Journalists like anniversaries, or at least this one does, and 2018 is an ideal vantage point from which to survey the past. It’s been a half-century now since the annus horribilis of 1968, for example, and a century-and-a-half since my favorite president (James Buchanan) died. But more to the point, this month marks the centennial of much the worst pandemic in modern history: the 1918 influenza epidemic.
In a century of man-made and natural disasters, it might be champion. To be sure, the Black Death of the middle 14th century was more devastating: The mortality rate from that decade-long outbreak of bubonic plague is believed to have been somewhere between 70 million and 200 million people worldwide—approximately half the population of Europe perished—while the influenza epidemic of 1918 killed about 75 million in a two-year period.
What makes the 1918 pandemic of interest, however, is its startling proximity to our own time—more about that in a moment—and the sheer determination with which it’s been reduced to footnote status in common memory.
Part of the reason for that, I suppose, is the contributing (and coincidental) factor of World War I. The two successive strains of the virus that attacked a half-billion people in 1918-20, and killed about a fifth of the world’s population, emerged toward the end of the carnage on the Western Front and might well have been aggravated by the concentration of troops in camp and battle. It’s worth noting that considerably more people died in six months from influenza around the world than were killed during four years in the trenches.
In the United States, it was first detected in March 1918 among soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, and with disconcerting speed spread far beyond military outposts into the general population. Before long the epidemic was in New York City. Remote villages and mighty metropolises were equally besieged, and the peculiar character of the virus—it seemed to overstimulate immune reactions—was, paradoxically, more lethal to the young and healthy than the old and weak.
Parents sent their children away to avoid contagion and then promptly died; households and whole blocks and neighborhoods were quarantined. And while public officials struggled to comprehend the calamity, daily life in certain cities and regions ground to a halt. Overnight, life expectancy in America dropped a dozen years.
Indeed, with an estimated 600,000 fatalities, it is very likely that every family in the United States at the time (population 100 million) was somehow affected. This was brought home to me, in a characteristically casual way, several decades ago.
As a schoolboy I had seen a photograph of people in Washington, circa 1918, gathered along a sidewalk, all hidden behind face masks. When I asked my father about this, he explained that there had been an influenza epidemic, and, at its height, such precautions were commonplace, especially in cities. When it struck, he was 10 years old and recalled the closure of schools in Philadelphia (where his family lived), the morbid silence of the streets, and the death of a handful of classmates in the American city most adversely affected by the pandemic.
That last detail prompted an obvious inquiry about his family—and the answer was startling. I cannot now remember whether my father, too, had been stricken, although I would guess that he had, as my mother (four years younger and several miles away) had been in her own family. He mentioned that his infant brother, born the previous December, had come close to dying, but that his uncle—one of his mother’s two younger siblings, who lived at the same address—had not been so fortunate.
When he died, the family’s capacity to act was stymied by illness and Philadelphia’s paralysis. But the following morning the city sent a horse-drawn cart down Chancellor Street, where my grandparents lived, to collect bodies; and my great-uncle’s corpse was transported to a common burial ground, location unknown.
Those carts, in my father’s recollection, had become a familiar specter—and of course would have been equally familiar to inhabitants of a medieval town during the Black Death. The centuries, as it were, melted away.
My father, I should mention, was a microbiologist and was occasionally prompted to reflect on the conquest of disease in his lifetime (he died in 1974) and the progress in public health to which he had contributed. That such a spectacle, such a scene drawn from Dante or Dickens, as death in a plague year and horse-drawn oblivion should have taken place within living memory would have surely struck him as reason enough to remember one centennial this season.
