Christopher McKnight Nichols - podcast
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[00:00:00] Christopher Nichols: One of the really amazing things about the early pandemic in the US and around the world was how eerily similar that was to 1918. And so you could almost directly map on this historical relationship. 

[00:00:16] From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, and Mathematics, chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others. The College always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

[00:00:46] David Staley: I'm very pleased to welcome into the ASC Tech studio today, Christopher McKnight Nichols, the Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies and Professor of History, the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. [00:01:00] He specializes in the history of the United States and its relationship to the rest of the world, particularly in the areas of isolationism, internationalism, and globalization, as well as the role of ideas and ideologies in US foreign relations. He's also an expert on modern US intellectual, political, and cultural history from the Gilded Age and Progressive era through to the present. Dr. Nichols, welcome to Voices. 

[00:01:25] Christopher Nichols: Oh, I'm so excited to be here with you. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:27] David Staley: I'm very happy that you're here. And I'd like to start with, as I suggested in your introduction, much of your work focuses on the role of ideas and ideologies in the history of US foreign relations and politics. Which ideas? Which ideologies? 

[00:01:41] Christopher Nichols: Yeah. So as the introduction suggested, some that I've focused on primarily include isolationism and internationalism. So they're often seen as somewhat of a binary, right? This, way in which the US engages with the world either, in the limits of that, in terms of isolationism or in the more advanced amplified version of [00:02:00] that interventionism international engagement and all that sort of thing. And looking at that historically as, you can see the ebbs and flows of how those ideas have impacted policy and debates. One of the things that we often don't think much about is that those debates and the winners and losers live to fight another day.

[00:02:15] So an isolationist argument of the late 19th century that perhaps doesn't seem like it was that effective, didn't win out, let's say, in terms of annexing the Philippines and Puerto Rico and Cuba and really expanding the US, may have won out with the League of Nations when the Senate rejected the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles and the US did not join the League.

[00:02:35] So that these kinds of international arguments recur. They adapt, they change. And tracking them over time helps you think about changes in culture, changes in politics, who the players are, that matter. Where these kinds of ideas in politics intersect across the political spectrum cuz they often are one of the ways that we talk about this is sort of in politic, but a strange bedfellows that you wind up with the left and the right meeting in, in odd places, terms of politics and foreign policy.

[00:02:59] David Staley: [00:03:00] What explains those historic ebbs and flows? What's the causal mechanism? 

[00:03:04] Christopher Nichols: Obviously there's not just one as we historians would know. I'm sure your work suggests the same thing, David. But one of the things that helps to explain those changes is points of crisis.

[00:03:12] I think the flash points of a crisis moment, whether it's a war, depression , kind of major set of cultural changes and frictions, those crises then kind of illuminate, I often say or think to myself in my work, the kind of fractures and fissures in society: think the Great Depression, right?

[00:03:30] The transformative political changes of the New Deal that come out of that. Or think about the second World War and the ways in which the US reshaped the nation at home:

[00:03:37] the GI Bill, and all kinds of other things, and abroad in terms of the Bretton Woods system, the UN, the World Bank, IMF all these other structures.

[00:03:46] So , it's points of crisis, but the other thing that I think is really interesting and less often observed is the sort of lulls , or moments of quiescence after crisis, as these sets of ideas evolve. So one of the things that I've looked at when I look at isolationism [00:04:00] is not just the rejection of the League of Nations, as I was just describing, but the twenties and thirties, where do those ideas about limiting the US's engagement with the world or engaging with the world on the US's own terms go. One of the places they go is really dark and terrible xenophobia, immigration restriction. But that's the twenties, the supposed Roaring Twenties. Actually they're characterized by some really heinous and terrible things, insular orientations and those sorts of elements , that's in a period between crises, if you argue the depression or the second World War is the next coming one.

[00:04:31] David Staley: So, what does it mean to study ideas? Or let me ask it this way: how does one study ideas? 

[00:04:37] Christopher Nichols: It's very difficult. Uh, so for intellectual historians we often to paraphrase a great thinker, Peter Novik, who wrote a terrific book on the objectivity dream in historiography, one of the ways that he talks about thinking about ideas in historiography is that it's like nailing jelly to the wall, right? As soon as you nail it in there, it's just dripping down. So what I take from that in one really profound kind of way is ideas [00:05:00] and ideologies are never static in the historical record. We can find them as fixed points in a given moment, and , when they're understood in context, then you can see how they're shape shifting over time. And that's what's really interests me. That's what attracts me to the study of ideas. Because you can get inside the head of an actor or a series of actors, a group, right?

