Maybe we’ll never know what brought influenza to America in 1918.
Some believe it started here.
Whatever the case, for a country so far removed from four years of butchery across the Atlantic Ocean, the quiet, stealthy approach of a deadly killer must have seemed like the end of the world.
Millions of people already had died burrowed in the dirt of the European western front. Many had perished in the plains between Russia and Germany.
The Gallipoli suffering was legendary. The nations had taken their fights to their colonies. (The African Queen film is about blowing up a German war ship in central Africa.) Germany tried to introduce it into Mexico (The Zimmerman telegram).
The world had gone mad.
In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson, a flinty-strict Presbyterian, had devotedly kept his country out of war until it became too much to avoid.
When the US finally did head “over there,” they brought a determination to win at any cost.
What the US did not count on was influenza bringing so much death to North America.
It was just influenza, nothing more, as John M. Barry recounted so brilliantly in his book The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.
It killed between 50-100 million people world-wide between 1918 and 1920 when it suddenly disappeared.
Read that number again: 50,000,000-100,000,000 people died from influenza.
5% of the world died from influenza?
Mainichi Shimbun (Wikimedia Commons)
A large majority of those dead were young adults, struck down in their prime because of the nature of the disease.
One in every sixty-seven soldiers in the army died of influenza and its complications.
(Disease often kills in greater numbers than battle in wars. Soldiers who have never been exposed to illness, brought together into camps and living in unsanitary conditions, often die from common ailments like the measles).
It’s a good thing the armistice was declared in November, 1918.
It’s known as the Spanish flu because the American, French, German and British newspapers kept it censored from the public–they were afraid, justifiably, of the morale problem as WWI ground to an armistice.
But neutral Spain reported the story, thus earning it the moniker of what was a deadly pandemic. (A pandemic is an illness that spreads world-wide and infects a large proportion of the populace).
Influenza came on quickly.
Many young people went to work in the morning and were dead by nightfall.
Soldier ward in France during the Great War. US Army photo
Symptoms began with a headache, then quickly moved to body aches, fever, exhaustion and a cough. The pain was terrible, and for those looking on, the body changes horrific.
A nose bleed often was the first sign of serious illness. Those whose skin flushed to a lavender color would die quickly. Little could be done to save them.
The United States had sent many nurses to Europe for the war effort.
There weren’t enough medical personnel in the country, doctors or nurses, to care for all the people who contracted the flu.
Medicine wasn’t available to help. The best suggestion was to go to bed and stay there until the influenza ran its course or you died.
So many people died in such a dramatically short period of time, they ran out of coffins. Bodies stacked up like cord wood–turning black from the disease.
No one would touch the bodies, no one was available to dig the graves, even in cities as large as Philadelphia.
I can’t imagine the horror.
Municipalities were empty; all civic meetings were curtailed. Shipyard workers in Philadelphia didn’t work.
Woodrow Wilson. (Wikimedia Commons)
President Wilson, in France for the treaty discussion in 1919, also came down with the flu. They conjecture it may have played a role in his stroke which incapacitated him for the rest of his presidency.
Influenza’s disorienting fever also may have played a part in the vindictiveness wrought on Germany after the war–which paved the way to Hitler and World War II.
The influenza horror was a coda to the war to end all wars–and killed far more people.
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Influenza caused more deaths than the trenches of WWI. Click to Tweet
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Wow!!
And yet, scientists STILL play with the viruses in “controlled” environments?? EEK!
I first read about the influenza pandemic of 1918 in Sterling North’s book Rascal, a memoir of his boyhood in WWI-era America. He described how quickly the disease killed – one elderly couple in his town died while pumping water and were found frozen to the pump handle. North himself became ill, but his was one of milder cases. Dr. Paul Brand also witnessed it as a young boy living with his missionary parents in India. He writes in The Gift of Pain how his parents were among the few who had the courage to treat patients; as a result of their kindness, the local Hindu priest, as he was dying of the disease, left his son and daughter in their care.
In learning about terrible plagues like the Spanish flu or the Black Death, I have been tempted to fear the coming of the next great epidemic. However, the thought came that I was descended from those who had survived all of them, and that was somehow comforting. What is amazing is the will of people to keep going, despite being surrounded by such horrors. If such another plague sweeps over the world, I hope I will act with the courage of people such as Dr. Brand’s parents and many other unsung and unknown heroes of that time.
It is often in situations like the flus you describe, Roscuro, when Christian belief stands in stark contrast to the rest of society. In a variety of plagues, Christians were the ones who stayed behind to bury the dead and care for the sick. In the 1918 pandemic in the US, Catholic nuns and priests were allowed to disregard their traditions (can’t think of the word for the moment), to live in the communities and care for the ill and dying.
I only hope we do as well during the next plague. 🙁
It’s also interesting to me how people adapt, react, in a health crisis. Someone I know lives in San Francisco and told me about the horror in the 1980s with AIDS. He worked at City Hall where they daily dealt with young, seemingly healthy people who suddenly were dying dreadful deaths, often without a large support network. The city had to get involved.
In the middle of this, when he was attending funerals continually, he got a call from his doctor telling him to come in immediately. “I don’t have time for a brain tumor,” he shouted and went back to work helping others.
The doctor sent someone to get him and he’s still with us. He is not a Christian, but a fine man.with a strong sense of duty. He’ll never get over that and probably shouldn’t.
May we all be so wise.