Pandemic 1918

by Catharine Arnold

The Donohue family had one modern, motorized hearse engraved with the family name. It could not keep up with the sheer numbers of the dead. ‘Everything was in panic, disarray. We were burying our neighbors, our friends, people we did business with, people we went to church with. The bodies never stopped coming. The sadness, the heartbreak went on and on, day after day.’40

  Michael’s family were particularly struck by the youth of the Spanish flu victims:

  Usually a mortician sees people dying in their forties, their fifties, some older, some in their nineties. But in the fall of 1918, young people were dying: eighteen-year-olds, twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, forty-year-olds. These were people who should not have died. Most of them were either first generation immigrants or right from their countries of origin: Ireland or Poland or Italy. These were people who came to the Promised Land. They came to start fresh, and when they got here, their lives were destroyed.41

  The Donohue family had kept detailed ledgers dating back to 1898. But after the epidemic struck Philadelphia, the ledgers reflect the sheer chaos and havoc wreaked by Spanish flu.

  Our ledger books are all handwritten and the ones from 1918 are written in the flowing fancy penmanship common in that era. In the early part of 1918, things are well documented. You can tell who a person was, who his parents were, his children. The book lists where he lived, what he died of, where the viewing and funeral were held, where he was buried. But when you get to October 1918, the ledgers become sloppy and confused; things are crossed out, scribbled in borders. Information is scant and all out of chronological order – it’s nearly impossible to keep track of what’s going on, it’s just page and page of tragedy and turmoil. Sometimes we got paid. Sometimes we didn’t. Usually, we buried people we knew. Other times, we buried strangers. One entry reads: ‘A girl.’ Another says ‘A Polish woman.’ Another: ‘A Polish man and his baby.’ Someone must have asked us to take care of these people and it was just the decent thing to do. We had a responsibility to make sure things were done in a proper, moral, dignified manner. Scribbled at the bottom of the ledger, below the entry for the ‘girl,’ is ‘This girl was buried in the trench.’ This girl was our addition to the trench. I guess we had nowhere else to put her.42

  Meanwhile, Columba Voltz’s parents had fallen sick and taken to their beds. ‘I was petrified. I was only eight. I didn’t know what to do. None of our relatives would come near us for fear of getting sick. And all day long, those horrible funeral bells rang: BONG, BONG, BONG. I heard them even in my sleep.’43

  Eventually, a neighbour came to help out and nurse Columba’s stricken parents. Columba tried to help, ‘I made mustard plasters [a poultice of mustard seed inside a protective dressing, designed to treat muscle pain] and put them on my parents’ chests. I brought lemonade, ran errands.’44 Columba went on gazing out of the window, watching the ceaseless tide of funerals winding their way in and out of the parish church. But then her teeth started to chatter, her head ached, she felt feverish and dizzy. She got into bed and:

  All I heard was those horrible bells: BONG, BONG, BONG. I was terrified. I was too afraid even to move. I lay very still, almost without breathing. All day long, I heard those funeral bells. I was sure I was going to die. I was sure they were going to put me inside a coffin, and carry me inside the church. I was sure those horrible bells were going to ring for me.45

  Little Harriet Ferrel had fallen sick, too, alongside her father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle and cousin. Harriet’s mother had to nurse all of them: ‘Our family doctor, Dr. Milton White, came by. He told my mother she didn’t need to feed me anymore, because I wasn’t going to live. He said if I did live, I would be blind.’46

  In North Street, Anna Milani fell sick, along with her brothers and sisters:

  The pain was awful. I remember the terrible, terrible headache, the pain all over my body, in my legs, my stomach, my chest. We were all very, very sick. Our father made us drink chamomile tea. Our mother made plasters out of flour. She couldn’t afford mustard plasters, so she heated up flour, put it in a warm cloth, and put it on our chests.47

  Life became harsh in the City of Brotherly Love, and Susanna Turner saw her neighbourhood torn apart by Spanish flu. ‘Neighbors weren’t helping neighbors. No one was taking any chances. People became selfish. We lost our spirit of charity. Fear just withered the hearts of people.’48

  Meanwhile, Anna Milani’s favourite brother, two-year-old Harry, was getting worse. A neighbour brought a doctor to the house, who diagnosed double pneumonia.

