and the white house renovation. watch "american history tv" this weekend on c-span 3. in 1918 the flu pandemic altered american life in ways familiar to those living through today's coronavirus pandemic. conflicted information left people fearful, college classes held outside, sporting events were canceled, there was fines for people that didn't wear masks. a look at how the u.s. dealt with those events a century ago and the lessons that we can hold today held in dallas in is an hour and 40 minutes. >> since the pandemic has begun, since let's say for our purposes since we shut down in march, the thing that has been driving our analysis here as historian social security what is the historical precedent. 1918 is the one that comes to mind and we have nobody better to tell us about 1918 than my

friend christopher nichols. he is an associate professor of history at oregon state. he is also a director there. oregon state center's for the humanities and the founder of their citizenship and crisis initiative. he got a phd from a good friend of ours, mel loeffler. chris is an expert on what i would say is the early parts of the 20th century. of course he is expanding out and he and i before we came on were just chatting about new work we got coming out on ideologies and u.s. foreign policy which was, that book itself, that term and title was a seminole book in the field in 1987. i'm glad that someone decided to go in and update it, shall we say. no one is better to do it than chris. he will be talking to us about

the 1918 pandemic. on the bottom you will see a q and a button on your screen. please hit it and submit your questions and you can see other people's questions as they come in and if you like their question or if you were going to ask a similar question hit the thumbs up button and that will be helpful because that moves it up the queue. the more people that like something the higher it gets like anything else on the web. so i will also remind you, of course, that there is no chat function here. we want people just to focus on the q and a and perhaps needless to say, but i will say it anyway, one of the great benefits of doing this via the web is that it is much easier to kick out anyone who is unruly. keep it civil, people. without further adieu, i'm going to ask brian franklin to turn on chris's camera. there he is. how are you doing, buddy?

i just gave you the intro, looks like a sunny day. i'm going to turn things over to you. chris will show us some images. he will walk us through as it is going, lay the questions on us, and then we will have a discussion when he is done with his presentation. >> the floor is yours. >> yes, thank you so much. first of all i want to say thank you to everyone here with us. it is a record turnout for registrations. i hope that i can keep you interested. the topic is inherently interesting. special thank you to brian franklin who helped to organize this and is behind the scenes running the zoom web functions. to ron fitz who helped get things set up, and most importantly many thank you to professor jeffrey engle. a fantastic colleague, collaborator, and friend. we worked on a project that will also be out next year coming.

look for "rethinking american grand statue." and frankly when i taught it to my u.s. history students they were bored, but now we're attuned to the historical lessons that we can learn from the previous most significant global pandemic that is comparable to our brief one into i will give you a brief and compelling talk about that and then i will telescope out to compare to 2020. i will give you the story with international kmen international dimensions, and we will reflect on historical comparison. i recently organized a round

table on some of the top historians working on this subject. we don't always agree but i was surprised about how much consensus there is. ly give you a brief run down of what happens in the pandemic of 1918 and then we will telescope in and out. please keep your questions coming. one of the things that i think is most important to consider when we go back to the 1918 moment, and here is where we look at human history. the human suffering and cost. i will talk a little about the numbers, but one of the crucial things to understand in this moment is the story of people like victor vaughn. he was a really fascinating figure. he was a distinguished leader of american medicine in 1918. he was dean of the university of michigan medical school. he becomes the person in charge of the army medical services. founding editor of the journal of laboratory and clinical

medicine. served as a colonel in the army. he had seen a lot of disease and death. and he gets involved leading that division when the worst deadly second wave of the pandemic began in fall 1918. and september 23rd, 1918, he travelled to a team appointed by the army surgeon general. he was devastated by what he saw. this was a little outside of boston. he could not believe what he was seeing. it was far worse than any other communicable disease. he was placed on the cots and others crowd in. the faces soon where a bluish cast, a distressing cough bringing up the bloodstains. in the morning the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue. this is what they were seeing in the bar ricks throughout the fall 1918.

because they're bar ricks, as part of the war effort were so connected to the urban spaces and port facilities, it very rapidly got to the investigation. so we need to think about the moment in 1918 in terms of the human cost and suffering. the numbers are staggering, frankly. this is one of the things that we need to think about when we think about the u.s. case. what happened in 1918, 1919, and the pandemic is the u.s. lost roughly 675,000 people. on the order of 50 million around the world died although there are differences in terms of the estimates of the numbers between 20 and 100 million. in the u.s. this 20% to 30% of the population was infected.

