The eyes of the medical world are on Wuhan, China. Will the new coronavirus grow from epidemic to pandemic? It’s the stuff of health officials’ nightmares. At last word, nearly 2,000 people have been infected. More than 50 of them have died. That’s triggering fears of a deadly virus marching unrestrained across the globe.
But here’s the thing: It’s happened before. And it happened where you live.
I first learned about it when I was 13-years-old. We were visiting my Great-Aunt Martha on her little farm outside Trenton, Missouri. She was a sweet, white-haired, apple-cheeked woman who had seen more than her Biblical three score and ten years. A relative was ill, and the old folks were discussing it. That led to talk of “the flu.” They all knew what that meant, for they’d all lived through it. They weren’t talking about your garden-variety influenza that knocks people down every cold and flu season.
No, this was “The Flu.” The 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic.
“What was it like?” I asked. “Well,” Aunt Martha said after a thoughtful pause, “you wouldn’t want to get it.” That, I later learned, was a massive understatement. But Aunt Martha always put things as kindly as possible.
The illness mysteriously popped up out of the blue in Haskell, Kansas, in early March 1918. The local newspaper reported “18 cases of influenza of a severe type.” The strain was particularly savage. A person would wake up fine in the morning, start feeling unwell at noontime, and be dead by evening. It caused a fever so intense that patients begged to die. Lungs filled rapidly and, in the end, victims suffocated.
In a particularly troubling twist, the Spanish flu focused on those in the prime of life. Most influenza strains target the vulnerable: the very young and the very old. Not so in this case. People from in their late teens to early 30s were most susceptible for some reason science has never been able to explain.
The outbreak’s timing couldn’t have been worse, for it coincided with World War I. Thousands of soldiers gathered in training camps where they coughed and sneezed on each other, then got on transport ships and sailed to France carrying the virus with them. This was a world war, after all, so the illness moved with the military. In an astonishingly short time, people were sick everywhere from the Polynesian Islands to the Antarctic.
The United States wasn’t spared. The flu spread from city to city, causing wholesale social upheaval as it went. Schools, churches, businesses, and movie theaters were closed for weeks. Train service was drastically reduced, making stores run low on food and essential goods as a result. When postal workers got sick, mail delivery ground to a halt. Funerals were held outdoors in hope the fresh air would protect mourners from the virus. It didn’t.
More than 200,000 people lined Philadelphia’s streets for a massive Liberty Loan Parade one morning in September 1918. Hundreds of them were dying by nightfall.
Some state legislatures even passed laws that made spitting a crime to halt the spread. Again, it didn’t.
Everywhere you looked, there were masks. Young, old, middle-aged — everyone wore a white gauze mask over their nose and mouth. A few cities enacted laws mandating their usage, though some people openly resisted wearing them. Virology was in its infancy then, so folks didn’t realize gauze masks were useless.
Numbers tell the ultimate story. There were 105 million people in the U.S. at the time — 675,000 of them died from the flu, more than were killed in World War I. In all, the illness killed some 20 million people worldwide. No wonder Aunt Martha shuddered when she described the experience 65 years later.
America’s collective memory is shamefully short, and most of our contemporaries know nothing about this horrible pandemic. History is a tough teacher, and its lessons are painfully to the point.
In this case, it happened here once, and it could happen again. The next time you watch a thriller movie about a pandemic, remember it’s not that far-fetched. In this case, science fiction could become science fact. The human cost is too real, too painfully high.
It was that way in 1918. It will be that way the next time, too. Let us hope and pray the coronavirus doesn’t become “next time.”
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He’s VP 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.
