When my mother died of Spanish influenza, we were all gathered in one room, all six of us, from age two to age twelve. My father was sitting beside my mother’s bed, head in his hands, sobbing bitterly. All my mother’s friends were there, with tears of shock in their eyes. They were shouting at my father, asking why he hadn’t called them, hadn’t told them she was sick. She had been fine yesterday. How could this have happened? 41
As Michael’s father and five brothers and sisters wept together, Michael himself found it impossible to make sense of events. ‘Looking at my mother, I could not relate to my loss. She looked like she was asleep.’42
The following morning, Michael and his two younger brothers were taken to the subway by their father. When he bought them all Hershey bars, Michael guessed something was wrong. He was right. They were on their way to the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum.43
CHAPTER NINE
EYE OF THE STORM
NOWHERE DID THE spectre of death flap its wings more powerfully than above the city of Philadelphia. While Philadelphia, with its population of 1,700,000, was regarded as a largely healthy city in 1918, there were severe pockets of deprivation among its many immigrant communities, and it was also home to one of the oldest black ghettoes in the United States.1 Historically, Philadelphia was a city where early death was taken for granted. Jack Fincher, screenwriter and one-time chief editor of Life magazine, whose uncle died of Spanish flu in October 1918, recalled:
My uncle’s death was but one small, sad design in the vast tapestry of a fatally infectious disease as common to the fabric of American family life then as it is rare today. Times were so different then. Grown-ups and children were so quickly subtracted from the world by so many diseases that we no longer have to fear. My grandmother, for instance, died before [my uncle]. She sewed her tubercular sister’s burial shroud and then died of the disease herself. Her youngest son was born tubercular. He died before his mother.2
The 11th of September saw an outbreak of Spanish flu in the Naval Yard at Philadelphia, while Camp Dix in New Jersey and Camp Meade in Maryland fell victim on the 15th and 17th respectively. By 18 September, the Philadelphia Bureau of Health was issuing a warning about influenza, with a campaign about the dangers of spreading infection through coughing, sneezing and spitting. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, 600 sailors were in hospital with flu and there were civilian cases as well.3 On 21 September, the Bureau of Health made influenza a reportable disease, although doctors claimed it was unlikely that influenza would affect the civilian population.4 Lieutenant Commander R. W. Plummer, medical aide to the commandant of the local naval district, told the public that naval and city officials were cooperating ‘to confine this disease to its present limits, and in this we are sure to be successful’.5 The doctors felt confident: on the same day that influenza was made a reportable disease in Philadelphia, Dr Paul A. Lewis, director of the laboratories of the Phipps Institute of Philadelphia, announced that he had isolated the cause of Spanish flu in the form of Pfeiffer’s bacillus. According to the Inquirer, this ‘armed the medical profession with absolute knowledge on which to base its campaign against this disease’.6 Lewis’s conclusion was only a local one, given the amount of research being conducted elsewhere into the causes of Spanish flu. It was also to have tragic consequences. In a buoyant mood, confident that a vaccine for Spanish flu was imminent, the city gave permission for a massive parade, the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive, on 28 September. Two hundred thousand people gathered at the start of the parade, which stretched through the city for twenty-three blocks.