the u.s. lost more soldiers to flu and pneumonia and other diseases than in combat in world war 1. all of this in part was detected to the war effort. i think that is the other piece for us to understand and think about. how did it begin? it all started in the u.s. context in winter of 1918. in march 1918 in kansas you begin to see widespread illness of a seemingly new type. in the american troops mustering there, newly draftly, indistricteindikucted, enlisted. of the 12 men in my squad room, seven were ill at a time. they fill up to capacity in their medical wards and they're

over whelmed. there is a couple different orange stor origin stories. in the u.s. context what a lot of us scholars now believe is that the most viral version that we think of as the pandemic version originated in kansas. in february and march of 1918. there is an ep deem epidemiologist that tracked it to france, but it comes out of kansas. you can watch that move. this is something that those of us that study presidential and u.s. political history know well. you can watch this move through army records in particular. we have amazing data on who got sick, when, and why because of army data and u.s. government census data. if nanyone says we don't have good data and information

they're not looking in the right places. we historians know where to look and you can get very fine grain analysis. one of the things i often note when we give talks on the flu of 1918 and why it it is so comparable to today, is it went around the world. the world was effectively globalized before world war i. and you see that playing out in terms of how this virus spreads. u.s. troops in particular arriving in france are conduits of information. so the soldiers start arriving well before the pandemic. but the u.s. doesn't really get it's mobileizatiization.

so they brought it on the railroads. you can see it happen in local newspapers. we know when flu arrived in cities like in portland, oregon, sti philadelphia, dallas, it almost always arrived with troops, civilian workers, and that sort of thing. a globalized world spread the pandemic in a way that previous ones did not. transmission of people's goods across borders. even in neutral countries, spread the disease as well. so if you're looking around the world in 1918 what happened. if it starts in march in kansas, by may it is in china. it is in new zealand, china, australia issued pretty strict foreign policies. sydney was particularly hard hit. it goes around the world within a year and that is a pretty amazing fact.

it used to be very striking to those of us who studied the pandemic. now in the current moment it is remarkably similar. from china and late 1919 to being a worldwide pandemic declaration from the who in march this year. it also helps us understand why the disease was discussed and how it was discussed and reported. what are some of the major concerns about talking about the virus, or treating it, or thinking more fully about the possibilities for an informed public taking public health measures, as the u.s. enters the war, here you can look at french forces near the u.s. western front, one thing that should stand out is this is the opposite of social distancing,

right? well the camps, the western front, images like these troops here they were absolutely prone to spreader and super spreader events. also with comparison back and forth one real significant contrast is the majority of those that died in 1918 and 1919, half or a third were in the 18-24 age bracket. it disproportionally hit young and healthy people. their immune system over responds and they drown with

fluid in their lungs in a horrific way. the type of thing that dr. vaughn that they embody iy embo. our current pandemic is not targeting the most heavy. i'm a historian not and epidemiologist. a lot of the information here relies on the histories of others. this is not just mine. i have a page of resourcesly share at the end and that we can share after the talk. so another thing that is important this think about the war-time consequences and the shaping was patriotism. it may strike you as a contrast, but it may be a continuity, but what you see here, the red cross women volunteers, workers, making masks and that sign behind "if i fail he dies."

it is a war work sign, supporting the war cause, and also a marshal language used to defeat the virus. we heard from president trump talking about the invisible enemy. that is very similar to what we saw in 1918 and 1919. thing of the virus. the spanish flu. trying to make visible the invisibility vinvi invisible virus. so there is another piece, perhaps more insidious that is that nations like the united kingdom had passed legislation, in this case the defense of the act of 1914 that sensored the mail and what the press could say and sensorcensored what was

distributed for a topics containing information about the war. communication in this case is about limiting access to anything that might undermine the war effort. in the just context there was the espionage acts. this headline from the u.s. national archives says, i think a "new york times" headline, one of the most drastic measures taken to act enpunish americ ann agents into why am i mentioning this? it meant that the journalists could not talk about the outbreaks at the bases. if you think about 24 of the 36 largest bases having large-scale outbreaks and virus that meant they were not combat effective,

they could not move across the country and the atlanta, you understand better how this possible communication about the waves of the virus, and it's infectiousness, it's fatalities might under mine the war effort. so you call this in other nations, germany and france, sensor the press, limiting the information about the outbreaks themselves n themselves. that is a first level take away. a huge problem in 1918 was a lack of rapid, honest and updated leadership from nation states, not just the u.s. but the u.k. don't talk. that includes not just talking about elements of the war effort

itself, or, for instance, the draft. another thing that many american desenato decentors talked about is whether or not the constituti constitution -- many people spoke out against the draft saying not even should have to serve. it might not even be constitutional to force them to serve and he was thrown in jail for a speech he gave saying that. so it was another example of how the world limited speech about public health issues and decent in a time of war. as the virus spread even into the middle of october when that

deadly second waive of polarity of american deaths happened, even in the fall, you saw documents like this. the spanish influ whinfluenza. there was previously a big outbreak. and here you see these widely distributed information coming from the u.s. department of public health from the surgeon general. he says it is the same grip that swept the world time and again. don't worry about it. modern nursing and health care will handle this. you see this well into the fall and it is creating a lot of problems. they don't know what policies to adopt at the local state and federal level, even, but they don't know what information to trust. so i will show you more images

