WHAT WAS HAPPENING in Philadelphia was happening everywhere. In that densely populated city, Isaac Starr had counted not a single other car on the road in his twelve-mile drive from the city center home. And on the other side of the world, the same experiences—the deaths, the terror, the reluctance to help, the silence—were replicated. Alfred Hollows was in Wellington, New Zealand: “I was detailed to an emergency hospital in Abel Smith Street. It was a hall…staffed by women volunteers.” They had sixty beds. “Our death rate was really quite appalling—something like a dozen a day—and the women volunteers just disappeared, and weren’t seen again…. I stood in the middle of Wellington City at 2 P.M. on a weekday afternoon, and there was not a soul to be seen—no trams running, no shops open, and the only traffic was a van with a white sheet tied to the side, with a big red cross painted on it, serving as an ambulance or hearse. It was really a City of the Dead.”
In New York City at Presbyterian Hospital, each morning on rounds Dr. Dana Atchley was astounded, and frightened, to see that, for what seemed to him an eternity, every single patient—every one—in the critical section had died overnight.
The federal government was giving no guidance that a reasoning person could credit. Few local governments did better. They left a vacuum. Fear filled it.
The government’s very efforts to preserve “morale” fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most shortsighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
It was a time when the phrase “brisk fighting” meant that more than 50 percent of a unit was killed or wounded; a time when the memoir of a nurse at the front, published in 1916, was withdrawn by her publisher after America entered the war because she told the truth about gruesome conditions; a time when newspapers insisted, “There is plenty of gasoline and oil for automobile use,” even while gas stations were ordered to close “voluntarily” at night and Sundays and a national campaign was being waged against driving on “gasless Sundays”—and police pulled over motorists who did not “voluntarily” comply.
Newspapers reported on the disease with the same mixture of truth and half-truth, truth and distortion, truth and lies with which they reported everything else. And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.
But in the medical community, deep concern had arisen. Welch of course had initially feared that it might be a new disease, although he soon recognized it as influenza. Many serious pathologists in Germany and Switzerland considered the possibility of plague. The director of the laboratory at Bellevue Hospital wondered in the Journal of the American Medical Association if “the world is facing” not a pandemic of an extraordinarily lethal influenza but instead a mild version of plague, noting, “The similarity of the two diseases is enforced by the clinical features, which are remarkably alike in many respects, and by the pathology of certain tissues other than the lungs.”
What pathologists said in medical journals physicians muttered to each other, while laymen and -women watched a husband or wife turning almost black. And a great chill settled over the land, a chill of fear.
Meanwhile, William Park sat in his laboratory amid petri dishes, dissected mice, and cultures of pathogens, and quoted Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year: “In the whole the face of things, as I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger.”
As terrifying as the disease was, the press made it more so. They terrified by making little of it, for what officials and the press said bore no relationship to what people saw and touched and smelled and endured. People could not trust what they read. Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear.
When influenza struck in Massachusetts, the nearby Providence Journal reported; “All the hospital beds at the forts at Boston harbor are occupied by influenza patients…. There are 3,500 cases at Camp Devens.” Yet the paper asserted, “Such reports may actually be reassuring rather than alarming. The soldier or sailor goes to bed if he is told to, just as he goes on sentry duty. He may not think he is sick, and he may be right about it, but the military doctor is not to be argued with and at this time the autocrat is not permitting the young men under his charge to take any chance.”
As the virus infested the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, the Associated Press reported, “To dispel alarm caused throughout the country by exaggerated stories…Captain W. A. Moffat, commandant, gave out the statement today that while there are about 4,500 cases of the disease among the 45,000 blue jackets at the station, the situation in general is much improved. The death rate has been only one and one half per cent, which is below the death rate in the east.”
That report was meant to reassure. It is unlikely that it did so, even though it omitted the fact that quarantines were being imposed upon the training station, the adjoining Great Lakes Aviation Camp, and the nearby Fort Sheridan army cantonment, which, combined, amounted to the largest military concentration in the country. And military authorities of course assured both civilians nearby as well as the country at large that “the epidemic is on the wane.”
Over and over in hundreds of newspapers, day after day, repeated in one form or another people read Rupert Blue’s reassurance as well: “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed.”
