBJ scooped up that mantle when he took office. ![]() Harrington's 1962 book about poverty, The Other America, opened a lot eyes, including those of President John F. But most of us never see the "unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in the economic underworld of American life" ( source). There are poor people in America, wrote Harrington, millions and millions of them. The Great Society speech was broader in scope than King's speech, which focused on justice and equality for Black Americans. how it could be if we all just set our minds to doing the right thing. King makes spiritual and moral arguments he uses juxtaposition to talk about how the world is now vs. Repetition: King begins eight sentences in his speech with "I have a dream" Johnson begins four with "Will you join?" Alliteration: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," said King. "My dream," he says, is "deeply rooted in the American dream."Īnd while Johnson was no MLK-level orator, he uses a lot of the same rhetorical devices. Just like Johnson locates his Great Society in the bigger American story, King puts his demands for equality right in the middle of American history. The themes are similar: a call for equality and justice that references America's historical moral values. If you listen to "I Have a Dream," you'll see why. It's Shmoop's hypothesis that Johnson crammed for his Michigan commencement address by listening to King's speech on YouTube. King gave an iconic speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, part of the March on Washington for civil rights and equal economic opportunity for Black Americans. As the predominant civil rights leader of his era, King was instrumental in getting the president to overcome political concerns and get civil rights legislation passed ASAP. Martin Luther King and LBJ had a complicated relationship.
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