[00:05:17] You can see what kinds of policies perhaps they impact or cultural changes, and then that moves on. So a challenge in the study of ideas is also a strength that you're looking at evolution, really. You're looking at change over time, which is the main thing that we as historians struggle to figure out. How can we describe change over time with some level of accuracy to the historical actors and era.

[00:05:36] All right? The other big challenge though, of course, is ideas are like religious faith, which is another thing that I've studied: religion and foreign relations. You can't ever fully get inside the head of your historical actors. It's a real challenge for us. We can read everything that they've written. We can spend our lives in the archives, their memoirs, their letters, right?

[00:05:53] You can understand their context incredibly well, and yet ideas sometimes are still elusive. And so part of [00:06:00] the sort of pleasure and the pain of studying ideas in the historical record is that, you know you can only go so far with them. Some ideas or ideologies in particular are more masking devices.

[00:06:10] They're more political rhetoric, right? They're designed to be persuasive, but do the historical actors really believe in them a little bit like faith. 

[00:06:18] David Staley: So when you're In the archives and you're looking at records, are you looking for the word isolation or isolationism? How does, one sort of extract these ideas?

[00:06:27] Christopher Nichols: I love that question because it's exactly what gets at the heart, especially of tracking ideas over time, even before the term is coined. 

[00:06:34] David Staley: Right.

[00:06:35] Christopher Nichols: So there's an open question in critical theory as well as history and other fields is could there be Marx before Marx? Right. Could Marxism.

[00:06:41] David Staley: That's a good question. 

[00:06:41] Christopher Nichols: Yeah. Right. do you need Marx to think about the problems in capitalist economies, the ways in which oligarchs and capitalists structure and suppress to and create ideologies that in fact, then imbue in people a sense that this is the only sort of structure that they can live in.

[00:06:56] My basic argument there would be no, you don't need a theorist or a term to [00:07:00] define that. You can look for the constituent ideas elsewhere. It is important to know the etymology of that ism, if it's an ideology.

[00:07:07] David Staley: Etymology the history of the word. 

[00:07:08] Christopher Nichols: Precisely yes. So, one of the terms that I've looked at is isolationism. There are few uses of the term isolationist before the 1920s, but really the main uses of isolationism and isolationists come in the twenties, and they're used as an epithet against people, a slur against those who are not for a kind of internationalism, Wilsonian internationalism: join the League, embark on a world-changing project to make the world safe for democracy.

[00:07:33] So I'm not necessarily in the archives looking for the term, although I'm very keenly interested when I see it, but I'm looking for the kind of constituent ideas, arguments, claims, core values, principles that in my view make up that ideology. So I'll give you one sort of metaphor, which I think works nicely.

[00:07:51] I like to think about ideologies in terms of a constellation of ideas. It's the firmament up there. It's all these stars. And in any given moment, [00:08:00] some are shining more brightly than others. So if you're thinking about isolationism, the way I've defined it, There's two main types, political and protectionist.

[00:08:07] We could get into a whole long conversation maybe that's not for today. And then there's about eight strains of ideas within that. And two of the most important are non entanglement and unilateralism. And so if you think about a given moment when foreign policy is being developed, when people are debating whether or not a quote unquote isolationist kind of a set of arguments should prevail, maybe unilateralism is the shining star in the sky.

[00:08:30] The US should act on its own, for its own purposes, value its own internal vital, best interests. And some of the other stars are not as bright, or things like self-sufficiency or neutrality are not as bright in that given moment, but they could be later on. So, the next time the US is involved in a war, an American president might immediately as both Woodrow Wilson and FDR did declare neutrality.

[00:08:51] And in that moment, you might say in an isolationist firmament neutrality is the brightest of the stars. I think that really helps you with the other piece that we're talking about, the [00:09:00] evolution of ideas over time. So you can have a core set, a constellation of ideas, stars in that firmament of an ideology.

[00:09:07] Yet they are changing. Their configuration is changing. Just like, if you're thinking about astronomy in a given moment, you could see parts of Orion, but not the whole belt. 