They read the words of Colonel Philip Doane, the officer in charge of health at the country’s shipyards, who told the Associated Press, “The so-called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old fashioned grippe.”
Those words, too, ran in hundreds of newspapers. But people could smell death in them. Then they came to know that death.
Immediately outside Little Rock lay Camp Pike, where eight thousand cases were admitted to the hospital in four days and the camp commandant stopped releasing the names of the dead. “You ought to see this hospital tonight,” wrote Francis Blake, one of four members of the army’s pneumonia commission at Pike. “Every corridor and there are miles of them with a double row of cots and every ward nearly with an extra row down the middle with influenza patients and lots of barracks about the camp turned into emergency infirmaries and the Camp closed…. There is only death and destruction.”
The camp called upon Little Rock for nurses, doctors, linens, and coffins, all while within the city the Arkansas Gazette declared in headlines, “Spanish influenza is plain la grippe—same old fever and chills.”
Outside Des Moines, Iowa, at Camp Dodge, also, influenza was killing hundreds of young soldiers. Within the city a group called the Greater Des Moines Committee, businessmen and professionals who had taken charge during the emergency, included the city attorney who warned publishers—and his warning carried the sting of potential prosecution—“I would recommend that if anything be printed in regard to the disease it be confined to simple preventive measures—something constructive rather than destructive.” Another committee member, a physician, said, “There is no question that by a right attitude of the mind these people have kept themselves from illness. I have no doubt that many persons have contracted the disease through fear…. Fear is the first thing to be overcome, the first step in conquering this epidemic.”
The Bronxville, New York, Review Press and Reporter simply said nothing at all about influenza, absolutely nothing, until October 4, when it reported that the “scourge” had claimed its first victim there. It was as if the scourge had come from nowhere; yet even the paper recognized that, without its printing a word, everyone knew of it. And even as the epidemic rooted itself in Bronxville, the paper condemned “alarmism” and warned, “Fear kills more than the disease and the weak and timid often succumb first.”
Fear, that was the enemy. Yes, fear. And the more officials tried to control it with half-truths and outright lies, the more the terror spread.
The Los Angeles public health director said, “If ordinary precautions are observed there is no cause for alarm.” Forty-eight hours later he closed all places of public gatherings, including schools, churches, and theaters.
The Illinois superintendent of public health had—privately, in a confidential meeting with other Illinois public health officials and Chicago politicians—suggested they close all places of business to save lives. Chicago Public Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson violently rejected that suggestion as unwarranted and very damaging to morale. In his official report on the epidemic, he bragged, “Nothing was done to interfere with the morale of the community.” Later he explained to other public health professionals, “It is our duty to keep the people from fear. Worry kills more people than the epidemic.”
The mortality rate at Cook County Hospital for all influenza cases—not just those who developed pneumonia—was 39.8 percent.
Literary Digest, one of the largest-circulation periodicals in the country, advised, “Fear is our first enemy.”
“Don’t Get Scared!” was the advice printed in virtually every newspaper in the country, in large, blocked-off parts of pages labeled “Advice on How to Avoid Influenza.”
The Albuquerque Morning Journal issued instructions on “How to Dodge ‘Flu.’” The most prominent advice was the usual: “Don’t Get Scared.” Almost daily it repeated, “Don’t Let Flu Frighten You to Death,” “Don’t Panic.”
In Phoenix the Arizona Republican monitored influenza from a distance. On September 22 it declared “Dr. W. C. Woodward of the Boston Health Department assumed an optimistic attitude tonight…. Dr. Woodward said the increase in cases today was not alarming.” At Camp Dix “the camp medical authorities asserted they have the epidemic under control.” And the paper noted the first influenza deaths in New Orleans two days before the New Orleans daily newspaper the Item mentioned any death in the city.
But after the first case appeared in Phoenix itself, the Republican fell silent, utterly silent, saying nothing about influenza anyplace in the country until the news was such that it could no longer keep silent. Its competitor the Gazette competed in reassurances, quoting local physician Herman Randall saying, “Ten people sit in the same draught, are exposed to the same microbes. Some will suffer and perhaps die, while the others go scot free…. The people during an epidemic who are most fearful are usually, on the testimony of physicians, the first ones to succumb to the disease.” And in Phoenix, even after the war ended, the “Citizens’ Committee” that had taken over the city during the emergency continued to impose silence, ordering that “merchants of the city refrain from mentioning the influenza epidemic directly or indirectly in their advertising.”
