An academic named Laura Smith recently took to the Washington Post with a pointed but overly facile diagnosis: “The spread of covid-19 in the South shows the risks of anti-intellectualism.” In the piece, she argues that anti-science bias has plagued the region’s coronavirus response. She doesn’t come close to proving it.
Smith criticizes the southern states’ “early reopening plans and hands-off measures.” Nearly all the southern states instituted some form of lockdown to tackle the virus, which is hardly hands-off. It’s true that they generally began to lift their lockdowns earlier than some other parts of the country, but then again, their outbreaks were generally less severe.
South Carolina began its reopening in early May. During the week of May 3-9, the state recorded a lower number of cases than it had in the previous five weeks. Alabama’s case numbers were fluctuating at a fairly low rate, between 100-200, during the last week of April when the state began its reopening.
Meanwhile, economies were being shattered and governors determined that their states could protect the public with the now familiar precautions while encouraging business at the same time. When they did open up, states required capacity restrictions and social distancing and encouraged mask-wearing, all recommendations coming from health officials.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that economic concerns were treated with such priority. Southern states are not generally among the most wealthy. Aside from ascribing transmission to bars, public health officials have not widely blamed restaurants and retail stores, which were among the primary victors of early reopenings in places like South Carolina, for contributing to widespread virus transmission. Governors “listened to the science” and made reopenings conditional.
Smith also raises the issue of mask mandates, saying that the South’s hands-off approaches, expressed most recently by Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s legal challenge to local mask mandates, “reflect a cultural emphasis on prioritizing freedom from government dictate — and an anti-science bias rooted in the history of the region.”
She implies that the scientific thing to do is to mandate masks, but science can only demonstrate whether masks are effective and so suggest that their widespread use would be effective towards a certain end. Science doesn’t and can’t suggest what mask-promoting methods are most prudent or even legal. Kemp’s lawsuit against Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms challenges her legal authority to mandate masks, not the efficacy of masks. He has been rather adamant about the importance of wearing masks, as have other southern governors.
At this point, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama has extended the state’s “safer at home” order and made mandated masks in various public spaces. Texas has a mask mandate in place, North Carolina has one, and so does Louisiana. Mississippi has just instituted one and South Carolina, too.
Several of these mandates are brand new. The governors’ reluctance to issue mask mandates has not been about the science of masks, as Smith suggests, but about the challenge of enforcing such rules. Democratic executives have been less concerned than their Republican counterparts about the consequences and logistics of using police to enforce mask mandates. More of them have now tabled those concerns and determined that masks do need to be mandatory in specified settings. Still, the general reluctance has been about law, not science. We know this is so because all of them have been wearing masks and encouraging them for months.
It is worth noting that Smith’s premise has a measure of historical legitimacy. Her history sketch starts with the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, but some historical traces of skepticism toward science and the academy in the South actually predate the Scopes Trial by a hundred or more years.
Wayne Flint, professor emeritus of the history department at Auburn University, is a preeminent historian in Alabama, and his book on Baptists charts the history of the country’s largest Protestant denomination in that state. He recounts early Alabama Baptists fighting about how to train their clergy. Northern transplants like Jesse Hartwell, who was Brown University educated, and Samuel Sterling Sherman were Baptist preachers who took up teaching roles in Alabama’s Baptist institutions. They prioritized the classics, mathematics, and so forth. The dominant native voices, who favored a “labor and religion” curriculum, thought that Plato, Homer, and ancient language literacy were of little use to frontier preachers. Preachers would be better off learning how to farm, they thought. Alabama was mostly rural farmland, after all.
Along with that dynamic, Darwinism and theological developments like Unitarianism and historical biblical criticism all began introducing new theories of man and religion into the 19th-century fold that southerners resisted. It may be reasonable to link southern criticisms of those movements with broader suspicions about the academy that persist today.
So, yes, southern, largely rural states have carried with them a level of skepticism toward the utility of the academy and “intellectualism,” especially where they combat orthodox religion. Smith didn’t make that up. But none of that has much to do with the coronavirus response. On that front, her argument is weak, full of air, and in search of a scapegoat. That same genre of skepticism is hardly a predominant force in the region’s COVID-19 response, as Smith suggests. More importantly, its response has not at all been anti-science in posture.
All governors welcome COVID-19’s demise. The southern states have largely resisted the notion that all matters of public and private life must be relinquished to contain the virus. Criticizing that approach is fair, but ascribing it to historical anti-science bias doesn’t work.
