Test. Test. Test. As you see over there on the left, the salon versus the church, the way the two parties were arguing which areas should get close first or reopened first, saloons, gambling houses versus churches. In some communities that mapped on to ljous sentiment or antisemitism or anticatholicism. Because remember this is an era of rising prohibition coming out of this. So it mapped on to different areas of politics to different regions related to what got privileged to the virus but not reaction to the virus itself. We will talk about that too. And a suf rujette handing out bonbons. And Warren Harding ran on the platform of world war i pushing the return to normalcy and return to society as we know it. As we take a step back, we saw pushback, protest and reemergence in that era. You may have heard about the antimask league. It was an organized league in San Francisco in early 1990s that pushed back against mask requirements that were mandatory. Antimask league is the only really large organized one in the u. S. Thousands in that piece. We see 4,500 listed. You see the mayor of San Francisco say no, were not taking off the mask ordinance. Were convinced its working. If you look at the data, death and disease go down after the mask ordinances were put on. But its unclear whether and how much the masks actually mattered. The key for the antimaskers were, this is a abridgement of civil liberty, forced to wear anything or not, and questioned whether they were essential, that they were really doing the kind of sanitary work they supposedly did. And there was pushback. And pushback to the pushback. If you have an ordinance, there were fines. Some places significant jail time, significant weeks. Significant dollar amounts. And there were a number of counts i can talk more about of mask flakers who were accused of disturbing the peace because they refused to wear masks. There were several times weapons were discharged in attempted apprehensions of those who wouldnt wear masks. And riding public transits, going into businesses or Court Facilities was another thing people did. And the mask slacker language is worth noting because its the same as wartime concept of draft slackers. Those who didnt go to war time duty or didnt go into the draft to the military were thought of as to their patriotic duty. And the press took that same language and Many Americans talked about it in terms of mask slacking. Your duty was to wear that mask to keep your community safe, not just yourself. This was similarly seen in a lot of great cartoons of the era. Trying to normalize that era. This is a great one. Even the horses are wearing them, says that kid, as theyre walking with their masks. This is from ft. Wayne, indiana and trying to teach people and regularize and normalize, even kissing through masks even. Owe behaviors in the masks. Or trying to teach your father or grandparents is another similar thing we used to see a lot in the cartoons of this era. We all are probably fairly familiar with this, phenomenon of people who wont take precautions. Mask is just one example of these. Again, very similar in the 1918 19 moment. Bosh, you wont catch me wearing one and then theres an urgency to wear masks. Another element if you think about going through the christmas season, holiday season, december, you see all of the shoppers wearing masks. Again, this is from indiana. What you also see are these germs, microbes. I thought the Holiday Shopping would be our chance to get them but those internalfernal masks it out. And you see this being manifested in this moment. And economic and political effects. There isnt that much data but as i mentioned before, merchants in other cities suggested their businesses declined 40 to 70 . Big increases in mine output, big increases of steel, 50 or more. And you saw a significant u. S. Recession. Significant one of the largest recessions in history in 20 to 21 with rampant inflation and more than that. So the roaring 20s of the economy is a little bit of an illusion and there was episodic downturns in this period. Historians offer argue theres some relationship between the pandemic and election of 1920 return to normalcy, immigration restriction, wanting fewer people coming to the u. S. , more xenophobia, more an isolationist term in american politics and society, and in 1919, a rise of strikes and social item ult. People who bought into the war era, the pols and nationals and irish, they wanted what they were promised after the war and more hours. You see the biggest strike in history, the Boston Police go on strike and get fired by calvin coolidge, all of them. Riots, street riots, africanamerican strikers called in to beat out white strikers in places like syracuse, turning into racial violence, up through 1921, the tulsa massacre. Historians speculate theres a relationship between the social tumult of influenza that killed 6 of the population, 1675,000 americans, and the war experience that came after. We often warn people and wonder, how similar this this moment, how can we get past this if possible without succumbing to worse . Final bit of data, were thinking global this moment 1919, midaugust 2020 data. Youre looking at the total deaths, total population of whats going on. Much lower percentage of the population has been killed lately,. 05 in the u. S. , thankfully, we havent suffered that much. But yet we suffered terribly. Were moving towards 200,000 u. S. Deaths in the u. S. If you look at the world population, call it the spanish flu with quotes because we dont want to succumb to using that language uncritically, you see the kind of global fatalities in the 2. 7 range. We have. 01 globally now. Roughly speaking again, this comes from my colleague with whom i worked and wrote an article. One thing that stands out is this one here and i want to leave it for a second and think about this as we microscope and telescope the u. S. Cases in 1918 to 2020. If you look at influenza deaths roughly, 1918 19 and u. S. Percent of rural population versus covid and that is striking and founding, frankly, when you look at the comparison, the u. S. Percentage of population is 4. 