Center for the humanities. Event occurred in dallas. Since the pandemic has begun, for our purposes, since we shut down in march, they thing that 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 than my friend christopher nichols. Hes an associate professor of history at oregon state. He is also the director of the Oregon State Center for humanities and the founder of their citizenship and crisis initiative. He also studied at harvard and wesleyan, and got his ma and phd from a good friend of ours at the university of virginia. Chris is an expert on i would say the early parts of the 20th century. That is what his previous work was on. 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 is 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. So, he is going to be talking to us about the 1918 pandemic. I would encourage you, as you look at your zoom screen, youll see a q and a button. Please hit that button and , submit your questions. In fact 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 actually will be helpful because it 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 also remind you that there is no chat function here. We want people to focus on the q a. Please note that one of the great benefits of 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 chris camera. There he is. How are you doing 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. Going, send us questions. And we will come back and have this discussion when hes done with the presentation. Christopher 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. But lets see if we cant make it exciting. 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 importantly, many thank yous to professor jeffrey engle. Jeff is a fantastic collaborator and friend. 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 today is a few things 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 previous, sort of 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. Differences and similarities. 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 reef 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 vaughn. Vaughn was a fascinating figure, a distinguished leader of american medicine in 1918, the dean of the university of medicine, in charge of the army medical services, Founding Editor of the journal of laboratory and clinical medicine served as a colonel in the army, led the division of Communicable Diseases. Here is a guy that 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. September 20 3, 1918, he travels 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. Camp devens. He could not believe what he was seeing. It was far worse than any other Communicable Disease he had been involved with. They are placed on the cots until every bed is full 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 those barracks were so integrally connected to nearby almost medially got to the civilian population, despite what Public Health officials and army medical officials often said. In terms of the human costs and suffering, the numbers are somewhat staggering. And of this is one of the things we also need to think about when we think of the u. S. Case. And 1919ened in 1918 in 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 and 100 million. 20 millionthe common estimates by historians and publichealth scholars. In the u. S. , 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. All of this, in part, was integrally connected to the war effort. Thats the other piece to understand and think about. Here we are. How did it begin . What happened . It all began in u. S. Contact in context in winter, 1918. In march of 1918 in kansas. It begins as the widespread illness of a seemingly new type. In american troops mustering there, newly drafted or enlisted. John berry writes, is soldier recalled of the 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. You know 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 we think of it spreading around the world in 1918 comes out of kansas. 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. We have got amazing data on who got sick, when and why, and thats largely because of army data. And the u. S. Government census data. If somebody says, we do not have good information on how the flu spread, they are not looking the right places because we historians know exactly where to look. And you can get very finegrained analysis. So one of the things i note when talks 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, Emily Rosenberg and others, that the world is effectively globalized before world war i. 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. They are vectors of disease. The 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. We know exactly when the flu arrives in cities like portland here or philadelphia or dallas , because it almost always arrives with u. S. Soldiers, troop transmissions, civilian workers and that sort of thing. A 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. If you are looking around the world in 1918, what happened . It starts in march in kansas, 1918. By may, it is in shanghai. It is in algeria by australia june. 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, again, 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. As i said, globally. It also helps us understand a bit more about why the disease was discussed and how what was discussed and reported, and what were the Major Concerns talking about the virus or treating it or thinking more fully about the possibilities for taking informed Public Health measures. So as the u. S. Enters the war in april, 1917 here you can look at French Forces near the western front. One thing that should stand out is this is the opposite of social distancing, the opposite of the social distancing being impressed upon all of us today as an essential way to stop the virus spread. 