Jill Lepore on How a Pandemic Ends

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Jill Lepore discusses the “stay at home” campaigns that ran on radio stations during the polio years, devised to keep children indoors; she is especially fond of a program that featured a young Hubert Humphrey reading comics. Lepore finds solace in revisiting the desperate measures of that era. “One of the reasons I study history,” she says, “is I like to see how things began, so I can imagine how bad things end.” She describes the momentous day, in 1955, when Dr. Jonas Salk and his colleagues announced the success of the polio vaccine trials. “That’s the great blessing of a vaccination program,” Lepore says. “We forget how bad the disease was.” Plus, David Remnick speaks with three mayors who have to negotiate the task of reopening their cities safely.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:12.6	Much of the country is beginning to reopen at least some businesses and activities.
0:17.5	A little later this hour, I'll talk with some of the mayors who are trying to negotiate
0:21.0	how to do that without putting huge numbers of people at risk.
0:25.7	But some restrictions are likely to extend through the summer and perhaps beyond.
0:30.3	The prospect of that is daunting for everyone, not least for anyone with kids in the house.
0:35.6	After months without going to school, the idea of keeping
0:38.4	kids indoors, away from their friends, their sports, summer camps, and scouting trips, it seems
0:44.4	like more than a parent can bear. But it's happened before and not that long ago. I'm Jill Lepore.
0:51.1	I'm a professor of history at Harvard. I'm also a staff writer at The New Yorker.
0:56.5	And as a historian, I always think a lot about, well, is there comfort to be found in times in the past when people have had harder struggles and gotten through things?
1:08.0	And immediately comes to mind for me, the-at-home campaigns that were run during
1:14.8	the polio years. For all the boys and girls of the Northwest during radio's stay-at-home campaign.
1:21.7	Now, listen.
1:32.0	Polio had first hit the U.S. in 1916, and some years were worse than others.
1:35.4	A lot of viruses abate in the hotter months.
1:45.9	But with polio, the warmer the weather, the virus spread faster, but also polio was most effectively transmitted by water. So in the summer when it got hot, this is before the age of air conditioning. Kids would be outside wanting to go to swimming pools,
1:51.5	jump in the river. And it's not like they have homeschooling assignments. It's this summer.
1:57.3	They're supposed to be outside playing catch and playing baseball and drawing hopscotch
2:01.8	with chalk on the sidewalk. And it was really hard to keep them inside. And I came across this
2:07.5	incredibly charming clip from WCCO in Minneapolis, which had a Sunday morning program called Fun
	...

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