“People spread the disease before they knew they had it, got sicker, brought it home, and died. … Ambulance drivers, stretcher bearers, doctors, nurses: working until they died on their feet. Trolley conductors, shopkeepers. Teachers. …
“Imagine: around the world, millions and millions vital and alive one day, slack-jawed dead the next. Imagine people dying in such numbers that they had to be buried in mass graves dug with steam shovels–dying not of some ancient plague or in some faraway land, but dying here and now, right in front of you. … What would you do?
“I’ll tell you what a lot of us did. We boozed and screwed like there was no tomorrow …”
—Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day (sequence rearranged)
My father, who was 1 year old when the flu reaped its victims in 1918-19, had a joke: “I opened the window and in flew Enza.” Although I hadn’t thought of it until just now, I wonder if that joke was rooted in the national trauma that he was too young to consciously remember but that must have filled the air of his childhood. What the psychologists would call a counter-phobic reaction: when you’re confronting something too scary to be borne, you find a way to laugh at it so you can get by.
About epidemiology, I know next to nothing. (Though I’m getting a crash course in it, thanks to an excellent website by epidemiologist Dr. Thomas Glass, about whom I plan to write in a future post.) I have no wisdom, no insights to offer about the so-called Spanish flu–we all know by now, don’t we, that the name is a misnomer and defamation of an innocent country?–or how it compares with our current world crisis. But history and memory do interest me, and I’ve spent much of my life reading the former and searching my own experience to understand the latter.
The first thing that strikes me: although I had a strong interest in the time right before and after World War I, how little I knew about the Spanish flu. Sure, I’d heard of it. But I had no sense of how catastrophic it was until, about ten years ago, I read the harrowing account in the opening pages of Mary Doria Russell’s 2008 novel Dreamers of the Day.
The history books had mostly forgotten it.
I check the index of R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton’s 1106-page A History of the Modern World. There are entries for “Spanish America,” “Spanish-American War,” “Spanish Armada,” “Spanish Main,” and “Spanish Succession, War of.” No “Spanish flu”; and browsing through the chapter on the First World War, which includes a section on “The Economic and Social Impact of the War,” I find no hint that the pandemic ever happened.
Ditto for Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, which to be fair begins with the aftermath of the war. (Its subtitle is The World from the Twenties to the Eighties.) But surely the human devastation wrought by the pandemic–which infected one-third of the world’s population, killing at least 50 million–would have been worth some mention, if Johnson had believed it of any significance.
The World War I chapter of Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People has a section on “The War at Home.” Morison–who was born in 1887, who must have experienced grisly scenes like those Russell describes at least at second hand–talks about “wheatless Mondays,” “meatless Tuesdays,” and similar home-front measures to support the war effort, like the introduction of Daylight Saving Time. No mention of a pandemic in which 675,000 Americans–more than half a percent of the population at the time–lost their lives. In the following chapter, Morison rhapsodizes about the stunning advances made in medicine during the first third of the twentieth century. “The death rate for tuberculosis dropped from 180 to 49 per 100,000, for typhoid from 36 to 2, for diphtheria from 43 to 2, for measles from 12 to 1, for pneumonia from 158 to 50. … Yellow fever and smallpox were practically wiped out,” and so on and so forth. This is a context in which the Spanish flu cries out for at least a parenthetical acknowledgment. But there’s no whisper of it.
And what shall we say of the Hong Kong flu?
The what?
I experienced a faint sense of recognition when I read the article by Bojan Pancevski on the Wall Street Journal website (April 24), “Forgotten Pandemic Offers Contrast to Today’s Coronavirus Lockdowns.” Yeah, I remembered something about a “Hong Kong flu” from long, long ago. But what exactly was it?
“The novel virus triggered a state of emergency in New York City,” Pancevski writes; “caused so many deaths in Berlin that corpses were stored in subway tunnels; overwhelmed London’s hospitals; and in some areas of France left half of the workforce bedridden. Severely ill patients suffering from acute pneumonia were put on ventilators, often in vain.”
“Flu-Filled Hospitals Postpone Operations, And Some Patients Die,” ran a contemporary Wall Street Journal headline. “Blood Shortage, Sick Staffs Add to Delays; Flu Deaths Climb to a Record in Week.”
This wasn’t back in Grandpa’s day, either. The Hong Kong flu struck, like the Spanish flu before it, in two waves: 1968-69 and 1969-70. I was 21 years old during the worst of it. And I barely noticed it was happening.
When the pandemic had passed, and a vaccine discovered, it had claimed the lives of 100,000 Americans. The population at the time was 200 million, so a comparable loss today would be 165,000. That’s nearly twice the toll COVID-19 has taken so far.
And we barely noticed. And life went on as usual. And in the summer in between the two waves we celebrated Woodstock.
Before you quit reading in disgust, let me make one thing clear. I am NOT saying that the lockdowns were a mistake, that we should have reacted the coronavirus the way we did to the Hong Kong flu. It’s completely clear to me, as it was to Bojan Pancevski, that COVID is a far deadlier illness. I have no doubt that, had we let it rage through the population, the death rates would have soared, possibly into the millions. Our medical system would have collapsed before the onslaught.
(An observation–the closest thing to a political remark I will make in this post. For a 72-year-old retiree like me, unemployment is not an existential threat; the virus is. For a healthy 40-year-old with a family to support, it’s the other way around. Use this as a rule of thumb to understand, and respect, the divisions that are starting to emerge over where we go from here.)
But 100,000 casualties is no trivial matter. It’s close to twice the number of Americans who perished in 20 years’ fighting in Vietnam, the hot topic of the era. How is it that all those lives were lost, and we barely gave it a thought?
Maybe the answer to the question lies in who “we” were. Anybody who remembers 1968 had to have been fairly young at the time; he or she has to be in the “vulnerable” category (shall we say?) now. That was an era when the young were the people who counted–at least, in our own self-important eyes. We had energy, we had idealism, we were going to remake the world. That is, if we managed not to get ourselves blown to pieces in some Southeast Asian jungle.
The old, who were the Hong Kong flu’s main victims? Well, it was a pity. But they were going to die pretty soon anyway, weren’t they?
(A reflection that seems distinctly less consoling, a half century later.)
If those who were elderly in the 1960s could speak from their graves, what would they say? What would they remember? Would they think of the pandemic as a defining event of their time, as my generation thinks of the Vietnam War? Somehow I doubt it. Youthful narcissism may be part of how to account for our peculiar failure of memory. I can’t believe it’s the whole explanation.
Pancevski writes: “In the 1960s and ’70s, the carnage of World War II was a recent memory. Life expectancy was significantly lower than today and such diseases as polio, diphtheria, measles or tuberculosis were part of everyday life”–a sad counterpoint to the burbly enthusiasm I’ve quoted from Samuel Eliot Morison, which singled out diphtheria, measles and tuberculosis as diseases beaten long ago. We were tougher back then, Pancevski seems to imply. (And yet we really, really, really did not want to get killed in Vietnam.)
Or is there something about pandemics that, through their ungovernable terror and arbitrary slaughter, induces an amnesia in those who come after?
And will the same happen, in future generations, with the coronavirus? Let’s rise together from our graves, you and I, and see.
by David Halperin
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