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 of the things that should also state out to us, as we think about the comparison back and forth, is between the 1918 epidemic and today, one real significant contract is the overwhelming majority of those who died in 1918 through 1920, from that deadly influenza the , overwhelming majority, Something Like one half or one third were in the 1845 age bracket. The influenza of that era disproportionally hit young and Healthy People. Their immune systems overrespond, damaging their lungs and frankly having them drown with fluid in their lungs. In a really horrific way. The sort of thing dr. Vaughn embodied so well people were just dropping dead awfully fast. Unlike our current pandemic, which does not target the most healthy in terms of fatality rate. We can talk about that more. But again, remember im a , historian, not an epidemiologist. Pleaser member a lot of the remember a lot of the information im conveying realize on the great histories of others. I have a page of resources i will share at the end and we can share after the talk. Another thing that is important to think about the wartime consequences and shaping of the flu response in lots of countries, but particularly the u. S. Was patriotism. This may strike you as a contrast today or continuity and i welcome talking about this in the q a. We see the red cross women volunteers and workers making masks if i fail, he dies. Its a war kind of sign, but also martial language used to defeat the virus. We have heard some of that from President Trump in terms of his invocation of the invisible enemy. That is the kind of language we heard operationalized, the fight against the virus, the terming of the nationstate concept, spain or spanish flu. Trying to make visible the invisible virus, so people would take it seriously washing hands, closure policies, and even Wearing Masks. But there is another piece perhaps a more insidious peace iece to that wartime story is nations like the United Kingdom had passed legislation, in this case, the defense of the realm act in 1914, that censored the mail, that censored what the press could say and what was distributed in terms of information about a wide array of topics that might pertain to the war. One of the key elements, 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 these were very famous in 1917, 1918. This headline from the National Archives says i think it is a New York Times headline sedition bill has been signed, one of the most drastic measures of her enacted to catch and punish enemy agents. But it was to eliminate anything that might undermine the war effort. So i am i mentioning this as a social history or political history . It also meant journalists couldnt talk about these outbreaks at the bases very much. Or they had to minimize what was going on at the bases. If you think of 24 of the 36 largest bases having a largescale outbreak of viruses, that meant the troops were not combat effective. You understand better how this possible communication about the ways of the virus and its infectiousness and its fatalities might undermine the war efforts. So you saw a censoring of the press, limiting information and a speech about the outbreak themselves. Thats one of the huge problems in 1918, a lack of rapid, honest, continually updated leadership from nationstates, not just the u. S. And u. K. But nations as well, germany, austria, hungary. Think about it in this context dont talk. That includes not just talking about elements of the war effort itself, but the draft, another thing many talked about, whether or not the draft was constitutional. It had not really been tested. Mobilizing millions of people for the war, many folks, including socialist candidate eugene debs spoke out against the draft, saying not everyone should have to serve, it might not even be constitutional to force them to serve. He was thrown in jail for a speech he gave saying that. Thats another example of the way the war limited speech both about about Health Issues and dissent in the time of war. Another limitation worth us thinking about, we hear this again today and have heard it in a lot of countries and the u. S. , ways of minimizing the virus. This was more true in march or april than it is today, but as the virus spread even into the middle of october when that deadly second wave where the plurality of american deaths happened, into the falls deadly second wave in the u. S. , you saw documents like this spanish influenza is a threeday fever. A new name for an old disease. There had been previously a big outbreak in 1889, and here you see widely distributed information coming from the department of Public Health, the Surgeon General, where he says the same old grip that swept over the world time and again, dont worry about it. Modern medical care will help handle this. You see this well into the fall and that creates a lot of problems in the u. S. Because americans dont know what to do, which policies to adopt at the local, state, and federal level even. But they also dont know what information to trust. I will show you some more images from the era about that. Another piece of the puzzle is about where it came from. One thing that lots of us historians have had to talk about lately is should we call flus by their nation of origin or city of origin, and what does that mean since viruses are global or not limited to nationstates . Why was it called the spanish flu . Some of you may know this, but the main reason is the wartime nations were censoring their presses. What does 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 to austro hungary in their aristocracy. Lots of nations in europe did. But they kept out of the war effort. In may of 1918, the king, a number of other major figures in elite circles in spain came down with the flu and the Spanish Press started treating this with coverage. There are accounts where man is walking down the street and felt congested in his chest, falls down and is dead within a day. Though that sounds sensational, very similar accounts we have from the u. S. Of incredibly strong people, men, all american football players, one of the strongest lumberjacks in the pacific northwest, cutting down trees for the war effort, they would just fall down dead. So, the Spanish Press covering this when it came out, you saw first the British Press covered this and they used terms like the hygiene and environment in spain were giving rise to this flu or the spanish were not able to deal with it because of their society. These subtle racist, heavily racialized terms. You can google it yourself. Look at some of the British Press about this. It gets adopted more widely in the Anglo American press. You wind up seeing u. S. And british spending a lot more time calling it the spanish flu. And before long, by the fall of 1918, much less around the world, they understood the origins of the flu were not in spain. They no longer said that, but the term had caught on. That racialized, nationalist version of this group caught on. Another thing worth noting is the spanish called it french flu. Because they blamed french workers coming for the war effort for it. The germans called the russian past. Russians called by several other names, including a chinese flu. So you see something we have seen today, this urge to weaponize and nationalize a flu or virus. Perhaps to diminish it or perhaps to better operationalize a way forward to fight the virus. As we are thinking through the conflict, you also find on the front, a number of french and british posts do have signific