Spanish Flu--a difficult look back

Or so said the editor of the Maurice Times, Maurice, Iowa, on Thursday, October 17, 1918. The worst was yet to come. He had no idea. My guess is that, in just a couple of days, he would have liked to take that lousy lynching reference out and burn it. People died in October, 1918, lots and lots of them. No one pushed them to flatten the curve. 

Of course, the world was a different place. Maurice had a daily newspaper; today it hasn't much of a downtown. Many more people lived "on the land" back then, and they did so on small family farms, the pride of America, the exemplar of a faith that those who stayed close to the land were somehow blessedly pure of heart and mind. Food cost more back then--generally one-third of a family's income, twice as much as today. Nine out of ten babies were born at home; ten percent of all infants never made it to a year. Generally, we walked or rode horses. 

In comparison to today, we had very limited scientific knowledge, and we were at war, the Great War. War, in fact, was greatly responsible for what came to be called Spanish Flu. It's origins are still being debated, but one of its sources was Fort Riley, Kansas, where 100 doughboys caught the new strain of influenza in one week. That number quadrupled the next. That was March of 1918.

Army camps--and there were 32 of them--were breeding grounds for a contagion that no one saw coming and ended with a death toll that seems unimaginable--50 million deaths worldwide. Here, in the U. S., 675,000 died out of a population of 100 million, as if all of Nebraska and South Dakota, today, were to be wiped out, in the U.S. over two million of us, gone. 

When it comes to the stats from the Spanish Flu of 1918, it's hard not to read 'em and weep. And it came--this isn't nice to hear--in waves. The first, that spring, was virulent and contagious like nothing anyone had seen; but it didn't kill, at least not in the volume the second wave did. Spanish Flu got in the way of the war, then, in summer, drifted away until fall, when it returned with a vengeance, spread around by troop movements. Whatever mutation had occurred that summer made that new edition an unforgiving killer. 

In three months, September through November, 1918, the rate of death simply took off. In October alone--remember, this was a second wave--almost 200,000 of us died. 

Just one of them was Johanna Brinks Van Roekel, who was 26 years old and pregnant with the couple's first child. She and her husband, Otto, had been married at First Reformed Church, Orange City in January of 1915. There she is. Just one.

There are some parallels. There was lots of fake news. War-time censorship barred any reports of sicknesses and death in the training camps and on the battlefield; in England and France and America, journalists were not permitted to write about sickness, about flu, about contagion. The only newspapers who did stories were from Spain. Hence, even though Spain was no seed bed, the world came to know the truth through Spanish journalists.

Business interests kept quarantines down in large part because war machinery was so absolutely essential to war effort. Keeping that war's Rosy the Riveter from her job at the munitions factory meant undercutting our boys overseas. You can't tell people they can't come to work if what they're making is keeping U.S. troops alive. A century ago, balancing needs was far, far more difficult.

In one twelve-hour period at Camp Dodge in Des Moines, 1000 new cases of the Spanish influenza occured--that was October 8. When finally the curve flattened at Camp Dodge, 10 thousand soldiers were hospitalized, 700 died.

The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 didn't officially end until 1920. Its devastation was greatly enhanced by the Great War, millions of troops moving all over the world. Twenty million military and civilian people died in the "war to end all wars." Some say 50 million, world-wide, died of the flu. 

We live in a different age. We know more than our ancestors did a century ago. We're staying away from each other now, not going out, and we've ended anything that draws more than a few of us together. We're all self-quarantined.

And, finally, remember this too: the Spanish flu ended. It quit, its powers gone. While no one has ever found a cure, we have successful inoculations.

It's easy to despair when you make the comparison. We're not the same. The coronavirus is not the Spanish Flu. 

Some may choose not to read the story, not to make the comparison. But they do at their peril--and ours.