I think there were four reasons why the Spanish Flu had so little impact afterwards:
1. Death was more common and was just accepted. For example the huge number of deaths in early childhood and from TB. There may have been an interaction (both ways) here with a higher level of religious faith. Nowadays we are less familiar with death and regard the possibility of it with greater horror.
2. The horror of the war may have taken precedence and to some extent the two horrors may have become merged in peoples’ minds. To say nothing of (e.g.) the Russian revolution. We have not had a major war this time (fortunately).
3. After both the war and the flu, people just wanted to forget about them, but the remembrance of the war was more formalised. It is striking that there are no memorials to the flu dead in contrast to the huge number of war memorials. Yet there is already talk here of a memorial to the Covid dead. It has been said that the frivolity and fast pace of life in the 1920s may have been a reaction to both horrors.
4. The mass media was much more limited in 1918, not least because of wartime censorship, and there was no rolling news, no internet news or social media. And the flu was much less prominent in the news than Covid now. On the BBC I reckon that Covid is always the first five items and at least 75% of the total newscast. Very different!
You wonder about the US in particular. Relative to the other factors I mention, I am not sure the larger number of deaths in itself is a factor (although it must play some role). Here in the UK and Europe generally, the death tolls in the flu pandemic were very high and Covid deaths (relatively speaking) are high too. But we are obsessing much more about Covid than our ancestors did about the flu over here too. I think part of it is the greater social and economic impact of Covid, there were no lockdowns in 1918!
As an historian who writes about complex historical systems and nonlinear dynamics, I can offer two of my recent publications, which reflect a multidisciplinary funding proposal I had hoped to submit to the U.S. National Science Foundation. The pandemic crushed that idea.
On a means to grasp the complexity of the First Global Age, 1400-1800:
* J. B. Owens and Vitit Kantabutra (2020) “A Research Scheme for a World History of the World,” Entremons. UPF Journal of World History. Número 11 (Octubre): 69-98.
(Universitat Pompeu Fabra | Barcelona)
The companion piece is a research report, which I intended to use to identify and recruit collaborators for the project. It deals with "local" non-linearity, which must be connected (via modeling) to the global complex, nonlinear system:
* J. B. Owens (2019) “If I Forget Thee, O Murcia,” Newsletter: Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. Vol. 10 (November): 5-15.
I hope that you find something of interest in this post.
I read with interest your letter about the 1918 influenza epidemic. When I wrote my novel, "The Poet's Girl," about the life of Emily Hale and her relationship with T. S. Eliot, I found that the 1918 epidemic was very well covered in the Boston papers at the time. When Hale arrived at Simmons College as a dorm matron in September 1918, the college was forced, almost immediately, to shut down and send most of its students home. A freshman from Vermont died soon after the start of the school year; her death was acknowledged at Simmons, and also her hometown paper (one of about seven deaths that day, as I recall.) My review of Volume 1 of Eliot's collected letters suggested he suffered a mild case of the flu in November 1918, as described in letters that he and his then-wife wrote to family members. Both of them, as you noted, had a lot of ailments, so they are probably both lucky the case was mild. I have heard many friends express surprise that older relatives did not write much about their experiences; I think many of them simply wanted to forget about that time. My book was published before the 2020 pandemic broke, and it was unnerving to go back and read what I had written, and how much it echoed our own experience.
There have been many theories about over populating the world. Could the rare outbreaks of pandemics be a natural check on population that would prevent the world from becoming overpopulated? Perhaps the fears of over population should not be a concern. Pandemics tend to even out the population. Perhaps the Pandemic has cleared the way to open up immigration once more.
` The Black Death paved the way for the decline e of the landed nobility to be replaced by capitalism but on a more egalitarian basis. Could the winnowing of the population by Covid lead to a new change?
My father, born in 1897, was training to be a pilot in the Naval Air Force at Pensacola Naval Air Station. The fatality rates among pilots of those planes were really high. I probably wouldn't be here to write this if the war hadn't ended the very day her graduated from ground school.
But then he got the flu. That really could have killed him. No anti-bionics. Barracks life. So he (and I) got lucky again.
He kept a detailed diary from 1915 until 1945. So I went back to his diary last year when COVID hit to see what he'd written about the flu.
NOT A WORD.
I've not done an exhaustive search of all his mail [he kept all his correspondence. We even found a little box in his truck with all the notes passed to him during his last year of high school!! But what I've looked at so far--no mention of the flu.
Apparently it was considered to be military secret.
Social media and the giant news media is a big difference for why we are so attuned to the virus. Back in 1917, people read newspapers but maybe didn't know that the Spanish flu was causing millions of deaths in other countries. Interesting data.
PS: I should have explained that my growing cannabis is a strange idea because I don't use it and only tried it once when I was 14! The stuff is big business here in the Berkshires.