Meanwhile, Vicks VapoRub advertisements in hundreds of papers danced down the delicate line of reassurance while promising relief, calling the epidemic, “Simply the Old-Fashioned Grip Masquerading Under a New Name.”
Some papers experimented in controlling fear by printing almost nothing at all. In Goldsboro, North Carolina, recalls a survivor, “The papers didn’t even want to publish the lists of names [of the dead]…. The information about who was dying had to come up through the grapevine, verbally, from one person to the other.”
A historian studying Buffalo County, Nebraska, expressed puzzlement that “[t]he county newspapers manifested a curious reticence regarding the effects of influenza, perhaps most evident in the The Kearney Hub. It may be surmised that the editors played down the severity of the problem to discourage the onset of general panic in the face of what was a thoroughly frightening situation.” As late as December 14 that paper was telling people not to “get panicky,” telling them city officials were “not inclined to be as panicky as a great many citizens.”
How could one not get panicky? Even before people’s neighbors began to die, before bodies began to pile up in each new community, every piece of information except the newspapers told the truth. Even while Blue recited his mantra—There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken—he was calling upon local authorities to “close all public gathering places, if their community is threatened with the epidemic. This will do much toward checking the spread of the disease.” Even if Colonel Doane had said Influenza is nothing more or less than old fashioned grippe, newspapers also quoted him saying, “Every person who spits is helping the Kaiser.”
And even while Blue and Doane, governors and mayors, and nearly all the newspapers insisted that this was influenza, only influenza, the Public Health Service was making a massive effort to distribute advice—nearly useless advice. It prepared ready-to-print plates and sent them to ten thousand newspapers, most of which did print them. It prepared—the Red Cross paid for printing and distribution—posters and pamphlets, including six million copies of a single circular. Teachers handed them out in schools; bosses stacked them in stores, post offices, and factories; Boy Scouts stuffed them into tens of thousands of doorways; ministers referred to them on Sundays; mailmen carried them to rural free delivery boxes; city workers pasted posters to walls.
But a Public Health Service warning to avoid crowds came too late to do much good, and the only advice of any real use remained the same: that those who felt sick should go to bed immediately and stay there several days after all symptoms disappeared. Everything else in Blue’s circulars was so general as to be pointless. Yet all over the country, newspapers printed again and again: “Remember the 3 Cs, clean mouth, clean skin, and clean clothes…. Keep the bowels open…. Food will win the war…. [H]elp by choosing and chewing your food well.”
The Journal of the American Medical Association knew better. It dismissed the public reassurances and warned, “The danger to life from influenza in this epidemic is so grave that it is imperative to secure from the individual patient the most complete isolation.” And it attacked “current advice and instructions to the public from the official and other sources”—Blue’s advice, the advice from local public-health officials downplaying everything—as useless and dangerous.
“Don’t Get Scared!” said the newspapers.
Meanwhile people read—those in the West seeing it before the virus reached them—the Red Cross appeals published in newspapers, often in half-page advertisements that said; “The safety of this country demands that all patriotic available nurses, nurses’ aids [sic] or anyone with experience in nursing place themselves at once under the disposal of the Government…. Physicians are urgently requested to release from attendance on chronic cases and all other cases which are not critically ill every nurse working under their direction who can possibly be spared for such duty. Graduate nurses, undergraduates, nurses’ aids, and volunteers are urged to telegraph collect at once…to their local Red Cross chapter or Red Cross headquarters, Washington, D.C.”
“Don’t Get Scared!” said the papers.
Be not afraid.
But not everyone was ready to trust in God.
In 2001 a terrorist attack with anthrax killed five people and transfixed America. In 2002 an outbreak of West Nile virus killed 284 people nationally in six months and sparked headlines for weeks, along with enough fear to change people’s behavior. In 2003 SARS killed over eight hundred people around the world, froze Asian economies, and frightened millions of people in Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere into wearing masks on the streets.
