The Daily Stoic - Andrew Wehrman On Why It Is Crucial To Study Pandemics Of The Past

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Ryan speaks with Andrew Wehrman about his new book The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution, how and why responses to health emergencies in the past are strangely similar to those of today, how major historical events always coincide with medical events of the day, the wisdom that studying history can impart on us, and more.Andrew Wehrman is a historian, author, and an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University whose work focuses on popular politics of medicine in early America. His writing has appeared in The New England Quarterly, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. He has been awarded the Muir Whitehill Prize in Early American History, and his most recent book The Contagion of Liberty, is currently a finalist for the LA Time Book Prize for History. Andrew’s work can be found on his website andrewwehrman.com. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holliday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. You should know by now that Marcus Aurelius lives through a major pandemic,

and actually name it partly after him, the Antenine plague. It's a devastating pandemic that lasts not for a couple years, but 15 years. And then we flash forward to the founding of America, influenced as it was by Stoke philosophy. And once again, they're in the middle of a similar outbreak, a smallpox is the scourge of the 18th century. And Washington has to make the decision about using this newfound technology of inoculation to protect people from this disease. And that's why I was actually fascinated to talk to today's guest, Andrew Wierman. He's a historian, a writer, and associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. He's a PhD from Northwestern, and an MAT, and a BA from the University of Arkansas.

And he's an expert on that period of American history, colonial, and revolutionary America and the history of medicine and disease and public health. And I wanted to talk to him because I'm fascinated with the intersection between liberty and freedom and then our obligations to each other. Right? The Stoics talk about, actually, just talk to Peter Singer about this also, the idea of the expanding circle. What are our obligations to other people?

How do we serve the common good? How do we make sure that our decisions don't have negative externalizations on other people? How do we protect the most vulnerable of society? And instead of getting into a big debate about what's happening right now, which is always controversial and partisan, I just wanted to talk about this idea going way, way back and how it intersects with philosophical ideas, how it intersects with constitutional ideas, and I really enjoyed this conversation.

Professor Wyrman has a fascinating book called The Contagion of Liberty. He's written articles for the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and BC News among many others. He was a finalist for the LA Times book award in history. And we just have a lively conversation about stoicism, about the common good, about the history of epidemics and pandemics. A bunch of other stuff. Enjoy this conversation. You can follow him at profw worman and andro, worman.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery's podcast business

wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare down family drama and financial disasters. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. I read this book several years ago called a Republic of Suffering and it was about sort of the effects on the psyche when you would go through something like the US Civil War when just so many people died. And she talked about this thing in there like what it must have been like for just almost every family to lose a child, to either war or disease or collateral damage.

And I think about this when I was thinking about your book and when I think about pandemics and generally and all the things that used to just sort of senselessly and relentlessly claim people, like what it must have been like to live in a time where a kid could just get sick at a moment's notice and you were totally helpless to do anything about it and then it just, you know, it overwhelms your house. You don't know what to do about it. How do you think, like, infectious diseases in the past, affected people? Like, how do you think about what it must have been like

to live in a time when these things happened? And we had almost no understanding of what to do about them or how to prevent them. Yeah, well thank God that the saving grace of COVID was that it really didn't affect children, to nearly the degree that it did older people. So we didn't have to experience that quite as directly,

but I think there's a sense that people in the past, however, distant a past, didn't care about their children in the same way they had them. And of course they did. Of course they had deep feelings, and we can read about them in their diaries and journals and letters. And it was always awful and tragic, even in times where there was high infant mortality. Every one of these deaths just weighed on family members, brothers and sisters, as well as parents. And we know that. Benjamin Franklin, when his son Francis died at the age of four from smallpox, it was such a tragedy. Franklin was just wrapped with guilt about it. This is the story of Franklin having been an advocate of inoculation for smallpox, but hadn't actually

gone through with the procedure for Francis. And he was devastated by it. For years and years, he wrote about it in his autobiography. He had a portrait, painted of Francis that he took with him when he traveled, when he traveled to London and back. It was something that is hard to even imagine the stages of grief that people in the past would have gone through. I think that's a really good point. I just had to put my dog down and it was devastating and terrible. And I remembered as I was sort of going through this, I just had to put my dog down and it was devastating and terrible.

I remembered as I was sort of going through this, there's a bunch of different museums have them. You can see pictures of them online. The different epitaphs that the Romans wrote for their dogs. You see this overwhelming outpouring of grief for an animal 2 years ago, the idea that yes, there was senseless violence and cruelty and loss was much more common in the ancient world statistically. But that doesn't change the fact that you love this person and now you don't have them anymore.

That is the tragedy and the timeless reality of the human experience that this stuff happens. Yeah, loss was common, but love was too, and it always has been. And so that's the terrible nature of it, and how thankful we ought to be to experience that less and less. we ought to be to experience that less and less. And it's also, it's so hard to think about what it must have felt like. Actually, speaking of Benjamin Franklin, I read this book a couple of years ago. I think it's called Storm Kings.

