The writer is a history professor at Texas A&M University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution
Nothing highlights local peculiarities like a global pandemic. The US has 4 per cent of the global population and 25 per cent of infections from a virus that began half a world away.
This anomaly comes as no surprise to students of American history. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner could have predicted the nation’s confused response to Covid-19 more than a century ago. His landmark 1893 essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History has long been criticised for promoting a self-aggrandising view of US exceptionalism. But critics miss the fact that Turner believed Americans could be exceptionally stupid.
The westward movement that forced Americans repeatedly to start over in unforgiving terrain shaped the national personality in ways both beneficial and dangerous, Turner argued.
From the pilgrims’ landing place of Plymouth Rock to the California goldfields, successive waves of migrants battled the environment. They pictured themselves as self-reliant, even as they claimed government giveaways like “free” land wrestled by the US cavalry from native populations. Pioneers were prone to populism and intolerant of government advice. They considered no man (and certainly no woman) their superior, regardless of greater experience and education.
The relationship between the keepers of the pioneer flame and the scientists trying to keep the nation safe from Covid-19 was bound to be fraught. Anthony Fauci, the Brooklyn-born scientist who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since the 1980s, has been cast as meddling easterner in this cowboy morality play.
Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant-governor who opposes laws requiring the wearing of face masks, claimed last week that Dr Fauci “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and Texans “don’t need his advice any more”. Bare-faced citizens are busting their way into Walmart and picking fights at mini-marts.
Meanwhile, Texas and Florida are reporting record daily increases in new coronavirus cases and have reversed plans for reopening the economy.
The worsening epidemic has forced California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, to make a U-turn as well. Although the state imposed the earliest quarantine measures, many residents resisted wearing masks. When Mr Newsom finally issued an order requiring them to do so in public in late June, some local authorities refused to enforce it.
Like other Americans, Californians have resisted health mandates before. During the 1918 influenza epidemic, San Franciscans formed the Anti-Mask League. Thousands of residents rallied to protest at the infringement on their civil liberties. San Francisco ended up with one of the highest death rates of all US cities.
Stiff-necked resistance to authority is not limited to western or southern states. New Hampshire, one of the original 13 colonies, remains the epitome of what Turner called Americans’ “antipathy to control”. The state motto, “Live Free or Die”, helps explain why it is the only US state without an adult seatbelt law and one of only three that do not require motorcyclists to wear helmets.
Today, the state has left the question of masks to municipal governments. After Nashua, the state’s second-largest city, passed a face-covering ordinance, it was hit with a lawsuit claiming the rule violated constitutional guarantees.
Political polarisation has heightened tensions. A recent Pew poll found that 76 per cent of voters who lean towards the Democrats report covering their faces most of the time compared with 53 per cent of those who lean towards the Republicans.
A Trump supporter recently explained his opposition to mask wearing in phrases redolent of America’s old anti-authoritarian bent. “It’s muzzling yourself, it looks weak,” he said, “especially for men.” A North Carolina group that opposes masks has urged Facebook followers to burn “your submission muzzle because you are not a sheep”.
This attitude has a long history. “Scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and ideas, and indifference to its lessons” characterised the frontier mentality, Turner wrote.
Yet there was a flipside. The pioneer communities could also spur innovation and co-operation. Indeed, John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” programme drew on that tradition and challenged Americans to support the most highly technological venture yet attempted by humanity: putting a man on the moon. Respect for science took off with the launches at Cape Canaveral. We are witness a struggle between the dark and light tendencies of the American national psyche. The mask is its symbol.
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July 09, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Americans want to be free to be stupid - Financial Times
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