FOR RELEASE

UPON DELIVERY

CHILDREN IN TROUBLE IN A TROUBLED SOCIETY

SPEECH AT
ANNUAL CONVENTION BANQUET, RHODE ISLAND CONGRESS OF PARENTS & TEACHERS
Tuesday night, April 29, 1958
Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, Cranston, Rhode Island
by
MIKE GORMAN, Washington, D.C.
Executive Director, NATIONAL COMMITTEE AGAINST MENTAL ILLNESS,

Madame President and Congress delegates:

In Washington, D.C., where I live, the sound and fury about
juvenile delinquency has reached almost hysterical proportions.
One newspaper has been running daily articles on "Violence in
the Streets" for the past three months.

To some of us the recent attention given to this problem
is ironic. For a number of years we have been telling public
officials that although the number of children under the age of
18 in the District of Columbia has increased from approximately
180,000 to 250,000 in the past eight years, there has been no
increase in either in-patient or out-patient treatment facilities
for children. There are only 102 beds in the District for psy-
chotic children, and 90 of these are located at St. Elizahbeths,
the 7,000 bed Federal Mental Hospital. Three years ago, a United
Community Services survey reported that at least 11,000 school

children in the District of Columbia needed psychiatric help.
- 29-

Of these, only 1,475--about 15%--were receiving diagnostic clini-
cal aid, and even fewer were receiving actual treatment. To
handle this situation the school system has only one psychiatrist,
part-time and on loan from the Health Department, to meet the
problems of these 11,000 children. In desperation, a number of
parent-teacher groups have raised money by cookie sales and other
methods to employ part-time psychologists and social workers.

In seeking scapegoats for this mess, most critics have over-
looked the basic responsibility of society. One critic did not.
He is Victor R. Daly, Minority Groups Consultant to the U.S.
Employment Service in the District. In a letter to the Washington
Post, Mr. Daly pointed out that there are currently 3,000 negro
boys in Washington between the ages of 16 and 19 who have dropped
out of school but cannot get work because of racial discrimination
practiced in the District.

"This is the malignant source that feeds delinquency and
crime in the District," Mr. Daly wrote. "The city is feeling the
impact of this social monster which stalks its streets night after
night ... When a condition of this sort exists in the Capital of
this Nation, there is something basically wrong in the heart of
the community. The city streets may be broad and clean and well
lighted. The buildings may be neat and trim. There may be an
abundance of monuments and parks. But the system of handling
human relations must be way out of kilter,"

Is the juvenile delinquency situation any different in other
parts of the country? It is generally agreed that it is not,

although we have no really reliable figures on the number of
-3-

children in erouble/ As Dr. Lawrence G, Derthick, U.S, Com-
missioner of Education pointed out in Congressional testimony
this year: "We have less information about our children than
we have about our hogs",

“LThe League for Emotionally Disturbed Children estimates
that there are about one million youngsters in school now who
need some psychiatric help. It estimates that another one-half
million children aren't in school because there are no facilities
to handle their particular behavioral problems, Where are some
of these troubled children? Between 5,000 and 6,000 of them
are in state mental hospitals. Some of them in these hospitals
are crowded on wards with 80 to 100 very sick adults. To any
of you who have any illusions about the type of "treatment"
given children in these massive mental hospitals, I respectfully
suggest that you talk to some of the children in these hospitals.
I have, and it is a very bitter experience,

In addition to the state mental hospitals, there are a hand-
ful of residential treatment centers for children. A year ago,
the Illinois State Department of Welfare did a survey of resi-
dential treatment centers for children in this country. The
survey revealed that only 13 states have specialized treatment
facilities for these children, and most of them have an inad-

equate number of beds. Thirty-seven of the states surveyed were

 

housing children in with the adult populations of their over-

 

 

‘crowded mental hospitals, For example, in Illinois the two
eee |
treatment centers for psychotic children have a combined capacity

of 84 beds, but there are 306 children in the state mental
hospitals and an additional 1,200 children in need of hospitali-
zation.