In 1918 fear moved ahead of the virus like the bow wave before a ship. Fear drove the people, and the government and the press could not control it. They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies. And the more the officials and newspapers reassured, the more they said, There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken, or Influenza is nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe, the more people believed themselves cast adrift, adrift with no one to trust, adrift on an ocean of death.
So people watched the virus approach, and feared, feeling as impotent as it moved toward them as if it were an inexorable oncoming cloud of poison gas. It was a thousand miles away, five hundred miles away, fifty miles away, twenty miles away.
In late September they saw published reports, reports buried in back pages, reports in tiny paragraphs, but reports nonetheless: eight hundred cases among midshipmen at Annapolis…in New York State coughing or sneezing without covering the face was now punishable by a year in jail and a $500 fine…thirty cases of influenza among students at the University of Colorado—but, of course, the Associated Press reassured, “None of the cases, it was said, is serious.”
But then it was serious: four hundred dead in a day in Philadelphia…twenty dead in Colorado and New Mexico…four hundred now dead in Chicago…all social and amusement activities suspended in El Paso, where seven funerals for soldiers occurred in a single day (it would get much worse)…a terrible outbreak in Winslow, Arizona.
It was like being bracketed by artillery, the barrage edging closer and closer.
In Lincoln, Illinois, a small town thirty miles from Springfield, William Maxwell sensed it: “My first intimations about the epidemic was that it was something happening to the troops. There didn’t seem to be any reason to think it would ever have anything to do with us. And yet in a gradual remorseless way it kept moving closer and closer. Rumors of the alarming situation reached this very small town in the midwest…. It was like, almost like an entity moving closer.”
In Meadow, Utah, one hundred miles from Provo, Lee Reay recalled, “We were very concerned in our town because it was moving south down the highway, and we were next.” They watched it kill in Payson, then Santaguin, then Nephi, Levan, and Mills. They watched it come closer and closer. They put up a huge sign on the road that ordered people to keep going, not to stop in Meadow. But the mailman stopped anyway.
Wherever one was in the country, it crept closer—it was in the next town, the next neighborhood, the next block, the next room. In Tucson the Arizona Daily Star warned readers not to catch “Spanish hysteria!” “Don’t worry!” was the official and final piece of advice on how to avoid the disease from the Arizona Board of Health.
Don’t get scared! said the newspapers everywhere. Don’t get scared! they said in Denver, in Seattle, in Detroit; in Burlington, Vermont, and Burlington, Iowa, and Burlington, North Carolina; in Greenville. Rhode Island, and Greenville, South Carolina, and Greenville, Mississippi. And every time the newspapers said, Don’t get scared! they frightened.
The virus had moved west and south from the East Coast by water and rail. It rose up in great crests to flood cities, rolled in great waves through the towns, broke into wild rivers to rage through villages, poured in swollen creeks through settlements, flowed in tiny rivulets into isolated homes. And as in a great flood it covered everything, varying in depth but covering everything, settling over the land in a great leveling.
Albert Camus wrote, “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.”
One who rose was Dr. Ralph Marshall Ward, who had abandoned medicine for cattle ranching. Leaving medicine had not been a business decision.
An intellectual, particularly interested in pharmacology, he was a prominent physician in Kansas City with an office and pharmacy in the Stockyard Exchange Building down by the bottoms. But Kansas City was a major railhead, with the yards near his office. Most of his practice involved treating railroad workers injured in accidents. He performed huge numbers of amputations, and seemed always to work on mangled men, men ripped into pieces by steel. To have a practice with so much human agony ripped him into pieces as well.
He had too much of doctoring, and, from treating cowboys hurt on cattle drives north to Kansas City, he had learned enough about the cattle business that he decided shortly before the war to buy a small ranch more than a thousand miles away, near San Benito, Texas, close to the Mexican border. On the long trip south, he and his wife made a pact never to utter a word that he had been a doctor. But in October 1918, influenza reached him. Some ranch hands got ill. He began treating them. Word spread.
