Historical precedent . 1918 is the one that comes to mind. And we have nobody better to tell us about 1918 than my good friend christopher nichols. He is a professor of history at oregon state. Hes also director there. Oregon state center for the humanities and founder of their citizenship and crisis initiative. He also studied at harvard, waysleyan and at the university of virginia. Chris is an expert on, i would say, earliest parts of the 20th century. Of course, is he expanding out. He and i, before we came on, were just chatting about new work we have coming out on ideologies on u. S. Foreign policy. That book itself, that term, that title, was a seminole book in the field in 1987. Im really glad someone has decided to go in and update it, shall we say. Theres no better person to do it than chris. Will he talk to us about the 1918 pandemic. I would encourage you, as you look at your zoom screen, on the bottom youll see a q a button. Please, hit that button and submit your questions. In fact, you can see other peoples questions as they come in. If you like their question or were going to ask a similar question, just hit the thumbs up button and that will be helpful because it moves it up the queue. The more people like something, the higher it gets in life. Like anything else on the web. Ill also remind you, of course, there is no chat function here. We want people to focus on the q a and needless to say, but ill say it anyway. Please note one of the great benefits to doing this via the web versus dallas hall, its much easier to kick out anyone who is unruly. So keep it civil, people. I will ask that chris camera be turned on. There he is. How are you doing, buddy . Listen, i just gave you the intro. Looks like a sunny day in corvalis. Im going to turn things over to you. Chris will show us some images, walk us through as its going. Lay the questions on us. He and i will come back and have that discussion when hes done with his presentation. Chris, the floor is yours, or the computer. Yes. Thank you so much. First of all, just want to say thank you to everyone who is here with us. We had a sort of record turnout for registrations. I hope i can keep you interested. This topic is inherently interesting. You dont need too much probably but lets see if we can keep it exciting. Special thanks to behind the scenes running the webinar, zoom functions and also, of course, maybe most importantly, many thank yous to professor jeffrey engle, a fantastic colleague, collaborator and friend. We worked on a project that will be out next year. Look for rethinking american grand strategy. Jeff wrote a great chapter in that book. In any case, i want to do a few things today. Im going to give you a marchthrough of what happened in the pandemic of 1918. This is something i started studying years ago when i was studying world war i and domestic politics. When i taught it to my students they were much more bored, more interested in world war i but not anymore. We are more attuned to the previous lessons we can learn to the pandemic thats most comparable to the one here in 2020. Ill give you a brief talk about that history, and then im going to telescope out periodically to make some comparisons to 2020 and think more globally. U. S. Story with u. S. Dimensions and periodically will pause to sort of reflect on questions of comparison, historical comparisons, differences and similarities. Recently i organized a round table of some of the top historians working on this subject. We dont always agree but i was surprised by how much consensus there is about the lessons you can learn from this. Ill give you a quick, brief rundown of exactly what happens in the pandemic, 1918, and well telescope in and out. Keep your questions coming. One thing thats most important to consider, when we go back to the 1918 moment and here is where we need to look at social history, the human suffering, the human cost. We talk a little bit about the numbers. One of the crucial things to understand in this moment is the story of the people like victor vaughn. Vaughn was a fascinating figure, distinguished leader of american medicine in 1918. Dean of the university of michigan medical school. He becomes the person in charge of the army medical services. Founding editor of the journal of laboratory and clinical medicine, served as a colonel in the army. He led its division of communicaticabe iabe communicateable diseases. The worst deadly second wave of the pandemic gak began in fall 1918. September 23rd, 1918 he traveled to air massachusetts as part of a team appointed by the army Surgeon General. He got there and he was devastated by what he saw. This was a little outside of boston, camp devins. It was far worse than any other communicable disease. Theyre placed on the cots until every bed is full and others crowd in. A distressing cough brings up the blood stain is the putum. The dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like corwood. This is the sort of thing medical doctors were seeing throughout fall of 1918 and because those barracks, as part of the war effort, were so connected to the urban spaces and port facilities nearby, the spread very rapidly got to the civilian population, despite what Public Health officials and army medical officials often said. So when you think about this moment, this moment of 1918 in terms of the human cost, in terms of the humans involved and the suffering. The numbers are somewhat staggering, frankly. This is one of the things we need to think about when we think about the u. S. Case. What happened in 1918 and 1919 in the pandemic was u. S. Lost roughly 675,000 people on the order of 50 million around the world died. Although there are some differences in terms of the estimates of those numbers between 20 and 100 million, the common estimates by historians and Public Health scholars. In the u. S. , this 20 to 30 of the population was infected. In fact, the u. S. Lost more soldiers to flu and pneumonia and other diseases than in combat in world war i. And all of this, in part, was integrally connected to the war effort. Thats the other piece for us to understand