All We Want is the Facts…Or Not
Susan Reverby“All we want is the facts, ma’am,” the fictional Los Angeles Police Sergeant Joe Friday used to say dryly on “Dragnet,” the 1950s television series. Sometimes I feel like Sergeant Friday as I have tried over more than three decades to correct the mistakes made about the facts in the so-called Tuskegee Syphilis Study in old and new media accounts, Congressional hearings, books, articles, Wikipedia, or everyday speech. The Study was the longest running (1932-72) non-therapeutic medical experiment in American history. More than 600 African American men (2/3 with late-stage syphilis and 1/3 controls without the disease) were watched by the U.S. Public Health Service researchers, but not intentionally treated for what they were told was “bad blood.” Instead, the aspirins, vitamins, and tonics handed out, and the diagnostic spinal taps performed, were labeled “treatment.”[1] However, in trying to tell a complex tale, many commentators reach for what they think they know, rather than what is factual. It raises the problem of what historians should or can do in this situation.
My first encounter with this problem caused by misinformation came in 1992 when the internet was new, and before cell phones or call waiting were introduced. I was on my landline with my mother when a telephone operator interrupted to tell me ABC News was calling in an emergency. Primetime Live, their 60 Minutes-like program, was going on the air within an hour with a story about the Tuskegee Study.
Diane Sawyer, then their correspondent, had walked onto the set, obviously read her copy for the first time, and wanted to know if penicillin would have made any difference to the men’s health in 1943. I suspect they found me just because my name, Susan Reverby, was much easier to discover in the then-available phone directories than James Jones, the first major historian of the Study. I was amazed both by the call interruption and that their highly paid medical correspondent wasn’t being queried. I attempted to answer with all the complicated reasons, but Sawyer in the end just said, “it may have.” This turned out to be a minor occurrence, but then other factual errors kept happening.
Two mistakes about the facts are more common. First, it was, and is often assumed, that the men were given syphilis by the government. This assumption that the men were injected is often accompanied by a 1950s photograph of a blood draw showing a white doctor’s hand on a black man’s arm, even if close examination shows the physician’s finger is drawing the blood into the syringe. Secondly, many people confuse the subjects of the Study with the famed World War II Tuskegee Airmen, even though their group wasn’t formed until 1941, nine years after the Study was started, and dismantled in 1949, twenty-three years before the Study was ended. (This story wasn’t helped in the 1990s when actor Laurence Fishburne starred in HBO films about both the Study and the Airmen). And alas, knowledge about the complex history of Tuskegee as both a place and an African American educational institution in American history is lacking.
As a historian of the Study, I have tried in various ways over the decades to correct these errors and others. It matters not just for accuracy but especially because what really happened was also the denial of care. The unwitting participants thought they were helping their families by accepting free medical care when there was little to none available. The lack of care, as thousands of studies on health disparities have shown, is of course more normative.
The real facts then force us to think not just about medical ethics in research, but also about the horror of our racist and broken health care system. But the crazed scientists injecting the hapless of course makes for better copy and political fodder. Just ask Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who went after the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases former head Dr. Anthony Fauci by referring to “the poor men who were injected with syphilis…” among her other tall tales of medical transgressions when questioning Fauci.[2] Yet even liberal Congressman Kweisi Mfume said the men were given syphilis at the same hearing.[3]
It isn’t just crazed or ill-informed Congressional representatives who make this and other factual errors. The media industry is also often occupied with misinformation. I have tried over and over to fix this in various situations: by calling a national news television station to correct NBC’s famed broadcaster Tom Brokaw or answering respectfully when a former Tuskegee Airman called into a Chicago Black radio station program I was on to tell me he was infected by the government.
Earlier this year, the Boston Globe ran a story with the photo of the blood draw that said in the caption that the man was being infected and that he was an Airman.[4] I wrote immediately, and they actually apologized to me and fixed the copy on the online story. They explained, however, that they received the caption from the photo in the Creative Commons. Yet two weeks later for another story they captioned the same picture with similar errors. But often when such errors go on air or in an internet account with no contact listed, it is impossible to correct.
It did not help, of course, as one of my friends in Tuskegee noted, when in 2010 I exposed the story of another Public Health Service study in Guatemala where they were trying to infect the participants with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. But since knowledge of the studies in Guatemala has faded from memory, that is not the cause of the dilemma.[5]
Once I even tracked down the name of a doctor I had never heard of who appeared in a Wikipedia article on the Study. Some snooping led to a high school student who was being pranked by his buddies. Let’s say that I could fix the Wikipedia story, but I cannot correct the several internet sites that picked it up and perpetuated it.