In 1956, the American Psychiatric Association and the American
Academy of Child Psychiatry held a conference on the psychiatric
in-patient treatment of children. Chapter six of the conference
report sadly concludes that "no reliable data exist on the in-
cidence and prevalence of childhood psychiatric disorders in gen-
eral".

The conference report quotes from a number of state, city,
and private surveys which have attempted to estimate the size of
the problem, As you well know, one of the more ambitious attempts
was conducted here in Rhode Island by the Pawtucket and Blackstone
Valley Council of Social Agencies, the Rhode Island Society for
Mental Hygiene, and the Family and Children's Division of the
Council of Community Services. This survey uncovered 1,678 emo-
tionally disturbed youngsters. Of these, 342 were found in need
of hospital care. Further noting that an additional 146 children
needed clinical service, which could not be provided by the
Providence Child Guidance Clinic, the report concluded:

"One thing is clear: we have sick children and their needs
are not being adequately met. Any other health problems involving
1,600 persons would be considered an epidemic, calling for drastic
action."

It is interesting to note that in each of these community
surveys the report always expresses "shock" at the number of
children who are beyond the reach of existing treatment facili-

ties. For example, the survey by the Cleveland Mental Health
-5-

Association turned up 407 emotionally disturbed children in that
city, with only 103 receiving any form of psychiatric care. In

a survey by the 14 Child Guidance Clinics of Michigan of approxi-
mately 7,000 children under its care, it was estimated that about
10% of these children needed to be hospitalized, but that only

35 were. Furthermore, all 14 Guidance Clinics attested to long
waiting lists of children who could not be handled.

Similar data have come from surveys in the state of Connecticut
and the cities of Baltimore and San Francisco. Furthermore, most
of these surveys are of the top-of-the-iceberg variety; they just
uncover the deeply troubled children who have come in contact with
one or another of the official social agencies.

But the community asks impatiently: "This is an emergency.
Sick children are roaming the streets, tearing up themselves and
those around them, How many beds should we provide to treat them?"

And the American Psychiatric Association and the American
Academy of Child Psychiatry answer wearily:

“There are at present no statistically valid data on the
number of emotionally ill children needing hospital treatment,
criteria for judgment on the need for hospital treatment in dis-
tinction to other types of therapy have not yet been established,
and the efficacy of hospital treatment has not yet been validated
.-. It is known, however, that there are relatively few beds,
and that seriously emotionally ill children are being kept in
detention homes, jails and other inappropriate places,"

What about disturbed children in the schools? Do they get
treatment? Several years ago, Dr. Leo Bartemeier, Chairman of

the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association,
-6-

testified before a Congressional Committee on this problem. He
called to the attention of the Congressmen a three-year research
project conducted under the auspices of the Columbia University
Department of Psychiatry, which reported that 10% of public
school children in the United States are emotionally disturbed
and need mental guidance, but that the majority of schools lack
the trained personnel or facilities to aid these disturbed children.

"The psychiatric personnel shortages in the schools are
appalling," Dr, Bartemeier told the Congress, "There _is one
psychiatrist for every 50,000 children, one psychologist for every
10,964 children, and one psychiatric social worker for every
38,461 children,"

How about the private schools? In the sea of platitudes
which seem to engulf the whole problem of the emotionally dis-
turbed child, none is more persistent than the nostrum that
private schools are a superior refuge from the troubles currently
besetting the public schools,

What are the facts? In a companion study. conducted by
Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry, it was reported
that youngsters in private schools suffer more from emotional
disturbances than do public school children, Furthermore, private
schools do an even less adequate job than public schools in pro-
viding the mental hygiene programs these children need, As a/
matter of fact, 36% of the private schools have no mental hygiene
services whatsoever, as compared with 17% having no such services
as reported in the earlier Columbia survey of public schools. No

private school among the 123 surveyed met the minimum needs of
-7-

its students for psychiatric guidance.