2 and yet were at 21. 9 of world deaths from covid versus influenza, which is Something Like 1. 4 . Its a staggering, striking change. I have more takeaways. I want to talk more. Youve heard a lot from me. Its a sweeping set of comparison to the presence and i think its important for us to take account of that social history, human suffering and political and social Public Health questions that are entailed in that. Not least the fact this disproportionately tends to fall on people with lower socioeconomic status, viral outbreaks, death and disease. Even those viruses transcend all borders and peoples, groups, races and Everything Else. Main insights, one is that where there were cancellations, postponements of large events and gatherings, school closures, anticrowding measures, et cetera, they worked well and slowed the spread, as weve seen today. Most western nations were involved in the war. They attempted to control information. Woodrow wilson never spoke about the war. We had censorship. His committee on Public Information really sought to minimize and hide infections and risk in the service of the war effort. Of course, the war was won and that was a positive benefit but it came with a cost of more infection and death. This meant, too, citizens were ill informed. It meant those examples i gave about people being fearful dominated their social interactions and lives in ways were seeing in some ways today. It also led to distrust of government in state, federal and other officials. Though there was more trust in other Officials SayPublic Health officials like mayors in st. Louis, for example, who did a good job against that of Public Health officials and say mayors in philadelphia. And rapid is honestly important. These layered closures dont seem to work as well. Close the door abruptly does. Whereas reopening more gradually, tracking data and disease, being ready to close at any moment is most important. And the final takeaway that i have that you all have probably experienced and thought yourselves, in the u. S. The main actions were local, mayors and governors and health officials. They werent on the federal government, just like 2020. Local government has been where the action has been. Finally, heres a set of recommended resources, lots of great stuff. I have articles in there. But there are amazing books and arms, free influenza archive from the university of michigan is amazing. Lie brar i why library of congress has a bunch of exhibit. So without further ado, lets see if jeff and i could have a good conversation. Hey, great. I cannot only talk but i can see myself. Great, awesome. That was good and depressing and distressing. So weve got a ton of questions. I know ive got a ton of questions myself but im going to ask you to start off, sir, big picture, one historian to another, why dont we talk about this . Im about to lecture on world war i in my presence at workhorse. I think the word flu may come out of my mouth once, mostly a sentence. This year i will talk about it more. If more people died in this flu in the United States than the United States lost both world war i and world war ii, why arent we talking about this more . Thats a great question. Historians up and through the 1960s often talked about this as the forgotten virus. Crosby has a book about this forgotten moment in u. S. History. First of all, theyre wrong. You can look at literature. An article that i put together shows how literature is full literature in the 20s, 30s, 40s, is full of references to influenza. Just need to look for it. People have trouble walking upstairs. People have particular memories of being locked inside home. A lot of these kinds of references to long issues or family members who are departed too soon. Theyre not necessarily lost generation references to the war but rath irtheyre about the flu. We of on import into the perspective it must be the war. I succumb to that to myself sometimes. Its there, and its not totally forgotten. But unlike the war, there are not memorials built. In 20s, you see sports i bet like dallas, a memorial that probably had origins in world war i for playing football or sports. We see a lot of that coming out of the flu in the closure policies, memorializing the war but actually doing that was lost because of the pandemic, not the war. Those warm memorials sometimes have a direct reference to the pandemic, and we just need to look for it. Why else didnt we talk about it . Some of the things you said there, you heard my historiantohistorian qualified lapg. Are they more attributable to the pandemic or conflict it skfl . How do you aggregate the two . The answer is you cant so the simple, easier answer is its always the war. But it may not be the right one. Its the reason you have to say flu even when you say readjustment, demobilization or the question of labor activism coming out of the war, along the same lines. The other thing thats interesting, the reason i wound up writing about this a few times is my fellow historians of this era, first half of the 20th century, all say what you just heard, why dont i talk more about the flu . One of the things is they didnt have the resources, frankly. We didnt have the resources. Now so much has been scanned in the last decade or so, all of the images i gave, a gave a lot in part because its so amazing to look at this and track it over time. Now you have the resources and ill send you my slides. You can do 20 minutes on the flu. Forget it, i will just send them this video so i dont have to teach that day. There you go. Did let me drive down about moralization, and im not going to judge the answer to this particular question, which is whether or not youve been watching the democratic and then republican convention. But Vice President pence said several times in his speech something that i thought was patently obviously false. And it wasnt what anybody else was worried about except a historian. He said several times speaking to the relief workers, speaking to the First Responders of our day, 2020, we will