Very, Very, Very Dreadful

by Albert Marrin

  White Christians often explained the disaster in a time-honored way: it was God’s punishment of humanity for its sins. To the seven deadly sins—anger, greed, lust, envy, pride, laziness, gluttony—they added an eighth sin: “worshipping science.” A South African preacher declared from the pulpit: “Nowadays people speak of germs and filthy streets and slums [as causes of disease]. But God wants us to have no other Gods than Him.” Another preacher blamed science for both the war and the pandemic. “Isn’t it as if the Almighty is toying with the murder resulting from sinful science?” he asked. “Humans may kill thousands, but God can kill in tens of thousands.” Thus, the only cure for the pandemic was to “get right” with the Lord.34

  Black people held two different views of the pandemic. In 1918, traditional African religion was still a powerful force. It taught that illness did not just happen but struck because someone magically “sent” it to do harm. Despite Christian missionaries attempting to convert the locals, witch finders—people claiming to have supernatural powers—still “smelled out” witches and wizards, literally sniffed them to detect the unique “odor” of evil. “Many cases of homicide or serious assault,” a South African official reported, “resulting from ‘smelling out’ have come to my notice recently, especially after the outbreak of influenza in the native territories.”35

  However, other native Africans blamed the disaster on the war. When British troops seized Germany’s colonies, black soldiers fought beside them, and black teamsters hauled military supplies. When influenza struck, it was so beyond blacks’ experience that they decided the war must be to blame. It was dubbed the “White Man’s Flu” and “war air” because many thought smoke from the big guns had fouled the air in a way that made it poisonous. Some went further, claiming a more sinister cause. “This disease,” they insisted, “was a device of the Europeans to finish off the Native races of South Africa.” Similarly, some whites, though ignorant of influenza’s true cause, blamed it on blacks’ “racial inferiority” and disregard of basic hygiene. To safeguard the health of whites, they demanded the separation of the races. Though apartheid, the South African government’s policy of rigid racial segregation, did not officially begin until 1948, its roots went back thirty years, to the influenza pandemic.36

  THE KILLER CIRCLES THE GLOBE

  Influenza spread eastward from Africa, across the Indian Ocean, to India, in South Asia. Known as the “Jewel in the Crown,” British-ruled India was the empire’s largest and most valuable holding in 1918. English is still the country’s second language, and the railroads built by the colonial rulers still flourish.

  H1N1 first came ashore at Bombay (today’s Mumbai), a sprawling seaport on the country’s west coast. From there, it spread north, south, and east, carried by infected train and riverboat passengers. In its wake, it left human devastation on a scale never before seen in India, a land often racked by crop failures and famines. Influenza’s effects reminded followers of Hinduism, India’s chief religion, of a saying by the god Vishnu. In a Hindu sacred text, Vishnu proclaims, “I am death, the mighty destroyer of the world, out to destroy.” For devout Hindus, it seemed as if only a divine force could unleash such horrors.37

  The pandemic rolled across India, unstoppable by human ingenuity or prayers. In Bombay, the largest city, 700 people died in a single day. On India’s east coast, a muddy river flowing through the port city of Calcutta (today’s Kolkata) into the Bay of Bengal was “choked with bodies.”38

  Credit 45

  With many of India’s physicians, native-born and white, serving overseas with the British army, people lacked basic medical care. The Associated Press reported that across the country “hospitals were so choked it was impossible quickly to remove the dead and make room for the dying. Streets and lanes of the cities were littered with dead and dying people….The depleted medical service, itself severely stricken by the epidemic, was incapable of dealing with more than a minute fraction of the sick requiring attention.” No country suffered worse than India. An astounding 6.1 percent, or 18.6 million, of its 305.6 million people died of influenza. In other words, India lost twice as many civilians as all soldiers killed during the World War.39

  H1N1 continued its lethal journey. Ships brought it across the South China Sea to the bustling seaport of Hong Kong, China. Though China had a larger population than India, 472 million in 1918, influenza claimed fewer victims, an estimated 9.5 million, for reasons that are still unclear. Influenza also reached Japan, an Allied power, by way of China or Allied ships, or both; 388,000 Japanese died. “The misery is appalling,” official reports said. Vessels also brought the mutated virus to the Philippines (93,686 died). The Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) lost 1.5 million of its 30 million inhabitants.40

  Australia and New Zealand were next in line. Immense areas, sparsely populated, these island nations counted around 23,100 deaths. Like Cape Town, Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, seemed deserted. Businessman Alfred Hollows recalled: “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 its side, and a big red cross painted on it, serving as an ambulance or hearse. It was really a City of the Dead.”41

  Other islands fared far worse. Fiji, today’s Republic of the Fiji Islands, a country in the South Pacific Ocean east of Australia, consists of more than 300 widely scattered islands. In the sixteen days following November 25, 1918, influenza swept away 9,000 out of a total of 164,000 Fijians. An Australian visitor to a sugar plantation on one island reported: “For a full week I was the only person moving about in this particular district. Everything was still and quiet. Cattle were unattended and helped themselves to growing crops of rice and sugar-cane. Bananas ripened on the trees and afterward turned to vinegar on the ground….[Yet] there was any amount of noise all night long—the hacking cough of the unfortunates who had developed pneumonia as a complication.” From Suva, Fiji’s capital, a visitor wrote, “Day and night trucks rumbled through the streets, filled with bodies for constantly burning pyres.”42

