What Were The Goals Of Johnson's Great Society

Primary Source 3

Address at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964
Question 1.
What were the goals of Johnson’s Great Society? Why would the Great Society be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods”?
Response:
The goals of Johnson’s Great Society were progress, new visions, a rich powerful society, abundance of life liberty for all, end to poverty, racial injustice, and a place where every child can find knowledge. These are just some of the goals mentioned in Johnson’s speech. However, Johnson pushed these goals through legislation when he negotiated through congress he “included programs for consumer protection, environmental protection education and training, civil rights

At its inception in 1960, there were just a few dozen members, inspired by the civil rights movement and initially concerned with equality, economic justice, peace, and participatory democracy.” The reason why Students for a Democratic Society were forced to confront their complacency during the postwar changes because the United States “was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nation that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world.” So, the SDS was proud of America and what it had accomplished, but they felt like it could be a better country. They felt like America could be a less destructive country and be a more peaceful one. America was getting out of hand and becoming the bully of nations. The responsibility that individual students had to encounter and resolve social problems “was the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing face of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the bomb brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.” They had to resolve these problems of racial degradation and war by using their voice. So, they had protest what they thought was right to resolve the social problems. The reason why most students avoided this responsibility because they do not “value activity as a citizen.” They are “passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging in their private lives.” “Students don’t give a damn about the apathy.” The reason why students avoided this responsibility because they are only worried about their social