This summer, everyone celebrated the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the address of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in which he described a new, refined American Dream.
On Nov. 22, we noted two historic events. One is the 1863 dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery 150 years ago by President Abraham Lincoln, during which he also gave a new vision for America. Lincoln’s address clearly incorporated slaves into the American Dream by citing America’s founding documents proclaiming “all men are created equal,” and therefore government “of the people, by the people and for the people” could not be reconciled with slavery.
Dr. King highlighted those same words as a promise America makes to its citizens. A promise, he said, that was broken to African Americans. They both spoke of failures in democracy.
We also note the tragedy of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination 50 years ago. His death gives us a moment to reflect on our selective memory. Many want to treat that tragedy as America’s loss of innocence, but innocence was already lost. Earlier that year, Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran, was assassinated for his work on voters’ rights in Mississippi. And that fall, four young girls were murdered by a bomb set off during Sunday services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.
The Pew Research Center says in 1963, 69 percent of Americans were aware of the march and 63 percent of them thought poorly of it. Kennedy’s approval rating dropped from 70 percent in February to 59 percent in October, in large part because of his June speech introducing a Civil Rights Act.
This summer, the AFL-CIO hosted a March for Jobs and Freedom symposium to discuss and assess where we are today. My contribution to that was released this week by the Economic Policy Institute. In August 1963, the unemployment rate was 5.7 percent. It has been more than five years since America had an unemployment rate that low. Recalling our selective memory problem for 1963, I wondered how the 5.7 percent rate created such a huge demand for jobs and addressing unemployment.
Our policy frame shifted to tilt our sense of the possible. Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers’ (CEA’s) policy goal was to get unemployment down to 4 percent. Arthur Okun, a CEA senior economist at the time, understood the cost of unemployment in terms of lost output. His rule: A 1 percent increase in unemployment costs, 2 percent in lowered output. This was an era when full employment was considered
important.
