Below is a transcript of our conversation with Dr. Andrew Wahrman:
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. It's a rarely if ever told, story of the American Revolution. The colonial army was fighting for independence, but also fighting a deadly smallpox epidemic. Doctor Andrew Warman is a professor in CMU's Department of History. World Languages and Cultures and the author of an award-winning book, “The Contagion of Liberty.” During grad school, he was looking for possible topics from the 1770s in America.
Andrew Wahrman:
I found a specific diary of a sailor in Massachusetts, and I thought, great, this is an ordinary working-class guy. I'm going to get his opinions on tea and Boston Tea Party or the stamp taxes or that kind of thing that's in every textbook. And I leafed through his journal, and he doesn't talk about any of it, never mentions he never mentions taxes. But what he does talk about day in and day out, especially in the 1770s. is smallpox. It's an epidemic that's affecting his town, his neighbors, his family, and I realized this was a story of the revolution that I hadn't really heard before. And the revolution itself, what we know broke out, started during a smallpox epidemic that was already taking place. So, everyone was already agitated; nervous, making demands on their government, making demands for inoculation, which is a big part of my book. And it's my argument in the book that that nervousness, that anger, those demands on government, and we all lived through one. We know that during an epidemic we are listening to the government, maybe getting angry with the government at the same time, but everyone is on edge and it made me see the whole revolution in a in a different light when I thought of it as a political event taking place during an epidemic.
DN:
I'm not trying to skip over everything but you, but you get up to the flu epidemic of 1918, and that was even far more widespread. What lessons did we gain? And (and) do you think there was knowledge that was acquired from looking back to that time of the revolution as to how society would deal with something like this?
AW:
I think there's knowledge gained and then lost. I think so often the history of medicine, history of disease is not really included in the way we teach history normally. So, it's sort of a separate thing. And I think so many of us didn't know what was expected of the government, what different levels could do. In my case during COVID-19 epidemic, I'm thinking about the ways that the founding generation reacted and they enforce strong quarantine laws, government shutdowns and things like this. They did do some things right, which is during an epidemic political activity, economic activity needs to stand back while you look after the health of the society itself.
DN:
When you come forward to COVID you, you say, then you see some of that same response, some of that same structure or are we still making some of the same mistakes?
AW:
Some of the structures were in place really early on. So, George Washington signed a quarantine act to quarantine ships that might be coming from places that carry, carry diseases. The Adams administration started a marine hospital system for, for sailors so that sailors are the people going from port to port, from diseased places. So, a hospital system for sailors. It's that hospital system that was established under John Adams in 1798 that eventually grew into the CDC, the National Institutes of Health. So, the, the concern over the health of the population, that the federal government has some responsibilities over containing disease, stopping epidemic. Many of us as citizens forgot about that essential responsibility, and then when it came back and there were these announcements and things, and the government seemed to be changing the way we were supposed to go about our everyday lives. There was resistance to that, largely because this hadn't been taught, hadn't been done in a long time, and, and, many of us, like historians like me are, are out there saying, well, this is just quarantine. This is what, people do during epidemics. And now, unfortunately, we have that again. We're going to have to live through it. It's a painful lesson every time, basically, is what history tells us.
DN:
Doctor Andrew Wehrman is a professor in CMU's Department of History, World Languages and Cultures. His book is “The Contagion of Liberty.” Andrew, congratulations on the publication. The recognition for the book. And thanks so much for spending time with us.
AW:
Well, thank you so much. And thanks for doing this and being interested in what faculty at CMU are up to.
