This is a time for taking stock amid the COVID-19 outbreak. President Trump and his top advisers, public health experts, governors, business leaders, and everyday people are all asking the same questions: Is the outbreak finally starting to wane? If it is, will there be a second wave? And if that happens, could it be worse than the first round?
Times may change, but history is once again repeating itself. Just over 100 years ago, folks were asking similar questions as they endured a different, but savage, illness. It helped make October 1918 the deadliest month in our history.
More U.S. citizens died then than ever passed away during any 30-day stretch before or since. Blame it on the one-two punch of a hideous pandemic and an equally horrific world war.
While World War I had officially begun in summer 1914, the United States didn’t enter the conflict until April 1917. The nation wasn’t prepared for combat, and it took a long time to equip and train it and transport it across the Atlantic. But by summer 1918, the doughboys (as American soldiers were nicknamed) were finally in the thick of the action.
That September, the Allied Forces (the British, French, and Americans) launched a major counter-offensive against the Germans. A host of new names such as the Meuse River, Argonne Forest, and the Hindenburg Line joined the roster of earlier bloody battles such as Belleau Wood and Chateau Thierry. People in the U.S. pored over maps of Europe, locating these unfamiliar places as the casualty counts poured in. By month’s end, General John “Black Jack” Pershing reported a total of 19,552 U.S. servicemen killed in action and dead from illness and injuries. (That figure would jump to 38,819 the next month.)
At the same time, the Spanish Flu pandemic was raging unchecked back home.
It had popped up mysteriously on an army training base in Kansas that winter. One soldier woke up feeling ill. By lunchtime, 106 others were sick. The ailment was so intense and spread so fast, doctors had never seen anything like it. Strangest of all, unlike typical infections that target the very young and the very old, this one brought down healthy people from late teens to the early 40s. With the nation mobilizing for war, the flu went with the troops, then spread through civilian ranks from city to city and bringing death and incredible suffering along with it.
Things seemed to turn a corner as spring gave way to summer and the weather grew warmer. That, many people thought, was that.
Except it wasn’t. The Spanish Flu returned with a vengeance that fall, stronger and more deadly than before. By October, it was again silently rampaging across the U.S. Major cities went into quarantine. People wore gauze face masks. Schools were dismissed, mail service stopped, churches and theaters were closed.
One thing didn’t stop, however. The war effort went on at full speed — which made the illness go from bad to worse. Men were still being drafted and enlisting in the armed forces. They were trained and prepared for fighting in France. Factories worked at full capacity to supply them. All along, the virus spread.
Consider Philadelphia, where over 11,000 people died of the flu that October. On one day alone, 759 lives were lost.
When the Spanish Flu finally went away for good in early 1920, some 675,000 people in America had died from it. More than 195,000 of them perished in October 1918.
So, the deadliest month of the outbreak happened to coincide with the deadliest month of America’s involvement in World War I. Combined, nearly 215,000 people perished in four weeks. When you add those who died of other causes, such as old age, accidents, and other non-flu natural causes, the final number approached 250,000.
The loss was so enormous, it actually made American life expectancy drop from 59 years to 39 years.
The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic collapse are bad. But we have endured far worse. Our country overcame October 1918, rebounded, and went on to enjoy a better tomorrow. I expect the same will eventually happen this time, too. It’s what we do best.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He’s vice president of communications at Ivory Tusk Consulting, a South Carolina-based agency. A former broadcast journalist and government communicator, his “Holy Cow! History” column is available at jmarkpowell.com.