  Similar accounts came from every part of the globe. Mysterious and merciless, untreatable and unstoppable, the pandemic had the upper hand. Thoughtful people, continents and oceans apart, asked the same questions and arrived at the same answers as Europeans had during the Black Death. In West Africa’s Gold Coast, for instance, villagers wondered “if this [was] the end of the world,” and a black South African thought the pandemic “threaten[ed] the existence of the entire [human] race.”43

  Here we will give the last word to Victor Vaughan. One night, the noted physician sat alone in his office, brooding. Vaughan knew as much about infectious diseases as anyone on the planet in 1918. He also knew how to count and how to project his findings into the future. He scribbled this on a piece of paper: “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear…from the face of the earth within a matter of a few more weeks.”44

  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.

  —American Red Cross report, 1918

  SCIENTIFIC MEDICINE’S FAILURE

  American physicians, like their European colleagues, entered the twentieth century justly proud of the triumphs of scientific medicine. In the decades before World War I, they had discovered the causes of many diseases, conquered pain, and promoted public health. And now this! Never in modern times had there been such a crisis in which physicians felt so helpless, so unprepared to deal with a disease of such a horrific nature.

  Victor Vaughan was downcast. Witnessing the pandemic was, he recalled in his autobiography, “the saddest part of my life.” If medicine’s failure taught him anything, he confessed, it was humility. “I decided,” he wrote, “never again to prate about the great achievements of medical science and to humbly admit our dense
ignorance in [this] case.” Vaughan’s friend William Welch agreed. The pandemic, said the famous pathologist, would forever remain the “great shadow cast upon the medical profession.” Other physicians, overcome by despair, wondered why they had devoted their lives to medicine. “Why did I become a doctor?” one muttered. “I can do nothing to help, and soon there won’t be any more people.”1

  As we have seen, neither physicians nor the public they served knew the cause of influenza. A bit of dark humor expressed their puzzlement. In November 1918, as the war’s end drew near, the Illinois Health News printed this anonymous poem:

  ?Flu?

  If we but knew

  The cause of flu

  And whence it comes and what to do,

  I think that you

  And we folks , too,

  Would hardly get in such a stew.

  Do you?

  Flu came from something—that was common sense, a logical matter of cause and effect. But without hard scientific facts about viruses, one explanation seemed as credible as the next. It was simply a case of believing whatever you wished, whatever satisfied you or gave you peace of mind.2

  POPULAR EXPLANATIONS

  In seeking to explain the disease, many Americans saw it in terms of their long-held prejudices. Since colonial times, America has attracted immigrants in search of freedom and opportunity. In the beginning, most immigrants came from western and northern Europe: Great Britain, Germany, Scandinavia. In the 1880s, however, a flood of immigrants started arriving from eastern and southern Europe, chiefly Russia and Italy. These newcomers—Jews and Roman Catholics in a Protestant-majority country—spoke languages and had customs different from those of self-styled “real Americans.” Worse, this “foreign element” gained a reputation as disease carriers.

  Many Jews suffered from tuberculosis, dubbed the “Jewish disease.” Tuberculosis raged among Jews who lived in crowded urban tenements and worked long hours for low pay in unhealthy factories called sweatshops. Moreover, critics charged, “the Jewish body was inherently inferior to the Christian body.”3

  Most Italians had emigrated from southern Italy, a region racked by poverty, illiteracy, and superstition. Southern Italians believed in the malocchio (evil eye), the ability to harm others simply by looking at them with envy. Italians also had strong family bonds, gathering around the beds of the sick to comfort them and kissing the dead to express grief and respect. Given their peculiar illnesses and customs, Jews and Italians were denounced as “society’s dregs” and thus were judged to be especially prone to contagious diseases. By this twisted logic, they were breeding grounds for influenza.4

  Other Americans blamed the pandemic on Germany, an idea that fit neatly with the demands of waging the war. The conflict’s outcome was not simply a matter of soldiers winning battles. It also depended on civilians on the home front believing in the Allied cause and being willing to give their labor, their wealth, and their menfolk for the glory of “God and country.”

  To keep Americans believing and giving, in 1917 President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the nation’s first propaganda agency. Using newspapers, films, posters, songs, and trained speakers, CPI experts stressed two themes: (1) The Allies were just, humane, and moral. (2) The Germans were the exact opposite—despicable, cruel, and corrupt. A poster from that time, colorful and shocking, says it all. Used to encourage army enlistments, it shows Germany as a howling, drooling, club-waving gorilla grasping a half-naked woman covering her eyes in terror. Its orange letters say: “Destroy This Mad Brute—Enlist.” To sell Liberty Bonds to pay for the war, movie stars Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks harangued crowds and posed for advertisements. A grim poster shows German bombers reducing the Statue of Liberty to ruins. Its caption reads: “That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth—Buy Liberty Bonds.” Never mind that no airplane could fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1918.

