In her autobiography spanning old and new worlds and two world wars, my husband’s grandmother never mentioned the flu pandemic. She wasn’t alone.
On a recent family call, my 90+ year-young father-in-law said he’d never heard any of his older family members talk about the 1918 pandemic, although his parents and four older sisters had obviously lived through it.
I thought about my life in England. Every town I’ve visited, even the tiniest collection of dwellings, has a memorial to those lost in the “Great War”. The older people in our village talked at length about the changes caused by the war, and what it meant for the generation their own parents grew up in. I heard about an entire generation of women who lived alone because the men who should have been sweethearts, lovers, husbands were instead killed in the war. But despite 50+ million deaths from the 1918-19 pandemic—more than double the 19+ million killed in World War I—nobody ever mentioned it.
War memorial in Brancepeth churchyard, outside of Durham in northern England: (Inscription: The Great War, 1914-1918 ‘OUR GLORIOUS DEAD’)
How could one of the most horrifically deadly events in human history be forgotten? In his book, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, Alfred W. Crosby says,
The important and almost incomprehensible fact about Spanish influenza is that it killed millions upon millions of people in a year or less. Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a period. And yet it has never inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since, not among the citizens of any particular land and not among the citizens of the United States. —Cambridge University Press, 1974
In her article, ‘Why the 1918 Flu Became ‘America’s Forgotten Pandemic’ for history.com, Betty Little speculates that, “Once it was over, no one wanted to talk about it.” One theory, she says, is that there were so very few personal stories published about the pandemic, so it wasn’t incorporated into the personal and social fabric of history. But is that cause or effect? Certainly the stories we do hear are horrific. The disease was so virulent, people sometimes died within hours of their first symptoms. Feeling ill, some would sit on a park bench and die before they could get up again. Whole families perished, hospitals and morgues were overrun, and no treatment existed other than folk remedies such as bags of camphor tied around the neck.
John Barry, author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (—Penguin, 2005), says: “I’ve never been able to come up with a good explanation as to why there’s so little written about the 1918 pandemic.”
Donald Trump said, “I didn’t know people died from the flu… Does anyone die from the flu?” (March 6, 2020). His grandfather, Frederick Trump, came home from a walk on May 30, 1918 and felt ill. Hours later, he was dead, one of the earliest victims of the forgotten pandemic, leaving his 12-year-old son Frederick behind to carry on the family business and eventually become father to Donald Trump. [Image credit: mediasvd.ancestry.com]
Writing for Vanity Fair, What 1918’s “Forgotten Pandemic” Can Teach Us About Today, author Ellen Marie Wiseman cites the war effort and theories that discussing the flu would somehow be unpatriotic, and thus were not covered in newspapers or contemporary literature. But none of that explains why the tragedy which must have touched almost every family was never discussed.
I’m not convinced by these explanations, especially because infectious disease theory did exist. The flu pandemic wasn’t seen as some act of heavenly vengeance meant to punish evildoers. It was known that the disease spread via respiratory droplets. Social distancing and facemasks were understood to help, and were mandated in many areas.
On October 5, 1918 in my hometown of Seattle, Mayor Ole Hanson ordered “…every place of indoor public assemblage in Seattle, including schools, theatres, motion picture houses, churches and dance halls closed by noon.” (—Seattle Daily Times) Theater owners who complained were told, “Some will kick, but we would rather listen to a live kicker than bury him.” When pastors protested, Hanson said, “Religion which won’t keep for two weeks is not worth having.” Fines for failing to wear a facemask or for “expectoration nuisance” (spitting on the sidewalk) were $5 ($81 in today’s dollars).
The front page of the Oct. 5, 1918 Seattle Daily Times.
After a second devastating wave of flu deaths in 1919, the virus disappeared. Unlike the sacrifices and tragedies of World War I, survivors didn’t retell their stories. Hemingway didn’t write them. Hollywood didn’t film them. Grateful and grieving nations didn’t put up monuments to them. And my husband’s grandmother didn’t pass them along.
Could it happen again?
What did you hear about the 1918 flu pandemic from family, friends, or history?
Could global amnesia remove our memories of the 2020 pandemic? One thing which gives me hope for a different outcome is a luminous new book, Writedown, which I review in my next post here.
Barb Taub 
I remember my father referring a few times to how his parents talked about it (my father was born in 1917). It may have been overshadowed by WWI and its aftermath, but that can’t be all of it. Perhaps the fact that people were somewhat desensitised to high death tolls because of the war and also because health care was less effective in general were reasons for a higher degree of “acceptance?”
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I guess if the newspapers didn’t cover it, and if you were used to some people dying from flu every year, it might not have appeared as devastating as we now know it was?