[00:09:15] David Staley: So when you're looking at these ideas, are you looking only at certain people? In other words, are you looking just at the ideas of secretaries of state or presidents? Whose ideas matter here?

[00:09:26] Christopher Nichols: I like to say, and I like to look for the widest possible swath. So I think some of the best work being done by historians these days is looking at grassroots actors, regular citizens, and particularly in foreign policy, what did regular citizens think? there's a couple different concepts of a so-called Democratic foreign policy, which seeks to find out what the citizens actually want. The US hasn't tended to operate that way at all, and in fact often has disdained sort of the levels of citizen engagement and understanding of foreign relations. But when you look at the historical record, when you go to those archives and you find the letters of regular folks for instance in a book that I [00:10:00] did on ideology and US foreign relations, there's a great chapter by the* *scholar Michaela Hoenicke Moore which looks at primarily how GIs coming back from World War II thought about foreign policy.

[00:10:09] And one of the things that they thought, interestingly, was that in fact the US should probably not be a world policeman. And even though they had been so invested in changing the world order and ridding the world to use the Atlantic Charter's terminology of the Nazi tyranny they come back and they think we don't want to be based in Europe.

[00:10:25] So they're actually much more thinking along the limits of US foreign policy than the kind of what becomes the more commonplace understanding of the Cold War. I think it would also add if you think about historical actors, If you just look at secretaries of state, or if you just looked at presidents, then you, maybe you're not looking at policy documents.

[00:10:41] So it's important to look at the National Security Council memos and things like that. And in earlier eras you can find them in speech writers. But I wouldn't limit my work to that. And so one of the things that I've been really interested in are non-governmental organization. And one of my favorites that I've looked at , in a number of different studies, is the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

[00:10:58] They were headed by the first two [00:11:00] American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Jane Adams and Emily Balch. And yet they're remarkably understudied in foreign relations circles, or they're not often put in conversation with secretaries of state and big ideologies. and so when you do that, I think you find much more robust and often odd, as I was noting before, configurations of peoples and groups advocating for different kinds of policies, often for their own ends, but coming together thinking that a certain kind of policy, for instance, the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlaw war brought together conservatives and liberals, peace activists, and actual hawks.

[00:11:33] That's a fascinating move and moment. And it's really important as a way of then understanding a diverse array of actors, regular people, women's peace activists Republican conservatives, a whole host of folks, to get a better handhold on the diverse ways in which ideology can operate for different peoples and groups.

[00:11:50] David Staley: One of your recent books is called Rethinking American Grand Strategy. And let's start first with a definition. What's meant by grand strategy. 

[00:11:59] Christopher Nichols: Oh, well this could be [00:12:00] another half hour, right? Right, right now. So grand strategy in my definitional framework is and I'm paraphrasing here from a great scholar named Hal Brands, who's a historian of grand strategy himself.

[00:12:11] That it's the sort of intellectual architecture that gives shape to policy ideas. So an intellectual architecture, a structure, you could use an edifice like structure there. But I would add to that, that the way that I reconceive it in the book along with my co-editors and co-authors Elizabeth Borgwardt and Andrew Preston is that it's a way of structuring knowledge, so an epistemology, grant strategy, and that it is more than just about the exercise of power. So if you look at a traditional literature on grand strategy, usually this comes from political science and or military history, and there's some great work in this, but it's about the use of hard power, military power, and how that then can shape the peace that comes after.

[00:12:51] And the way that we look at it in the book, and the reason that I was so dedicated to this project and still am dedicated to the project of rethinking grand strategy is that by [00:13:00] expanding what counts as a grand strategy or grand strategist, and this ties in perfectly to your previous question, you actually can find a very different orientation of grand strategies in the world.

[00:13:10] In other words if you look at that hard power, military power, political science, and military history view, you look at major policy makers. You look at generals, you look at strategic thinkers, you don't look at missionaries, for instance. You don't look at people like, as I was just mentioning, women's peace activists.

[00:13:28] If you add them into the mix, they should absolutely count in that definitional structure. So the other way to talk about that definition is that as, John Lewis Gaddes and Paul Kennedy who started the Yale School of Grand Strategy define it, it's really about matching means to ends, long- term, sweeping, aspirational ends.

[00:13:46] They have to be big ends to count as grand in strategy and necessarily limited means. So we never have at our disposal, whether we're a nation state, like the hegemonic power of the US or a very small nonprofit organization, we never have [00:14:00] the means that we want to achieve the large ends that we're hoping for.