And it was talking about how things like tornadoes, even until like the 1700s, we like didn't understand. And no one had really even seen one. We hadn't we hadn't track them. And obviously the populations were so much more sparse that like, you know, you didn't go, oh, a tornado is coming. That's why I woke up in the middle of the night and I was in a tree, you know, and I couldn't figure out what happened. And a lot of, they were speculating a lot of, like what we would think of God's wrath

was that like events of weather that people just didn't understand, right? I'm just bringing this up to make this point of like, we understand to a certain degree how pathogens are passed, how viruses work, bacteria, the effect that certain diseases have on the body, it must have been so profoundly terrifying and disorienting to just not really know. I mean, I guess they had these sort of rudimentary in in some cases totally inaccurate understanding of

what these diseases or viruses were doing, but also it must have just been like, this person was here with me today and they're gone tomorrow. And I don't really know why, other than that they got very sick and there was nothing I could do about it. They were afflicted and the vocabulary of it was, and they would call on religion, of course, to help understand these events, to maybe try to rationalize them. But they develop some tools to deal with grief and mysterious things that happens. Yet it's hard to imagine you're not knowing what a tornado was or what it looked like or the

which predicts when they're coming. Yeah, you can't go back and understand what it must have been like to not know something. Like to even know, like they had all these ideas of like where cholera or these yellow fever came from, you know, the idea that it's being passed from mosquitoes, it like never occurred to them. And so they, you know, they have this, they have these kind of general aversions or suspicions. Sometimes they're kind of helpful, sometimes they're not. But just even, yeah, the idea that someone in your house gets sick and you're not, you do, do you know to stay away from them or not, right? Like, do you, do you, or, or,

does, now, everyone get it because you don't even understand, I mean, they don't even understand how to wash hands yet. Like how late are understanding of some of these things was. And certainly, like the Romans didn't get the contagiousness of disease, that comes later, the quarantine wasn't invented. Yeah. Yet for them, they had to have some sense of it. I think that the people who have encountered people who were sick are the ones becoming ill.

They had some sense of like with leprosy and other things that coming into contact with lepers was bad. In a general sense of how to stop a disease, they're just couldn't. Well, yeah, I think about this. So Marcus Aurelius probably dies of the Antenine plague. Some version, they think of smallpox, which we'll talk more about. But like, we know that towards the end of his life,

he gets sick and he sends his son away, right? The son who's supposed to succeed him, he sends him, so he would have had some sense probably that, hey, I can't be around this person that I want to see really bad, I can't be around. And the sadness of that, it brings you back to COVID, like people dying and joining hospital rooms or hospital wings or families not being able to visit each other.

Again, how timeless it is, but even our modern understanding of, hey, this is really hard, but at least I understand what's happening intellectually, just how overwhelming and terrifying it would have been to not know. Was this my fault? Did I do something wrong? Did I anger the gods? Yeah, I get very sad just thinking about how it's almost like a child that doesn't understand, hey, you're going to sleep, I'm going to sleep. We're gonna wake up and see each other, but they don't understand what's happening, right? And how scary it is when you don't understand

what's happening. It was scary enough during COVID and to think about blaming yourselves. If your household got it, was it that trip that I didn't need to take somewhere that did it. Or, I wanted to make sure that my kids, if they caught it at school, didn't feel like they were the ones who did something wrong. That sense of blame that so often goes on with disease would be even so much more profound

when you don't even understand how it spreads. Or the feeling of like why was I spared? Let's say you're some Roman family or you're some family around the time of the American Revolution or it's the 1918 pandemic and everyone in your family gets it, they die or have devastating health effects and you're just fine. Like why me? There's this another story about Marx's release. Again, we tend to think of the Stokes not having emotions, but someone mentions the people that died during the plague in this trial,

and he just burst out into tears. And I wonder how much of it was like, you know, why did I survive? And all these other people died. I'm sure survivors guilt was very real when these things were so much more fatal, unpredictable and poorly understood. They had to be, I mean, the survivors guilt and that it was so random and who lived and who died. Marcus Riel hasis had like a 12 children die before adulthood or something

like that and many of them in the in the plague. He had 12 and I think less than half made it to adulthood. And I think about that people go, you know, why why did Marcus Aurelis' son, Comedis, you know, why was he the way that he was? Like he was as bad as Bad as Joaquin Phoenix, his character plays him in Gladiator or so we think. But you're like, what would the way that he was? Like, he was as bad as Joaquin Phoenix's character, Plasim and Gladiator, or so we think. But you're like, what would that do to a person? What would it do to a person to watch half of your siblings die? To say nothing of the terror and the unpredictable,

just of that happening during your formative years to other people, you know, we think about what the effects of COVID are gonna be on the population. You know, just imagine, imagine if that happened to your parents, how that would affect how your parents raised you. I mean, these are, these are things that, you know, we struggle to deal with today with all our tools and breakthroughs and psychology and medicine. And I mean, they were basically like, all right, rub some dirt on it, you know? And that would have affected you profoundly

as a human being to see all that death. Well, this isn't going to come as a surprise from a historian who studies disease. But yeah, I mean, it's crucial that we understand these diseases and pandemics as part of history that we don't just think of history as the bare words of people in the past or the, that real humanity, real events affected them.

