On Pandemic and Progress: Musings of a Father and Disaster Historian

By Christopher M. Church

“Look! Humans!” My four-year-old shouts and dramatically points at a family of three as they walk up the path. In her voice, I hear one part excitement and one part fear. She pulls up her mask, grabs her older sister, and we step off to the side of the path in order to let the other family pass.

This is a familiar occurrence on our evening walks through the hiking paths near our home. Over six months into the pandemic, my daughters’ and my lives have been characterized by social distancing, diligent handwashing, distance learning, and honestly far too much time spent at home. Meanwhile, as a clinical pharmacist, my spouse’s life has been marked by a growing unease with the worsening pandemic and society’s lackluster response. While we stay home and navigate the perils of Zoom, she dons her surgical mask each day to navigate hospital corridors, bringing life-saving medications to those suffering from ailments both old and new. Sharing elevators with colleagues wearing full HAZMAT gear, she returns home each night tired but ready to a perform a ritual birthed of the pandemic: leaving her shoes in the garage, running her clothes though the washer’s sanitation cycle, wiping down her keys and phone with Clorox wipes, and then taking a shower before coming within six feet of the children. When she arrives home, the kids wave to her from a distance, knowing they’ll get their hugs once the rites of cleaning have been performed.

Though we’re fortunate that nothing tragic has happened to us, at least not as of the writing of this piece, our lives have nevertheless been turned upside down: my eldest daughter’s social circle was broken and then refashioned within cyberspace, my youngest daughter tells me daily how much she misses her friends and teachers from daycare, and my book manuscript sits somewhere in the bowels of my computer untouched. To give a sense of scale, the pandemic has now consumed more than one eighth of my youngest daughter’s life, and my children, like so many across the United States, have been thrust into a social purgatory marked by online education and Zoom dates. My spouse and I worry about the lasting impact all this will have on our children’s formative years.

We are healthy and safe, and we are doing our best to piece together shreds of normalcy, but the fact remains that seeing other people has become simultaneously thrilling and frightening.

While we inhabit this neurotic world of ritualistic sanitization, social distancing, and doom-scrolling the news (a neologism born of the pandemic itself), other members of our society go about their lives in a cavalier fashion: dining indoors at restaurants, refusing to wear a mask in public, and attending the umpteenth party at the Lake of the Ozarks, a place I didn’t know existed six months ago and which I now have heard too much about. Just yesterday, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, announced that the state will fully reopen and lift all COVID-19 restrictions; bars, theaters, restaurants—all will throw caution to the wind. Mission accomplished.

The numbers tell a different story, of course. We were supposed to flatten the curve, to head into the fall well equipped to weather the flu season. Instead, there are now over 200,000 dead from COVID-19, with an expected 150,000 more to perish by the end of the year. With conspiracy theories about vaccines reaching a fever pitch, healthcare professionals worry that the flu season will amplify COVID-19’s mortality. Our president has injected politics into the scientific process, casting doubt on the efficacy of the vaccine we’ve all been anxiously waiting for. At my lowest moments, I feel my family’s decision to respect epidemiological guidelines has been for naught, that my daughters will bear the lasting mental consequences their entire lives while so many seem to continue to live carefree. I then consider the now hundreds of thousands who’ve perished, and the millions who’ve experienced COVID-19’s devastation, and I become enraged that while politically motivated governors and public officials rearrange economic deck chairs, the ship sinks.

Sadly, this polarized reaction to worldwide tragedy is nothing new. As an historian, I can’t help but draw parallels to the past, as so many have rightfully done in the press. The most readily referenced precedent is of course the 1918-19 flu pandemic, which went through four waves and ultimately led to the deaths of as many as 100 million people worldwide.

Germ theory wasn’t new then, just as it isn’t new now. At the time, epidemiologists made many of the same recommendations: stay away from large crowds, don a mask in public, and wash your hands frequently. In response to these responsible precautions, less than scrupulous politicians formed anti-mask leagues and irresponsibly blamed the illness on foreigners (hence the name Spanish Flu), while angry citizens loudly protested local bans on public gatherings and countless others stuck their fingers in their ears and went about their daily lives as if nothing happened.

Consequently, the pandemic went through four stages, with the death toll mounting and the lasting effects—economic, social, and political—worsening as time passed. While many families doubtless experienced the pandemic as mine has, and as many more mourned the loss of loved ones, others ignorantly parroted Donald Trump’s adage, uttered in his Axios interview with Jonathan Swan: “It is what it is.” Despite most Americans dutifully following safety guidelines, the minority’s actions put everyone in danger.

