The long roots of anti-vax, anti-mask “freedom” and “liberty” rhetoric
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say.
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I knew
You would know why.
– Refugee in America, Langston Hughes
When next you hear the words “freedom” or “liberty” used as a justification for opposing vaccine or mask mandates wave, take a moment to reflect on the roots of the perversion of the ideals Langston Hughes wrote should sing to our heart strings.
If those protesting mandatory vaccination and masking have a familiar sounding message, it’s probably because as what journalist Carmen Miranda brands as “toxic individualism” and the misleading rants about “freedom” and “liberty,” date back to the first footprints of English settlers on this continent.
Whether in the Jamestown or Plymouth colonies, the “freedom” they espoused was premised on land expropriated from indigenous people, and, especially in the Virginia environs, by “defining it against the bondage of the Africans among them,” as Heather McGhee writes in her recent book “The Sum of Us.”
“Freedom” and “liberty” verbiage were in common usage by slave owners from the American revolution through the Civil War with little acknowledgement of the double standard they espoused. 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners; 11 of them owned or managed slave-operated plantations or large farms.
A few decades later, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, the leading antebellum proponent of slavery and a former Vice President argued in defense of a Gag Rule to prohibit introduction of anti-slavery public petitions to Congress that “The defence (sic) of human liberty against the aggressions of despotic power have been always the most efficient in States where domestic slavery was to prevail.” It would not be the first, or last, time “freedom” and “liberty” would be weaponized against the alleged tyranny of the public good and the rights of others.
Similarly, in 1856, the Richmond Enquirer, declared: “Democratic liberty exists solely because we have slaves . . . freedom is not possible without slavery.”
“Liberty” remained on the lips of Confederate soldiers throughout the war. “Abolitionists who are invading our soil seeking to destroy that which our forefathers gained for us ‘liberty,” Lieutenant Robert G. Haile, 55th Virginia Infantry wrote home. “The vandals of the North are determined to destroy slavery…. We must all fight, and I choose to fight for southern rights and southern liberty,” wrote Kentucky Cavalry Private Lunsford Yandell, Jr.
Miranda also traces the linkage of liberty and individualism to “the cultural legacy of Manifest Destiny and the settlement of the West: the myth of the up-by-the-bootstraps pioneer who helped tame the uninhabited West in the name of the United States.”
What later became labeled the “frontier thesis,” held that the suddenly available land spurred national development and the expansion of U.S.-style democracy through self-centered actions of settlers claiming land and resources — again seized from the original indigenous inhabitants — for themselves, free from the intrusion of governing institutions or regulators they believed constrained their liberty.
Never mind that, as Miranda points out, the “nation building was not the work of rugged individuals working alone but a lot of people working in tandem,” with substantial support from the U.S. government through land grants, tax favors, and support of the military.
However, the ideological mix of individualism, freedom, and liberty had become deeply embedded among a large swatch of Americans, further poisoned by centuries of structural racism that persists today.
In response to the Civil Rights movement “liberty” and “freedom,” became code words for fighting equal rights which undermined a public good that benefits everyone. In Virginia, for one, “massive resistance” to court-ordered integration took the form of closure of public schools. Montgomery, Ala. officials, as McGhee notes, closed their entire public parks system, including selling off zoo animals, and draining a crown jewel public pool.
The tortured use of “freedom” was regularly employed by segregationists, such as George Wallace, echoing the words of Calhoun, in his infamous 1963 “segregation forever” inauguration speech as Alabama governor: “Today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.”
Subverted interpretations of freedom, liberty, choice, individualism, and opposition to government have consistently undermined collective action for the common interest, especially when infused with racism, with deadly consequences when it comes to public health.
McGhee cites multiple examples of how large numbers of white Americans oppose many “race neutral” government programs that benefit them too, like expanding healthcare, worker’s rights including forming unions, climate action and environmental protections, and public health measures as “taking something away from white people.”
Or by what McGhee calls “the tragic example of governments and corporations failing to protect” the Black, brown and Indigenous lives disproportionately harmed by the pandemic. “Though if they had,” she adds, “everyone would have been safer.”
More than 670,000 dead Americans, now more than died in the U.S. during the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago, while many anti-vax, anti-mask objectors distort those ideals of freedom and liberty to encourage resistance to pandemic safety measures, sabotaging the collective action that is so critical in the face of a public health emergency.
The idea of a “commons” — that resources, such as public land, clean air and water, food safety, and public health programs, should be accessible to all members of a society for the common interest — is trampled by corrupted concepts of “freedom,” “liberty,” and “individualism,” in the hands of those who always put their self-interest ahead of others, even when it puts them and their own families in jeopardy.
Vaccine mandates, especially for epidemics, also have long been seen as in the common interest, as Maggie Astor writes. In 1777, Continental Army commander George Washington mandated smallpox inoculations for his troops. In 1902, vaccine mandates were upheld as Constitutional by the Supreme Court. Writing for the 7–2 majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan said, “real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
Vaccine mandates remain common in the public interest. It’s worth asking how many of today’s protesters choose to send their child to a day care center, or a public school that require a series of required vaccines including immunizations for polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps and rubella, hepatitis B, and chickenpox?
The unsuccessful recent election to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom offered a reminder that the majority remains committed to public health protections, despite the loud voices of a small minority and their misleading use of “freedom” and “liberty” sloganeering. Nearly 70 percent of California voters in exit polls supported school mask requirements, as do 67 percent of all U.S. voters in a Fox News poll of mid-September.
“We live in a culture of rugged individualism run amok,” Miranda concludes. “Call it toxic individualism. Because in the case of this pandemic, it is literally toxic. The focus on individual rights over the greater good is one for which we are paying with our health and our lives.”