not forget you. And i said, oh, yeah, we will. Theres no historical evidence that we will remember these people at all. And im just curious if the fact that we have our inter connected world, you think theres any reason to think thats going to change from how weve prioritized war vesdeaths over pandemic deaths . Thats a really good insight, thats sharp. I wonder, theres this thing thats happening in a lot of cities at 7 00 p. M. People applaud and thank medical workers. And that is an international phenomenon, in a way that we didnt see that related to medical workers, certainly in 1918 and 19. I wonder if any of those kinds of practices will have a kind of long echo because weve been doing them collectively in the way you didnt in the past. The other piece of it is, you know, the incredible suffering and death is almost always localized. Thats why i started with those examples, searing examples that are so sad. And because one thing thats interesting about the 1918 moment and today is tragic, ever since i started giving talks on this, epidemiologists have been in touch with me and talked a good bit about viral load and how that the amount of virus youre exposed to generally speaking can mean that you get a worse case. So medical folks tend to get it worse or more likely to. And that seems very true in 1918 data. We dont have enough to make that conclusion definitively. But i wonder if memorializing medical deaths, im pivoting to as wartime, marshal language, rather than the suffering of the individuals there dyeing at home or one of the worst cases in 1918 that i sometimes refer to as indian islanders, eskimos in alaska were horribly hit. There was a village of 80 people and 72 were dead. When the red cross workers got there, they found so many bodies decomposing, they werent sure who was alive or who was dead. And many of the red cross workers then got terrible viruses coming out of this, and they were also sick. But thats a terrible story thats only sort of in red cross histories. Its not even in your typical history of the flu pandemic to some extent. Anyway, so all of this is probably a longwinded way of affirming your point, which is to say i cant imagine we will be memorializing the frontline workers in this for very long. However, i think a very interesting narrative about this moment is the most rapid global march to a vaccine in science and development, Research Science and development and then its the production and, could very well be the story of this moment, something we dont anticipate. You get billions of doses as fast as ever in Human History and the heroes may be whoever invent that and whoever can do production stuff. Maybe its individuals, maybe its individuals or institutions or universities. I can imagine those people being celebrated, like salk. I can imagine the next jonah salk saying to himself, this is my moment. We have a bunch of questions. One of the themes that emerged from the questions is actually something youve been alluding to is that disparate death and mortality in the 1918 compared to ours. As an historian im confused i say, okay, what if they antibiotics and ventilators, how many people would have died . Can i really say covid19 is less lethal than the influenza of 1918, or simply we are betting at dealing with it than them . My honest answer, i cant say and i dont think our medical establishment can come up with a clear answer to that. Probably not until we see this out farther. There are really good history of medicine accounts that explain the viral changes and mutations, or attempt to talk about those for that deadly second wave, which was so much worse. The first wave all of the british soldiers and sailors are sick but very few day. Americans got sick but very few die. The second wave that comes back across the atlantic, call it an atlantic rebound, boom, much worse. And you think at first this year i thought to myself were using the same medical treatment strategies and whats interesting in this comparison 1918 is like 1920 both in the medicine and Public Health measures, closure policies, nonpharmaceutical interventions and no good treatment strategies. First, remember, they were throwing everything at covid and nothing seemed to work and in fact some things seemed to be skajer baiti sk skajer exacerbating death and disease. My sense from the data of 1918 is the disproportionate death of Healthy People versus our ability today to cordon off our most at had much ririsk people difference. Should a Large Society today not be able cordon off, you may see much higher results. And thats also part of the flattening the curve. The philadelphia story, if all of your hospitals are full, youre going to have more death, and shouldve enough, they did. Interesting. One of the other things that emerged from our discussion has to do not surprisingly with the politics of this. Two questions in effect. As you like. The first is this does not become a partisan issue in 1918 in the same way it does today. Explain. But secondly, i want you to say more about trying to interpret the 1918 election in this context, because obviously, the way i tell the story, the way all of us form relations guy tell sto tells the story of Woodrow Wilson, vote for me on my policies and loses. Judging from our other experience now, people are not happy right now and when people are not happy, they take it out on the incumbent period. Right. Absent the flu, is there a chance wilson is able to do Different Things with at least the numbers in the senate . Oh, thats interesting. First well do the partisan thing. One of the things that surprised me the most in this moment, although it shouldnt as a historian of politics and Foreign Policy is how partisan this Public Health moment has become. In part because of the history of Public Health asterisks have not been particularly participate destine. You can think of some agencies like fema or political aopponentees not up to the task. Thats one thing. But the response would map on to party politics. And my decision to socially distance or deny that would have any close correlation to