A few days later his wife woke up to a disturbing and unrecognizable sound. She went outside and saw out there in the gloaming people, hundreds of people, on the horizon. They seemed to cover that horizon, and as they came closer, it was clear they were Mexicans, a few of them on mules, most on foot, women carrying babies, men carrying women, bedraggled, beaten down, a mass of humanity, a mass of horror and suffering. She yelled for her husband, and he came out and stood on the porch. “Oh my God!” he said.
The people had come with nothing. But they knew he was a doctor so they had come. The Wards later told their granddaughter it was like the hospital scene in Gone With the Wind, with rows of wounded and dying laid out on the ground in agony. These people had come with nothing, had nothing, and they were dying. The Wards took huge pots outside to boil water, used all their resources to feed them, treated them. Out on the empty harsh range near the Mexican border, they had no Red Cross to turn to for help, no Council of National Defense. They did what they could, and it ruined them. He went back to Kansas City; he had already gone back to being a doctor.
There were other men and women like the Wards. Physicians, nurses, scientists—did their jobs, and the virus killed them, killed them in such numbers that each week JAMA was filled with literally page after page after page after page after page of nothing but brief obituaries in tiny compressed type. Hundreds of doctors dying. Hundreds. Others helped too.
But as Camus knew, evil and crises do not make all men rise above themselves. Crises only make them discover themselves. And some discover a less inspiring humanity.
As the crest of the wave that broke over Philadelphia began its sweep across the rest of the country, it was accompanied by the same terror that had silenced the streets there. Most men and women sacrificed and risked their lives only for those they loved most deeply: a child, a wife, a husband. Others, loving chiefly themselves, fled in terror even from them.
Still others fomented terror, believing that blaming the enemy—Germany—could help the war effort, or perhaps actually believing that Germany was responsible. Doane himself charged that “German agents…from submarines” brought influenza to the United States. “The Germans have started epidemics in Europe, and there is no reason why they should be particularly gentle to America.”
Others around the country echoed him. Starkville, Mississippi, a town of three thousand in the Mississippi hill country, was built around a sawmill, cotton farms—not the rich, lush plantations of the Delta but harsh land—and Mississippi A&M College (now Mississippi State University). It served as headquarters for Dr. M. G. Parsons, the U.S. Public Health Service officer for northeastern Mississippi, who proudly informed Blue that he had succeeded in getting local newspapers to run stories he made up that “aid in forming a proper frame of mind” in the public. That frame of mind was fear. Parsons wanted to create fear, believing it “prepared the public mind to receive and act on our suggestions.”
Parsons got the local press to say, “The Hun resorts to unwanted murder of innocent noncombatants…. He has been tempted to spread sickness and death thru germs, and has done so in authenticated cases…. Communicable diseases are more strictly a weapon for use well back of the lines, over on French or British, or American land.” Blue neither reprimanded Parsons for fomenting fear nor suggested that he take another tack. Another story read, “The Germs Are Coming. An epidemic of influenza is spreading or being spread, (we wonder which).”…
Those and similar charges created enough public sentiment to force Public Health Service laboratories to waste valuable time and energy investigating such possible agents of germ warfare as Bayer aspirin. Parsons’s territory bordered on Alabama and there a traveling salesman from Philadelphia named H. M. Thomas was arrested on suspicion of being a German agent and spreading influenza—death. Thomas was released, but on October 17, the day after influenza had killed 759 people in Philadelphia, his body was found in a hotel room with his wrists cut—and his throat slit. Police ruled it suicide.
Everywhere, as in Philadelphia, two problems developed: caring for the sick, and maintaining some kind of order.
In Cumberland, Maryland, a gritty railroad and industrial city in the heart of a coal-mining region—where one actually could throw a stone across the Potomac River into West Virginia—to prevent the spread of the disease schools and churches had already been closed, all public gathering places had been closed, and stores had been ordered to close early. Nonetheless, the epidemic exploded on October 5. At noon that day the local Red Cross chairman met with the treasurer of the Red Cross’s War Fund and the head of the local Council of National Defense. Their conclusion: “The matter seemed far beyond control…. Reports were spreading fast that ‘this one’ or ‘that one’ had died without doctor or nurse and it was a panic indeed.”