The really intriguing aspect of this survey is that while
not one of the private schools surveyed even admitted the existence
of juvenile delinquency among its pupils, the director of the sur-
vey, Dr. David Abrahamsen, pointed out that he was treating quite
a few of the youngsters from these very schools in private psy-
chiatric practice. As a further irony, it is significant to note
that many of the private schools reporting they had no emotional
disturbances among their pupils said they needed a full-time
psychiatrist.

I presume that you have all heard of the recent sorry events
in the New York City school system. A number of violent events
culminating in the suicide of a junior high school principal,
who was being harassed by a grand jury looking for a scapegoat,
resulted in an order by the Superintendent of the New York City
Schools suspending close to 1,000 of the most troublesome pupils.
Some of these children have since been transferred to special
schools for problem children; the majority of them have been left
to roam the streets.

There was an immediate hue and outcry from an outraged
citizenry. Militant do-gooders and social welfare organizations,
which spend more time guarding their own little empires against
encroachments than in concern for these troubled children, de-
manded to know what was wrong with the psychiatric treatment
program in the city schools,

The first target was the Bureau of Child Guidance, which

is supposed to handle the most disturbed cases in the schools.
-~8-

But the Director of the Bureau, Dr. Jean Thompson, cried out in
anguish that she was swamped by referrals,

"There are about 500 children in the five boroughs whose
cases we have accepted but have not been able to touch,"

Dr. Thompson told reporters. "I haven't the faintest idea how
many hundreds have not been accepted after principals asked for
help".

She pointed out that the Bureau was understaffed "because
the salaries were not high enough to attract psychiatrists,
psychologists, and social workers".

What about New York City's Children's Center? It has facil-
ities for 321 youngsters, but is now caring for 515. Mrs. David M.
Levy, president of the Citizens Committee for Children of New York
City, pointed out sorrowfully that three children frequently slept
in one bed at the Center. Furthermore, the Bureau of Child Welfare
shortages in all staff categories were so acute that records on
some children were not transcribed for six months to a year. Be-
cause of this delay, many of the 1600 children waiting to be placed
in foster homes were losing their chance.

Critic after critic pointed out that many of the vacancies
in the child welfare agencies were left unfilled because of budget-
ary economies in New York City. This in the wealthiest city in
the world, with a school population of close to one million children.

Further testimony revealed that troubled children were being
stacked up in an overcrowded assembly line. For example, Youth
House is another facility which cares for disturbed children in
New York City. Presiding Justice John Warren Hill of the Domestic

Relations Court pointed out that on two recent occasions judges
~9-

of the court were unable to remand to Youth House 597 boys because
it was filled to overflowing, including in its number 50 boys

who were awaiting transfer to overloaded state training schools.
During this period, Judge Hill asserted, hundreds of juveniles
were arrested who could not be accepted at Youth House and were
turned back on the streets.

When the buck was passed along to the state training schools,
they in turn howled, They pointed out that there were only 1,150
beds for New York City children at these schools, They said they
needed at least 600 more beds immediately, and they admitted they
were discharging children too soon because of the crying need for
bed space.

Then some of the abuse fell on the New York City Youth Board,
which has a great responsibility in this whole area. But Youth
Board officials pointed out that their budget was only $4,500,000
a year, the smallest budget of any agency in a city government
which spends two billion dollars a year to provide services to
its citizens,

Finally, an enterprising New York newspaper uncovered the
fact that at least 243 of New York's children had tried to take
their lives in 1957, The newspaper went after the New York City
Health Department. The Health Department recognized the gravity
of the problem, and admitted that 243 cases was a very low esti-
mate, since attempted suicides were reported to the Department
only when drugs or chemicals were used.

What happens to these children who attempt to commit suicide?

A public health nurse visits the home after the child has received
- 10-

medical attention. Her visit is followed by a health department
letter, asking that a parent and the child visit a department
psychiatrist. The health department estimated that only 18%

of the families respond to the letter. The rest are lost to the
department.

What happens to the families who take their children to the
Department in response to the letter?

"We do not diagnose or treat" a department psychiatrist
explained, "All of these youngsters need some kind of treatment.
We tell them to get it privately or go to a mental hygiene clinic.
Unfortunately, there are long waiting lists at clinics."

