The 1918 flu pandemic altered American Life in ways that are familiar to those living through the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Conflicting information left people wary and fearful. College classes were held outside, sports were canceled, asks or challenged as unamerican, and fines imposed on those who refuse to wear them. Next, Christopher Mcknight nichols recounts how the country experienced the events of a century ago and the lessons we might learn. He directs the Oregon University center for humanities. Since the pandemic has begun, for our purposes, since we shut down in march, they thing that has been driving our analysis here as historians is what is the historical precedent . Obviously, 1918 is the one that comes to mind and we have nobody better to tell us about 1918 that my friend christopher nichols. Hes an associate professor of history at oregon state. Hes the director of the Oregon State Center for humanities and the founder of their citizenship and crisis initiative. He also studied at harvard and wesley in and got his ma and phd from a good friend of ours at the university of virginia. He is an expert on i would say the early parts of the 20th century. He is expanding out and he and i, before we came on, we were chatting about new work on ideologies in u. S. Foreign policy, which that book itself was a seminal book in the field in 1987 and im glad someone has decided to go in and update it. Theres no better person to do it than chris. Hes going to be talking to us about the 1918 pandemic. I would encourage you as you look at your zoom creek zoom screen, youll see a q and a button. Hit that button and submit your questions. You can see other peoples questions as they come in, and if you like their question or if you were going to ask a similar question, hit the thumbs up button. That will be helpful because that will move it up the queue. The more people who like something, the higher it gets, just like anything else on the web. I will remind you there is no chat function here. We want people to focus on the q a. One of the great benefits to doing this on the web is it is much easier to kick out anyone who is unruly, so keep it civil, people. Without further ado, im going to ask Brian Franklin to turn on chriscamera. There he is. How are you doing him a buddy . I just gave you the intro. Looks like a sunny day in corvallis, so im going to turn things over to you. Chris is going to show us some images and walk us through and then he and i will come back and have this discussion when hes done with the presentation. Thank you so much. First of all, i want to say thank you to everyone who is here with us. We had record turnout for registration. I hope i can keep you interested. This topic is inherently interesting, so you dont need too much. A special thank you to Brian Franklin who helped organize this and is behind the scenes running the webinar and zoom web functions. And also, of course, most important, many thank yous to professor jeffrey angle. We worked on a project that will be out next year, look for rethinking america, grand strategy. Jeff wrote a great chapter in that book. What i want to do things is im going to give you a march through what happened in the pandemic of 1918. This is something i started studying years ago when i was studying world war i and international and domestic politics. When i taught it to my survey students, they were much more interested in world war i. But now, with no such thing. We are attuned to the historical lessons we can learn from the most significant Global Pandemic comparable to our current one in 2020. I will give you a brief and hopefully compelling talk about that history. Then, im going to telescope out and make comparisons to 2020 and think more globally. I will give you the u. S. Story with International Dimensions and we will pause to reflect on questions and historical comparisons. Recently, there was a roundtable working on this subject. We dont always agree, but im surprised at how much consensus there is about the lessons you can learn from this. Im going to give you this brief rundown of what happened in the pandemic of 1918 and then we will telescope in and out, so please keep your questions coming. One of the things i think is most important to consider when we go back to the 1918 moment, and heres where we need to look at social history the human suffering and human cost. I will talk a little bit about the numbers but one of the crucial things to understand is the story of people like victor von. He was a fascinating figure, a distinguished leader of american medicine, the dean of the university of medicine, in charge of the army medical services, Founding Editor of the journal of laboratory and medicine, served as a colonel in the army, led the division of Communicable Diseases. Heres a guy who has seen a lot of disease and death and he gets involved leading that division when the worst deadly second wave of the pandemic began in the fall of 1918. He traveled to massachusetts as part of a team appointed by the army Surgeon General. He got there and was devastated by what he saw. This was a little outside of boston. It was far worse than any other Communicable Disease he had been involved with. They are placed on the cots until every bed is, yet others crowd in. A distressing cough brings up the blood. In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked at the morgue like cordwood. This is the sort of thing medical doctors were seeing at barracks throughout the fall of 1918. Because the barracks were so integrally connected to nearby committees, it almost medially got to the civilian population, despite what Public Health officials and army medical fissions often said. In terms of the human costs and suffering, the numbers are somewhat staggering. This is one of the things we need to think about when we think about the u. S. Case. If we think about 1918, 1919 and the pandemic, the u. S. Lost 675,000 people. On the order of 50 million around the world died, although there are some