As terror seized her beloved Seattle, 15-year-old Violet Harris beamed. Quarantined in her Washington State home, isolated from the threat of the deadly virus consuming her community, she sewed a dress and baked fudge. Only when her best friend Rania contracted the virus did Harris’s outlook change. Harris was not a tech-savvy Gen-Zer. In fact, she lived in a world in which tech-savvy meant able to use a vacuum cleaner successfully. Harris survived the 1918 flu pandemic, while zealous “freedom-lovers” resisted mask-wearing orders, hospitals brimmed with patients, and schools shut down nationwide.

As Americans live through a historic pandemic today, COVID-19, many look for historical analogs as they navigate these seemingly unprecedented times. 

Upper School history teacher Kevin Conlon has been researching the 1918 flu pandemic, commonly referred to by the misnomer “Spanish flu.” “I recently learned that, in the 1918 pandemic, San Francisco issued an order for obligatory mask-wearing, and there was the vocal but smaller crowd who said, ‘I don’t want to wear a mask,’” Upper School history teacher Kevin Conlon said. “‘That’s against my personal freedom.’ They would be out in the streets. The numbers started to go down, and the mask order was rescinded. People went crazy and intermingled, and there was a very vicious second wave.”

Not only is the people’s response to today’s pandemic similar to that of 1918, but, according to Upper School history teacher Susan Elliott, President Trump’s refusal to listen to experts is also far from unprecedented. “You look at the cities like Philadelphia, which—during the flu pandemic—was told not to hold a parade, and they held it anyway, even though their experts told them not to,” Elliott said.

During the 1918 pandemic, President Woodrow Wilson contracted the flu while negotiating with world leaders after World War I. Elliott compared his desire to ratify the Treaty of Versailles to Trump’s silencing of medical professionals. “What you see there was Wilson was actually rejecting the experts,” Elliott said. “Experts like Henry Cabot Lodge were saying, ‘This isn’t a good treaty. Diplomatically, this isn’t good for the United States.’ He went over the heads of the experts straight to the people.”

Elliott also compared Trump’s attitude to that of his hero, President Andrew Jackson. “I think that anti-intellectualism dates back to Andrew Jackson,” Elliott said. “He really did the spoils system and brought in all of his political buddies to take over these positions that had been held by experts.”

Over a century after the Jackson Administration, World War II fervor gripped the United States. Elliott contrasted the economic mobilization during the War to that of today. “We asked people to ration,” Elliott said. “‘Don’t buy fuel, don’t buy so much flour.’ The factories and food production weren’t allowing people to buy those things. In other words, they couldn’t have bought them if they wanted to. Right now, you can easily horde. You can easily not care about your neighbors. We’re not being asked to mobilize in that way.”

Elliott believes that the lack of a visible enemy, like the Japanese during the War, has contributed to the lack of rationing zeal now. “If you were to say to someone, ‘You’ve got to do this because of the enemy,’ people were probably more willing to do it,” Elliott said about Americans right after Pearl Harbor. “Right now, we don’t have an enemy in the sense that we can see them. It’s kind of hard for us to say, ‘You have to wear a mask because of the enemy. We’re all in this together.’ They don’t feel that way.”

Leading up to World War II was the Great Depression, which rivaled the current crisis in terms of joblessness. Upper School history teacher Daniel Greenstone contrasted the federal government’s response to the two crises. “I do think that the amount of spending and lending and aggressive action is pretty unprecedented,” Greenstone said about the government’s response to COVID-19. “That’s different from what we saw in the Great Depression, where the government didn’t do those things. They didn’t understand monetary policy the way they do now.”

During the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, still in its relative infancy—President Wilson created the central bank in 1913—had a limited understanding of monetary policy. As worldwide faith in capitalism declined, British economist John Maynard Keynes rose to prominence, advocating aggressive fiscal (tax and other legislative policies) and monetary (central banking) policy in times of crisis. Keynes’s ideas challenged the widely-accepted laissez-faire (“hands-off”) approach of the time. “Trump is not laissez-faire,” Greenstone said. “Trump is pretty supportive, not of every government intervention but of a lot of them. It’s unthinkable, $1,200 checks to people and the PPP program. I actually have seen conservatives bend on their principles way more than they have in the past.” 

President Herbert Hoover, a fiscal conservative, pushed for austerity measures during the Great Depression. “I think it’s a closed case that Hoover’s austerity approach was really bad for the American people,” Conlon said. “It was really good for capitalist economic principles to some extent, but capitalism, as it turns out, needed sustaining toward policies that were unorthodox at the time. Deficit-spending was seen as unorthodox at the time. It was seen as wasteful. The lesson learned is that capitalism needs help every now and again to stay alive.”

Elliott thinks that history should be kinder to Hoover. “I think the Hoover situation is not fair,” Elliott said. “Hoover was looking at a long-term depression that no one had ever seen before. He didn’t think it would last that long. He was looking at the panics of the 19th century. No one could’ve foreseen that.”

Because Elliott believes that the current crisis differs considerably from the Great Depression, she believes that deficit reduction is a noble goal. “There’s no way this pandemic’s economic impact is going to be as severe or as long-term as the Great Depression,” Elliott said. “In order to safeguard future generations, we should think about how much this is going to cost and how we’re going to pay for it rather than just onboarding all of these spending programs without a thought for the future.”