When mistakes in memory are made, as oral historians have discussed now for decades, we are asked to understand that the historian’s task is to understand why such falsities exist.[6] Some of it is of course just a way to cope with the horrible, and to align with the melodrama of medical experimentation with the mad scientist and the ill-fated victims. It fits a set and familiar narrative, especially when the patients are of color and the doctors are white. Other times, as with Greene, it serves a conservative political dialogue. For example, in 2010, opponents of the Affordable Care Act put up highway signs to warn black voters that the Study shows what the government does when it is involved with health care.[7]
Sometimes the term “Tuskegee” is just invoked as a shorthand for racism. In a Saturday Night Live skit during the pandemic, for example, a Black physician is trying to encourage his family members to get vaccinated. One of the relatives asks: “Does it have syphilis in it?” “No,” he says, ”why would you say that? And she quickly replies, “Tuskegee.” So yet again we get Tuskegee as a one word meaning and the implication that the danger is government infecting.[8]
Perhaps, too, the general public’s lack of knowledge of African American history means that the multiple things that happened in Tuskegee (the Institute, now University, the Airmen, the Study, the fictionalization in the first 100 pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man novel, the civil rights work) all meld. So saying Tuskegee also means you just acknowledge some kind of Black history, however vague.
Similarly, many journalists reached for “Tuskegee” to explain seeming resistance to vaccination in African American communities during the beginning of the COVID pandemic. [9]Even when it was shown that the reluctance to vaccinate in Black communities often resulted from a lack of options, and that white Republicans were more likely to refuse the vaccine, “Tuskegee” kept appearing. It made it seem, as medical historian Evelynn M. Hammonds and I argued, that African Americans just couldn’t get over their past, rather than understanding how the past can be used to explain current racism.[10]
In the end, historians should keep making corrections of egregious factual errors when it is possible, and in various public forums, not just in our scholarly articles and books. Other times we can only explain what purpose mistakes serve. With the viral nature of the internet, it is often impossible to catch the errors or even fix them, particularly in an age when “facts” seem to be fast disappearing or everyone has their own. However, sometimes I think I am just Don Quixote tilting at windmills rather than Sergeant Friday. I told my children to put on my tombstone, “She tried to tell the truth.” It still matters.
Notes
- Susan M. Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). ↑
- Gary Legum, “Marjorie Taylor Greene Goes After Anthony Fauci with Darkest Timeline Snoopy Scenario,” Wonkette, June 4, 2024, https://www.wonkette.com/p/marjorie-taylor-greene-goes-after. ↑
- Zeynep Tufekci, “An Object Lesson from Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust,” New York Times, June 8, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/opinion/covid-fauci-hearings-health.html ↑
- Kelly Hornan, Boston Globe, Deputy Editor, Ideas, email to Susan M. Reverby, May 8, 2024. Hornan wrote: “I am so glad you wrote. The caption is fixed—it’s an error I should have caught, and you are so right to express your concern! The caption came with the photo, which we found using creative commons, but of course we should have caught that inaccuracy.” ↑
- Susan M. Reverby and Amy Moran-Thomas, “On the Appearance and Disappearance of Difficult Medical Histories: What Does it Take to Sustain Public Memory?” American Journal of Public Health 114 (June 2024): 564-567. ↑
- Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). ↑
- Susan Reverby, “A New Lesson from the Old Tuskegee Study, The Huffington Post, March 18, 2010, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-new-lesson-from-the-old_b_378649. ↑
- “Vaccine Game Show,” Saturday Night Life, April 4, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocJCAfFQgCQ. ↑
- X Hou,Y. Jiao, L.Shen, et al. “The lasting impact of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: COVID-19 vaccination hesitation among African Americans,” Journal of Population Economics 37 (2024)). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-024-01013-y ↑
- Evelynn M. Hammonds and Susan M. Reverby, “Taking a Medical History: COVID, ‘Mistrust,’ and Racism,”, The Mudsill 1 (April 15, 2021), https://themudsill.substack.com/p/the-mudsill-vol-1-no-7. ↑
Insert feature image caption after notes/at bottom of post, example:
Featured image caption: Photograph of participants in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. (Courtesy National Archives)
Susan M. Reverby, PhD, is the McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita in Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College where she taught for 34 years. Her most recent books are Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (2009) and Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman (2020, 2024).
