Hands Across America

How many people would have to hold hands in order to create an unbroken chain from one side of the United States to the other?

I woke up a little earlier than I anticipated this morning, so I started doing some mental math to see if I could put myself back to sleep. This sort of thought experiment is pretty common for me whenever I’m trying to sleep, but it was to no avail today.

However, I couldn’t wait to tell you about this. The question I was considering wasn’t purely hypothetical: there was a real event called Hands Across America where this massive logistical feat was actually tried.

Hands Across America was part of a wave of charity events I lived through during the mid-1980s. If you’ve never heard We Are the World before, you might want to keep it that way. I don’t know of any better cautionary tales about having too much talent in one place than this song and video, but if you’re eager for nostalgia, here you go:

In fairness, you can see the sincerity on everyone’s faces, and most of these artists were legitimately interested in leveraging capitalism for good. The biggest stars in the world would use their star power to raise awareness for a brutal famine in Ethiopia, and to raise as much money as possible, which turned out to be about $60 million.

Hands Across America was a domestic corollary, designed to raise awareness about homelessness and poverty in America. They also wanted to raise a ton of money by charging everyone who participated $10, which would then go to homeless shelters all across the US.

I love the symbolism of connecting one side of a nation with an unbroken human chain. Unfortunately, the idea was a bit of a commercial flop: it ended up raising only $15 million.

By this point, people were burned out by really big charity efforts. I remember a cynical backlash to these attempts to raise cash to help folks.

Back over to the math and guessing.

First, I guessed that the US is 3000 miles wide, and I assumed that a person took up about a meter of space. That means a thousand people would make up every kilometer, and since something like 2.5 kilometers are in a mile, a mile means 2500 people holding hands.

2500 people per mile times 3000 miles is a little unwieldy in my head, so I broke it up into 1000 x 2500 = 2,500,000. 2,500,000 x 3 = 7,500,000.

That was the guess I held in my mind when I started researching the actual event just a few minutes ago. The actual number of participants seems to have been 5.5 million or so, and the chain of hands wasn’t actually complete, particularly in the American southwest.

If you research how wide the continental US is, you’ll get an answer of 2800 miles at its widest point. I think this answer is typically given so that you get a sense of the enormity of the continent, but we don’t really want the widest spot for this.

The shortest distance from the Atlantic to the Pacific, completely traversing the continent, is 2089 miles. This is starting just south of Brunswick, Georgia, and finishing just south of San Diego, California. So, all you’d need to do is get a bunch of people together who can levitate, and…

Actually, we should probably consider a more pragmatic route. If you drive between those two points, you’re looking at about 2400 miles. That’s probably pretty close to the shortest distance for which you could really set this thing up.

My next assumption was that a person took up a meter of space, and I’ll concede that a meter is a pretty short guess. My arm span is around six feet (closer to 2 meters), for example, but I also figured the average person would be a little shorter than me. I also wanted to account for wiggles in the line, so I leaned toward the conservative side with this assumption.

The last assumption I made was that there are 2.5 kilometers in a mile. This one was way off: a mile is approximately 1.6 kilometers. So, we need to multiply 1.6 by the number of people per kilometer in order to get the number of people per mile. That’s 1600 people per mile, assuming everyone takes up a meter of space.

1600 people/mile times 2400 miles gives us 3,840,000 people. You could get this done if you had a little under 4 million people, all perfectly cooperating at once.

Despite the lack of funds raised, this event sticks in my mind. I just think it’s the coolest experiment to run, just to scratch that very human symbolic itch. And, of course, I love thinking about this sort of enormous endeavor.

Hands Across America’s legacy is one of collective action and the shared human desire to connect and make a difference, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Do you remember Hands Across America? If you’re younger, what are some notable large scale events like this you have lived through?