  I was like a second mother to Harry. When Harry got sick, he called for me all the time. Even though I was sick, I was always beside him. I would cuddle and pet him; I couldn’t do anything else. Harry had big, beautiful eyes, but his face got so thin, his eyes bulged out. He was in so much pain. We were all in so much pain.49

  In another district of Philadelphia, Mrs Ferrel was ignoring medical advice to withhold food from her little daughter. ‘You know how mothers are. No mother listens when someone tells her not to feed her child. She does what she has to do for her children, and doesn’t listen to anyone else, and that’s what my mother did for me.’50

  For Susanna Turner, working in the parish hospital alongside the nuns, the epidemic allowed her to prove her worth as a nurse. When Susanna asked after one patient, a pregnant woman, Francis the messenger boy said that she had died. ‘“Where is she?” I asked. Francis said, “In the back room of the school.” So we walked down the hall and I said, “Francis, I think I hear a noise in there.” We went in. She was alive. The nuns called the ambulance. The woman was taken to a hospital where she delivered her child.’51

  Anna Milani, sick herself, was caring for her little brother when her mother told her to get some sleep.

  My mother said I’d been up too long taking care of Harry. I should rest. While I was lying down, Harry died. My mother came to get me. She was crying, holding my baby sister and crying. She said Harry had opened his eyes – his head rolled back and forth – and he said, ‘Nanina.’ My name was Nanina in Italian. Harry died with my name in his mouth.

  There were no embalmers, so my parents covered Harry with ice. There were no coffins, just boxes painted white. My parents put Harry in a box. My mother wanted him dressed in white – it had to be white. So she dressed him in a little white suit and put him in the box. You’d think he was sleeping. We all said a little prayer. The priest came over and blessed him. I remember my mother putting in a white piece of cloth over his face; then they closed the box. They put Harry in a little wagon, drawn by a horse. Only my father and uncle were allowed to go to the cemetery. When they got there, two soldiers lowered Harry into a hole.52

  CHAPTER TEN

  A WINDING SHEET AND A WOODEN BOX

  AFTER MAKING A catastrophic impact on America’s Eastern Seaboard, the Spanish Lady returned to the Midwest, attacking the military and civilians alike. Valiant efforts to halt her progress floundered for lack of sufficient medical staff. With so many doctors and nurses away in the army, ‘all the organizational machinery in the world could not make up for the cold fact that there weren’t enough nurses to care for all the men, women, and children who would need them so desperately in the coming weeks’.1

  When influenza struck the Great Lakes Naval Training Station at Illinois, thirty miles north of Chicago, on 11 September, 2,600 sailors went sick within the week. Josie Mabel Brown was among the nurses summoned to Great Lakes to cope with the epidemic.

  Josie, who had graduated from nursing school just a few months after the United States entered the war, had already been called up. At this period, newly graduated registered nurses were obliged to serve in the military. ‘I had to go,’2 Josie recalled. ‘There was no choice about it. When my paper came back, it said, “You are in the Navy now. Do not leave Saint Louis; do not change your address; do not change your telephone number.”’3

  Josie’s actual call-up was dramatic:

  One day, I was at the theater and suddenly the scre
en went blank. Then a message appeared across the screen: ‘Would Josie M. Brown please report to the ticket office?’ I went back and there was a Western Union boy with a telegram from the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, DC. It said, ‘You are called to duty. Do you have enough money to travel?’ and ‘When is the earliest date that you can travel?’ And I wired back, ‘I have money. I can pay my way.’ About forty-five minutes later a reply came back. ‘Proceed to Great Lakes, Illinois. Keep strict account of your expenses. Do not pay over $1.50 for your meals or over 50¢ for tips. You will be reimbursed.’4

  Josie boarded an old Pullman train to Chicago. ‘I went right through our town and saw the light in the window that mother put there. I got to Chicago in the morning. When someone opened a paper in front of me I saw “6,000 in the hospital have Spanish Influenza in Great Lakes, Illinois.” I said, “Oh, that’s where I’m going. What is Spanish Influenza?”’5

  Josie soon found out. After arriving at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, she was given a meal of roast pork and apple sauce and then went on duty for the first time. Josie was appalled by the sight that met her eyes.