and think about. How did it begin . What happened . It all began in the u. S. Context in winter 1918. In march 1918, in kansas. You begin to see widespread illness of a seemingly new type in the american troops mustering there, newly drafted, inducted or enlisted. A soldier recalled of the 12 men who slept in my squad room, seven were ill at one time. You saw 24 of the 36 major army bases in the u. S. Fill up to capacity in their medical wards overwhelmed in the spring of 1918 by the influenza virus. A couple of origin stories about the influenza virus. The spanish flu, that its sometimes called and what that meant. In the u. S. Context, a lot of us scholars now believe that the viral version that we think of as the pandemic version originated in kansas in february and march 1918. Theres some epidemiologists and others who track the virus to vietnam, to china and to france, but the version we think of when we think of it spreading around the world in 1918 comes out of kansas. You can watch that, those of us who study president ial and u. S. Political history. You can watch this move through army records in particular. Weve got amazing data on who got sick, when and why. Largely because of army data and u. S. Government census datea. When somebody says we dont have precedence for this, we dont have good information about how this flu spread in 1918 and 1919, theyre not look in the right places. Us historians know exactly where to look and you can get very finegrain analysis. When we give talks on the flu of 1918 and why its so comparable, as jeff engle said, to today, is that it went around the world. Lot of historians have made different arguments related to this that the world was effectively globalized before world war i. And you see that playing out in terms of how this virus spreads. In a globalized world, u. S. Troops in particular arriving in france are conduits of transmission. Theyre vectors of disease. U. S. Soldiers first began arriving well before the pandemic in june 1917, but the u. S. Doesnt really get its mobilization ramped up until 1918, and that roughly coincides with the spread of the flu. So, as the u. S. Troops on railroads crisscross the nation they brought the flu with them. You can watch that happen in local newspapers. Ill show you a few of those as we go. We know exactly when flu arrived in cities like portland here, in oregon, or philadelphia, or dallas, because it almost always arrived with u. S. Soldiers or troop transmissions of material and aid, civilian workers and that sort of thing. Globalized world spread the pandemic in a way that previous ones did not. The transmission of peoples, goods across borders, including from war work, even in neutral countries spread the disease as well. So if youre looking around the world in 1918, what happened . Well, if it starts in march in kansas in 1918, by may its in shanghai and china, its in new zealand. Its in algeria by june. Australia issued some pretty strict quarantine policies but by 1919, australia has it as well. Sydney was particularly hard hit. It goes around the world within a year, which is a Pretty Amazing fact. It used to be very striking to those of us who studied the pandemic. Now as we look at our current moment, its remarkably similar, again, to think about what happened from the disease outbreak in china, in late 1919, to worldwide pandemic declaration from the w. H. O. In march of this year. So, the great war, though, really helps to explain the conflict, explain the ways in which the virus was transmitted globally. It also helps us to understand a bit more about why the disease was discussed and how it was discussed and reported. What some of the Major Concerns were about talking about the virus or treating it, or thinking more fully about the possibilities for an informed public taking Public Health measures related to t as the u. S. Enters the war in april 1917, French Forces near the western front, one thing that should immediately stand out to you, this is the opposite of social distancing, right . This is the opposite of the physical distancing that is being impressed upon all of us today as an essential way to stop the virus spread. Induction camps, trenches in the western front, if you can conjure those up, images like the troops here, right, they were absolutely prone to spreader and super spreader events. One thing that should also stand out to us as we think about comparison back and forth is that between the 1918 epidemic and today, one real significant contrast is that the overwhelming majority of those who died in 1918, 19 and 20, the other whelming majority, Something Like half to a third were in the 18 to 45 age bracket. That flu, the influenza of that era disproportionately hit young and Healthy People. Their immune systems overrespond, damage their lungs, having them drown with fluid in their lungs in a horrific way. The sort of thing that dr. Vaughn in the opening quote embodied so well, that people were dropping dead awfully fast, unlike our current pandemic, which does not target the most healthy, at least in terms of mortality rate. Remember, im an historian not an especialpidemiologyist or md. Another thing thats important to think about the wartime consequences and shaping the flu responses in lots of countries, but particularly the u. S. Was patriotism. It may strike you as a contrast today or continuity and i welcome talking about this in the q a. You see the red cross women volunteers and workers making masks and that sign behind if i fail, he dies, its both a war work kind of sign, supporting the war cause and also a martial language used to defeat the virus. Weve heard that from President Trump in terms of the invivl enemy. Thats very much the kind of martial language we heard operationalized in 1918 and 19. The fight against the virus. The terming of it with a nation state kind of concept. Spain or spanish flu. Trying to make visible the invisible of the virus so people would take it more seriously. Practice hand hygiene. Accept closure policies, even wear masks. So but theres another piece, perhaps a more insidious piece to that wartime story. That is that nations like the United Kingdom had passed legislation. In this case, the defense of the realm act 1914, that censored the mail that, censored what the press could say and censored what was distributed in terms of information about a wide array of topics that might pertain to the war. 