And especially, I think when we study American history, my subject or even Roman history as well, we don't have that. We don't usually study medicine, disease, the real things that people were focused on that brought both tragedy, but sometimes miraculous healing and things like this into their lives.

Yeah, it is, that is a weird thing. It's a fascinating thing that you study in a very important thing, you study, because maybe it's that people just don't understand or study history enough. So to then study the effect of a disease or a pandemic on the history that you're studying is a bit much to ask of people.

But when I was reading John Embarry's book, The Great Influenza, you're like, oh yeah, this was like the defining event of the 20th century. And it's not talked about in literature. It's not talked about in history. It's not talked about in popular culture, but it was at the time, there's just this kind of like, well, that was really unpleasant. Let's move on from that. And the same, yeah, the same is. It was going to say, you think that's happening now? Yeah, it wasn't until we went through COVID that I was like, oh, Marcus really says,

Meditations is a plague book. He was writing the entirety of this through a plague that would have been the thing he woke up and thought about almost every single day. And I've been studying this for over a decade and I've really not even considered the effect of that on him and his decision making in his life for more than like 10 seconds.

Yeah, well, I'm curious about how that has affected your reading of it through COVID. For me, I was working on this book on smallpox in the American Revolution before COVID happens. And, you know, the argument was there. I understood that it was happening, but living through a pandemic myself really helped me sort of crystallize my thinking about how disease affected people, how it would have made people angry, how people would be checking the newspapers to read about case counts and where quarantines were being held. And at the same time time because they're reading about the pandemic that's going to affect them or possibly affect their children. They're reading the other news too about news from parliament, news from England and kind

of getting angry about all of it at the same time. It made me think about our revolution differently when you set it in that pandemic context. Totally. Yeah. You think of the American revolution as a political event or a, a, a, uh, a, a military event, but it's intersecting with this medical event at the same time. And that tends to be true. In a lot of cases, like I was, I was thinking about this during the pandemic. I was reading like there was an influenza outbreak in the United States that killed like 100,000 people in 1968. And so we think of 1968 as this sort of year of political unrest and disruption. But a lot of

people would have been coming home from the hospital, right? You know, thinking about should they do this or that? Or even if they weren't, it's still an undercurrent of what's happening. And yeah, it's often this major thread that just gets totally ignored from or disconnected from a thing that it was very much bound up in as the history was unfolding in the moment. A source of anger, agitation, I think about it a lot when we think about January 6th in 2021, that this was January 6th, the interaction that the capital took place just before, months before just before, months before the vaccine for COVID was generally released to the public. This was sort of at the peak time of death and dying during COVID. And many of the insurrectionists, if there's a venn diagram, it's probably pretty close to a circle of the same people

who are angry about shutdowns and closures and vaccines were the ones that were also angry about the election. They sort of channeled and festered along with each other. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, and also, I know we're just talking about how people love people, so it hurts whenever. But also, when you think about something like the American Revolution, which drags on for all these years and has this terrible death toll, it's intertwined with the terrible death toll of the

infectious diseases. And in some cases, inseparable, right? You might get a letter that says, hey, your son or your brother or your father died in George Washington's army. you know, in George Washington's army, but the distinction between, and on the battlefield death and a in-camp death, doesn't matter to you that much as an individual, but you might not even see yourself as the, you don't see yourself perhaps as the victim of a plague, you see yourself as the victim of this cruel and terrible war.

And basically for all wars up until relatively recently, you were much more likely to die of other stuff than on the battlefield, but that's probably not the message that's coming home. That's right. Well, and there was an idea during the revolution, it was known that smallpox was affecting the camps, affecting soldiers,

and there was worry on the home front that soldiers were gonna return home from the camp and then infect their families, infect their wives. So there was pressure from local communities, but also pressure within families for those soldiers to get inoculated, right? To, there was this preventative that was available in the 18th century, we can talk about it.

But this kind of bottom up pressure to do something about it, from to make governments do something, to make the army do something about it, calling on George Washington to implement inoculation schemes. But you're right, there wasn't a distinction made between if a person really died in battle

versus died in camp or died in one of the prison ships of the British that were just notorious for disease of the whole sort of blended together and any of those deaths was tragic. Yeah, to you your your loved one is a casualty of the war. You're not saying oh they were fighting in a war and they died of X even though they are a casualty of war because these camps are so unsanitary and the prison ships are so terrible. But I'm just saying like when you think about the sacrifice that people are making and the way they, their identity and the country's identity is tied up in what's happened and what's been given. You know, there's actually two kind of distinct events happening, but they get blended into