differences in terms of the estimates between 20 and 100 million. In the u. S. , 20 to 30 of the population was infected. The u. S. Lost more soldiers to flu and pneumonia and other diseases than in combat in world war i. All of this was integrally connected to the war effort. Thats the other piece to understand and think about. How did it begin . What happened . It all began in the u. S. Context in winter, 1918. In march of 1918 in kansas. You began to see widespread illness of a seemingly new type. In american troops mustering there, newly drafted or enlisted. A soldier recalled 12 men who slept in my squadron, seven were ill at one time. Something like 24 of the 30 army bases were overwhelmed in the spring of 1918. There are a couple of different origin stories about the influenza virus and i will talk a little later about the spanish flu as it is sometimes called and what that meant. In the u. S. Context, a lot of scholars now believe the viral version we think of as a pandemic version originated in kansas in february and march of 1918. There is an epidemiologist and others who track the virus to vietnam, china and france. But the version we think of when it spreads around the world comes out of kansas. And you can watch that move. For those of us who study president ial and u. S. History, you can watch this move through army records in particular. Weve got amazing data on who got sick, when and why, and thats largely because of army data. If anyone says we dont have good information about how the flu spread, they are not looking the right places because we historians know exactly where to look. You can get very finegrained analysis. One of the things i note when we get on the flu of 1918 and why it is so comparable to today is it went around the world. A lot of historians have made different arguments related to this that the world was effectively globalized before world war i. You see that playing out in terms of how this virus spreads. U. S. Troops in particular arriving in france are conduits of transmission. They are vectors of disease. U. S. Soldiers first begin arriving well before the pandemic in june of 1917, but the u. S. Does not get its mobilization ramped up until 1918 and that roughly coincides with the spread of the flu. U. S. Troops on railroads crisscross the nation, they brought the flu with them. You can see it in local newspapers and i will show you a few as a we go. You can see the flu arrive in cities like portland here or philadelphia or dallas because it almost arrives with u. S. Soldiers, troop transmissions, civilian workers and that sort of thing. So i globalized world spread the pandemic in a way that previous ones did not. Transmission of people and goods across borders, including for war, even in neutral countries spread the disease as well. Looking around the world, what happened . It starts in march in kansas, 1918. By may, it is in shanghai. It is in algeria in june. Australia issued strict quarantine policies but by 1919, australia has it as well. Sydney was particularly hardhit. It goes around the world within a year which is an amazing fact. It used to be very striking to those of us who studied the pandemic but as we look at our current moment, it is remarkably similar to think about what happened from the disease outbreak in china to a worldwide pandemic declaration from the who in march of this year. So the great war helps to explain the way the virus was transmitted. It also helps us understand a bit more about why the disease was discussed and how what was discussed and recorded. What some of the Major Concerns were about talking about the virus or treating it or thinking more fully about the possibilities for taking informed Public Health measures. The u. S. Enters the war in april, 1917. You can look at French Forces near the western front. One thing that should stand out is this is the opposite of social distancing being impressed upon all of us today as an essential way to stop the virus spread. The camps, trenches on the western front, if you can conjure images like that up, they absolutely were prone to spreader and a super spreader events. One thing that should stand out is that between the 1918 epidemic and today, one real significant contract is the overwhelming majority of those who died in 1918 through 1920, the overwhelming majority, Something Like one half or one third were in the eight teen to 45 age bracket. That flew, the influence of that era, disproportionately hit young and Healthy People. We can talk about that. Their immune systems over respond, damaging their lungs and having them drown with fluid in their lungs. Its a really horrific way. The sort of thing that doctor vaughan, that opening quote, embodies so well, people were just dropping that ultimately fast. Thats unlike our current pandemic, which does not target the most healthy, at least in terms of case fatality rates. We can talk about that more. Remember, im a historian and not an epidemiologist. A lot of the information here is based off of others, its not just nine. Another thing that is important to think about, the wartime consequences and the shaping of the flu responses in lots of countries, but especially in the u. S. , was patriotism. This might strike you as a contrast today or a continuity, and i welcome talking about this in the queue and a. What you see here are these red cross women volunteers and workers making masks. The sign behind them is if i fail, he dies. Its a sign supporting the cause and also a martial language to defeat the virus. Weve heard some of that from President Trump in terms of his invocation of the invisible enemy. That is very much the kind of martial language we heard operationalize in 1919 and 1918. Trying to make visible the invisible of the virus so that people would take it more seriously. Practice hand hygiene, accept closure policies and even wear masks. But there is another piece, perhaps a more insidious piece this story, that is nations like the United Kingdom had passed legislation, in this case the defense of the realm act of 1914, that censored the mail. It censored with the press could say and its censored what was distributed in terms of information about a wide array of topics that might pertain to the war. One of the key elements here, communication in this case, is about limiting access to anything that might undermine the war effort. In the u. S. Context, there were the espionage and sedition acts. Those are very famous. 