They decided to convert two large buildings on Washington Street to emergency hospitals. From there a handful of women took over, meeting barely an hour after the men had. Each woman had a task: to gather linens, or bathroom supplies, or cooking utensils, or flour. They worked fast. The next morning the hospitals filled with patients.
In Cumberland, 41 percent of the entire population got sick. But the emergency hospitals had only three nurses. The organizers begged for more: “We notified the Bd of Health we must have more nurses if we were to go on….[Nurses] promised. However this help never materialized and up to date…93 admissions, 18 deaths. The question of orderlies is difficult. They are just not to be found.”
Back in Starkville, Parsons met with the president of the college, the army commander of the students—all the students had been inducted into the army—and physicians. “We had an open discussion of the dangers and best actions to take and they assured me everything possible would be done,” he wired Blue. He asked for and received fifteen thousand pamphlets, posters, and circulars, more than the combined population of Starkville, Columbus, and West Point. But he, and they, accomplished little. Of eighteen hundred students, well over half would get influenza. On October 9 Parsons “found unbelievable conditions with everybody in power stunned.” At that moment eight hundred students were sick and 2 percent of all students had already died, with many deaths to come. Parsons found “influenza is all thru the region, in town, hamlet, and single home. People are pretty well scared, with reason….” In West Point, a town of five thousand, fifteen hundred were ill simultaneously. Parsons confessed, “Panic incipient.”
In El Paso a U.S. Public Health Service officer reported to Blue, “I have the honor to inform you that from Oct 9th to date there have been 275 deaths from influenza in El Paso among civilians. This does not include civilians who are employed by the government and who died at the base hospital of Fort Bliss, nor does it include soldiers…[W]hole city in a panic.”
In Colorado, towns in the San Juan Mountains did not panic. They turned grimly serious. They had time to prepare. Lake City guards kept the town entirely free of the disease, allowing no one to enter. Silverton, a town of two thousand, authorized closing businesses even before a single case surfaced. But the virus snuck in, with a vengeance. In a single week in Silverton, 125 died. The town of Ouray set up a “shot gun quarantine,” hiring guards to keep miners from Silverton and Telluride out. But the virus reached Ouray as well.
It had not reached Gunnison. Neither tiny nor isolated, Gunnison was a railroad town, a supply center for the west-central part of the state, the home of Western State Teachers College. In early October—far in advance of any cases of influenza—Gunnison and most neighboring towns issued a closing order and a ban on public gatherings. Then Gunnison decided to isolate itself entirely. Gunnison lawmen blocked all through roads. Train conductors warned all passengers that if they stepped foot on the platform in Gunnison to stretch their legs, they would be arrested and quarantined for five days. Two Nebraskans trying simply to drive through to a town in the next county ran the blockade and were thrown into jail. Meanwhile, the nearby town of Sargents suffered six deaths in a single day—out of a total population of 130.
Early in the epidemic, back on September 27—it seemed like years before—the Wisconsin newspaper the Jefferson County Union had reported the truth about the disease, and the general in charge of the Army Morale Branch decreed the report “depressant to morale” and forwarded it to enforcement officials for “any action which may be deemed appropriate,” including criminal prosecution. Now, weeks later, after weeks of dying and with the war over, the Gunnison News-Chronicle, unlike virtually every other newspaper in the country, played no games and warned, “This disease is no joke, to be made light of, but a terrible calamity.”
Gunnison escaped without a death.
In the United States, the war was something over there. The epidemic was here.
“Even if there was war,” recalled Susanna Turner of Philadelphia, “the war was removed from us, you know…on the other side…. This malignancy, it was right at our very doors.”
People feared and hated this malignancy, this alien thing in their midst. They were willing to cut it out at any cost. In Goldsboro, North Carolina, Dan Tonkel recalled, “We were actually almost afraid to breathe, the theaters were closed down so you didn’t get into any crowds…. You felt like you were walking on eggshells, you were afraid even to go out. You couldn’t play with your playmates, your classmates, your neighbors, you had to stay home and just be careful. The fear was so great people were actually afraid to leave their homes. People were actually afraid to talk to one another. It was almost like don’t breathe in my face, don’t look at me and breathe in my face…. You never knew from day to day who was going to be next on the death list…. That was the horrible part, people just died so quickly.”