[00:14:03] And that's another way to think about what grant strategy is and which is why, in my view, and when I came to study the subject, I was deeply perplexed that you didn't see, for instance, missionary movements. They're incredibly important in world history. They're incredibly important in diplomatic history, religious history. Can you imagine any listener out there... can you imagine a more world shaping aspiration as an end than as the evangelist DL Moody put it, to evangelize the world in one generation? I can't. Even the most ambitious Imperial project doesn't quite go there, right? Change not just people's structures of government, but their hearts, their souls.

[00:14:37] Save them for an afterlife, right? So in my view, you have to include missionaries in a study of grand strategy. And once you do that, then that leads to next level questions. Should you be thinking about black internationalists? Why are they not normally put into this conversation with sweeping kinds of goals, matching necessarily limited means to them to aiming to achieve them?

[00:14:55] So part of the book project and part of the larger project is about including the hidden [00:15:00] strategists who are there the historical record, into this expanded definitional framework of what counts as grand strategy. 

[00:15:06] David Staley: Is that framework influencing our thinking about grand strategy today, and when I say our, I mean policymakers. Obviously it's influencing scholars.

[00:15:16] Christopher Nichols: Right. I'd like to think so. one thing that's interesting is, so in this Yale grant strategy school, a lot of the people who work there, who present there, who teach there are practitioners. In fact, the current national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, was teaching there up until the Biden administration pulled him in.

[00:15:32] So if you look to the kinds of statements that he made about a grand strategy for the middle class, right as Biden was taking office that comes directly out of thinking about social movements and economics and grand strategy, which is the kind of stuff that we're doing when we're rethinking grand strategy in the historical record.

[00:15:47] I would like to push them to think more about these topics and to include more in their grand strategizing. Once you get into the murky, bureaucratic process of developing policy, it's much easier to look at [00:16:00] more simply quantifiable kinds of variables and then kind of move that mechanism forward.

[00:16:06] Harder to think about some of the ineffable things, the more ephemeral qualities of global peace activism or the kinds of pan-africanism and solidarities that you find in black internationalism. But that said, if they were looking at those actors, I think one of the things they'd see is how the deeply held beliefs of international organizations and people with sort of strategic aims can and do impact what's possible for nation states.

[00:16:33] So if we're thinking to the future, and this is something you and I have talked about, I'd be keen to know what you think here, climate change is one of those deeply held views that we've got lots of international, non-governmental organizations advocating about. We've got corporate capitalism, multinational organizations doing that kind of work.

[00:16:47] And we also know there are strategic concerns about all kinds of questions related to rising sea, different weather patterns. So for me, if you open that what does that permit you to think about when you recognize that there are other grand strategic operators [00:17:00] in the ecosystem, so to speak?

[00:17:01] David Staley: Yeah. that's a fascinating question. I just wonder if the Jake Sullivans of the world subscribe to that sort of thinking. I mean, it's one thing for you and I I suppose to have a discussion about grand strategy. Can you and I actually influence American Grand Strategy? 

[00:17:16] Christopher Nichols: I'm of two minds on that. I think we are lucky enough to publish, be consulted periodically. So perhaps we can be part of that conversation and being part of it move the needle. That's my hope: by bringing serious historical topics to wider audiences, one of my main motivations, even when it feels like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. It's just coming back down and down. You know, what is isolationism? It's not what you think it is, right? History suggests that it's not inward looking. It's not so naive. It's not so negative and in fact there's some things to recommend that an isolationist argument that's pushing back against, rash interventionism. Same thing with grand strategy. You open up what you think about grand strategy, maybe you're a little bit less hubristic about it, a little bit less universalizing, right? There's this argument that the people who do grand strategy look like Henry Kissinger.

[00:17:59] And what I wanna say is [00:18:00] they look like Jane Adams and W.E.B. DuBois. So we can all be grand strategists to some extent. Now, maybe it just means diversifying who's involved and the kinds of ideas that are involved at the National Security Council in a US context. I would take that as a win for a team rethinking grand strategy.