Comnlicating all the aforementioned difficulties is the
tussling and hassling among the various agencies having juris-
diction over the sick and bewildered child. I have had a long
and bitter experience with agency officials and social workers
in the attempt to follow specific children undergoing treatment.
A few years ago I picked the records of 40 disturbed children at
random from the files of a large social agency in New York City.
Over the next six months I was able to find only 11] of them, and
only because these 11 were either in jail, in a state mental hos-
pital, or fin a state training school. The other 29 were lost to
me, but they were still nice, shiny cards in the file cabinet
of a well-educated social worker.

More than two years ago, speaking to the First Annual Con-
vention of the New York State Community Mental Health Boards,

I told the delegates that we were all “intently awaiting a

comprehensive plan for psychiatric services in the New York
-ll-

City schools. As an alumnus of the New York City Public School
System, I realize the difficulties in setting up such a program.
However, there is no excuse for the mediocre psychiatric services
now available in the New York City schools. I know there are
egos involved, there are conflicting jurisdictions involved--
there are even "empires" involved--but there are also thousands
upon thousands of terribly sick children involved, and I think
that is much more important than a wounded emperor or two."

I do not stress this problem unduly. Professor Kenneth Clark
of New York University, who has given a great deal of attention
to the problem of the disturbed child, said this recently when
asked to comment on the reason for lack of a unified plan for
psychiatric services in the New York City schools:

"The real problem is hypocritical bureaucracy, protective
of its kingdom, ready to use bullying, blackmailing, or any other
weapon to maintain the status quo. The real jungle is in the
office of the bureaucrats, not on the streets to which we consign
the youngsters,"

Because there is no plan, because few communities have
tackled the problem of the disturbed child in all of its rami-

fications, he is most frequently lost in a nightmare of arrests,

 

 

 

-
—,
expulsions, visits to overcrowded clinics, and final dumping in
a
some massive penitentiary.

Mr. Harrison Salisbury recently did a superb series for

 

 

 

 

the New York Times on disturbed children in New York City. This
is what he had to say of this lost generation of young children:
"A look at the record of some problem children shows they

have lived at 15 or 18 addresses in the last two years alone.

 

 
-~ 12 -

They are birds of passage, rootless and drifting, pathetic bits
of evidence in support of Albert Schweitzer's conviction that
‘modern man is lost in the mass in a way which is without prece-
dent in history'".

The foregoing is a brief resume of some of the dimensions
of the problem. On the positive side, what steps must we take
as a society to reduce the epidemic of juvenile delinquency and
restore many of these disturbed children to productive living?

It has been my long held belief, which I expressed at some
length in EVERY OTHER BED, that we know little or nothing about
the underlying causes of emotional disturbances in children.

We are surfeited with all kinds of contradictory advice
from "experts" on how to handle these children. One of the
saner minds in the field, Dr. Hilde Bruch of Columbia University's
Department of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, recently denounced the
"intimidating techniques" of experts which result in "increased
disturbances in) children, as illustrated by the increasing need
for psychiatric treatment of children in families who have fol-
lowed the psychological advice. In the United States, where the
teaching of child psychiatry is propagated most vigorously, there
seems to be no decline in the incidence of mental disorders. On
the contrary, emotional problems and juvenile delinquency are
said to be on the increase, involving more and more children from
middle class homes",

At the 1956 Convention of the American Psychiatric Association,
Dr. Ian Stevenson, Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry of the

University of Virginia Medical School, performed a devastating
- 13 -

biopsy on some of the current cliches and platitudes concerning
child rearing. Backed up with impressive documentation, here
are some of Dr. Stevenson's conclusions:

1- We have no compelling evidence of a predictable re-
lationship between child training practices and later personality.

2- Severe psychological stresses can have as marked effects
in adulthood as in infancy and childhood, sometimes having greater
effect in adulthood, As Dr, Stevenson put it:

"The capacity to acquire a fixed, irrational fear or other
learned response is found in adulthood as much as in childhood,
and perhaps more so."