  My supervisor took me to a ward that was supposedly caring for 42 patients. There was a man lying on the bed dying and one was lying on the floor. Another man was on a stretcher waiting for the fellow on the bed to die. We would wrap him in a winding sheet because he had stopped breathing. I don’t know whether he was dead or not, but we wrapped him in a winding sheet and left nothing but the big toe on the left foot out with a shipping tag on it to tell the man’s rank, his nearest of kin, and hometown. And the ambulance carried four litters. It would bring us four live ones and take out four dead ones.6

  The morgues were overflowing, packed almost to the ceiling with bodies stacked one on top of another as the morticians worked day and night. ‘You could never turn around without seeing a big red truck being loaded with caskets for the train station so the bodies could be sent home.’7

  Little attempt was made to treat the patients.

  We didn’t have time to treat them. We didn’t take temperatures; we didn’t even have time to take blood pressure. We would give them a little hot whiskey toddy; that’s about all we had time to do. They would have terrific nosebleeds with it. Sometimes the blood would just shoot across the room. You had to get out of the way or someone’s nose would bleed all over you.8

  Some were delirious and some had their lungs punctured. Then their bodies would fill with air. You would feel somebody and he would be bubbles. You would see them with bubbles all through their arms.9

  There was worse to come. ‘When their lungs collapsed, air was trapped beneath their skin. As we rolled the dead in winding sheets, their bodies crackled – an awful crackling noise which sounded like Rice Crispies [sic] when you pour milk over them.’10

  Working sixteen-hour days, Josie was little more than an intermediary between the ambulance and the morgue. Even as she slept, Josie seemed to hear the trucks reversing into the morgue, collecting the dead. As to the numbers of the dead, Josie had no idea of the final total. ‘They died by the thousands. There were 173,000 men at Great Lakes at the time, and 6,000 were in the hospitals at the height of the epidemic. I suppose no one knows how many died. They just lost track of them.’11

  Back in Chicago, a young man nicknamed ‘Diz’ lied about his age and enlisted as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross. Ignoring his father’s desperate pleas, young Diz took himself off to the Red Cross Ambulance Corps Training Facility on Chicago’s South Side and was soon learning how to drive and repair cars and trucks. When Diz himself was struck down by influenza like so many healthy young men, his father’s fears had been realized. Sent home and nursed by his mother, Diz survived, to become the world’s most successful animator under his full name of Walt Disney.12

  As thousands of theatres closed across the country, an up-and-coming vaudeville act named the Marx Brothers had worked up a show. Entitled The Street Cinderella, the production had a score by Gus Kahn and Egbert Van Alstyne, but Groucho Marx had little faith in the enterprise. Living up to his name, Groucho later commented that his brother Chico had ‘hired six dancers out of a five-and-dime store, and gave them each ten dollars. They were overpaid.’13 The Street Cinderella might have prospered but for Spanish flu. In a strange twist on the concept of flu prevention, ‘vaudeville theaters were only allowed to be half full – members of the audience had to leave the seat on either side empty so that they would not breathe on one another. To further protect themselves many wore surgical masks, so that even when they laughed the sound was muffled.’14 As a result, The Street Cinderella ‘could be chalked up as another victim of flu, succumbing in Michigan to bad reviews and empty houses’.15

  As the epidemic intensified, the windy city witnessed similar tragic scenes to the ones that had blighted Boston, New York and Philadelphia. October the 17th 1918 swiftly became known as ‘Black Thursday’ when 381 people died and 1,200 fell sick. The city ran out of hearses, and trolley buses, draped in black, were used to collect the bodies. In an even more desperate bid to halt the spread of Spanish flu, funerals were banned. The civic authorities declared that:

  There shall be no public funerals held in Chicago over any body dead from any disease or cause whatsoever. No wakes or public gatherings of any kind shall be held in connection with these bodies. No one except adult relatives and friends not to exceed ten persons in addition to the undertaker, undertaker’s assistants, minister, and necessary drivers shall be permitted to attend any funeral. No dead body shall be taken into any church or chapel for funeral services in connection with such body.16

