QUESTION ASKED: America Forgot the 1918 Flu. Will We Also Forget Covid?
The poor and immigrants—like my grandparents’ families—were hit hardest. So it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that some of my family got sick, or watched a neighbor or schoolmate get sick or die? But I don’t know for sure. Despite having spent thousands of collective hours with my grandfather and grandmother, with my uncles Gabriel and Sidney and Henry (and the other Henry), my aunts Nettie and Ruth and Ann, and numerous others—not to mention their spouses, all Philadelphians—I never heard any of them mention the Spanish flu. Not once.
That absence has me wondering how Americans will remember Covid-19 once it is finally behind us, or when it has become a manageable nuisance. Right now, it’s hard to imagine it will be regarded as anything less than a generation-defining phenomenon, like the antiwar protests of the late 1960s, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s or the attacks of 9/11. But I think it’s just as likely that it will disappear from our consciousness, as the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 did.
The Spanish flu was deadlier than Covid-19 and was more likely to kill those in the prime of life, yet it has been largely obliterated from historical memory. As Alfred W. Crosby noted in his 1989 book “America’s Forgotten Pandemic,” the Spanish flu was omitted from all the great midcentury American history textbooks, including volumes by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward—all men who had lived through the pandemic.
The one major textbook that Crosby could find that mentioned the pandemic, Thomas A. Bailey’s “The American Pageant” (1956), gave it one sentence and, Crosby says, “understates the total number of deaths due to it by at least one half.” Today, a U.S. history student is still unlikely to learn about the 1918-19 pandemic. The latest, 17th edition of “The American Pageant,” by David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, mentions the pandemic on two pages.
Popular culture did at least as poor a job in commemorating it. The Spanish flu killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide, the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, of 200 million people today. Yet there is no great film about the Spanish flu pandemic, and the literature is sparse. Katherine Ann Porter’s novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939) and William Maxwell’s novel “They Came Like Swallows” (1937) offer the principal treatments by major writers. Then there is John O’Hara’s short story “The Doctor’s Son,” which ran in The New Yorker in 1935, and Willa Cather’s minor 1922 novel, “One of Ours.”
At the time, people remarked upon this gap in the literature. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill.” But she was lamenting the general inattention to illness in literature, which she attributes to the fact that fiction writers concern themselves with affairs of the mind rather than the ordeals of the body. The flu pandemic was less than a decade in the past, yet it did not seem to loom larger in her mind than typhoid or any other malady.
Nobody seems to have a good answer for why the extraordinary, worldwide die-off of 1918-19 imprinted so little on our collective imagination. “The whole issue of how quickly it was forgotten is one that historians have not really grappled with,” said Naomi Rogers, who teaches the history of science at Yale. John Barry concurred: “No satisfactory explanation,” he wrote to me in an email, when I asked about this forgetfulness. “No research that I know of” on its causes, he added.
It seems less likely we’ll forget Covid, given our current obsession with social media, and ubiquitous smart phones documenting everything. Including this classic flip/flop from America’s healthcare professionals in the spring of 2020, which began the next phase of that annus horribilis, the summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots and looting. But given the left’s vaunted ability to pivot on dime on any topic, who knows?
UPDATE: A vintage post from Neo on the tsunami and the forgetting.
(Updated and bumped.)