by Dan Rather
On Christmas Eve, my father and uncle pooled their money, meager though it was, and bought toys for the families living in the dilapidated house and under the tin roof. I remember a rag doll, a small wooden train, and for some reason a tambourine—why these details are so vivid I couldn’t say. We waited until after the children had gone to bed to give the gifts quietly to the parents, so that when those children woke up the next morning they would not think Santa had forsaken them. That was the hope, anyway.
What sticks with me more than even that act of kindness was how my mother talked to me about it. I was an inquisitive child (perhaps not surprising considering my later path in life), and I was always asking questions. So I asked my mother why we gave those families gifts at Christmas when we ourselves didn’t have much. I remember then answering for myself: “It was because we felt sorry for them, right?”
“We do not feel sorry for them,” my mother said sternly. “We understand how they feel.” It was a lesson that is so seared in my mind, I can see her face and I can hear her tone of voice as if it were yesterday.
What my family did was not heroic. I like to think of it more as neighborly. And it was in line with a national ethos in those dark days, repeated countless times in countless communities across the country. We understood that those who were suffering weren’t lazy or lacking the desire to do better. Fate had the potential to slap any of us. In another family in our neighborhood, the father had a part-time job as a watchman. One morning a neighbor noticed that he had come home from work early, and then she saw his wife crying. When she went over to find out what had happened, she learned the man had lost his job. The news spread from neighbor to neighbor like an unwired telegraph. By the time my father came home from work, people were gathering to grieve with the unlucky family. Their house had the feeling of one mourning the death of a loved one. Everybody knew that a lost job was not likely to be replaced.
There is one other story that for me is perhaps the most resonant. It is of a boy, a few years older than I, who lived near us and had a gifted artistic sensibility. He was the kind of kid who could draw almost anything. I remember, with wonder, how he could build model airplanes out of balsa wood with perfect symmetry and not a wrinkle in the paper skins that covered them. In different circumstances, he might have grown up to show his work in galleries. He had also been a strong student and a wonderful athlete, winning all the footraces in the neighborhood and dominating sandlot football. His love for the Glenn Miller Orchestra irked some of his neighbors, who complained about how many times he played the three records he owned. But his family was in dire economic straits, so he quit school at fifteen to start looking for a job to support them.
He never found much work other than a few projects helping out a bricklayer. What he did start to find was trouble. He began smoking and running with the wrong crowd. He started hanging out on the street corners, often late into the night. Before long, he became ill with what I believe was some respiratory ailment and went into the hospital. When I visited him, I saw the shell of a young man, in many ways still a boy. I had looked up to him as one blessed with talent and grace, and here he was, completely defeated by a life that had once held such promise. Shortly thereafter he died. I attributed it to a broken heart and I imagine him taking his final breaths with flashes of what could have been, what might have been.
It is perhaps not surprising that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan looked at a nation so traumatized and felt they could defeat us. Of course, history turned out differently. The same generation that had been driven to such depths in the 1930s rose up to push back the forces of totalitarianism in a two-ocean global war in the 1940s. Perhaps those authoritarians, who felt no empathy for their own people or those they conquered, underestimated the strength of our empathy. Empathy builds community. Communities strengthen a country and its resolve and will to fight back. We were never as unified in national purpose as we were in those days. What had weakened us had also made us stronger.
I remember a major push to organize for civil defense, as there was great fear of a German or Japanese invasion. Almost everyone, truly everyone, regardless of age, race, or economic status, rushed to come together and help as soon as word came out. Our neighborhood wasn’t known for organization, but this need galvanized even those you would have never expected to volunteer. We practiced blackouts, and people were deputized as air raid wardens. It might seem a little silly now, but we all took this very seriously. It must be noted, of course, that we were still a segregated nation. But the war effort, including the service of African American soldiers, helped change the country in that regard as well. In 1948, President Harry Truman would desegregate the armed forces, six years before Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in our public schools.
Indeed, this sweep of empathy continued after the war. One of the best foreign policy efforts in American history was to help rebuild Europe and Japan. Our enemies became our friends through an acknowledgment of the common bonds of humanity. The postwar world order was built on that foundation. And when the GIs returned home, we treated them empathetically as well. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the GI Bill, was one of the greatest pieces of social legislation in our nation’s history. Among other benefits, the GI Bill ensured that servicemen’s tuitions to college or technical school were fully paid. Empathy makes for wise foreign and domestic policy.
When I consider the forces that have led to our greatest moments of progress, I do not think it is a surprise that a great spasm of empathetic legislation came in the midst of the Great Depression. The beginning of Social Security is the most notable example, but there were a host of other programs that aimed to bring relief and the dignity of work to a populace in desperate need. Many of these endeavors fell under the so-called alphabet agencies, federal programs created by President Franklin Roosevelt to combat the Great Depression. One of the most consequential was the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which at its height employed millions of people on public works projects across the country. But there were also programs like the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), which brought electrification and other services to a particularly hard-hit area of the country; the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), which regulated the stock market and other financial exchanges; and the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), which established the minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor rules. The last three of these programs remain an example of the enduring legacy of that time. This effort was widely popular and seen as the worthy and necessary actions of a government in touch with the needs of the people it served.
