America as a “Shining City on a Hill”—and Other Myths to Die By

e all need myths to live by, and some of these stories we tell ourselves are ones we will cling to until the grave. In 1630, on the Arbella as it sailed toward North America, Puritan leader John Winthrop delivered a sermon called “A Modell of Christian Charity” asserting that this new land “shall be as a city upon a hill.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because on several occasions Ronald Reagan spoke of a shining city on a hill, sitting above other nations. Laying out an argument for American exceptionalism, Reagan claimed “that that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage,” concluding at the very first Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974 that “we are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.” Of course, this kind of mythmaking requires an imperviousness to facts, a commitment to burying parts of our history, telling lies to ourselves and others to make them believe.

What does this have to do with our current predicament, the Covid-19 pandemic? Why reach back to the 17th century? Because our relationship to disease, to pandemics past, is obscured by this myth of fundamental American goodness. If we accept that we are capable of barbarity, official cruelty, these myths shatter and leave us with a national story that is far more complicated to tell, a legacy to work against; such acceptance brings us toward the need for truth and reconciliation, reparations and justice. It is no coincidence that the rise of American paranoia about critical race theory has emerged right now as an organizing tool for the Republican Party, an articulation of white grievance—a monumental fictional role reversal where white America is under threat from the black and brown. It also functions as a vaccine against the facts of the present, where hundreds of thousands of people lie dead from a virus at least partly because of political choices made by the same voters and those who represent them.

So let’s talk pandemics and pathogens. Those who work in public health are very familiar with the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, a study of 600 African American men—a little more than half with a latent form of syphilis—who were deprived of treatment with penicillin for decades so scientists could observe the course of the disease. From the start of the study in 1932 to the discovery of penicillin as a treatment in 1947 to 1972 when the study was terminated “28 participants had perished from syphilis, 100 more had passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth.” The Tuskegee study stands as a cautionary tale, but it also is often the only story told about the intersection of American medicine and public health with white supremacy, as if it were an exception—a mistake, albeit a terrible one. But what if we see the Tuskegee study as part of a pattern that stretches back deep into our national past, and remains part of our pandemic present?

Only a century or so after John Winthrop’s voyage, the new colonists were at war with people whose land they had seized—the indigenous inhabitants of North America. That war was brutal, but so was the smallpox epidemic at the time, which afflicted colonists in their fortified outposts. At Fort Pitt, where today’s Pittsburgh now stands, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander in chief of British forces of North America during the French and Indian War, and for whom Amherst College is named, came up with a gruesome plan: “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them…as well as try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble [sic] Race.” The idea was to infect the local indigenous population with smallpox via contaminated blankets.

We now turn New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Here, infectious disease was mobilized not as a weapon but as an excuse, a rationale for the importance of slavery in the “heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms.” Yellow fever ran rampant, killing almost a tenth of the population each year. Stanford historian Kathryn Olivarius describes how the city’s elite “argued that they required large-scale black slavery—publicly proclaiming that black people were naturally immune to the disease based on spurious and racially-specific visions of medicine and biology,” even as they refrained from buying slaves who had not yet had the disease.