Protesting a Pandemic? That’s Old News
The history of the Anti-Mask League in 1919 foreshadowed eerily familiar patterns of popular frustration with state-imposed public-health mandates.
Photo: CBC
As we approach the second anniversary of Covid pandemic lockdowns in mid-March, one might expect to find governments and ordinary citizens redoubling their efforts to cooperate in pursuit of a return to normalcy. Many people, however, have clearly become fed up with the status quo, as the recent furore over the “Freedom Convoy” has demonstrated.
The original purpose of the convoy was to protest the federal government’s imposition in November 2021 of a mandate requiring Canadian truck operators to be vaccinated in order to enter the United States without having to quarantine. This imposition of this vaccine mandate late in the pandemic—on truckers whose sacrifices had rightly been lionized even by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the initial phase of the lockdown—galvanized the festering frustrations of many essential workers in Canada and beyond. To many observers, the vehemence of both the truckers’ protest and the federal response to it signalled a lamentable, almost un-Canadian fragmentation of the country’s collective effort to end the pandemic, and at the very moment that this effort appeared to offer the greatest promise of success.
Yet pandemic protests against state-imposed pandemic mandates are not new. In 1918 the world faced similar hardships and challenges with the arrival of the global influenza pandemic in the wake of the Great War. In 1919, officials in San Francisco took the initiative to require the city’s citizens to wear masks in order to reduce the transmission of the disease. And, in a manner that foreshadowed our own current protests, many San Franciscans, fed up with state-imposed mandates for stopping the spread of disease, inaugurated the Anti-Mask League.
It took mere days for the initial, tightly focused objective of the Canadian truckers’ protest to radicalize under the pressure of competing political grievances articulated by truckers and non-truckers alike. Brigitte Belton, one of the original participants in the trucker convoy, told Global News that she wanted only “to get freedom back” and was not interested in the claims of protesters who were there for more partisan reasons. Among the latter was the group calling itself “Canada Unity,” which drafted a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) destined for the Canadian Senate. The aim of the MOU was to leverage the Canadian government to repeal Covid-19 public health rules or, failing that, to demand that the government surrender its leadership.
A similar escalation of political rhetoric under the pressure of mass protest also characterized the San Francisco Anti-Mask League in 1919. The original, tightly focused objective of the League was to petition for an end to legislated mask mandates. There were, however, members of the Anti-Mask League who before long saw an opportunity to remove Mayor James Rolph, Jr., if he did not accede to their demands. The latter group organized a public meeting on January 25, 1919 and drew a formidable four to five thousand participants. Before long, the Anti-Mask League was comprised of the original group of civil libertarians but also people who questioned mask mandates on the basis of their distrust of the science behind masking.
The Canadian “Freedom Convoy” ultimately saw thousands of truckers and other activists gather on January 28 at Ottawa’s Parliament Hill. Many ptotesters, like the members of the Anti-Mask League before them, set out on this path to restore what they believed was a sense of their own personal freedom. Also present, however, was a disparate and assertive group of protestors who professed no faith in Covid vaccines. Lorraine Commodore, a convoy participant interviewed by CBC News, was among the latter. She and her husband refused outright to get vaccinated. They questioned the effectiveness of the vaccines but, more than this, did not want anyone presuming to tell them what to inject into their bodies. An untold number of the convoy protesters expressed this view, even though it contradicted evidence from the Public Health Agency of Canada. (PHAC data show that unvaccinated individuals are nineteen times more likely to undergo hospitalization after contracting COVID-19 than people who are fully vaccinated.) Others in the trucker protests were themselves vaccinated, stating that they objected to mandates on principle or out of solidarity.
The trucker convoy received over $7-million in donations from a GoFundMe page that was organized by B.J. Dichter and Tamara Lich. Dichter is a former fitness instructor, a vocal proponent of Western separatism, and someone who has stated publicly his belief that the Liberal Party is “infested with Islamists.” Other convoy supporters have promoted nativist conspiracies, and still others believe that the vaccines are being used for nefarious purposes including state surveillance of people’s movements.
Here, too, the convoy protests hearken back a century to the Anti-Mask League. The league was led by Mrs. E.C. Harrington, a labour rights activist, lawyer, and suffragette. She was a long-standing opponent of Mayor Rolph, which led many of her contemporaries to presume that the Anti-Mask League was at least in part a vehicle for her own political ambitions. Harrington’s supporters included an individual from the Board of Supervisors, as well as health officers from other American cities who believed that masks should not be mandatory. Harrington signed a petition that was brought forth by the Anti-Mask league on January 27, 1919. It was then sent to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, where they demanded the nullification of the masking order. Tellingly, this local story attracted global attention. Ultimately, on February 1, 1919, San Francisco lifted the mask order on the basis of the Board of Health’s guidance.
Ottawa’s reaction to the truckers’ convoy was to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time in history. It had become necessary, so said the prime minister, to remove the blockade and protests. On February 17 the police in Ottawa began to arrest recalcitrant protesters, which including taking Tamara Lich into custody. By February 19, police were employing tougher tactics to arrest protesters, including the use of shields, batons, and pepper spray. By February 20, owing to the professionalism of the police officers, the majority of the protestors and their vehicles had been removed without incident. In total there were 389 charges laid, 191 people arrested, and 76 vehicles impounded. On February 22, Lich was denied bail. The next day Prime Minister Trudeau ended the state of emergency.
The saga of the “Freedom Convoy” bears a striking resemblance to the appearance of the Anti-Mask League a century ago, demonstrating perhaps not that history repeats itself but that there are durable patterns discernible in people’s distrust, frustration, and anger in the face of state-imposed pandemic mandates. Canadians (and others) appear to have been shocked at the speed and ferocity with which a legal and legitimate mass protest were undermined by some participants’ doctrinaire distrust of vaccine science, on the one hand, and others’ noisy and highly partisan political grievances, on the other.
The real surprise, perhaps, is that we did not see more of this sort of acrimony, and sooner.