Dialogs: Considering Contagion with Maddow and Schama at Chicago Humanities Festival Events

This autumn’s Chicago Humanities Festival is chock-a-block with notable writers. That focus is normal for one of the Windy City’s most diverse and comprehensive cultural institutions, but especially true this year, during the middle of the SAG-AFTRA strike when actors are purposefully avoiding the spotlight.

Two authors presented different books with a common theme: contagion. Historian Simon Schama spoke at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall about his new tome, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations. The following week, MSNBC juggernaut Rachel Maddow returned to the CHF to have a conversation about the virulence of authoritarianism with her new publication, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.

Rachel Maddow and Kathleen Belew. Photo by Emma Richman/The Daily Northwestern.

After reading an excerpt from Prequel, Maddow sat down in front of an early standing ovation by an enthusiastic crowd at UIC’s Dorin Hall, with moderator Kathleen Belew, a Northwestern history professor and editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy as a leading authority on the white power movement. Maddow seemed pleased and a bit overwhelmed by the appreciative response, saying “when I do my TV show, I don’t see you.”

Maddow also acknowledged her “uncontrolled verbosity,” which helped her leap from short-attention span television to long-form books and deeply researched podcasts. With her new, lighter MSNBC schedule—only hosting on Monday nights and during elections or political events—she’s plunged headlong into her print wordiness (she’s already known for her famous historical framing of modern stories). “That’s how my brain works,” she said. “I like origin stories, the prehistory of the prehistory.”

Her popular eight-part podcast Ultra is a prequel of sorts for Prequel, and recounts the somewhat hidden history of the Nazi infiltration of American government and life around World War II, a topic also plumbed in the book. Maddow talked about automobile pioneer Henry Ford’s virulent antisemitism, including promoting the 1903 Russian propaganda piece, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which fabricated a Jewish plot for global domination, into every new car purchased. Hitler regarded Ford and his anti-Semitic smears as the inspiration for Mein Kampf, “because somebody has to be blamed for our troubles.” Hitler and Ford had framed pictures of each other on their respective desks.

Four cornerstones for evaluating a healthy democracy were also extrapolated from Maddow’s book. First, can people vote? Will that vote count? How do citizens know if an election is rigged? Secondly, is a scapegoat sought for society’s ills, and are conspiracy theories, under the auspices of a secret elite, rolled out? The third point is the presence of violence. Is there intimidation or attacks in the political sphere, either at the polls or online? Finally, are there attacks on truth? (Spoiler: yes.) Variations of these can “soften us up to do what the dear leader wants,” Maddow explained. But do we have all four in concert here and now? Yes, she said, so that means all hands on the democracy deck, because, in 2023, “history has come for us.”

So Maddow assigns a chore wheel for her rapt listeners to recognize and stifle this anti-democratic resurgence that echoes last century’s American history. She talked about the importance of courts, such as the 1944 sedition trial that she covers in the Ultra podcast and the Prequel book, precursors to today’s Proud Boys and Oath Keepers prosecutions.

Modern racist and gaslighting communicators like Fox News have historical precedence in the “Radio Priest,” Father Charles Coughlin, whose violent anti-Semitic propaganda reached a staggering 30 million people, one in four Americans at the time. His bully pulpit was also headquartered near Motown in Michigan. The “mostly likely to be Hitler” Louisiana Governor and corrupt machine politician Huey Long was also discussed.

Maddow warned to not take the attitude that “these clowns aren’t a threat,” although she noted that it’s hard to prosecute crimes with political intentions. She also encouraged a “pro-democratic practice,” including the work of nonpartisan journalists (like 1940s Washington journalist Drew Pearson), dogged prosecutors like the Justice Department’s John Rogge, citizens standing up to fascists (as some notably did in the '40s), as well as to vote the insurrectionists out.

The audience was reminded that history is not just a precedent, but a roadmap on how to act when democracy is assaulted. There are ways to embarrass, discredit, oppose and beat back acsending authoritarians. She encourages folks to become poll workers, to get “souls to the polls,” and to work on campaigns that match personal values.

She responded to a media literacy high school teacher’s question by saying that it’s important for students to learn what real journalism is, and to differentiate between mere information and actual reporting. What is an argument and what is a fact? Educate yourself about sourcing—do you have multiple sources? Are they named? What are the entities behind the reporting? Can I see the raw material, like court documents, or photos with time stamps? And don’t be afraid to make corrections.

Maddow also advised questioners to not just live in your phones, but to have human connections, and to know your neighbors. She’s worried about the resurgence of Holocaust denialism, which she terms “weird, insane, terrible and morally odious.”

Rachel Maddow remains hopeful that “we can beat the pikers we’re up against now.” Ordinary citizens must act so 2024 won’t be America’s last election. “It’s a time of precarity for the democratic project,” she said. “Democracy is a citizen process. You never know when you will be called on. Your country needs you.”

Simon Schama. Photo by Oxford Film & Television Ltd.

In conversation with Northwestern University’s History Department chair Deborah Cohen, Sir Simon Schama (formerly at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard, now at Columbia) gave a light and lively chat (accompanied by slides, some by Captain Claude Moss) on the history of pandemics covered in his new book, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations.

He charted how society has slowly moved from “only God is the arbiter of life and death” to the more robust and game-changing embrace of virology. As a noted historian (knighted for his service), Schama cited George Santayana’s famous admonition, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Schama’s book is full of optimists, he said, although catastrophe is a leitmotif throughout. He covers cholera (spread by fecal contamination and touch, not by respiration), smallpox and the bubonic plague. He reminded the audience that the fifth wave of the Black Death killed 30 million people relatively recently, between 1892 and the 1920, primarily in Asia, China and Russia. Schama explained how life in Bombay collapsed due to disease, but British imperialists didn’t want to shut things down because the area was such a money-making hub. Quarantines weren’t good for international trade, they reasoned, so the French and Germans bested the Brits in microbiology advancements. First steamship travel, then trains and now airplanes make all these devastating pathogens “extraordinarily contagious.”

Since he’s married to American geneticist Virginia Papaioannou, he’s also interested in women’s roles in medical history. Schama recounted that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought smallpox inoculations, observed during her time in Turkey, to England in 1718, after her own case disfigured her. Her motherly instincts, coupled with the idea that humans should take the seemingly counter-intuitive “little bit of what can kill you,” to “awaken the immune system.” She even converted the royal family to the idea of vaccinations. Queen Victoria was also interested in educating women in India to become doctors.

Vaccine pioneer Waldemar Haffkine was also discussed. He worked without a medical degree in fin de siècle Paris and India, developing the first shots to mediate cholera and plague. He would always bravely vaccinate himself first, and had great success until unsanitary needles in the field caused a mass poisoning that ruined his reputation and ended his important work. English nurse Florence Nightingale’s aid during the Crimean War between Britain and Russia was admired, as was the work of Joseph Lister to create an antiseptic between a surgical wound and the environment (who inspired the creation of Listerine as well). By August 1899, the first mass-produced vaccines, six million doses, were sent around the world. At the time, imperial Japan wanted to lead in plague research, so Great Britain finally saw vaccine research as politically important.

Schama, who joked that he was now in “the springtime of senility” (not likely for the shrewd 78-year-old), connected the history of pandemics to today’s “stupid and cynical” politicization of disease and the weaponization of vaccinations, including “the challenge to the authority of knowledge” and “Fauci phobia.” He questioned if one’s body is individual, or universal? Are health choices endemic to the body politic? He cited certain pharma companies that refused to waive patents too, as well as Shakespeare’s quote: “What a piece of work is man.”