Sanford Claims States' Influence Will Soon Grow

Former Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina predicted last night that the states will become increasingly responsible for fighting poverty and improving education.

Federal programs, bound by their massive, uniform regulations, "have been missing too many of the people they were supposed to help," he said in a speech at Burr Hall. "The state has to become the new home of the liberal."

Sanford, now studying federal and state governments at Duke University on a Ford grant, pointed to North Carolina's own poverty program--one of the models for the Federal War on Poverty and to its state subsidized center for educational research as examples of state initiative.

But federal planners, while expecting to carry out their programs, leave them no room for such experimentation, Sanford said.

"We once asked Washington if we could train some Appalachian girls for the tourist industry under the Manpower Retraining Act," he recalled. "I guess we confounded them. After two years, we stopped trying."

He argued that the states can seize a larger role without diminishing the power of the federal government. "The states simply have to be involved in the planning programs before they're passed by Congress and then given a freer hand in improving them," he said.

But he conceded that the states have many own problems to overcome. "Many states are still fumbling," he explained, relinquishing their power, cloaking their inaction in a tattered blanket of states' rights."

Southern states, Sanford told a questioner, have more potential than any others in the nation. "With its promising economic market and new industries, the South may become the region in the new few decades," he said. "We have a few lingering problems, but we're getting rid of them."