30. Parallels--with 1918

 America’s Forgotten Pandemic: the Influenza of 1918, by Alfred Crosby, was first published in 1976. A second edition was published in 2003, and I imagine the book has been given new life by the advent of Covid-19.

What seems certain from his account is that the 1918 flu got tangled up with WW I. The disease was carried back and forth across the seas with Navy ships and soldiers. It shared headlines—and often took a back seat to War news. The demand for troops was so high that military brass said that the deaths of soldiers in transit was a small price to pay when halting troop shipments might be seen as weakness by the Germans (who were dealing with the Pandemic themselves). 

Finally, General Pershing’s call for more troops could not be met; the draft call for 142,000 men in October, 1918 was cancelled, because the bases to which men would have to report were quarantined. Fortunately, the war ended and the country gave way to joy and celebration--which of course exacerbated the spread of disease. 

As war ground down in the fall of 1918, San Francisco was a hot spot, and Dr. William Hassler, Chief of the city’s Board of Health, was able to impose quarantines and a facemask ordinance on the population. In December, with war's end and incidences of disease dropping dramatically, the facemask ordinance was dropped and the City celebrated the end of the War and the holidays… and the flu raged again. 

This time the population, including city officials, the Christian Scientists, and many doctors, railed against re-imposition. Businesses were looking for holiday sales. Someone sent Hassler a bomb. He didn’t get his masks— “the dollar sign is exalted above the health sign,” he said. For reasons not much understood at the time, the Pandemic wound down on its own.

There are parallels here, with War and Pandemic linked in time and space, just as Pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the election co-exist in a gnarly braid in our own time. 

And there are great hopes—maybe expectations?—for such a miraculous disappearance of our mysterious coronavirus.

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