His father had a store. Four of eight salesgirls died. “Farmers stopped farming and the merchants stopped selling merchandise and the country really more or less just shut down holding their breath. Everyone was holding their breath.” His uncle Benny was nineteen years old and had been living with him until he was drafted and went to Fort Bragg, which sent him home when he reported. The camp was refusing all new draftees. Tonkel recalls his parents not wanting to allow Benny back in the house. “‘Benny we don’t know what to do with you,’” they said. “‘Well, what can I tell you. I’m here,’” his uncle replied. They let him in. “We were frightened, yes absolutely, we were frightened.”
In Washington, D.C., William Sardo said, “It kept people apart…. It took away all your community life, you had no community life, you had no school life, you had no church life, you had nothing…. It completely destroyed all family and community life. People were afraid to kiss one another, people were afraid to eat with one another, they were afraid to have anything that made contact because that’s how you got the flu…. It destroyed those contacts and destroyed the intimacy that existed amongst people…. You were constantly afraid, you were afraid because you saw so much death around you, you were surrounded by death…. When each day dawned you didn’t know whether you would be there when the sun set that day. It wiped out entire families from the time that the day began in the morning to bedtime at night—entire families were gone completely, there wasn’t any single soul left and that didn’t happen just intermittently, it happened all the way across the neighborhoods, it was a terrifying experience. It justifiably should be called a plague because that’s what it was…. You were quarantined, is what you were, from fear, it was so quick, so sudden…. There was an aura of a constant fear that you lived through from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night.”
In New Haven, Connecticut, John Delano recalled the same isolating fear: “Normally when someone was sick in those days the parents, the mothers, the fathers, would bring food over to other families but this was very weird…. Nobody was coming in, nobody would bring food in, nobody came to visit.”
Prescott, Arizona, made it illegal to shake hands. In Perry County, Kentucky, in the mountains where men either dug into the earth for coal or scratched upon the earth’s surface trying to farm despite topsoil only a few inches deep, a county of hard people, where family ties bound tightly, where men and women were loyal and would murder for pride or honor, the Red Cross chapter chairman begged for help, reporting “hundreds of cases up in mountains that they were unable to reach.” They were unreachable not just because the county had almost no roads; streambeds in dry weather substituted for them and when the streambeds filled, transport became impossible. It was more: “People starving to death not from lack of food but because the well were panic stricken and would not go near the sick; that in the stricken families the dead were lying uncared for.” Doctors were offered $100 to come out and stay there one hour. None came. Even one Red Cross worker, Morgan Brawner, arrived in the county Saturday and left Sunday, himself terror stricken. He had reason to fear: in some areas the civilian mortality rate reached 30 percent.
In Norwood, Massachusetts, a historian years later interviewed survivors. One man, a newsboy in 1918, remembered that his manager would “tell me to put the money on the table and he’d spray the money before he’d pick it up.” Said another survivor; “There wasn’t much visiting…. We stayed by ourselves.” And another: “[H]e’d bring, you know, whatever my father needed and leave it on the doorstep. No one would go into each other’s houses.” And another: “Everything came to a standstill…. We weren’t allowed out the door. We had to keep away from people.” And another: “A cop, a big burly guy…came up to the house and nailed a big white sign and on the sign it said INFLUENZA in red letters. And they nailed it to the door.” A sign made a family even more isolated. And another survivor: “I’d go up the street, walk up the street with my hand over my eyes because there were so many houses with crepe draped over the doors.” And still another: “It was horrifying. Not only were you frightened you might come down with it but there was the eerie feeling of people passing away all around you.”
In Luce County, Michigan, one woman was nursing her husband and three boys when she “came down with it herself,” reported a Red Cross worker. “Not one of the neighbors would come in and help. I stayed there all night, and in the morning telephoned the woman’s sister. She came and tapped on the window, but refused to talk to me until she had gotten a safe distance away…. I could do nothing for the woman…except send for the priest.”
Monument and Ignacio, Colorado, went further than banning all public gatherings. They banned customers from stores; the stores remained open, but customers shouted orders through doors, then waited outside for packages.
Colorado Springs placarded homes with signs that read “Sickness.”