  LEFT: A poster depicting Germany as a monstrous beast. (1917) Credit 46

  RIGHT: Charlie Chaplin stumps for Liberty Bonds in The Bond, a film he made at his own expense to help the war effort. (1918) Credit 47

  For propagandists, whatever promoted the Allied cause was true, whether factual or not. What counted was the noble end—victory—not the sordid means of achieving it. “Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms,” declared a CPI official. “There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other….There are lifeless truths and vital lies….The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.”5

  God, too, became part of the propaganda effort. Depending on where you heard it, the Almighty was British, French, Belgian, Russian, Austrian, or German. Not to be outdone, American clergymen of all denominations became superpatriots. A poet-priest put it like this:

  Fight for the colors of Christ the King,

  Fight as He fought for you;

  Fight for the Right with all your might,

  Fight for the Red, White, and Blue.6

  A Detroit News Tribune spread of the Reverend Billy Sunday “fighting the devil.” (1916) Credit 48

  The Reverend Billy Sunday, a baseball player turned popular preacher, appealed to countless American Christians. Love of the United States and love of the Lord, Sunday said, were really the same. “I am glad that loyalty to my country and to Jesus Christ are synonymous,” he told thousands, “Germany against America, hell against heaven.” America, he added, had a divine mission to crush the “devil hordes,” those “dirty Germans,” those “hungry hyenas,” those beasts “out of the pits of hell.” Just as Germany had used poison gas first, Sunday insisted, it had unleashed influenza, too. The pandemic “started over there in Spain,” the preacher thundered from the pulpit, “where they [Germans] scattered germs around….There’s nothing short of hell they haven’t stooped to since the war began.” Forget that influenza ravaged Germany as badly as it attacked any other European country. For Billy Sunday and his kind, the will to believe overcame awkward facts.7

  The idea of Germany’s guilt for the pandemic gained wide acceptance. Even respected newspapers like the New York Times blamed Germany. “Let the curse be called the German plague,” the Times declared with all the confidence of ignorance. Others, equally confident, insisted that Bayer aspirin had become a weapon. The popular drug was manufactured in the United States under a German license, and critics said the formula had been secretly laced with “germs.”8

  The threat of influenza terrorism kept the country on edge. A German ship supposedly sneaked into Boston Harbor one night and released the germs that infected the city. An elderly woman said she saw it release a gray cloud that drifted over the waterfront.9

  With German submarines prowling the Atlantic coast, some military officers linked the pandemic to the undersea raiders. Colonel Philip S. Doane of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which oversaw American shipyards, told the newspapers: “It is quite possible that the epidemic was started by [agents] sent ashore by submarine commanders….It would be quite easy for one of these agents to turn loose those Spanish influenza germs in a theater or some other place where large numbers of persons are assembled….The Germans have started epidemics in Europe, and there is no reason why they should be particularly gentle with America.” Newspapers quickly spread Doane’s theory across the country.10

  The World War I U-boat UB 14. One theory held that German U-boats released the influenza virus on American shores. (1918) Credit 49

  Colonel Doane was wrong. There was (and is) no proof that German agents deliberately infected anybody in Europe with bacteria, let alone with a virus. Yet that did not put a stop to the rumors. One particularly nasty rumor claimed that “almost every U.S. Army Camp” had seen executions of traitors—doctors and nurses who had injected recruits with influenza germs. Ordinary folks took to calling Germany “Germ-any.” A newspaper article titled “The Germs Are Coming” warned of an enemy invasion by influenza, not troops. All
of which confirms the proverb “The first casualty of war is truth.”11

  “PREVENTION,” “TREATMENT,” AND “CURE”

  Everyone believed, but no one could yet prove, that influenza, whatever caused it, passed from person to person. As had happened during the plague years of the Middle Ages, authorities in 1918 tried to curb influenza by limiting human contact. The U.S. surgeon general, Rupert Blue, set the tone. On October 4, 1918, he recommended closing “all public gathering places” where the disease might spread. Note: recommended, not ordered. Blue’s lack of action typified poor leadership in high places; indeed, no single official took charge of the anti-flu effort. Throughout the pandemic, the nation lacked a uniform policy about gathering places, and there was no central authority with the power to make and enforce rules that everyone had to obey. Each community acted on its own, doing as its elected officials thought best.12

  Surgical masks supposedly provided protection against the killer flu for American baseball players. (1918) Credit 50

  New York, the nation’s largest city, offers a perfect example of this problem. City officials sent out mixed messages. Public libraries, the New York Stock Exchange, and private clubs had to close their doors. Telephone booths were padlocked, and drinking fountains were cleansed every few hours with blowtorches. But officials allowed subways, streetcars, churches, department stores, and factories to stay open, along with saloons, which workers insisted they needed to relax in after a hard day on the job. Workmen marched with NO BEER, NO WORK buttons on their overalls. In Little Italy, a large immigrant neighborhood, you could hardly find a store without a NO WINE, NO WEDDING sign in its window. In Italian-immigrant culture, gathering to drink wine played an important role on joyful occasions like weddings and christenings.13