The earlier pandemic had its share of swindlers and hucksters, claiming false cures and spreading conspiracy theories. One such individual was Eugene Schmitz, a Trumpian man known as “Handsome Gene.” Backed by the police union and touting a focus on “law and order,” “Handsome Gene” was a smooth-talking musical performer whose popularity among the working class assured him a political career and gave cover to his criminal dealings while mayor of San Francisco from 1902 to 1907. When catastrophe struck during the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906, “Handsome Gene” was ill-prepared to mitigate the disaster, but nevertheless saw an opportunity to amplify anti-Chinese sentiment and attempt to expel Chinese Americans from Chinatown once and for all. Throwing gas on the fire, as it were, he responded to phantom reports of looting by giving police an expansive shoot-to-kill order that led to the state-sanctioned murder of dozens of Americans. (The parallels here with Trump’s stance on the Black Lives Matter protests could fill another article altogether.) After the debacle of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire in 1906, Gene was found guilty of bribery, extortion, and giving safe harbor to criminals during his tenure as mayor. Though he was sentenced to five years in San Quentin, he never set foot in the state prison due to a lengthy appeals process.

A decade later, as the 1918 flu pandemic sickened millions, “Handsome Gene” helped to lead the charge against mask wearing, and many had not learned to distrust the man and what he represented. Anti-maskers of his ilk claimed not only that public health requirements abridged liberty and were their own form of oppression, but that mask wearing was itself causing people to fall sick with the flu—a baseless assertion that now makes the rounds on social media and appears in conspiratorial YouTube “documentaries” about COVID-19. Rounding out the uncomfortable parallels, anti-maskers in 1918 and 1919 alleged that the case figures were inflated due to physicians’ zeal in finding cases—a claim that resonates too closely with Donald Trump’s criticism of testing.

As the death toll from the pandemic reached about 240,000, roughly in line with the current death toll from COVID-19 in the present day, resistance to public health measures began to peak. In fact, someone set a buckshot-filled, dirty bomb outside the home of Dr. William Hassler, the public health chief in San Francisco, and in January 1919, Eugene Schmitz, now on the city’s Board of Supervisors, headlined an anti-masker gathering at the Dreamland Rink that drew up to 5,000 people. [1] With Schmitz as a political ally on the Board who penned an anti-mask proclamation, the Anti-Mask League’s agitation ultimately led to the lifting of San Francisco’s mask requirements, and the pandemic bloomed in response.[2]

As governors like Ron DeSantis and US Senators like Rand Paul question the legitimacy of healthcare professionals’ recommendations, demanding that we do nothing and let the virus take its course, it seems plain as day that progress is always pushed to tomorrow. The past resonates painfully in the present, and from my vantage point as an historian and father, the knowledge that we have learned so little from the past is beyond infuriating.

To make progress, we need to learn from society’s past mistakes, and to do that we need humanities education. Sadly, the pandemic has brought an economic crisis, and the Nevada legislature’s response has been to dramatically cut education funding, particularly for higher education. With the past as a guide, I fear that these cuts will disproportionately affect the humanities disciplines already imperiled by the last financial crisis. As I watch others repeat the same mistakes as those a century before, as I hear our leaders lie to the public with the very same phrases used by conmen like “Handsome Gene,” and as I witness an effort to cut humanities funding and refocus it on “patriotic instruction,” I cannot help but feel fury when I hear the trepidation in my daughter’s voice as she shouts “Look! Humans!” during our evening walks.

[1] Cohn, Samuel. 2018. Epidemics hate and compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS. London: Oxford University Press.

[2] Dolan, Brian. 2020. “Unmasking History: Who Was Behind the Anti-Mask League Protests During the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in San Francisco?” Perspectives in Medical Humanities. eScholarship, University of California.

Dr. Christopher M. Church is associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches colonial, environmental, and digital history. Specializing in disasters, collective action, and civil unrest, his wider research agenda addresses the historical relationship between citizens, the public sphere, and the state. He is the author of Paradise Destroyed: Catastrophe and Citizenship in the French Caribbean, which won the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize in 2018. He has worked on numerous digital humanities projects, including Pryor's Peoria, The Online Edition of the Journals of Alfred Doten, and an online archive of neon in Northern Nevada. His current research focuses on the historical development of and resistance to our increasingly globalized world, which includes, among other things, the cultural, social, and economic ties between historical piracy and present-day hacking.

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Kathleen KuoOctober 19, 2020C2 Comments