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 acts, 1917, 1918, as this headline from the u. S. National archives says. I think its a New York Times headline. Sedition bill has been signed, to capture and punish enemy agents but another piece of that was civil liberties, talking about anything that might undermine the war effort. Why am i mentioning this . It sounds like social history or political history. It also meant that journalists couldnt talk about the outbreaks at the bases or had to minimize what was going on at the bases. If you think about 24 of the 36 largest bases having largescale outbreak outbreaks of virus, the troops were not combat effective, could not move across the country and then across the atlantic, you understand better how this possible communication about the waves of the virus and its infectiousness and its fatalities might undermine the war effort. So you saw in this moment in the u. S. , uk and other combatant nations, germany and france, sen censoring of the press. Thats a firstlevel takeway for us. One of the huge problems in 1918 was a lack of rapid, honest and continually updated information in leadership from nation states, not just the u. S. , the uk, but combatant nations as well, austria, germany, et cetera. You think about this. You could think about it in this context as well, right . Dont talk. The web is 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 descenters related to war was whether or not the draft was constitutional. In world war i, mobilizing millions through the war, many folks, socialists fivetime candidate for president eugene debbs spoke out against the draft, saying everyone might not have to serve, it might not even be constitutional for everyone to serve and he, himself, was thrown in jail in canton, ohio, for saying that. Another kind of limitation, we heard this in the u. S. , ways of minimizing the virus. This was more true in march or april than it is today. But, you know, as the virus spread even into the middle of october when that deadly second wave, plurality of american deaths happened into the fall, deadly second wave in the u. S. You saw documents like this. The spanish influenza is a threeday fever, the flu. New name for an old disease. Previously there had been a big outbreak, previous pandemic in the u. S. Had been in 1889 and 1890. You see these widely distributed information coming from the u. S. Department of Public Health and the Surgeon General where he says its the same old grip that slips over the world time and time again. Dont worry about it. You see this in the fall. It creates problems because americans dont know which policies to adopt at the local, state and federal level even. But they also dont know what information to trust. So ill show you some more images from the era about that. Another piece of the puzzle is where it came from. Its one thing that lots of us historians have had to talk about lately, you know, should we call flus by their nation of origin or city of origin . What does that even mean since viruses are global or not limited to nation states . Why was it called the spanish flu . Some of you may know this. But the main reason, as i said, the wartime nations were censoring their presses. Spain was a neutral in the war. King alfonso xiii kept them out of the war effort. Although they had in their aristocracy, as a lot of other nations did, too, as you may know. The king, a number of other major figures in the elite circles in spain came down with the flu. And the Spanish Press started treating this with lots of sensational coverage. Theres accounts where they say a man walking down the street suddenly felt congested, his chest, his head, his face, falls down and is dead within a day. Although that sounds sayingal, very similar accounts we had from the u. S. Of incredibly strong people, men, allamerican football players, one of the strongest lumber jacks in the Pacific Northwest division at the army, cutting down trees with the war effort sometimes would just fall down dead. So the Spanish Press, covering this, when it came out, you saw first the British Press cover this, and 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 social because of society. These kind of subtle, racist, heavily racialized terms, then get adopted more widely in the angloamerican press. The u. S. And british spend more time calling it the spanish flu. Before long throughout the summer of 1918 into the fall its become the spanish flu. Of course, by the fall of 1918, Public Health officials in the u. S. And uk, much less around the world, understood that the origins of the flu werent in spain. But the term had caught on. It was kind of weaponized, racialized, nationalist version of the flu caught on. Another thing thats worth noting is that the spanish called the french flu. They blamed french workers coming from the war effort for that. The germans called it the russian pest and russians called it by several names, including a chinese flu. You see in this moment something weve seen today, in the near past. This kind of urge to weaponize and nationalize a flu or virus, perhaps to diminish it or perhaps to better operationalize a way forward to fight that virus. As were thinking about this moment, thinking through the conflict, you also find that the on the front, a number of places, number of french posts, for instance, british posts do have significant flu outbreaks. Throughout the spring into the summer of 1918. What most of them note is that, for instance, in the british navy, some 10,000 troops, sailors go down with the flu but only Something Like four or five die. There are a few posts of the french where everyone is sick but very few die. All of a sudden in late summer something seems to change, in the reporting, in the intelligence we get from u. S. And british s