I think there were four reasons why the Spanish Flu had so little impact afterwards:
1. Death was more common and was just accepted. For example the huge number of deaths in early childhood and from TB. There may have been an interaction (both ways) here with a higher level of religious faith. Nowadays we are less familiar with death and regard the possibility of it with greater horror.
2. The horror of the war may have taken precedence and to some extent the two horrors may have become merged in peoples’ minds. To say nothing of (e.g.) the Russian revolution. We have not had a major war this time (fortunately).
3. After both the war and the flu, people just wanted to forget about them, but the remembrance of the war was more formalised. It is striking that there are no memorials to the flu dead in contrast to the huge number of war memorials. Yet there is already talk here of a memorial to the Covid dead. It has been said that the frivolity and fast pace of life in the 1920s may have been a reaction to both horrors.
4. The mass media was much more limited in 1918, not least because of wartime censorship, and there was no rolling news, no internet news or social media. And the flu was much less prominent in the news than Covid now. On the BBC I reckon that Covid is always the first five items and at least 75% of the total newscast. Very different!
You wonder about the US in particular. Relative to the other factors I mention, I am not sure the larger number of deaths in itself is a factor (although it must play some role). Here in the UK and Europe generally, the death tolls in the flu pandemic were very high and Covid deaths (relatively speaking) are high too. But we are obsessing much more about Covid than our ancestors did about the flu over here too. I think part of it is the greater social and economic impact of Covid, there were no lockdowns in 1918!
As an historian who writes about complex historical systems and nonlinear dynamics, I can offer two of my recent publications, which reflect a multidisciplinary funding proposal I had hoped to submit to the U.S. National Science Foundation. The pandemic crushed that idea.
On a means to grasp the complexity of the First Global Age, 1400-1800:
* J. B. Owens and Vitit Kantabutra (2020) “A Research Scheme for a World History of the World,” Entremons. UPF Journal of World History. Número 11 (Octubre): 69-98.
(Universitat Pompeu Fabra | Barcelona)
The companion piece is a research report, which I intended to use to identify and recruit collaborators for the project. It deals with "local" non-linearity, which must be connected (via modeling) to the global complex, nonlinear system:
* J. B. Owens (2019) “If I Forget Thee, O Murcia,” Newsletter: Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. Vol. 10 (November): 5-15.
I hope that you find something of interest in this post.
Jack Owens
I read with interest your letter about the 1918 influenza epidemic. When I wrote my novel, "The Poet's Girl," about the life of Emily Hale and her relationship with T. S. Eliot, I found that the 1918 epidemic was very well covered in the Boston papers at the time. When Hale arrived at Simmons College as a dorm matron in September 1918, the college was forced, almost immediately, to shut down and send most of its students home. A freshman from Vermont died soon after the start of the school year; her death was acknowledged at Simmons, and also her hometown paper (one of about seven deaths that day, as I recall.) My review of Volume 1 of Eliot's collected letters suggested he suffered a mild case of the flu in November 1918, as described in letters that he and his then-wife wrote to family members. Both of them, as you noted, had a lot of ailments, so they are probably both lucky the case was mild. I have heard many friends express surprise that older relatives did not write much about their experiences; I think many of them simply wanted to forget about that time. My book was published before the 2020 pandemic broke, and it was unnerving to go back and read what I had written, and how much it echoed our own experience.
Leo SWest ———Some Random Thoughts———
There have been many theories about over populating the world. Could the rare outbreaks of pandemics be a natural check on population that would prevent the world from becoming overpopulated? Perhaps the fears of over population should not be a concern. Pandemics tend to even out the population. Perhaps the Pandemic has cleared the way to open up immigration once more.
` The Black Death paved the way for the decline e of the landed nobility to be replaced by capitalism but on a more egalitarian basis. Could the winnowing of the population by Covid lead to a new change?
My father, born in 1897, was training to be a pilot in the Naval Air Force at Pensacola Naval Air Station. The fatality rates among pilots of those planes were really high. I probably wouldn't be here to write this if the war hadn't ended the very day her graduated from ground school.
But then he got the flu. That really could have killed him. No anti-bionics. Barracks life. So he (and I) got lucky again.
He kept a detailed diary from 1915 until 1945. So I went back to his diary last year when COVID hit to see what he'd written about the flu.
NOT A WORD.
I've not done an exhaustive search of all his mail [he kept all his correspondence. We even found a little box in his truck with all the notes passed to him during his last year of high school!! But what I've looked at so far--no mention of the flu.
Apparently it was considered to be military secret.
Fascinating. I'm really puzzled, since there are obviously records and photos being republished this year.
Social media and the giant news media is a big difference for why we are so attuned to the virus. Back in 1917, people read newspapers but maybe didn't know that the Spanish flu was causing millions of deaths in other countries. Interesting data.
PS: I should have explained that my growing cannabis is a strange idea because I don't use it and only tried it once when I was 14! The stuff is big business here in the Berkshires.
Guardian article today on just this subject! https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/29/history-forget-pandemic-spanish-flu-covid?CMP=fb_cif