one. And yet we only study it as a war, right? We study it as a political movement of war, but actually there's this undercurrent that's affecting the outcome that's directly contributing to what names are in the newspaper the next day as a casualty. But yeah, they're not necessarily dying by musket fire. They're dying because smallpox and cholera and typhus and all these other things are just running rampant through the ranks. Yeah, the revolution and both the war and the sort of broader political context, you can't fully understand them without understanding the disease that's affecting society at the

same time, that even far from battlefields, communities are dealing with smallpox when soldiers are going into the army, they're worried about catching it. It's pervasive. Yet, as we think about the revolution and it gets written up historically, that part disappears. And so, the same way, when people are writing about World War One, the tragic conclusion of the influence isn't part of it. It's something else if it's remembered entirely. Well, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because it's like, okay, we look at the flagging

support for the revolution. It's going poorly. People's patience and, you know, commitment to it is waning and we celebrate, you know, Washington crossing the Delaware because we only think about it as a military endeavor. We don't think about the steps that Washington takes and we should talk about it to inoculate the soldiers, the public health messaging, that might have been just as consequential, both militarily and in terms of morale,

in terms of saving, preserving, protecting soldiers, because again, we think about it in the military context and not this holistic societal concept that it's in to go to World War I, a great example, which John talks about in the Great Influenza. We think about the collapse for the support of the League of Nations, and we go, was Wilson true idealistic, was the American Congress, the Senate just failed to ratify it, because there's isolationist tendencies. And it could also just be people were overwhelmed focusing on the fact that everyone was dying

of the influenza, right? And that's where the backlash is coming from. And by separating the two, we really miss the full heroism and tragedy of what's happening in these events. Yeah, and certainly the courage and sacrifices of the people that are involved in missing those debates, missing those actions. It has ramifications down the line as Americans in COVID in 2020 have to sort of re-remember if at all you know how they've handled disease in the past you know our quarantine legal did the founding fathers want them but the answer is yes

but because we haven't we disconnected all of these things or history isn't often about public health matters. Generally, these kinds of things get forgotten. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field glory. But the new podcast Sports Explains the World brings you some of the wildest and most surprising sports stories you've never heard, like the teenager who wrote a fake Wikipedia page for a young athlete and then watched as a real team fell for his prank. Diving into his Wikipedia page we turned three career goals into 11 and added 20 new assists for good measure. Figures that nobody would, should, have believed. And the mysterious secret of a US Olympic superstar killed at the peak of his career.

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I think about like one of the first laws that the US Congress passed was a series of whistleblower protections because they wanted people to point out military contractors and fraud, right? So you're like, oh, wow, okay. The Congress is like, hey, we've got to protect these whistleblowers. And then you think about Washington

and his sort of vaccine mandates for the soldiers. You mentioned Ben Franklin, like as I understand it, maybe you could tell me this story, but as I understand it, Franklin and his wife disagree over whether they should inoculate their son and she wins out. The son tragically dies and like their marriage is never the same. That's a pretty modern, like there are couples that have been having some version of that argument, unfortunately, like in the last year. That's definitely one of the theories with Franklin and Deborah and the potential theory of sort of why they were never married.

There's more to it than that, but there would have had to have been arguments within a marriage with that kind of tragic event happen. And Franklin considered himself the educated one. He had been writing about the miracle of inoculation in his newspaper and in his Almanacs and was promoting it. And so there's speculation that perhaps there was there was doubt within the household. Now Franklin himself did not explicitly blame Deborah. He doesn't say that in the autobiography. There are some textual foods. He plays himself. Within letters where he talks exactly about the sort of he doesn't name names, but he says when some couples, husbands and wives disagree over inoculation, but they shouldn't, they should agree to it

for the good of the child. And so it's within that that people have speculated, ah, maybe this is it, maybe there was some a split between them on the issue. Again, and I also feel that kind of sadness and empathy again where, you know, the inoculation for say, smallpox was miraculous, but it was, like, what was the chances of dying of a smallpox vaccine, or then, or an inoculation? It was relatively high, right? Yeah. Because the dose was so strong. Well, the dose was strong. It was just the initial inoculation, inoculation for smallpox that was introduced to the colonies

in 1721, the irony and just fascinating detail, a crucial detail was that a black slave, an African slave named Onisimus told his owner, cotton mather in Boston about this procedure that you use a little bit of the smallpox matter of the pus from a smallpox sore and inserted into the skin of the arm. And by doing that, it gives the person a mild case of smallpox. But yeah, that they refined that procedure over the decades, but there was

still usually around a 1% mortality rate from inoculation itself. And that compares to a 15 to 30% mortality rate for smallpox itself. So people making this decision, it's a tough one, right? You've got a one-in-a-hundred chance of death by giving yourself an inoculation or getting inoculated versus, you know, a 10 or 15 chance out of 100 from natural smallpox, which you don't even necessarily know if you're going to get it or not. And so it was Franklin who was using those statistics and saying, look, the statistics went out. Inoculation works. It's a better, better probability, better odds, parents owe it to their children to get inoculated. And over the decades, this

becomes more and more popular. Americans take real pride in inoculation. They claim that they invented it. They sort of ignore the African origins of it. They don't sort of ignore it. Purposefully ignore them. And claim it as a as a colonial invention. They say it wasn't the British that gave this to us.