[00:18:15] But I think it could be a lot more than that, and I'm not sure how far that'll go, but I do think that policymakers often draw on history. We have good evidence of this, right? And so the lessons of history, the insights of history, and when they come to understand how perhaps grand strategy has been shaped historically by different kinds of actors and groups, different sorts of ideologies, that may then give them some data points, even if they're somewhat reductively yanked from our history, not the way you and I would want in the classroom, to then take them and operationalize them in ways that perhaps are more fitting with the sort of poke or prod provocation that we're putting out there? 

[00:18:50] David Staley: Well, I've got a question about that. 

[00:18:52] Christopher Nichols: Yeah. 

[00:18:52] David Staley: But I wanna first draw attention to the fact that you also conduct research into the 1918 influenza pandemic.

[00:18:59] Christopher Nichols: Yes. 

[00:18:59] David Staley: And I [00:19:00] just want to first briefly get a sense that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with foreign relations. How did you end up studying the influenza pandemic? 

[00:19:07] Christopher Nichols: All right, so this is great. So this is a classic history, humanities kind of thing, working on my dissertation, which became my first monograph Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age, which is a significantly engaged with where did ideas about isolationism come from? How did they develop and what was their relationship to internationalism? I kept encountering the archives things happening in 1918. Eugene Debbs, the famous American Socialist, five time candidate for president, can't campaign in lots of places. The midterm elections seemed to have a lower turnout Uh, 1918. There's some real problems with the troops getting across the Atlantic. I'm being vague across this as if you all don't know what the answer is, right? It's the flu pandemic. And so I thought, okay, I really need to know more about this. So this is the early mid two thousands.

[00:19:53] And this is right before, right around when John Barry's book comes out, which on the great influenza, which then [00:20:00] in draft form George W. Bush read, and that helped him set up the planning for pandemic preparedness. So in fact if you wanna talk about how history can have an impact, there's a great example. You get your draft manuscript to the president of the United States, and he starts planning for the next pandemic. But so as I read and worked on this, I got more and more interested in the politics of the 1918 pandemic in the US. And in particular how there was pushback, what public health messaging was like.

[00:20:24] I was very interested in the political rhetoric. Shocked by the fact that Woodrow Wilson, who I was studying intensively then and have written a lot about over the years, never once in public mentioned the flu pandemic. I just couldn't 

[00:20:36] David Staley: Wow. 

[00:20:36] Christopher Nichols: Fathom that. So all my friends in grad school got a full blast of pandemic stuff and then basically none of that made it to my books and articles, maybe, I don't know, 2%. 

[00:20:48] David Staley: And then, and then March of 2020? 

[00:20:52] Christopher Nichols: Yes. March of 2020. So what happened then was was one of the couple handfuls, maybe more of US-based historians who knew a hell of a [00:21:00] lot about the flu pandemic.

[00:21:01] And when I got back from an amazing trip abroad, my last trip ,abroad in January of 2020, I remember well, talking to my partner and saying, I'm seeing this thing rolling from China, and this feels a lot like if it's not avian flu, MERS and SARS, it's even worse. It's like 1918. So I started writing some op-eds immediately.

[00:21:22] I did a Twitter thread, I think, in February of that year that got a ton of attention with images of masking and debates and Babe Ruth got it and FDR got it. And did you know, we think maybe Amelia Earhart got it and all this kind of stuff. And then that led to hundreds of press interviews.

[00:21:37] Talks all over the place. And then I was in conversation with a lot of scholars who've done even more work on the subject, right? So I'm a minor player in the group of those who've done this work, but part of this sort of constellation again, or this set of folks. So I got to have great moderated conversations with Nancy Bristow and John Barry and, a lot of other scholars who have also worked on the subject. And one of the really amazing things [00:22:00] about the early pandemic in the US and around the world was how eerily similar that was...

[00:22:05] David Staley: mm-hmm.

[00:22:05] Christopher Nichols: To 1918. And so you could almost directly map on this historical relationship. We have the same before vaccines, before we knew more about, the virus.

[00:22:14] Right. It's all you have are non-pharmaceutical interventions--NPIs things like social distancing and closures. We've known about this since the plague. These have been things that have been in the toolkit of practitioners to some extent throughout most of written human history.

