572 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



The man is President Johnson, whose message on natural beauty is 

 a clarion call to action. And science, through automation, is pro- 

 ducing a leisure class with time on its hands. 



Beauty has always touched the favored few of wealth, education, 

 and imagination, and it has almost always escaped the many in 

 our mill towns, tenements, and roadsides. It has always been my 

 experience that beautiful ghettos built on power and wealth have 

 been more exclusive than ugly ghettos built on poverty. 



Now, in the face of more free time for the millions, there will 

 be more possibilities for creating and sharing beauty than ever 

 existed in the history of mankind. The achievement of this beauty 

 through recreation, education, and the arts requires the high- 

 est degree of public service, which means citizen action. Only 

 then will the Great Society become a reality, because the Great 

 Society is a society of hope, scope, duty, and beauty. 



Mr. BURNING. I have approached this task with some concern. 

 I once worked here in these halls, and I have a rather healthy 

 respect for the immense trouble one can get into by opening one's 

 mouth in the State Department, but I have now crossed the Rubicon. 

 So here goes. 



I mean it, here goes, because I have to change my text on the 

 basis of seeing Mrs. Bush-Brown's pictures and on the basis of Mrs. 

 Dickerson's remarks. I have had to change my remarks because I 

 grow more and more uneasy. Suggestions are coming and they are 

 excellent, but I get the feeling that we are pikers. There will be 230 

 million more Americans in the second half of this century, compared 

 to 75 million added in the first half. The President has told us we 

 will rebuild America in 40 years. There are 190 million people out 

 there somewhere, and we are talking to ourselves. 



The President invited us here, and we received a very nice message 

 from the chairman that I perhaps didn't understand fully. The Pres- 

 ident invited us to think boldly, and now for the first time I think 

 I have been stimulated in that direction, to conceive the immensity 

 of the task before this conference. 



This White House conference has more political, business, conser- 

 vation, and education leaders than have ever been assembled before 

 to consider what we are doing to the land we live in. 



Yesterday and today we received excellent suggestions for Federal, 

 State and local programs. But frankly those kinds of suggestions 

 weren't all new. We have heard about them for a long time. What 