It was colonists who were for it, and it's true that Britain's North American colony is where the most advanced in the world in terms of adopting inoculations, sponsoring it, holding mass general inoculations of towns, Boston, was one of them, but there were other places too. And the demand for that procedure, as dangerous as it was, was growing and growing towards the American Revolution.

And that was one of the shocking things when I wrote the book, right? I was thinking I would find pockets of resistance. People who were sort of like modern anti-vaxxers saying this is too dangerous to be used or doubt that it worked or had religious ideas against it, that this was playing God in a way that they didn't want. And you don't see that. There were no soldiers who protested, Washington's inoculation order. They all cheered it. They all wanted it.

Inoculation was expensive to get. Otherwise, doctors charged a lot for it. And if the army was gonna provide this for free, the soldiers lined up for it. There were no protests over inoculation during the war. Am I wrong in remembering, speaking of this being a colonial versus royalist, and am I wrong in thinking that one of King George's children died of an inoculation? You're right. Yeah. Late in the war, 1782, 83, I think two of his children, one maybe died of smallpox,pox from inoculation.

Yeah, and that's one of the reasons that inoculation spread a little bit slower in Europe because royal families tried it and had some tragedies. But we know that royal bloodlines are not always the best, right? It's a thin line. It's a thin line. And thin blood.

And so royalty tended the suffer from a mortality rate from inoculation at a higher percentage than common people. Well, yeah. And you just think, again, with some empathy and just sort of the terror of it, like deciding to roll a one in 100 chance with yourself. That's a, that's a decision an adult can make. But to have to make that for a child, and maybe I don't know the specific odds in a child, maybe it's better or worse, but to make that for your child, it must have been horrible.

And you can see why that would tear a couple apart, or you could see how the aftermath for someone like King George, if you're already of shaky mental health, which he was, just how devastating that would be to know you made the decision with the odds, and then the odds did not come out in your favor. That's just a horrendous, horrendous choice. I mean, it's not quite Sophie's choice, but it's close. Well, and there were many people that talked about this. And John Adams and Franklin, among others, said, you know, the choice was better to know in your mind that you did, you trusted in modern medicine. You did what others were doing, you did what was expected, what statistics were proving correct, but that

would be far better than not acting. Franklin wrote, you know, when his son died, that the tragedy of not doing something is so much worse than trying your utmost to protect your loved one and then seeing them die. But yeah, it's the same thing. John and Abigail Adams were apart from each other during the smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1776. John Adams was in second continental Congress on the committee to write the Declaration of Independence. And he and Abigail are writing each other letters throughout their lives, but the letters during the smallpox epidemic are some of the most potent and you can really get a sense of what people were going through. And Abigail writes to John and she says if the opportunity comes up to inoculate my children, I'm going to take all of my treasure of children, she

writes, and get them inoculated, I'm willing to run you in debt for it, no matter what it costs, and I'm gonna do it whether you want me to or not. And of course, John Adams writes, of course, do it. This is what I want as well. He agrees with her. And then rights that he wants to see public hospitals built in every colony to provide access to inoculation throughout. But he's worried he's getting updates from Abigail on each of the children.

Some get through it pretty easily. Others suffer with more pox, and they all end up surviving, all of his children, but of course he is constantly worried about his kids at the same time as Jefferson's preparing the Declaration of Independence. He's on that committee doing all these really important things in preparation for independence and guiding the war effort. In his mind and in the minds of all the other delegates, they're thinking about the suffering around the country. Well, I loved the book. I thought the title was interesting, the Contagent of Liberty. There's kind of attention there, a paradox.

Was there a sense at that time that there was also a public health benefit to the individual making that decision or no? Yes, they understood that by, and it's the only way that it worked because inoculation, this is before vaccination, before that is invented, in inoculated patient could spread smallpox to other people for about three weeks after being inoculated. So they had to be quarantined if you were inoculated for about a month.

And so there was an acute awareness that when you're inoculated, you impact others. And so they would try to inoculate as many people at once as possible, whole communities together. There was an understanding that inoculation helped your neighbors as well as yourself. That it was that inoculation that that's the contagion of Liberty in the title. Yeah, this is the the thing the small self-sacrifice that ultimately leads to this sense of independence from from disease. And of course, the fact that so many Americans made this sacrifice, the fact that George Washington called for the soldiers of the revolution to go for it.