Singing conductors and speakers were distributed among the marchers, and whenever the parade halted, they led the crowds in patriotic songs and harangued them to buy bonds. Women in mourning were plucked out of the crowd and used to advertise the purpose of the parade: ‘This woman gave her all. What will you give?’ Planes flew overhead and antiaircraft guns fired at them, the fuses carefully adjusted so that the shells would explode far below the aircraft.7
During each pause, the crowd was entreated, pressured, and harangued to buy bonds. Why buy bonds? Why send ‘our darlings’ to France? ‘You have brought them into the soul-awakening experience of War for Principle. They must be kept there, equipped for this stupendous task, until the task is finished. And your support is the only thing that will do it.’8
Two faces in the crowd watching this parade were Susanna Turner and Columba Voltz. Susanna, seventeen years old, was a student at William Penn High School. ‘We were so conscious of the war, of liberty. We marched and sang and saved our money for Liberty Bonds,’ Susanna remembered.9 Columba, aged just eight years old, recalled the parade as ‘a marvelous singing fest, with huge posters of Uncle Sam bobbing through the crowd’.10 Columba and her friend Katherine linked arms and sang, and spent their pennies on bonds. ‘Katherine and I were happy,’ Columba remembered, ‘thinking we were helping the war effort.’11
A massive epidemic of Spanish flu exploded within a day of the parade. On October 1, 635 new cases were reported. Physicians were kept so busy that they didn’t have time to file reports: the actual number of cases was likely to have been much higher. Dr A. A. Cairns of the Bureau of Health estimated 75,000 cases in Philadelphia between 11 September and the end of the month.12 At the Hog Island Shipyards 8 per cent of workers were laid off and so many riveting teams were broken up that the number of rivets driven on 3 October dropped from 86,000 to 11,000.13 That night, all schools, churches and theatres in Philadelphia were ordered to be closed. On the same night, Dr B. F. Royer, Acting State Commissioner of Health for Pennsylvania, ordered all places of public amusement and saloons to be closed, while Surgeon General Blue recommended the same policy for the entire country. Although many towns and cities followed his advice, it did little to check the spread of the disease.
Anna Milani was just a little girl living in an Italian community in North Street, when tragedy struck. ‘I remember it was a mild day and we were sitting outside on the steps. Around twilight, we heard screams. In that same house, the same family where the girl had died, an eighteen-month-old baby died. Someone told us there was an epidemic of Spanish influenza: Influenza de la Spagnuolo.’14
By the week ending 5 October, 700 Philadelphians had died of flu and pneumonia. The next week, 2,600 died, and over 4,500 died the following week. Doctors were rushed off their feet and were days behind in reporting deaths to the authorities. With hundreds of thousands estimated to be sick, patients overwhelmed the hospitals, arriving in limousines, horse carts and even wheelbarrows. To make matters worse, those whose job it was to treat the patients fell ill themselves. Hospitals had to struggle on with even less in the way of nurses and orderlies and cleaners. At the Philadelphia Hospital, forty nurses fell sick. Soon the authorities were pleading with anyone able bodied and willing to work to come forward. In North Philadelphia, Susanna Turner volunteered to help nurse Spanish flu victims:
I was seventeen years old and I thought I might like to be a nurse. So I went to our pastor and I asked what I could do. He told me to see Mrs Thomas (the wife of Ira Thomas who was the catcher for the Philadelphia Athletics, our city’s baseball team) who was making masks in a little side room of the hospital. Mrs Thomas made me dip a mask in disinfectant outside the sickroom. Then I put it on and went in. I carried bed pans, helped the Sisters the best I could. People were so weak, they almost seemed dead.15
Every once in a while, I’d stiffen up and get scared and wonder if I was going to get the flu. But I was surviving. I just lived from day to day. I didn’t think about the future.16
Essential services collapsed during the epidemic. Four hundred and eighty-seven police officers did not show up for work, while the Bureau of Child Hygiene was overwhelmed with hundreds of abandoned children. As they could not send the children to orphanages for fear of spreading the disease, they had to ask neighbours to take the children in. When 850 employees of the Pennsylvania Bell Telephone Company stayed away from work on 8 October, Bell was forced to take out a ne
wspaper advertisement stating that the company could handle no ‘other than absolutely necessary calls compelled by the epidemic or by war necessity’.17 The following day, the Department of Health and charities authorized the company to deny service to anyone making unessential calls, which it did in a thousand cases.