3—~ Infants reared according to ostensibly ideal methods
of infant care show no greater immunity to mental illness than
do other children reared differently. Infants reared under appar-
ently inadequate or harmful circumstances do not necessarily
develop psychological disorders. Quoting Dr. Stevenson again:

"An event which proves traumatic to one person may strengthen
another."

At the same scientific session a magnificent 30-year
follow-up study was presented on 150 disturbed children who had
been treated at the St. Louis Municipal Psychiatric Clinic from
1924-1929. Although there was some correlation between child-
hood disturbances and adult maladjustment in this group, it was
reported that the incidence of these disturbances bore little
or no relation to socio-economic status or to broken homes.

In fact, in some categories of mental illness the lower socio-

economic levels had more adults without psychiatric disease
-14-

than the upper levels. Furthermore, subjects from homes broken
either by death or by separation and divorce were at least as
often free of psychiatric disease as those from unbroken homes.

The conclusions of the St. Louis survey have been recently
substantiated by a much larger survey of high school children
in the Midwest and Far West, recently reported in the American
Journal of Sociology. The authors of the report, members of
the faculty at the State College of Washington, uncovered no
significant statistical differences in delinquency in any one
of a broad strata of socio-economic groups surveyed.

Several years ago, in a study of manic depressive disease
in children reported in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, Dr. John D. Campbell presented impressive evidence
to the effect that each child "seems to possess his own pattern
of susceptibility based on inherent or constitutional factors".

"The psychodynamic school of psychiatry seems to allow the
child no credit at all for individual adaptability," Dr. Campbell
wrote. "It would appear that the very history of America, with
its many examples of log-cabin-to-President personality, or from
the slums to executive type of success story, should show the
discrepancy in this kind of reasoning. If patients were studied
as if the physicians were original observers, and not simply to
repeat by rote unproved theories, it would readily be seen that
child psychiatry is not always a case of parental neglect, mis-—
understanding, rejection, or discord in the home,"

Dr. Paul Lemkau of Johns Hopkins, a distinguished American

psychiatrist not usually associated with the organic school
-15-

of psychiatry, has pleaded with his colleagues over the past

few years to accelerate research on physiological disturbances
underlying childhood disorders. Emphasizing the crucial im-
portance of detailed bio-chemical and neurological studies of
organic changes in the infant from conception to birth, Dr. Lemkau
cited the impressive existing evidence of pre-natal damage to a
child as a major contributing factor in epilepsy, mental de-
ficiency, and cerebral palsy.

The field of mental deficiency offers a dramatic illustration
of what I am talking about. There are four million mental de-
fectives in this country, and each day sees the birth of 300
babies destined to be victims of this tragic disease. Yet, up
until a few years ago, there was a pitifully small amount of
physiological research on this disorder,

Representative John Fogarty has spearheaded the awakening
in this country on this problem, In a speech on the floor of
the House of Representatives on March 21, 1955, he pointed out
that there were scores of research questions going unanswered in
the field of mental deficiency,

"Much more new knowledge is within reach," Congressman
Fogarty told the House, "Mental retardation at birth has been
definitely linked in many cases with the fate of the mother and
the child... There are many other studies which should be di-
rected to the prevention of mental retardation. What happens
to the embryo during pregnancy? How does the brain develop?
What causes brain abnormal ties? How is the brain nourished?

A
And when it is adversely affected during embryonic growth, can
~16-

the destructive process be reversed by an administration of drugs
or other substances?"

As a result of the eloquence and persistence of the Congress-
man from Rhode Island, several million dollars have been allocated
over the past few years to research on mental deficiency. There
are limited break-throughs which offer great promises. We know
of the danger of the mother contracting German Measles during
the first three months of pregnancy. We also know that some mental
deficiencies are caused by incompatible Rh factors in the blood
of the mother and infant. In an even more important break-through,
we know that a specific type of mental deficiency characterized
by a defect in the metabolism of an essential amino acid can be
corrected by diet.