In no industry did workers hear more about patriotism, about how their work mattered to the war effort as much as that of soldiers fighting at the front, than in shipbuilding. Nor were workers in any industry more carefully attended to. In all plants common drinking cups were immediately destroyed, replaced by tens of thousands of paper cups. Hospital and treatment facilities were arranged in advance, influenza vaccine supplied, and it was perhaps the only industry in which nurses and doctors remained available. As a result, claimed a Public Health Service officer, “There is no reason to believe that many men were absent from work through panic or fear of the disease, because our educational program took care to avoid frightening the men. The men were taught that they were safer at work than any where else.”
They were also of course not paid unless they came to work. But at dozens of shipyards in New England, the absentee records were striking. At the L. H. Shattuck Company, 45.9 percent of the workers stayed home. At the George A. Gilchrist yard, 54.3 percent stayed home. At Freeport Shipbuilding, 57 percent stayed home. At Groton Iron Works, 58.3 percent stayed home.
Twenty-six hundred miles away was Phoenix, Arizona. At the beginning of the epidemic its newspapers had behaved as did those everywhere else, saying little, reassuring, insisting that fear was more dangerous than the disease. But the virus took its time there, lingered longer than elsewhere, lingered until finally even the press expressed fear. On November 8 the Arizona Republican warned, “The people of Phoenix are facing a crisis. The [epidemic] has reached such serious proportions that it is the first problem before the people…. Almost every home in the city has been stricken with the plague…. Fearless men and women [must] serve in the cause of humanity.”
The war was three days from ending, and several false peaces had been announced. Still, for that newspaper to call influenza “the first problem” while the war continued was extraordinary. And finally the city formed a “citizens’ committee” to take charge.
In Arizona, citizens’ committees were taken seriously. A year earlier fifteen hundred armed members of a “Citizens Protective League” had put 1,221 striking miners into cattle and boxcars and abandoned them without food or water on a railroad siding in the desert, across the New Mexico line. In Phoenix another “citizens’ committee” had been going after “bond slackers,” hanging them in effigy on main streets. One man refused to buy a bond because of religious reasons. Nonetheless he was hung in effigy with a placard reading, “H. G. Saylor, yellow slacker…. Can, but won’t buy a liberty bond!” Saylor was lucky. The committee also seized Charles Reas, a carpenter, tied his hands behind his back, painted his face yellow, put a noose around his neck, and dragged him through downtown Phoenix streets wearing a sign that read “with this exception we are 100%.”
The influenza Citizens’ Committee took similar initiatives. It deputized a special police force and also called upon all “patriotic citizens” to enforce anti-influenza ordinances, including requiring every person in public to wear a mask, arresting anyone who spit or coughed without covering his mouth, dictating that businesses (those that remained open) give twelve hundred cubic feet of air space to each customer, and halting all traffic into the city and allowing only those with “actual business here” to enter. Soon the Republican described “a city of masked faces, a city as grotesque as a masked carnival.”
And yet—ironically—influenza touched Phoenix only lightly compared to elsewhere. The panic came anyway. Dogs told the story of terror, but not with their barking. Rumors spread that dogs carried influenza. The police began killing all dogs on the street. And people began killing their own dogs, dogs they loved, and if they had not the heart to kill them themselves, they gave them to the police to be killed. “At this death rate from causes other than natural,” reported the Gazette, “Phoenix will soon be dogless.” Back in Philadelphia Mary Volz lived near a church. She had always “loved to hear the church bells ringing, they were so jubilantly ringing.” But now every few minutes people carried a casket into the church, left, “and there would be another casket.” Each time the bells rang. “The bells were my joy and then this ‘BONG! BONG! BONG!’ I was terrified, lying sick in bed hearing ‘BONG! BONG! BONG!’ Is the bell going to bong for me?”
The war was over there. The epidemic was here. The war ended. The epidemic continued. Fear settled over the nation like a frozen blanket. “Some say the world will end in fire,” wrote Robert Frost in 1920. “Ice is also great / and would suffice.”
An internal American Red Cross report concluded, “A fear and panic of the influenza, akin to the terror of the Middle Ages regarding the Black Plague, [has] been prevalent in many parts of the country.”