He had to be convinced of that. He changed his mind and decided to allow the soldiers to But it was that the duality of gaining independence from smallpox at the same time as independence from Britain was something that was understood. When the Declaration of Independence was first read in Boston, it was during one of these mass inoculation campaigns, all the people that heard it had experienced inoculation. Many of them were still suffering from it. They would have understood it really distinctly that the smallpox of disease had to be stopped in order for independence to be won. Yeah, it's this tension of asserting independence and autonomy at the same time you're getting hit smack in the face with the interdependence and the inseparableness of everyone together

and thus the obligations inherent thereof. Liberty required obligations to other people. That's how they understood it. This idea of personal liberty that I can do what I want and the government has to allow that. That's a later concept that comes about in the in the 19th and 20th centuries. Liberty for colonial Americans was a kind of permission to act with the consent of all of your neighbors and with everyone else in mind. You had to ask for liberty in a town meeting to build a fence that might block your neighbor's land, right? That's what liberty meant. Now, you could build it. But without the consent of your

neighbors, it would get torn down. So people would ask for in town meetings for the liberty to inoculate. And there are all these town meetings and debates over it, if we allow you to inoculate, that might start in the epidemic. So maybe we'll tell you to stop and we'll hold out for a while longer or maybe the town would decide that we'll all inoculate together. If we all do it at the same time,

then there's less risk. And so in the book, I talk about lots of episodes where towns are making these decisions together. Well, yeah, because how free are you if you break the bonds of what was actually not a profound form of tyranny I've come to understand in my study of the American Revolution? Well, a lot of the grievances, let's say, are a bit exaggerated, right? In theory, in practice, everyone, a representative democracy or a republic is obviously a superior form of government, but it's not like the columnists had this oppressive boot on their neck,

really, compared to most people at the time. Economists, in most senses, thriving and people are living good lives compared to in other places. But this understanding of, hey, we're not really free if we're all dying of a disease that with a small amount of collective action, we could also be free of. It's this weird kind of perverse modern understanding of of liberty where it's like, I'm free to menace you with my assault rifle, or I am free to poison the public rivers, or whatever, there it's this weird understanding we have today of liberty where these things which are supposed to encourage collective flourishing and health and happiness actually get perverted to enable us a percentage

of the population to do the exact opposite and thus deprive everyone of liberty. Yeah, I mean, there were all that. There were strict rules against any individual spreading disease. You could be whipped for wanton layer, wickedly going about town. If you knew that you have a disease, there were laws and many of the colonies for inkeepers and tavern keepers to look at travelers to see if they showed signs of disease. If so, it was their responsibility to report them. Colonial Americans were surprisingly good at actually stopping epidemics of disease through these methods,

through quarantines and inspections. They wouldn't have thought of any kind of intervention, if it's for the public good and at a time of a pandemic as being something contrary to liberty. The purpose of having a society or having a government is to protect the lives of the people. Why else do you form governments as John Locke? Right. The first reason is to protect people's lives and that gets connected to health as well. The government should do everything in their utmost, that they have a duty to protect the health of their citizens,

just as citizens themselves, have duties to look after their own health and their own lives. Yeah, it's a strange place we've gotten to, I've talked about this before, but Victor Franco famously said that he thought, on the west coast of the United States, we needed a statue of responsibility, States, we needed a statue of responsibility, that there would be a statue of liberty and a statue of responsibility,

and that these two counterbalance each other or enable each other. There does seem to be a collapse of that sense. The idea that our fates are tied up with each other, that you really can't make an individual decision that affects the public health. And it's almost like a tyranny of the minority where the person who says, I want to pretend this doesn't exist. I don't want my life to be impeded or limited in any way by the indisputable existence of this pathogen or crisis or whatever. So everyone else is going to have to be at the mercy of my delusions because I'm free to do that.

delusions because I'm free to do that. As a citizen, we have duties as well as rights the same way. And that gets forgotten. Yeah, that was one of the weird parts to me about COVID. Obviously, our hopes for the vaccine, being a stop on transmission was exaggerated or overstated, like the data, especially as the different variants came out. Yeah. But I always found it illustrative that the first thing that people who were opposed to vaccines or vaccines mandates would say was it has zero impact on transmission.

It does nothing to stop transmission, which of course was objectively not the case. It wasn't 100%, it probably wasn't 50%, but the idea that it was 0% was said and insisted on so many times that it almost became true. The reason this was said, I felt like, was to absolve people of even the nagging inkling that they would have an obligation to do something that benefited other people. I mean, even just the idea that, hey, do you have a right to take up a hospital bed for something that was easily treatable or the severity was mitigatable. I feel like to me, that's a pretty clear duty

as a human being. I mean, obviously a hospital's job is to accept and help anyone, but can you as an individual, can your conscience justify taking up, yeah, a hospital bed that you don't have to be on, I would say no. Yeah, I think about that a lot, and I think that it's important to note that I think, by far, vast majority of Americans acted as responsibly as they could, they followed guidelines, they tried to stay safe and separate and wear masks and got vaccinated overwhelming numbers of Americans. But I think you're right, that the people that have really

dug in their heels in resistance to everything and continue to do so when it's true that the reason that we're in the situation that we are now is thanks to vaccines. Even though COVID is not completely gone, transmission is down, cases are down, certainly deaths and debilitating injuries are down thanks to vaccines. And I think the people that are still unwilling to say that are the same folks who, if they really thought about it introspectively would realize that perhaps they behave monstrously during this, you know, once in a century terrible pandemic in saying that people should ignore public health guidelines

or should avoid getting vaccinated because of it. Well, yeah, I mean, we were just talking about this with the Frank Landerer with King George, where let's say you make the decision to vaccinate your kid and it goes terribly, how that would weigh on you. And then you think about the person who makes the decision not to do it and something happens to their child. It takes a strong person and it might even take, if you think about like forces like cognitive dissonance, you're almost, we're almost evolutionarily designed to not take responsibility for that decision because it's so terrible that it would crush you, right?

