(Director’s Note: Stephanie Barczewski is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar in the Humanities. She is a specialist in the history of modern Britain. Her most recent book is Heroic Failure and the British (2016); her next book, Englishness and the Country House, is forthcoming from Reaktion Books in 2021. The title of her essay comes from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.” This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
The response to the coronavirus pandemic has relied upon academic expertise from obvious sources: medicine, epidemiology, biology and other scientific disciplines. Occasionally, however, historians have been summoned to provide insight, mostly related to the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. For example, they have pointed out that the very name of the pandemic is misleading, because it resulted from Spain’s neutrality in World War I, which meant that its newspapers were the first to report the outbreak. Even today, the source remains unknown: it was most likely the United States but could also have been China, France or Britain. This knowledge is valuable not only for accuracy’s sake, but because it points out the damage that can be done by associating a deadly virus with a particular country. This has been useful for combating President Trump’s efforts to label Covid-19 the “Chinese” or “Wuhan virus,” which can lead to the demonization of people of East Asian ethnicity.[2]
Historians have also contributed to efforts to examine the efforts made to reduce the impact of the 1918 flu through “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs). Academic studies showing that American cities that imposed NPIs more aggressively saw reduced death rates have been frequently cited on social media.[3] But I would like to introduce a counter-example: in Britain, almost nothing was done to combat the spread of the virus, as the Great War was deemed a greater threat to public safety and the national welfare. The general attitude was summed up by Sir Arthur Newsholme in a report compiled for the Royal Society of Medicine in 1919: “There are national circumstances in which the major duty is to ‘carry on’, even when risk to health and life is involved.”[4] We might then assume that the death toll was higher in Britain than it was in the United States. But this was not the case: Britain, with minimal NPIs, suffered around 228,000 deaths out of a total population of around 42,000,000 (or .005 of the total population). The United States, with far more NPIs, suffered 670,000 deaths out of a total population of 104,000,000 (.006). So are we to conclude from this that not introducing NPIs saved 24,000 lives in Britain, or the difference between .005 and .006 of the population? Or conversely that NPIs cost 130,000 lives in the United States? This would be ridiculously simplistic, but it is no more so than the “Philadelphia had a parade and St. Louis did not” comparisons that have frequently been used to justify aggressive NPIs.
I am not attempting here to assess the efficacy of NPIs, a subject on which I am not qualified to offer an opinion, but rather I am trying to make a suggestion about how history can be most effective in helping to shape the response to a present-day crisis. My point is that the past rarely offers simple answers, because the evidence often points in multiple directions. History may be doomed to repeat itself, but this is not because we ignore it, but because of how difficult its lessons are to extract. In 1918, there was a debate over whether wearing masks could slow the spread of influenza. In some large cities, mask usage was widespread, and, as one Red Cross public-service announcement put it, “the man or woman or child who will not wear a mask” was seen as “a dangerous slacker.” But other voices argued that masks did not work, were uncomfortable or detrimental to commerce. Some public officials refused to wear them, and in San Francisco there was even an “Anti-Mask League.”[5] A century later, the “science” has not much changed; it is instead the culture of mask-wearing that has evolved in recent months, perhaps to fit people’s political predilections.
If history is going to provide understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic, it must be done in a way that acknowledges the unknowability of the past alongside its knowability; history tells us not only what we do know, but also what we do not. If we fail to acknowledge this, it will mislead more than it will enlighten. As a guide to present-day decision-making, it therefore requires more than facile comparisons between then and now. And with its eye on the long view, it may be better suited to helping to provide the answers to the big, long-term questions about the impact of the pandemic rather than the shorter-term ones such as what measures might be effective. In this moment where we are increasingly recognizing the historical impact of the privileging of certain groups over others, we should be unafraid to acknowledge how the ways in which western societies have chosen to react to a threatening new disease are having an impact on the rest of the world. Is the near-obsessive focus on Covid-19, in other words, yet another embodiment of the elevation of the lives of wealthy westerners over those of people in the developing world? While attention and resources are directed exclusively at Covid, millions may die from other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, the treatment of which is currently being set back for years if not decades, while millions of children will go unvaccinated for diseases like polio that were, prior to this crisis, on the brink of elimination. And this is without taking into account the effects of the massive economic disruption caused by the western response to the pandemic, which will cause widespread hunger and social unrest. This, I fear, and not our failure to achieve the eradication of the virus through lockdowns or universal mask-wearing, is the most dire way in which our current history will take the form of a repetition of the past.
[1] The title of this essay comes from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” (1891): “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”
[2] See https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304645.
[3] The most-frequently cited study is: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291356/.
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52564371. See also https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/spanish-flu-britain-how-many-died-quarantine-corona-virus-deaths-pandemic/.
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/05/06/mask-protests-flu-san-francisco-coronavirus/.