Conlon disagrees. “We’re talking about people’s lives, people who will lose their savings,” Conlon said. “In the interest of social stability, of political stability, of the future growth of our economy, it just seems to be a no-brainer that the lesson learned from the Great Depression and 2008 is that the government does play a role.”

Conlon believes that the other economic consequences, including unemployment, will more negatively impact future generations than the national debt. “Lawmakers have realized, ‘We’re being criticized for not putting enough money into this. We’re putting a lot of money into it now, and we’re getting into huge debt,’” Conlon said. “Now, we’re getting to the point where it’s like, ‘We can’t do it now because then we will have too much debt, and our grandchildren will have to be paying for ours.’ I hate it when I hear that. Your grandchildren will be inheriting an economy.”

Pointing to the rise in fascism as a result of the Great Depression, Conlon believes that the US government should consider the social impact of their economic policies. “Keynes said that if we don’t do this,” Conlon said about aggressive fiscal and monetary policy, “we’ll have extremist governments, predicting the rise of fascism.”

Upper School history teacher Andrew Bigelow agrees with Conlon. “You need more of a Keynesian approach,” Bigelow said. “Every time we have a Republican president who believes in a hands-off approach, an unregulated economy, we have a disaster. As every president has found by the end of their presidency, their hands-off approach is always doomed.”

Although many Republicans in Congress are adopting a more Keynesian approach, Greenstone thinks that Americans should keep a close eye on those legislators’ positions if Biden wins. “We did see, when Obama won, Republicans were very laissez-faire, after the Great Recession,” Greenstone said. “I think that’s something to watch for. I’m not making a prediction. I’m just saying it’s possible that conservatives are more open to government intervention now, before the election, then they would be if Biden won.”

Conlon has also been looking at the government’s response to the Great Recession of 2008 as the economic damage of the pandemic increases. He also compared the current crisis to 9/11. “The airline industry after 9/11 took a couple of years to fully recover,” Conlon said. “The Federal Reserve Bank and Congress chipped in. There’s been more of a willingness this time around to throw a lot of money at the situation because there is an understanding that there are a lot of people who can’t work now. There are some similarities with 9/11 and 2008 in terms of the slowdown of the economy and having to have government intervention to try and solve it.”

In addition to pointing to historical analogs to the current economic situation, Parker history teachers discussed the historical analogs to the current Trump-Fox News feedback loop. For weeks, Fox News promoted hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure for COVID-19. Consequently, Trump promoted the drug at his press conferences. On May 22, a study found that COVID-19 patients who took the drug had a significantly higher rate of death than those who did not. “In some ways, cable news and some of the dark pockets of the internet resemble the pamphlet culture that existed in the time of Hamilton and Jefferson,” Greenstone said. “Politics back then was extremely hardball, and then it chilled out. It really chilled out during the Cold War because the threat of the Soviet Union was so intense that the parties got together better than they did in the past. A lot of people my age and older have a sunk assumption of the parties always getting along that is really more of a Cold War thing than it is a historic thing.”

Elliott compared Fox News to the yellow journalism of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst during the Spanish-American War of 1898. “They were doing this circulation war, and they were publishing even more outrageous stories, and that led to the belief among Americans that the USS Maine had been blown up by Spain, when it had been an error on the part of American sailors,” Elliott said. “As a result, we were dragged into a war we never should’ve gotten involved in.”

Elliott also referenced the pamphleteering of the late-18th century. “I would also point to Callender during the Adams Administration, who inspired Adams to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts,” Elliott said, referring to the pamphleteer James T. Callender. “He was always trying to dig up dirt on all the political rivals and trying to stir the pot. We have a lot of tradition of good journalism, but we have these times in our history where journalism has been very suspect and not always a positive element of our democracy.”

Parker history teachers overwhelmingly believe that the Trump-Fox News feedback loop is dangerous and point to leaders from history from whom Trump should learn as he navigates this current crisis. “I think that Trump should learn from those presidents who have shown real empathy,” Elliott said. “He doesn’t seem to be able to work up that capacity for empathy.”

Elliott points to Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan as examples of presidents with the capacity for empathy.

Conlon agrees with Elliott about FDR and extolled his successor and vice president, President Harry Truman. “Truman at the end of World War II, Eisenhower calling out the military-industrial complex as he was leaving office, these are moments as a non-Americanist history teacher even I am aware of that showed true signs of leadership during times of crisis,” Conlon said. 

Bigelow believes that Trump should take notes from President Barack Obama. “He really needs to learn from President Obama, who just hired unbelievably qualified people in his cabinet,” Bigelow said. “The Secretary of Energy under Obama was a nuclear physicist. All of his cabinet members were highly experienced in their field.”

Greenstone does not think Trump has the capacity to learn from Obama. “Trump learning from other people is a thing that hasn’t happened,” Greenstone said, chuckling.

Although Greenstone and his colleagues can point to moments in US history similar to specific aspects of the current crisis, they overwhelmingly believe that no event has come close to capturing all of the features of this crisis combined. “Certainly, given everyone who’s alive today’s lifetime, nobody has ever experienced this before,” Conlon said. “There really isn’t an equivalent. We’re really being tested.”