We must begin to do the same kind of intensive research on

 

emotional disturbances in children. The current psychiatric
literature on children is cluttered up with hundreds of books

and thousands of magazine articles attempting to prove that the
disturbed child is the conditioned reflex result of a Greek myth
concerning Oedipus. I do not discount the importance of parental
and environmental influences in shaping the behavior of the child,
But I do discount premature and unscientific clinical impressions
about the impact of these influences.

I am also somewhat skeptical of the hothouse school of
psychiatry which plants four to eight children behind a one-way
vision window and observes them "scientifically" for an enormous
number of years, Unfortunately the one-way window is too fre-
quently clouded--it reflects only the psychodynamic theories of

the observers. As one of the children being observed put it to
-17-

- me recently:

"We think the window is one-way in the wrong direction."

In addition to more scientific research on childhood behavior,
it is imperative that we train more psychiatric personnel to handle
these children. However, it would be sheer folly to think that we
can ever train enough personnel to give individual psychotherapy
to every disturbed child. It would not only be impossible to do
this in terms of available manpower, but it would be totally un-
wise, The very nature of the treatment situation is an artificial
and traumatic one, and we should at all costs try to avoid it.

Instead of a great number of highly specialized people, we
need a great number of additional people with specific skills
which can be applied to these children. For example, the trained
workers of the New York City Youth Board are doing a magnificent
job going into the neighborhoods where trouble exists and applying
their knowledge and affection to a solution of behavior problems.

We do ourselves a great disservice when we continually push
these children out of the community and into specialized treat-
ment situations, We fail to use the tremendous community resources
which now exist and can be applied to these troubled children.

For example, Mr, Salisbury in the New York Times series
points out that extension of the school day to 5 p.m, and pro-
vision of school facilities for work and play in delinquent areas
costs only about $15 a child per year above the regular program,

By way of contrast, the cost of an institutionalized delinquent
is $4,000 a year or more.

Where all-day neighborhood centers have been provided, and
-~18-

where schools have been kept open until 5 p.m., delinquency has
dropped sharply in New York City. However, in the areas where
there are two-shift and three-shift schools, the situation is
impossible. A truant officer checking on a child is frequently
unable to determine when the child is supposed to be attending
school,

We need more school teachers specially trained to give
Sympathetic guidance and discipline to these troubled children.
The New York Herald Tribune recently ran a profile of one of
these teachers. She is Miss Norma Marenstein, and she teaches
at PS 614, one of the city's special "600" schools for maladjusted
children,

On a blackboard at the rear of her classroom is a list of
names under the heading "100% attendance", The names of 16
students who have attended classes every day during the school
year are on the list. In the schools they used to attend, every
one of these students was officially known as an "inveterate
truant", Miss Marenstein's entire class consists of these 16
students, How does she do it? Here is what she has to say:

"We appeal to their reasoning power, You show them you are
willing to do something. They must show they‘re willing to comply.
Here they meet their match. You know, these boys are not just sur-
prised when they become conscious of the fact that they are quali-
fied to use their brains, They are shocked, It*s a matter of
building their confidence--once they've got that, I've got them.
They learn that they get what they give. They become men."

But there aren't enough teachers like Miss Marenstein in the
-19 -

New York City school system. The salaries are low and the schools
are overcrowded, Why? Mr, Salisbury put it this way:

"The plain truth seems to be that in the war-disoriented,
prosperity-tranquilized last ten years, the city and most of its
inhabitants have been content to drift and make do, ‘*Let George
do it* has been a convenient motto for too many. Today the fear-
some harvest is being reaped,"

This is where you of the congress of parents and teachers
come into the picture, You are the precious yeast of this
democracy, but frequently you do little to raise the level of
society*s goals. For example, in all the newspaper clamor re-
cently about more psychiatrists in the New York City school system,
there was only a small one-paragraph item which reported that the
New York State Legislature recently killed a bill which would have
permitted State aid to Day Care Centers for children of working
mothers. In a few years, the harvest of that action will be
reaped. Will the mothers of New York City then call for more
psychiatrists and more one-way windows?