And so I think we had this weird response in the pandemic where certain people objected to it, behaved monstrously, as you said, and we kept hoping they would change their mind. And I feel like that was inherently irrational that like someone, people who murder people and spend 20 years in jail have trouble coming to terms with the consequences of their actions, right? Like the idea that someone would be like,

hey, you know, this once in a lifetime event happened and I was part of the problem, not the solution, I have moral guilt. You know, the human mind is really good at finding a reason to not feel moral guilt. So of course, conspiracy theories, rationalizations, you know, cherry-pick statistics, etc. are gonna come into play there as a protective blanket, asserting ointment so you don't have to feel shitty. Yeah, I think that's a really good way of looking at it.

You know, when we think about my folks in the revolution, the people that I study, and one of those rationalizations that happens is there's a terrible, the epidemic is worse. It's felt the worst in the South and among enslaved people. They suffer the most. And it's because tighter quarters, better health or worse health. Yeah.

And because many plantation owners and slavers did not inoculate their slaves, even though that they knew that they ought to do it. Some did, George Washington inoculated all of his enslaved people at Mount Vernon. Thomas Jefferson did not. And Jefferson put all of the blame on these deaths in the South, on the British. The British were doing an on purpose. They were spreading smallpox.

They were acting terribly. And none of it on southerners who hadn't gotten their slaves or hadn't encouraged people to to get inoculated. It's a similar sort of thing. Jefferson goes about and tries to estimate the numbers of deaths that the British caused by spreading smallpox rather than looking at the numbers that might have been saved if inoculation had been more pervasive in the South as it was in New England. That's a really fascinating viewpoint. So the modern equivalent of that would be, hey, look, it's really easy to blame the pandemic on its origins. It's really easy to blame the spread of the pandemic on government failures, on anti-vaxxers,

COVID deniers, et cetera. But obviously at the highest level are income inequality, structural and systemic racism, the structure of society itself, even if everyone had played ball, we still would have been quite vulnerable, because we don't have a great social safety net. We don't have equal access to health care. You know, like, I worked in a vaccine clinic a number of times here in Texas, and obviously there's a whole bunch of blame for how Texas responded, but then just watching the different waves of people,

like the people who got it at first towards the people who got it later. It's not moral superiority that separates them. It's access to information, It's access to time off. It's access to childcare. You know, it's these, it's fear of doctors, etc. That's something that everyone is complicit in. You know, our political system, the structure of American life, even if everything had also gone well, the death toll still would have been higher than it, you know, quote unquote, should have been because we have accepted injustices that become visible in the course of something

like a public health crisis. Absolutely. And I think many of those structures have origins at the very beginning of the country and certainly in the same way that Jefferson was blaming the British, others blamed black people themselves for getting sick and started rationalizing that black people were just an inferior realizing that black people were just an inferior race, that you see sort of the birth of racism as part of this rationalization of how disease works without the sort of thinking about how to solve

those issues of equality that might erase those problems. equality that might erase those problems. Yeah, yeah. It's easy to find reasons to not have to look in the mirror and go, I have accepted something that is unfair and unjust, that trickles the consequences down to vulnerable people. And, and, and you know, yeah, you watched people during the pandemic, you know, be very, very careful

until they were good. You know, we're all on the same team. You know, we're all, you know, we're all in this together. We gotta spread these messages, et cetera. And then their family was good or their family got it. And then they're like, my interest in this together, we got to spread these messages, et cetera. And then their family was good or their family got it. And then they're like, my interest in this pandemic is officially over. Life goes back to normal. The idea that, hey, yeah, in communities where information is not as good, where living

conditions are not as good, or countries that have, you know, that are further down the waterfall of these supplies or benefits of modern civilization, you know, it's not over for them. And just because it doesn't affect you personally as much anymore doesn't mean that you are not culpable. I think that's interesting about Washington and his and and and inoculating his slaves. And I wonder also, I was just thinking about this because I wrote a piece about this for daily still. I'm like, Washington was in a place financially to free his slaves at the end of his life. Jefferson, who was much more financially irresponsible,

was not. And how much even some of our abilities to make, quote unquote, virtuous decisions are rooted in the privileges or the economic position that we happen to be in in a given moment. Yeah, I mean, both of these people, Jefferson and Washington, we're in places where people listen to them a well-placed speech or article in the newspaper talking about, you know, freeing one slaves and the responsibilities would have gone a long way, even if they were in the position economically

to do it themselves. They might have done that. But yeah, you're, I think that's an accurate description of where they were financially. And of course, Washington free slaves upon his death, but most of the slaves living at Mount Vernon belong to his wife to Martha. And so those remained enslaved afterward. The entangling, the public health in the United States

entangling the public health in the United States got off to this really strong potential. The United States was fighting smallpox. People in Europe were amazed by Americans' ability to stop a disease that was endemic in Europe, ever present. But in the early United States and the United States during the revolution, these inoculation campaigns during the revolution were stunning to people in other countries. But what held it back again was slavery.