1917 and 1918. This is from the u. S. National archives. I think its a New York Times headline. This edition bill has been signed, one of the most drastic measures ever enacted to catch and punish enemy agents. Another piece of that was to limit free speech and Civil Liberties by talking about anything that might undermine the war effort. This sounds like social history or political history. Well, it also meant that journalists could not talk about these outbreaks at the base is very much. Or, they had to minimize what was going on. If you think about 24 of the 36 largest bases having largescale outbreaks of the virus, that meant the troops were not combat effective, they could not move across the country and then across the atlantic, you understand better how this possible communication of the waves of the virus and its infectiousness and its fatalities, that might undermine the war effort. You saw in this moment the u. S. , the uk and other combatant nations like germany and france, they are censoring the press and limiting speech and information about the outbreaks themselves. Thats a take away for us to take about. Historians are very clear about this. One of the huge problems of 1918 was a lack of rapid, honest and continually updated information and leadership from nation states. Not just the u. S. , the uk, but combat nations as well. You think about this. You can think about it in this context as well. Dont talk, the web spun for you with invisible threads. That includes not just talking about elements of the war effort itself, or for instance the draft, another thing that Many American dissenters related to the war. They talked about whether or not the drafters constitutional. That had never been fully tested in a civil war era. And world war i, mobilizing millions of people for the war. Many folks including fivetime candidate for president eugene debs, a socialist, he spoke out against the draft. He said not everyone should serve. It could unconstitutional that to force them to serve. He was thrown in jail for a speech he gave in canton, ohio. Thats another example in the ways the more limited speech about Public Health issues and dissent in a time of war. Another limitation that is worth thinking about, we hear this again today and weve heard it and a lot of countries, its ways of minimizing the virus. This was more true in march or april than it is today. As the virus spread, even into the middle of october, when that deadly second wave, and the plurality of american deaths happen in the u. S. , you saw documents like this. The spanish influenza is a threeday fever. Its a flu. Its a new name for an old disease. There had been previously a big outbreak. The previous big pandemic in the u. S. Had been in 1889 to 1890. Here you see these widely distributed information coming from u. S. Department of Public Health and the Surgeon General. He says its simply the same old thing that swept over the world. Modern nursing and modern medical care will help handle this. That creates a lot of problems in the u. S. Because americans do not know what to do. They do not know which policies to adopt at the local, state and federal level. They also dont know what information to trust. So i will show you some more images from the air about that. Another piece of the puzzle is about where it came from. One thing that lots of us historians ive had to talk about lately has been should we call lose by their nation of origin or by their city abortion . What does that even mean since viruses are global and not limited to nation states . So why was it called the spanish flu . Some of you may know this, but the main reason, as ive said, is that the wartime nations were censoring their press. Would that mean for other countries . Spain was neutral in the war. King alfonso the 13th kept the nation out of the war effort, though they had some direct ties through blood to the haves birds and castro angry aristocracy. Although, many nations in europe did as well. So they kept out of the war effort. In may 1918, the king and a number of other major figures in the elite circles of spain, came down with the flu. The Spanish Press started treating this with lots of coverage. There are accounts where a man walking down the street suddenly felt congested and is dead with it a day. Though it sounds sensational, a very similar accounts we have in the u. S. Have incredibly strong people, all american football players, one of the strongest lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest division of the u. S. Army cutting down trees for the war effort, they would also sometimes just fall down dead. So the Spanish Press covering this, when it came out, you saw first the British Press cover this. They used terms like the hygiene and environment in spain were giving rise to this flu. Or that the spanish werent able to deal with it because of their society. These kind of subtle, heavily racialized terms. You can find this yourself if you google it. It was then adopted more widely in the ankle american press. So you wind up seeing the u. S. And the british spending a lot more time calling it the spanish flu. Before long, throughout the summer of 1918, it has become the spanish flu. Of course, by the fall of 1918, Public Health officials in the u. S. In the uk, much less around the world, understood the origins of the flu were not in spain. They no longer said that. But the term had caught on. This kind of weaponized, racialized, nationalist version of the few caught on. Another thing that is worth noting is the spanish called it the french flu because they blame french workers coming for the