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I didn’t even know about it until my grown daughter who is a history buff with quite a good mind and memory told me about it. In my family of origin, we did not talk about ANYTHING! We asked no questions and were only spoken to when orders came down to be obeyed. Military father/ German mother. There was no conversation about the war my mother had just lived through or father had come into at the tail end. I didn’t know about so much in life and have come into understanding so late in life. I’ve learned through my children who were allowed to ask and seek anything. I’ve noticed people do not want to talk about the hard stuff. They will immediately change any tough subject. I’m lucky to have very curious and bright children and they were lucky they had a mom who didn’t beat them when they dared challenge an idea. We have discovered the world together. I know there was no mention of most of this stuff in any of the many schools I attended. At this moment in time, we know of no one who has contracted the virus personally. All of us are being extra careful. You have asked an excellent question, Barb.
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“We have discovered the world together. ” Clearly, as a mother, you are a HUGE success. Well done.
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I’ve pondered this myself. My grandmother, who told us many stories of her youth, would have been 19 in 1918, yet she never mentioned the influenza pandemic. Nor did my mother, who was born 8 years later. And in my family we talked about EVERYTHING. I think my mom never heard much about it, and so she had no stories to relay.
I think, and this is just a theory, that while scientists understood infectious disease, the general public’s attitude then was still that such diseases were somehow a punishment for not being good enough, or some such nonsense. At the very least, they were something shameful somehow that one just did not talk about.
I once overheard my great aunt and uncle talking about someone having “the big C.” I asked my mother about it and she said it stood for cancer, and that some older people felt it wasn’t okay to talk about serious illnesses like that.
All I can say is I’m glad we live in more open times today. And I’m very grateful for modern science that produces vaccines in less than a year!
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That’s so interesting. Serious illness was too private to discuss? It actually makes a lot more sense than the other theories I’ve heard. Thanks!
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Thanks Barb for a really interesting post And what did we learn from that pandemic that could be applied to this? Masks were among the best precautions and people objected and still do object to wearing them; lockdown and closures worked and still today people are objecting to stores and schools being closed.
Here in Aotearoa/New Zealand where we have been so lucky with strong and early steps to minimise the effects, we have those refusing to take advice, and even those arriving and having to be in isolation have been finding ways to get out. Selfishness or irresponsibility?
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I read recently that asking people to distance and wear masks because it will protect others is doomed to failure. Most only respond to direct threats—”do this or YOU will die” is the only way to get their attention and/or cooperation.
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I grew up listening to my grandmother talk about her beloved older sister, Mary, who died of “Spanish flu” in late November 1918 after her 4 brothers returned to Scotland uninjured from fighting in the first world war. I also researched three nurses who died near my home from flu at that time. https://somerville66.blogspot.com/2014/05/dying-of-flu-another-tragic-consequence.html
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Thank you SO much for sharing these tragic stories of young nurses who died of the flu while tending soldiers. I wonder if their families told succeeding generations about them as your grandmother did for you?
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I hope they did.
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I have thought exactly the same thing. I knew about it, but had no idea of the huge numbers until programmes for the centenary started appearing. I don’t remember Mum’s parents, but Mum passed on many family stories, like her mother’s sister having her appendix out on the kitchen table, but no tales of anyone in the family having ‘flu! Dad’s parents were born either side of the turn of the century so must have remembered it, but I don’t recall it ever being mentioned. Mind you, nobody talked much about the First World War either! Mum’s Dad looked after the horses and apparently always said ‘If there’s anything worse than a German it’s a Frenchman’ bet he would have voted for Brexit!
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It really makes me wonder what our grandchildren will say they heard about 2020.
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That is weird that it wasn’t much talked about. Obviously, it was before my mother’s time. She loved talking about health issues, hers and everyone else’s. I did know about it though. I remember as a teenager reading a book about a Canadian soldier who survived the horrors of WWI, came back to his mom and sweetheart, only to die of the flu a few weeks later. I cried and cried at the unfairness of it.
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There must have been millions of true stories like that—but somehow they didn’t get told.
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That’s really interesting, Barb. Thanks for the post.
Peggy
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I would like to see the distribution of the people who died from it with respect to socioeconomic status. One thing this current pandemic seems to indicate is that if most the people dying are poor then there is less urgency to confront the disease.
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There seems to be considerable evidence that (as now) demographics played a sad role. Of course, figures were skewed by military casualties of WW1 so it’s difficult to pin down precisely.
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Excellent post, Barb. I never heard stories from my parents or grandparents, and Hubby didn’t either. Wouldn’t you think one family member would have told stories of the Spanish flu? Let’s hope Covid disappears just as quickly.
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We videoed my mother over several days as she talked about her past and what she remembered being told about friends and family. She had a suitcase full of loose photographs and we used these as ‘prompts’. Several of her close family died of the Spanish flu and she told us that a lot of nursing staff died as well. It was the first time she’d talked about it. One of her uncles died in France as a soldier, another survived the sinking of no less than three ships and I’d heard these stories before. The other uncle died of ‘flu. Perhaps illness – no matter how devastating – lacks the heroism of a sacrifice on the battlefield. Perhaps there’s a hint of weakness in succumbing to ill health – Trump certainly gives that impression…
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I watched a History Channel documentary about the 1981 pandemic and it was interesting how people (at least here in America) reacted virtually the same – with the anti-maskers, etc. We never learn, sadly.
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