[00:22:29] David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

[00:22:30] Christopher Nichols: And so just culminating in the present one of the things I've been involved in that I'm really proud of and happy with is that I got to be part of a New England Journal of Medicine group that just did a mini documentary on the politics of masking. And it goes all the way back and it basically, it just says, Hey, masking is inherently political and gives a pretty neutral take on that, that we know masking works but not alone, not without other preventative measures. And it needs to have widespread buy-in. But it also works differently in different eras. Gauze masks were not very effective in 1918, but gauze masks in [00:23:00] combination with quarantine policies and closure policies and other kinds of behavior patterns actually do work.

[00:23:05] So even like how you define how does something work in public health terms is interesting. And that's the kind of work that historians then can be part of because we can say, oh, it was operationalized differently, or different rhetoric operated in a different moment. And then the other final thing just to say on this that I think is fascinating and that has fascinated me since my earliest studies of the flu pandemic is patriotism.

[00:23:24] David Staley: Yeah.

[00:23:24] Christopher Nichols: What you see in 1918 is very different from what you saw in 2020. 

[00:23:28] David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

[00:23:28] Christopher Nichols: You saw a World War context, and that is the most important way to understand the flu pandemic. And that's why I was interested in it. And in the US you mapped right on this concept of draft slackers, people who were not doing their patriotic duty for the country, to so-called mask slackers.

[00:23:42] You particularly saw that on the west coast, and by operationalizing patriotism, you had people buy in to community public health in much larger numbers and not questioning and not having the same kind of partisan political mapping on that we saw. That's a huge difference. And in my view, if I had been, you were talking about how could we influence [00:24:00] policymakers, if I had been involved, I would've strongly suggested a kind of hyper patriotic turn for the community best interest.

[00:24:08] And certainly if you think about how that has an inherent appeal to conservatives who are in favor of kind of a state centered, somewhat militarized kind of operation, you could also argue that there would be a problem with overreach, but nevertheless, as a political rhetoric, it's your patriotic duty.

[00:24:22] The president is doing it. We are doing this for our community that was much, much more easily operationalized in a World War context, and for a variety of reasons didn't happen. 

[00:24:30] David Staley: You had said earlier that policymakers often draw on history. 

[00:24:34] Christopher Nichols: Mm-hmm. 

[00:24:34] David Staley: Do you think in the context of Covid policymakers drew the right lessons from history?

[00:24:39] Christopher Nichols: Mm-hmm. I think some were drawing good lessons from history, useful lessons, and some were using the history of the flu pandemic as evidence for what should be done. Certainly public health scholars who were informing responses in a number of countries in the West in particular but also Japan, China, [00:25:00] India knew the history of the 1918 pandemic, and that deeply inflected the quick turn on of lockdowns of quarantines.* *You know,

[00:25:08] David Staley: Flatten the curve. 

[00:25:09] Christopher Nichols: Flatten the curve, precisely. Yeah. And you can look to I have these great graphs as there as probably a lot of people who have seen them, St. Louis versus Philadelphia, 1918, right. Philadelphia doesn't flatten the curve, has a huge super spreader parade. St. Louis with a very public health oriented chief public health officer and a mayor who empowered him flattened the curve by early on putting in these kind of strictures. So I think they did learn from that. One of the central challenges that I'm better able to articulate now, having lived through a pandemic as well as just studied it, is there's an urge by the wider public for consistency.

[00:25:39] They want a consistent message. I would argue they're probably okay with some sacrifices, but they have to be limited in duration. And the challenge was we did not know enough, I think in all intellectual honesty and humility, we did not know enough about covid. And so we had very inconsistent messaging on masking.

[00:25:56] And then later we had somewhat illogical messaging on masking. [00:26:00] Colleague of mine was talking about In Madrid, you had to wear your mask till you got to the restaurant where you could take off your mask, even if you walked alone. That just doesn't make sense. And so that makes people think, Hey, this health information is bunk. I'm not gonna listen to it, right? So having lived through this, but I can see why public health officials would attempt some level of consistency or feign it. And but the problem is that that actually undermines confidence. So that doesn't map on neatly from 1918 because there were much more short -duration, pharmaceutical interventions, and where you saw the most pushback, which was really pretty limited in the greater scheme of things, it came in second and third lockdowns, second and third mask mandates. Places like San Francisco, where the famous anti mask league was. It's famous, but it's pretty irrelevant, few thousand people and the city was about to ease up. Did they ease up on their mask mandate two weeks early, one week early because of their presence? Hard to say. Hardly really significant in the greater scheme of thing, not like what we've seen in terms of protests, storming state capitols, and that kind of thing. 