I would like to make myself clearly understood on this issue.
For a number of years I have gone up and down the byways of this
hand, pleading for more residential treatment centers for children.
I still believe these are desperately needed, but I don*t want us
to put all of our eggs in this one basket. I don’t want this
movement for residential treatment centers to proliferate to the
point where we have a vast chain of these edifices replete with
psychodynamic psychiatrists who outnumber the children who are
messing up the clay pots they don*t like behind one-way windows

they ridicule.
- 20 -

A very wise psychiatrist once described the state mental
hospital as "a monument to failure--the failure of society to
create the necessary conditions for the full healthy adjustment
of individual minds". By the same token, these residential
centers can become monuments celebrating our failure to ade-
quately tackle the problem of the disturbed child in the setting
in which he lives and learns,

In a very fundamental sense, the disturbed children of
today serves as a scapegoat for our adult sense of guilt about
the unstable world in which we live,

"Juvenile delinquency is not an indictment of our young
people," the Rev, Walter Donald Kring asserted recently. "It
is an indictment of our culture. The search in our day must not
particularly be to provide more help for the youth who are psy-
chologically disturbed, but to look at the areas of our living
which are making people disturbed and to try to get some decent
basis of mental health for our civilization."

In the recent uproar in the New York City schools, scape-
goats were uncovered by the score, But a few courageous voices
spoke out and placed the blame where it really belongs. Irving

ee
Levin, principal of a Junior High School in Brooklyn, had this

 

‘to say of the "shook-up" generation he was trying to teach:

"Ty try to make them act the way we don't. We try to
teach them to be polite, to be generous, to believe in the
sacredness of human life, to respect the rights of others. But

the kids have eyes. They look around. They see that ultimately
- 2) -

individuals and nations use force to solve their problems. We
tell them about the old fashioned virtues, but we do not practice
them in private life, community life, or in foreign relations."

We adults create the society in which our children live,
We set the values by our approval or disapproval. I am force-
fully\reminded of this by the action of our Federal Government
just a year ago. You remember the great economy wave of that
period. As I pointed out in a speech in Springfield, Illinois
on April 30, 1957, we were then cutting back our health and
welfare expenditures despite the fact that we were adding four
million children a year to the nation’s population. Although
the health and welfare expenditures of the Federal Government
comprise only 4% of its budget total, the House of Representatives,
following the dire warnings of President Eisenhower and George
Humphrey, spent two weeks trying to cut these health and welfare
expenditures below the austerity levels already approved by the
Bureau of the Budget. And were it not for the gallant battle
conducted by John Fogarty, who stood on the floor day in and day
out and fought these cuts, they would have gone through.

However, among the items cut was one which would have pro-
vided $3,000,000 for the inauguration of a research and training
attack on juvenile delinquency. Billions for new turnpikes,
billions for new weapons of war, but not a penny for an attack
on juvenile delinquency.

This year the picture is superficially different. Because
of heavy unemployment, you can get money for health and welfare

programs if you can prove they help the employment situation,
-~ 92 -

Mind you, you still don't get the money on the merits of the
program. As Walter Reuther once pointed out, you can only get
day care centers for children in time of war and depression.

Let's look at it honestly. This is the world you and I
have created for our children. This is the society in which
you get billions more for missiles, billions more for roads,
and even two billion dollars for an expensive trip to the moon.
But when it comes to more money for our schools, even the cur-
rent unemployment situation hasn*t convinced the Administration
to ask the Congress for the school construction monies which it
regarded as absolutely vital only a year ago.

Questioning the values of our current way of life, Adlai
Stevenson asked the United Parents* Associations recently what
had become of American standards when the no-shift automobile
was put ahead of abolishing the two-shift school.

This quotation appears as the summing point of the excellent
recent booklet on juvenile delinquency issued by the National
Congress of Parents and Teachers. This, then, is our challenge
for the future.

May I conclude with something I said a year ago in Spring-
field:

"TI earnestly beseech all of you here today to take a firm
stand in favor of the human race. Fight hard for those unfor-
tunates who are in your care--who cannot speak for themselves.
If you do not falter, we will win, and this democracy will be a

healthier place in which to live and raise our children."

-~ 30 -