Nurses witnessed scenes reminiscent of the original Black Death. In their distinctive white robes and gauze masks, they were followed by crowds desperate for help, or shunned out of fear. A nurse could start her day with a list of fifteen patients and end up seeing fifty. ‘One nurse found a husband dead in the same room where his wife lay with newly born twins. It had been twenty-four hours since the death and the births, and the wife had no food but an apple which happened to lie within reach.’18
While civic leadership was patchy and inconsistent,19 the Philadelphia Council of National Defense coordinated a campaign against the pandemic. This organization opened a Bureau of Information in the Strawbridge and Clothier department store on 10 October with a twenty-four-hour telephone helpline and ran an advertisement in the local papers: ‘Influenza Sufferers, If you need Physicians, Nurses, Ambulances, Motor Vehicles, or any other service because of the epidemic, telephone “Filbert 100” and when the number answers, say: Influenza.’20 The switchboard was immediately jammed. Bell Telephone Company doubled, then quadrupled, its lines. By 7 October, it was overwhelmed – 850 of the ‘hello girls’ were sick with flu.21
As always during epidemics, the poor were the most vulnerable. In the slum tenements, families who did not immediately succumb to Spanish flu starved when they lost their breadwinner parents, and had to rely on volunteers bringing supplies from the soup kitchens house to house. Mercifully, the Council for National Defense had plenty of vehicles. Over 400 vehicles from the Auto Committee of the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive were diverted to fight the epidemic, fifteen ambulances were available after 10 October, and dozens of private cars and even taxis were donated to drive doctors and nurses around.
But there was still a shortage of doctors, nurses and auxiliaries to carry out the work. Within days of the outbreak on 1 October, elderly doctors were being called out of retirement, while medical students suddenly found themselves shouldering the responsibilities of veteran physicians, working fifteen-hour days.
Charities and religious and political organizations were keen to help. Hundreds of teachers, unable to work since the schools had been closed, also volunteered; Archbishop Daugherty assigned 200 nurses from the Order of St Joseph to the emergency hospitals; Roman Catholic nuns worked at a Jewish hospital under the direction of a Doctor Cohen, while the St Vincent de Paul Society offered food, clothing and care, with its members prepared to dig graves if required.22 Dozens of off-duty police officers from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association acted as stretcher-bearers.23 In South Philadelphia, where the epidemic was worse, hundreds of grocery stores closed to the public and distributed their goods to the poor and needy, and a fireman drove an old horse-drawn ambulance through the streets delivering aid and food.24
Until the Spanish Lady arrived in town, Columba Voltz had always loved the sound of bells from the nearby church. ‘They rang jubilantly, joyfully, all the time. The bells were beautiful, and they gave me such joy.’25 All this changed when Spanish flu hit the neighbourhood. Columba, who lived across the street from an undertaker’s, watched coffins stacked up on the sidewalk.
The beautiful bells had stopped ringing. All day long, I watched coffins being carried into the church, accompanied by the low, sad, funeral bells: BONG, BONG, BONG. Only a few people were allowed into the church at a time and the service lasted only a few minutes, just long enough to bless the coffin. Then the casket would be carried out and another one would go in. All day long, the funeral bells tolled: BONG, BONG, BONG. Up and down the street, crepes were hanging on the doors of houses. I knew inside every one of those houses, someone was being laid out. I was very scared and depressed. I thought the world was coming to an end.26
The Philadelphia death rate spiralled, with 2,600 dead in the second week of October and 4,500 dying of flu and pneumonia in the third week. And then, in a horrific twist, Spanish flu hit the undertaking trade. ‘On one occasion the Society for Organizing Charity called 25 undertakers before finding one able and willing to bury a member of a poor family.’27 Bodies remained at home for days. Private undertaking firms were overwhelmed by the demand and some exploited the situation by raising their prices by as much as 600 per cent.28 Complaints circulated that cemeteries charged families $15 for a burial, then made them dig the graves themselves. The Donohue family, who had run a small undertaking business since 1898, had to hire a security guard to mind their caskets. Michael Donohue, just a boy at the time, remembered:
Normally, stealing a casket would be inconceivable. It would be equated with grave robbing. But in October 1918, the influenza epidemic changed people’s minds about what they would do, how they would act. People were desperate. They felt they had no alternative, there was no place for them to turn. These were nice people, people who wouldn’t have done this otherwise. These were our neighbors, our friends, and for some of them, stealing a casket was the only way they could see to provide for their loved one.29