  While Chicago Health Commissioner Dr John Dill Robertson ordered the police to ‘arrest thousands, if necessary, to stop sneezing in public!’ there was one small grain of comfort: Reverend J. P. Brushingham of Chicago’s Morals Commission noted that during October the crime rate in Chicago had dropped by 43 per cent. There was no protection against insanity, alas. Chicago resident Peter Marrazo, a recent immigrant, became convinced that his family was doomed and barricaded his wife and four children inside their apartment, shouting: ‘I’ll cure them in my own way!’ Then he slashed their throats. It was subsequently revealed that none of them had actually been suffering from Spanish flu.17

  Up in Alaska, Governor Thomas Riggs, Jr, learned of the pandemic raging in the ‘Outside’ and imposed strict quarantine regulations. Travel into the Alaskan interior was restricted, US marshals were posted at ports, trail heads and river mouths, and schools, churches, theatres and pool halls were shut down.18 At Fairbanks, quarantine stations were guarded by marshals, and citizens underwent regular health checks, with those who passed their inspections issued with armbands. The frontier town of Shaktoolik, out in the wilderness, took a more traditional approach. Guards were paid at the rate of four deer a month, while anyone who violated quarantine was fined in firewood, which had to be delivered up to the community, ‘sawed, split and piled’.19

  Despite these precautions, Spanish flu broke through the sanity cordons, spreading along the coast of Alaska and into the interior. Half the white population of Nome succumbed to influenza, with Superintendent of Education Walter Shields becoming one of the first victims; the native population was practically annihilated.20 Spanish flu cut a swathe through Nome’s Iñupiat Eskimo population, killing 176 out of 300.21 According to the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Iñupiat had reacted to the news of Spanish flu by panicking and running from cabin to cabin, spreading disease. Entire families, too sick to keep their fires going, froze to death. When one group of native Alaskans were taken to hospital, they became convinced they had been condemned to a death-house and hanged themselves. Stefansson himself suffered bereavement during the epidemic, losing five of his guides, including the legendary musher, Split-the-Wind.22

  In a desperate attempt to control the outbreak, Governor Riggs ordered the native Alaskans to stay inside their cabins and avoid public gatherings, a diktat which flew in
the face of their traditional values. The Iñupiat people were convivial, generous and had a culture characterized by communal living. Isolation was to them a form of living death. They were also considered to be fatalistic, responding to the epidemic in a markedly different fashion from the white settlers. One schoolteacher wrote that:

  They refused to help themselves but preferred to sit on the floor and wait to die. I did everything for them; furnished wood and water, split kindling, made shavings, built fires, cooked food and delivered it to them, and even acted as undertaker and hearse driver. Apparently the native had no regard but rather fear for their dead. Frequently I had to rescue corpses from the dogs which began to eat them.23

  Across Alaska, village after village fell to influenza. Too sick to hunt, many native Alaskans resorted to killing and eating their sled dogs, while in Hamilton the dogs started eating the people.

  Given the isolated nature of the remote Alaskan communities, the swift trajectory of Spanish flu seems inexplicable. At this point, before the Armistice, Alaska could not blame the epidemic on returning soldiers or big social gatherings. Tragically, the explanation lies with the one service that promised it would always get through: the postal service. And, like the US mail, the Spanish Lady always got through, even where others had failed.

  North of the border, the first documented case of Spanish flu in the civilian population of Canada was reported at Victoriaville, on 8 September 1918.24 Within a month, the disease controlled the entire country from coast to coast. By the end of 1918, 50,000 Canadians had died of Spanish flu.25

  The Spanish Lady arrived in Winnipeg, capital of Manitoba, on 30 September 1918, travelling west on a troop train containing sick soldiers. Within four days of arrival, two of the soldiers had died, along with a local railway worker, Winnipeg’s first civilian casualty. The civic authorities were hopeful that the influenza infection would soon pass, but by 12 October the Manitoba Free Press was telling its readers that ‘All schools, churches, theatres [sic] dance halls, and other public places in Winnipeg and suburbs will be closed for an indefinite period at midnight tonight as a precautionary measure against the spreading epidemic of Spanish “flu,” of which 12 new cases were reported in the city yesterday.’26