It was sovereign slavery that really made a difference that stopped these campaigns from being really universal. The other was that American colonists did not seek to inoculate Native Americans. They thought that inoculation would probably be too dangerous for them. They also, and largely thought- Did mine get fair? There were fewer of them. Exactly. So they thought it was benefited the expansion across the continent in a really callous way. John Adams at the same time that he's having

is children-annoculated and calling for hospitals. Also says a consolation of the pandemic, of the smallpox, is that the Indians have got a fair dose of it, I think he says. And so I think with my book and the contagion of liberty and the title going back to it, there was an understanding that providing inoculation provided independence and good health, but it's important to also look at who was kept from it, who was kept from gaining that sense of liberty, it was slaves in the South, it was Native Americans in the West.

And I think it's important to think about in our own society who has the benefits of the system and who's being kept out of it. No, I think that's a very good point. The sort of original sin of slavery is not just that it was unjust and terrible to the enslaved people, but that everyone, all of us who are errors, to that, both that tradition and the bounty, the wealth that came from that plunder and exploitation, were actually all fundamentally

impoverished by it as well, because at the root of the founding of the country was this sense that some people are lesser, some people are expendable, some people we don't have to fully extend all of the rights and obligations and responsibilities to, and that that was inherently corrupting, and it's stolen from us our ability to fully realize the beauty of what Jefferson was talking about in the Declaration of Independence. We can't quite get there because he didn't quite mean it when he wrote it.

We're getting closer, but the legacy of that is still there and always will be there. It turns us all into hypocrites, but it also makes us less healthy. Yes. Yeah, I am Isabella Wilkerson as this wonderful book called Caste and she's talking about how the response is, the public health response

to the crack epidemic, which was basically, these people's problem, it's these people's problem. It's not a true public health emergency. Had we responded differently then, how might everyone have been benefited now that we dealt with opioids and fentanyl, right? Because when it's happening to another community, you tell yourself it's their fault. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to sacrifice my liberty as what counts.

But if you could muster empathy and most of all resources to do something about it, everyone is better because you get a stronger public health, edifice and culture and tradition that protects you from future epidemics or, you know, drugs or outbreaks or whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, imagine if we, if Americans had had more empathy in late 2019, early 2020 for people in China, for people in Italy, the, and responded more quickly. It's hard to do that kind of thinking, but empathy is always what's needed in these situations. When vaccination was first introduced into the United States, It was superior to inoculation.

It didn't cause deaths. The mortality rate was basically zero. When you were vaccinated with cowpox, you didn't spread it to other people. It was a medical innovation supreme. And so when the first people were vaccinating in the United States in the year 1800, so after Washington had died,

this is under the, when Jefferson was president, you could vaccinate yourself and not worry about spreading it to your family members. You could vaccinate yourself and your neighbor next door didn't have to complain. There was no town meeting that was necessary, right? So it didn't seem like we needed any government at all. People could choose to be vaccinated. It didn't affect anyone else.

Yeah, if there's an epidemic, really people need to go get vaccinated. But there weren't these kind of mass community efforts like there were during the revolution. And it was, so it's the irony that the benefit of vaccination, this medical gift was presented as more of this private choice. And then the people who don't make that choice or can't because they can't afford it

or they're kept out, were the ones that were blamed for being sick. And I see that with COVID and the mRNA vaccines, these amazing new technologies. It's a miracle and amazing that a vaccine. Back into the moon landing. Came out so, yeah, so quickly. It's a miracle and amazing that a vaccine came out. So, yeah, so quickly, there were estimates, I know you know this at the beginning of the pandemic, when things were looking really bad that it might be three years before a vaccine would be through with trials

and thank God that we've had them now for a couple of years already. But again, that the new technology seems to bring with it, additional societal problems that we need to think about and deal with. Well, I thought the book was fascinating. I think it's really important that you wrote it. And it's only by studying something hopefully as uncontroversial as a smallpox epidemic, many centuries ago that we can hopefully learn some things, notice some flaws in our thinking

but also our capacity for collective action. And then hopefully we can apply those lessons to the current more partisan politically charged era. So I think the book's really important and I'm so glad we got to have this conversation. Well, I'm thrilled to get the chance to talk about it and I hope people get the same kinds of things out of it that you did.

Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music App today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. Thanks for watching.