Philadelphia had just one city morgue, at 13th and Wood Streets, with space for just thirty-six bodies, normally sufficient for homicide victims or unknown ‘John Does’. By the third week of October, it was struggling to cope with several hundred corpses, piled three deep in the corridors and in every room, covered with dirty blood-stained sheets.30 The bodies were neither embalmed nor packed with ice, and soon emitted a nauseating stench. The doors, left open to allow air to circulate, stood open upon a scene from Hell. At one point, there were ten times as many bodies at the morgue as coffins.31
By 10 October, 500 bodies lay awaiting burial at the morgue and the undertakers, coffin makers and gravediggers were unable to keep pace with the demand. To cope with the sheer number of dead, the authorities opened an emergency morgue at a cold-storage plant on 20th and Cambridge Streets. Another five makeshift morgues would be opened before the epidemic was over.32
Collecting the bodies was another matter: while it was comparatively simple to remove bodies from Emergency Hospital Number One and take them to a cemetery, it was far more time consuming collecting the dead from homes and lodgings; on one occasion, six wagons and a motor truck drove around the city and collected 221 corpses between one and four days old.33
After 528 Philadelphians died in a single day, Father Joseph Corrigan, director of the city’s Catholic Charities, organized a melancholy convoy of six horse-drawn wagons. Night and day, they combed alleys and back streets for the abandoned dead. Parish volunteers and theology students manned the grim march, carrying shovels and spades, lighting the way with kerosene lanterns.34
Little Harriet Ferrel lived in a poor black district. ‘People were in a panic. Suffering. Crying. The Board of Health had issued a proclamation that anyone who died had to be left out for the wagons. But it was just too much to bear – having to put your loved one on the street for a truck to take them away.’35
Selma Epp’s entire family succumbed to Spanish flu.
My parents went for help. They stood in line for hours outside Pennsylvania Hospital, but were turned away. So they came home and made up their own remedies, like castor oil, laxatives. My grandfather made wine. Nothing helped. Everyone in my family – my parents, my aunts and my brother Daniel – everyone up and down our block was sick. There were no medicines, no doctors, nothing people could do to heal themselves. My grandfather was very religious. He was an Orthodox Jew and he wore his tallith shawl and he prayed, hoping God would take away the illness. Everyone in our house grew weaker and weaker. Then Daniel died. My aunt saw the horse-drawn wagon coming down the street. The strongest person in our family carried Daniel’s body to the sidewalk. Everyone was too weak to protest. There were no coffins in the wagon, just bodies piled up on top of each other. Daniel was two; he was just a
little boy. They put his body in the wagon and took him away.36
Philadelphia’s fifty embalmers were soon overwhelmed by demand, a problem partially solved by a resourceful undertaker, Mr H. S. Eckels of the Purple Cross undertakers’ association. Mr Eckels asked the mayor of Philadelphia to contact the Secretary of War, who sent ten military embalmers.37
The shortage of coffins was another matter, with the cheapest ones sold out, leaving only the most expensive available, and in some cases marked up by unscrupulous undertakers. This problem was solved in Philadelphia by the Council of National Defense recruiting several local woodworking businesses to make extra coffins. These were distributed with strict instructions that they were only to be available for the burial of Philadelphians and that the undertaker could add no more than 20 per cent to the price.38
Faced with a shortage of gravediggers, the city authorities recruited navvies from the highways department and prisoners from the local jails. When the number of dead became so high that mere manpower was not enough, the Bureau of Highways lent a steam shovel to dig trenches in Potter’s Field for the burial of the poor and unknown, their bodies tagged in case relatives appeared who would later want to remove them to family plots. Michael Donohue, whose family ran a small funeral home in West Philadelphia, recalled:
The cemeteries went to extraordinary lengths to help people, especially the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. In some cases, families had to dig the graves themselves, but it was either that or they weren’t going to get the grave open. In order to maintain some level of humanity, the Archdiocese brought in a steam shovel to excavate section 42 of Holy Cross Cemetery – what became known as the ‘trench.’ The trench was the cemetery’s way of expediting burials to help families, give people closure. They lined up the dead, one right after another, and did the committal prayers right there in the trench.39
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