Pandemics Don't Have to Destroy Our National Soul

David Wallace-Wells’s recent article in the New York Times, “How COVID Remade America,” suggests that the COVID pandemic completely upended our national culture and politics – almost entirely in negative ways.

“America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional,” Wallace-Wells wrote. “We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world.”

COVID, he said, turned us “inward” and made us more individualistic. We lost faith in the public health system and in the government in general. We turned to our own conspiracy theories and ultimately turned against one another.

It’s hard to deny these trends – but was COVID really responsible for them?

On this five-year anniversary of COVID’s entrance into the United States, I’ve reflected on earlier pandemics in American history and asked if they had the same effect on American cultural attitudes.

The closest precursor to the COVID pandemic, the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, arguably had similar effects on the nation. It coincided with the Red Scare, race riots in several major cities, national strikes and economic disruption, and increasing calls for limiting immigration. During the next decade, Americans moved sharply away from faith in government protections for social welfare and exchanged the Progressive era for a combination of hedonism, individualism, and nihilism, with billionaires enjoying a new round of tax cuts and enjoying a new round of cultural adulation that hadn’t been seen since the Gilded Age. It’s hard to miss the parallels with the present.

But on closer inspection, it appears that the flu pandemic exacerbated and accelerated these trends rather than serve as their initial catalyst. When the flu pandemic began, a major race riot (the East St. Louis riot of 1917) had already occurred. The First World War had already led to strong suspicion of central, eastern, and southern European immigrants. Dissatisfaction with the federal controls over the economy were already underway.

The flu pandemic probably made all of these trends much worse, but blaming all of this on the disease and the quarantines is probably an exaggeration. Rather, it seems more accurate to say that when compounded with the deaths and disruptions of World War I, the flu pandemic accelerated Americans’ inward cultural turn and resulted in a widespread anger against governmental controls – including cultural battles over masking.

But not every epidemic prompts such a reaction. In 1957, more than 100,000 Americans died from the H2N2 flu, but these deaths resulted in no discernible turn toward isolation or anger against the government. Instead, Americans remained fully committed to national unity in the Cold War and to the continued growth of the military industrial complex, complete with a robust social safety net.

And they were strong proponents of vaccines, partly because of the undeniable success of the polio vaccine, which had been introduced to the public only two years earlier. In 1955, before the vaccine was introduced, there were 58,000 cases of polio in the United States, but by 1957, there were only 5,600. The fact that a rapidly spreading flu was killing an even greater number of people per year than polio ever had was not enough to offset Americans’ general faith in medicine and in the power of the government to protect them.

As a result, when American historians like me think of the national crises of 1957, we tend not to think of the flu pandemic. We probably think of Sputnik. We think of the resistance to racial integration of Little Rock High School and the use of federal troops to force the state to comply with a federal court order. But we don’t think about a pandemic that killed nearly twice as many Americans in one year as died in the entire Vietnam War.

That tells us something about pandemics: They don’t automatically lead to anger, isolation, or distrust. They don’t necessarily produce the social disruptions and long-term negative cultural effects that characterized both the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 and the COVID pandemic of 2020.

Instead, pandemics test our national soul and exacerbate existing tensions. But in both 1918-19 and 2020, the tensions that the pandemic exacerbated were already in full force before the disease arrived – and therefore the pandemic made them considerably worse.

In 2020, for instance, Americans were already sharply polarized along partisan lines, as divisions over Donald Trump’s presidency had already indicated. Racial tensions were already high. (The Black Lives Matter movement, after all, had already existed for seven years before COVID arrived). Polarization over immigration was already in full force. Americans had already become tribalists in the way that they consumed their news and thought about the world. And their distrust of government was already remarkably high, with public approval ratings for Congress hovering only in the teens for most of the previous decade.

COVID exacerbated all of these trends and prompted many Americans to turn against the medical establishment in addition to turning against each other. Both vaxxers and anti-vaxxers blamed each other for ruining America’s health – and both were able to find evidence for their position.

Vaxxers were correct in noting that the states with the lowest vaccination rates had the highest COVID-related death rates, with the deeply red, pro-Trump states of Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Tennessee experiencing the nation’s highest rates of death from COVID. But critics of COVID protocols and government-mandated social isolation could correctly point out that it was the blue states that shut down schools for the longest time that saw the most severe setbacks in children’s educational development over the long term.

An Ivy League academic study released last month showed that most of the states where students today are furthest behind in their academic achievement because of COVID-related learning losses are blue states that delayed full school re-openings as long as possible, while the three states that experienced the least amount of COVID-related learning losses in math are the deeply red states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee, where shutdowns were shortened and where masking and social isolation were far less common. If those on the right were too quick to dismiss the health benefits of masks and vaccines, some on the left may have underestimated the long-term effects of social isolation and shutdowns on mental and academic health. Germs are certainly detrimental to our society – but so are loneliness and isolation.

But rather than try to learn from the critiques and arguments of each side, we turned against each other during the pandemic and accused those on the other side of killing us with their ideology. The tensions that we were already feeling as a society boiled over and prompted us to engage in even more uncivil behavior and extreme partisanship.

Yet the example of the 1957 influenza pandemic shows us that none of this had to happen. There is a way to survive a pandemic – even a pandemic with tens of thousands of deaths – without losing our minds or our national soul. The key to doing so, I think, is to forge strong social bonds before a pandemic breaks out.

Pandemics test us, but they need not break us. In the 1950s, the strong national unity that America was experiencing during the Cold War easily survived a pandemic. On the other hand, in 1918-19 and 2020, a nation that was already badly divided experienced even greater fractures as the result of a spreading disease. But what really mattered in every case was not merely the physical properties of the disease or our own physical health but the health of our national civic life.