The second wave of such legislation came in the 1960s, and I don’t think it is coincidental that this happened as the children of the Great Depression and World War II grew into adulthood. Efforts to improve racial justice, labor rights, antipoverty programs, education, medical care, and many other needs began under President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and peaked with President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” The scope of the legislation from this time is still staggering: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, among others. Note that most of these laws were passed with considerable—sometimes overwhelming—bipartisan support. My generation came of age in a period marked by firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be faced with economic despair and a brutal war. We knew of no other world than one of hardship, and so we did not realize growing up how dire and anomalous the situation was. I cannot imagine there was a more conducive environment in which to learn the lessons of empathy.
Today these kinds of empathetic programs are associated with big government bureaucracies. There are legitimate questions about the manner in which they operate, and they could probably be improved. It is undeniable that they still do good work in bringing more fairness and justice to our democracy, but the spirit of empathy with which they were created has been lost. Empathy is a deeply personal emotion. It is about the feeling one has for one’s fellow human beings
. Transferring responsibilities to government is often necessary, but it creates a distance between us and those who need help. And if this impulse of forgoing our individual responsibilities is left unchecked, it absolves us from our own responsibility as citizens to form a more empathetic union with others.
I worry that our nation today suffers from a deficit of empathy, and this is especially true of many in positions of national leadership. It is a phenomenon that is born from, and that exacerbates, the broader divisions tearing at our republic. We see a rising tribalism along cultural, ethnic, economic class, and geographic lines. And the responsibility for these divisions should fall more squarely on the shoulders of the powerful, those who need to be empathetic, than on those who need our empathy. When we live in a self-selected bubble of friends, neighbors, and colleagues, it is too easy to forget how important it is to try to walk in the shoes of others. Technology and social media can be tools for connecting us, but I fear these advancements are in many ways deepening and hardening the divisions between us.
Very few families escaped the wounds of the Great Depression and World War II. In the intervening decades, however, the wealthy and the powerful largely have been protected from economic, social, and military upheavals by a shield of immunity. A commonality of understanding has been lost. Where once the American experience was one of a spectrum from the rich to the poor, now we live in pockets that insulate us from others. We have more in the ranks of the extremely wealthy, many fewer in the middle economic class, and a larger pool falling further and further behind. So we grow more isolated and less empathetic. The threads stitching our union together begin to fray. We see others, but we cannot imagine what their lives are actually like. We don’t even think we should have to bother.
Empathy is not only a personal feeling; it can be a potent force for political and social change. And thus the suppression or denial of empathy is a deliberate part of a cynical political calculus. Dividing people and stoking animosity can pave a path to power (and in many recent elections, it has). This has been well known since the time of the ancients. But these divisions inevitably come at the expense of the long-term health and welfare of the nation as a whole. We have seen many examples from our history where the economic and social needs of one group have been pitted against another’s—on immigration, labor rights, environmental protections, racial justice, and so many more. Such clashes usually do not end very well. In contrast, there have been moments where we reached out to one another as a nation, channeling what unites us rather than what separates us. It might be hard to imagine today, but there were times when the common purpose of the United States seemed to rise above pettiness and narrow self-interest.
One often finds the greatest lack of empathy in those who were born lucky. They tend to misidentify that luck as the superiority of their character. There are some notable exceptions: The incredibly successful investor Warren Buffett once speculated to a group of students about what would happen if, before birth, a genie gave us the opportunity to choose the political, economic, and social system into which we would be born. “What’s the catch?” he said. “One catch—just before you emerge [from the womb] you have to go through a huge bucket with seven billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you get—you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the U.S. or in Bangladesh, etc. You have no idea which slip you will get. Not knowing which slip you are going to get, how would you design the world?”
It is a wonderful thought experiment that lays out a provocative case for empathy. Buffett calls his construct “the ovarian lottery.” Now, take a moment to imagine the most sanctimonious of our current national voices. Imagine those who lecture most loudly about morality and personal responsibility from the perch of privilege. Imagine those who blame the victims of discrimination and poverty. How would these men and women fare in such a lottery as Buffett outlines? What would their message be if they themselves had been born under far different circumstances? These people are in dire need of humility, a humility bathed in the refreshing waters of empathy. We can all afford to drink more from that spring as well.
Immigration
No one can deny that the United States is now, and has always been, a nation of immigrants, even if the issue of immigration has become one of the most contentious and divisive of our current age. And yet, improbable as it may sound, I don’t remember hearing the word “immigrant” until I was in early adulthood. It was likely because of a quirk in history and geography. For one, my childhood during the Great Depression and World War II marked one of the lowest ebbs of foreign arrivals to our shores in our nation’s history. And also the Texas of my youth seemed to me at the time so overwhelmingly white and Protestant that it was hard to imagine any other type of America.