[00:26:56] David Staley: Is it true that you wanted to be an historian when you were in the fourth grade? [00:27:00] 

[00:27:00] Christopher Nichols: That's, that's a fun question. It would warm my mother's heart where she here with us today. It is absolutely true. I had an amazing teacher, which is usually the story for a lot of us who are listening, probably faculty members in particular, scholars, teachers, in fourth grade, Mrs. Brighton. And she turned me on actually to ancient Sumaria. And the first written records, then I remember I actually taped it to my wall.

[00:27:24] I had never once tasted beer, but one of the first written recipes that we found, was a beer recipe, at least it was when I was in fourth grade. And though I had no idea what kind of history something between that sort of voyeuristic element of archeology and touching the past and getting in touch with the lived realities of people in the past. What made them tick? What made their societies operate? How similar or different were they? Yep. So I wrote my college applications essays about being a historian. Somehow I made it all the way here through a lot of good fortune because , it's hard to become a historian these days.

[00:27:55] David Staley: Tell us what you're working on now. 

[00:27:57] Christopher Nichols: So, I'm working on a number of projects. The one [00:28:00] that is going to come out the next is on the election of 1952, the battle between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Taft for the heart of the Republican Party to win the presidential nomination. And then what the national election and the ensuing Eisenhower years meant for the transformation of US domestic and foreign policy.

[00:28:20] The core story there is about how we got the early Cold War that we now understand to have been the intersection of domestic and foreign civil rights. US interventions around the world, covert actions, the atomic diplomacy, the interstate highway system, the Supreme Court, all kinds of things are all imbued in that moment. And one of the fascinating things about it is the counterfactuals, because Eisenhower, 

[00:28:45] David Staley: The what? The what ifs, the what if something else would've happened? 

[00:28:48] Christopher Nichols: Yes. Right. And this is something that I think we share as an area of deep interest. We've talked about this. 

[00:28:52] David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

[00:28:53] Christopher Nichols: You know, historians sometimes aren't that interested in pursuing counterfactuals, as if we're at some arms length, objective distance from the past. But [00:29:00] if you go to any community group, if you talk to our students, they love counterfactuals. 

[00:29:03] David Staley: Yeah. 

[00:29:04] Christopher Nichols: And it in fact, 

[00:29:04] David Staley: teaching a class in next spring. I am so, 

[00:29:06] Christopher Nichols: Oh, you are? On counterfactuals? 

[00:29:08] David Staley: Included it include counterfactuals. 

[00:29:10] Christopher Nichols: Yes. Nice. Yes. So, And I think responsible counterfactuals are something that's incumbent on us to put out there. And in fact, embedded in a lot of our arguments are counterfactuals. 

[00:29:19] David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

[00:29:19] Christopher Nichols: If you say it turned out this way embedded in that argument is it might have turned out differently, right? 

[00:29:24] David Staley: Mm-hmm. 

[00:29:24] Christopher Nichols: It's a pretty simple formulation, so in any case, I'll give you one. I don't wanna scoop the whole book, but the biggest one, the way that I'm setting it up in this conversation is, So Taft was Mr. Republican. He was the likely nominee of the party until Eisenhower announces. And Eisenhower is very slow to announce, but it's pretty clear that if he'd been a Democrat or Republican, he would've gotten the nomination for either party. In this moment where Truman was so unpopular, pretty much no Democrat could win.

[00:29:51] We were just joking: what's significant about 1952? It's the first time Adlai Stevenson loses for the presidency, but more seriously, if Eisenhower hadn't [00:30:00] stepped in, Taft most likely would've won, a very conservative Republican whose views about how the US should operate in the world were starkly different from Eisenhower.

[00:30:08] He was against NATO. He was against the war on Korea. He was not happy with the UN. He really did not like the Marshall plan, did not wanna have lots of troop stationed in Western Europe. 

[00:30:18] David Staley: That's a very different history. If he wins. 

[00:30:21] Christopher Nichols: Yep. He would not have appointed Earl Warren. 

[00:30:23] David Staley: No. 

[00:30:24] Christopher Nichols: And I could go on, but I'm leaving some of those counterfactuals for later.

[00:30:28] David Staley: Christopher McKnight Nichols, thank you. 

[00:30:31] Christopher Nichols: Thank you. 

[00:30:32] Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.