href="#fb3_img_img_37d40f51-664a-5f72-b448-381ee83bb637.jpg" alt="FIGURE 3. The bottle of Chanel perfume my father..."/>
Photograph by David Schoenbrod, 2016.
FIGURE 3. The bottle of Chanel perfume my father bought for my mother during World War II.
Scientists see no paradox in seemingly selfish people desiring to act fairly, because in the millennia-long competition among societies, those societies whose members tend to treat one another fairly work better and therefore are more likely to thrive. Being fit to survive includes fairness as well as selfishness.12
Yet circumstances can make it tough to be fair. This, again, can be seen in everyday events. When, long ago, I started to take the Amtrak train from New York City to upstate New York, passengers dutifully lined up in the waiting room to board the train, but as the space became increasingly congested over the years, a few passengers, pretending that they saw no line, butted in at the front. Noticing that others were cheating, more and more of the passengers butted in. What had been an orderly line in time turned into a crush of individuals elbowing to get to the head, with most trying not to be too obvious about it. Most nerve, first served.
Thankfully, Amtrak put Charles John Jackson in charge of boarding the trains. He could see that passengers felt horrible about being put in this situation and set about creating circumstances in which people would act fairly despite the congestion. His solution: put up cordons to make the line plainly visible in order to communicate to passengers that “we do care about people waiting in line patiently.” He found that about 98 percent of people complied voluntarily and assigned three subordinates to stop those who didn’t. Now that passengers have become accustomed to circumstances that make for fairness in boarding the trains to upstate New York, hardly anyone tries to cheat. Behavioral scientists would approve of Mr. Jackson’s strategy. Some of them have found, for example, that people are less apt to cheat when they sense that others aren’t doing it.13 I saw an instance of the payoff take place on the day before Thanksgiving in 2014, when 649 people waited to board the midmorning Amtrak train. They formed a line seven hundred feet long. The line required six right turns to fit into the cramped and crowded station. And, as far as I could see, no one tried to butt in line.
The people who wrote the Constitution sought to structure the government to create circumstances that would encourage the fair side of human nature and discourage the selfish side. The Constitution gave members of Congress the job of taking responsibility for the benefits and burdens of legislation, and, as a necessary consequence, the job of educating themselves and their constituents on who would gain and who would lose from the proposed action.14 In sum, to do its job well, Congress needs to have open debate, just as the honeybees need to have open debate to find good sites for their hives.
There was open debate when Congress attempted to pass civil rights legislation in the early 1960s and the fair side of human nature won out with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson as well as Congress deserve great credit for its passage, but there are other heroes who don’t get the credit they deserve: the ordinary Americans who supported the legislation because they wanted their country to be fair.
In the summer of 1962, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the most outspoken proponent of civil rights in the Senate, had nowhere near the two-thirds vote from the senators needed to stop the filibuster by Southern senators. His despair was palpable. I had the chance to talk with Senator Humphrey because I worked in his office as a summer intern.15 These Southern senators had no self-consciousness about their opposition to civil rights legislation. They would never relent. In 1962, Southern opposition to civil rights legislation seemed like an immovable object. That’s why its passage in 1964 was a surprise.
In 1963 came the March on Washington amid growing unease in the heartland of America about Jim Crow segregation. When the leaders of the march assembled on the high stage built in front of the Lincoln Memorial, they saw below them a host of marchers stretching out a mile along the Lincoln Monument Reflecting Pool. This host—of which I was a part—seemed to me like a community, a communion in the root sense of the word. It was vast and it was determined. The immovable object of bigotry had met an irresistible force.
Dr. King’s speech, and, in particular, the “I have a dream” passage, which he added on the inspiration of the moment, convinced the marchers that the irresistible force would prevail. As Clarence Jones, whom Dr. King commissioned to write a draft of the speech, stated a half century later:
If you read the text of the speech, while you might be impressed and moved by certain parts of it, you would probably think it was a good speech, but not necessarily a profound or powerful speech. . . . What made the speech an extraordinary speech was a combination of factors. [It was delivered] at a gathering of the largest group of people assembled anywhere in the country at any time in the history of the United States for any purpose, 25 percent of whom were white. [It] was in the capital of the United States. [It was] at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. . . . Dr. King, to me, spoke on that day in a way I had never heard him speak before, and had never heard him speak since.16
Dr. King’s words moved the marchers, and the marchers’ reaction moved King. Then, too, everyone there understood that the march would have a vast audience through television. As we listened, we knew that his words would sway the people watching at home. As Jones put it, “Once those words hit the ears of the listener at home, all that was left was to let their meaning take hold and stir the conscience of everyone who was tuned in.”17
Dr. King’s Dream, it seemed, would move the immovable object. And so it would, but not at first. Immediately after the march, King and other leaders met with President John Kennedy and asked him to put some real effort into getting Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act that he had endorsed. What they heard from the president was, in Jones’s words, “the March hadn’t done much for him. . . . [Kennedy] was more worried about his party’s chances come election day than about the Negroes’ chances for justice. Despite the rousing success of The March, he wasn’t going to give The Movement any genuine support.”18
In 1964, only five months after the march and two months after the assassination of President Kennedy, Dr. King and other key civil rights leaders met with President Johnson. The leaders walked into the Oval Office with little hope that the Civil Rights Act would pass soon, but by the time they left, they were confident that it would. According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, the president needed a strong civil rights bill to secure the support of liberals in the 1964 election, but, more than that, he believed passionately in civil rights. Ironically, one tactic that President Johnson used to sell the legislation to the country is that its passage would honor John Kennedy.19
In the end, the Civil Rights Act got passed only because the Senate voted to stop the Southern filibuster, which had blocked the bill for fifty-seven days. In 1964, a motion to stop a filibuster required sixty-seven votes. The motion passed 71–29. Senator Humphrey, who was the floor manager of the bill, a diverse team of other senators, and President Johnson eked out this victory by winning over not only a few reluctant Democratic senators but also the overwhelming majority of the Senate’s Republicans.20
Photograph by David Schoenbrod, 1963.
FIGURE 4. Some members of the “communion” listening to a speech at the March on Washington.
Because by 1964 the northern heartland of America had come to share the Dream, the