Of course it wasn’t really white. Houston also contained a significant population of African Americans, but they lived separate, segregated lives, and very little attention was paid in my school or upbringing to the means by which their ancestors had arrived in the Americas. There were also many Mexicans in Houston, but we never really considered them immigrants so much as the cultural backdrop of Texas. The southern border of the United States was not far away, and nobody paid it much heed at the time. We all knew that it could be easily crossed from both sides for purposes of work and pleasure. I remember Mexican children, the sons and daughters of migrant farmworkers, starting each fall at my elementary school. By the time we got to Thanksgiving, the harvest and livestock roundups were complete, and all of those schoolmates would be gone.
There were undoubtedly small immigrant communities in Houston—Irish and Italian populations, Catholics and Jews—but none of these groups made a sizable impression on my young consciousness.
But later, when I was wooing my wife, Jean, I traveled out to meet her family in the deep hinterland of Texas. This was about as far as one could get from people’s perceptions of immigrant America—the Lower East Side of New York City, the ethnic neighborhoods of the midwestern cities, the Chinatowns of the West. Hers was a place of open vistas, where the scrub oaks far outnumbered the human inhabitants. But Jean was a descendant of a hardy immigrant stock that still harbored a strong sense of their transatlantic journey, one made many decades earlier.
Jean came from a people known as the Wends, a Lutheran minority of Slavic ancestry who had been living in Germany and had faced cultural and religious persecution. In the days of the Texas Republic, before it joined the United States (1836 – 1845), the government in Austin commissioned agents in Europe to encourage immigrants to populate their young nation. One thing Texas had in abundance was land, and its government was promising large tracts to immigrants who would settle on the frontier (I imagine they made little mention of the existing Native American population). The story goes that this appeal made a big impression on a congregation of Wends, and a few families made the arduous journey to the U.S. They sent back glowing reports of vast horizons, of both geography and opportunity. This was enough for the entire congregation to make the dangerous passage across the great Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. Many died of disease en route, but the ones who survived landed in Galveston and spread inland. Many set up communities in towns so small they consisted of just a few families. Jean’s hometown of Winchester had a population that could be counted in the few dozens.
As I got to know Jean’s family, I began to revel in the great immigrant currents that had shaped the United States more broadly. I saw how this was a continent that beckoned to the poor and persecuted from around the globe with offers of freedom and seemingly boundless space. For much of the relatively short history of the United States, most of the world still lived under the remnants of feudal systems. The United States offered a destiny of one’s own making.
From Jean’s relatives, I learned that moving here did not require erasing a pride in one’s ancestry. While the Wends had embraced their American identity, they still felt s
trongly affiliated with the cultural taproots of the old country. It struck me at times that their journey to America seemed to have happened in the recent past, even though not one of Jean’s living family members had known a home other than the challenging Texas prairie. And I saw how thoroughly these families embraced their American identity—they were patriots, just like the people with whom I had grown up. But they also understood that they were from another continent. This is one of the greatest lessons of our nation’s improbable makeup: A united citizenry can be quilted together from so many different cultural fabrics. I was already in my twenties, but I was realizing I had a lot to learn about a country I loved deeply.
We all have come here from somewhere else, and the vast majority of us are only a few generations removed from another land. Whether that is one generation or ten, it seems rather sanctimonious to claim that there is much of a difference. Not many of us can trace our arrival back a few hundred years, let alone millennia. But even the ancestors of the Native Americans are believed to have come across a land bridge from Asia—a reminder that we are a species of migrations, and always have been. Of course, not all migrations have been voluntary; many are here because their ancestors were ripped from their homelands in Africa and carried across the ocean in bondage.
Too many times the term “American” has been used as a weapon against new immigrants, especially those who look, speak, or pray differently. And yet one of the noblest ideals of our country is that anybody from anywhere can be an American. This has been, and continues to be, an eternal battle between our demons and angels for the soul of the United States. And it was present at the baptism of a nation that proclaimed “all men are created equal” but defined many men as three-fifths of a whole, never mind women of all races.
The debate over immigration takes many forms, and some of them are worth considering. We are a land of opportunity and prosperity, and it would be wonderful if we had the ability to welcome everyone seeking a better life to our shores. We cannot, so we will always have to make hard choices. There are also many hard questions. How do we handle undocumented immigrants, not only the ones who have crossed our southern border, but also those who have overstayed visas? How do we continue to welcome skilled workers who can benefit our economy without taking jobs away from American citizens capable of doing the work but who might demand a higher wage? How do we contend with the fact that many undocumented workers do difficult and dangerous jobs, in agriculture, construction, and service, that most Americans do not seem to want to do themselves? How do we balance empathy for refugees seeking asylum with security concerns? Immigration will always be a complicated and perplexing issue, especially if we remain a country that is perceived as a promised land. That is the spirit that drew most of our ancestors, and hopefully we will remain such a nation.