from the era about that. another piece of the puddle is about where it came from, right? lots of historians have had to talk about this lately, should we call flus by their nation of origin, their city of origin, why does it mean. the main reason is the wartime nations were scensoring their presses. spain was a neutral in the world. they kept the nation out of the war effort, but they had ties to austria and ungary. many of you probably know so many of you kept out of the war effort, but in may 1918 the king and a number of other aides came

down with the flu. and the spanish press started to flesz with lots of sensational coverage. there is accounts where they say a man walking down the street felt congested, there are very similar accounts of strong people, all american football players, you know, one of the stronger lumber jacks in the northwest division cutting down trees, they would also sometimes just fall down dead, so when they covered this, it came out you saw the british press covered this and they used terms like the hygiene environment. or that the spanish were not able to deal with it because of their society.

these kind of subtle racist or heavily racial terms, they got adopted more wisely. and tlous long, it is the spanish flu. but of course officials around the world understand that the or begins were not in spain. they no longer said that, but the term that caught on, the weaponized, rationalized version of the flew caught on. the spanish called it the french flu. they landed them for that. the germans called it the russian pest and russians called it several or names. so you 1993 this moment, in the

near past, the urge to weaponize a flu or virus. perhaps to diminish is or to better operationalize a way forward to fight it. as we're thinking about this moment and the conflict, you also find that the -- on the front a number of places, a number of french posts, do have significant flu outbreaks. throughout the spring into the summer of 1918, but what most of them ♪ that frins in the british navy, some 10,000 say slors go down with the flu, but only four or five die. there is a few posts of the french where everyone is sick but very few die. in late summer something seems to change in the reporting,

changing in the intelligence that we get that we can look back on now. and it changes most importantly in the virus. and so by late in summer 1918 in places not known to the u.s. and british to have good medical care, you found wide spread disease and that it was knocking out more people not just from combat effectiveness, but also from life itself. they recovered but they could not breathe good enough. here is an example of patients in switzerland. so what you see in the moment was really interesting to look back on. british and american officers are reporting back in documents saying things like the disease that is now an epidemic.

we must deal with this now. the affliction has resurfaced in significant form. so they're worried about the combat effectiveness and they take the virus very soorsly, but anyone that knows this history, that knows about this story, the wartime narratives triumphed over that. so you see as troops bring back from france that form to east coast port cities involved in the war, new york, philadelphia, boston. you see americans taking the advice of people like rupert blue. going ahead with major events and going ahead with business as usual.

it is the largest parade to date. it was a moment to sell bonds, it was an era where the u.s. attempted to no longer do that. this is an interesting topic to think about as well. so here is an image of an a aircraft traveling down a parade route in philly, and what you may know about what comes next is about how horrific that super spreader event was. doctors urged the public health officials to cancel the parade. they are really fearful that hundreds of thousands of people jammed into the route would be a problem and of course it was a huge one. two days after the parade the head of public health said something as follows, i will

paraphrase. now in the civilian population is some type of flu but let's not be panic stricken over exaggerated reports. there was details like this the philadelphia evening bulletin may not have some left to take care of burying their dead. husband and infant dmed a few hours. it was really horrific. after the parade, it got much worse. the hospital's quickly filled up, they built supplemental hospitals. at one point you're getting 700 plus people dieing in one day. police that drove carts to pick up the bodies could not keep up. you think about what historians have been hollaring about since march. and there is a great report about the history of the

pandemic. this is what we worry about. we worry about this kind of moment, because philadelphia could not keep up in the modern parliaments, the curve could not be flattened and the city was devastated because of that. so across the country public health officials continued on those lines and that is one thing that we learned. here is one more about the ambiguity of that moment. they say there is no cause for alarm. as i have up here, the president of the west philadelphia association started an anti-scare campaign. on the other hand, linked to the last image, the young girl with the mortally ill sister in that case. the editorsover the inquirer

wrote that they went too far. they made a case here shutting down schools, churches, and there was an unreasonable amount of fear. and here you see an antisp anti-spitting campaign. but there you see in the lower part later in the pandemic someone being brought into the hospital by police who are masked. so you saw a lot of similar situation. today the question of whether or not the measures to stop the virus were worse than the virus itself. the city of philadelphia was seemingly proving that the virus was pretty terrible. and in philadelphia you see this kind of information. i'm often asked what about the economy. the height of the deadliest second pandemic, as bad as it

gets. here is the wall street journal. they have caused production to decrease at 50%, and in other places it is falling off. they are met, they have been large, the war is still on, it doesn't end until november 11th. there has never fwhn this country so complete domination of an ep didemic like this one. most cities had closure orders. so war industrial plants were trying to open and make ammunitions, rivals, tanks, and all sorts of things. in those industries you saw 40%, 50%, or 60% of folks not showing up to work. they weren't all sick, but they were making a risk calculation in that moment about whether or

not it was wlort it to go into work in those industries. you imagine the other jobs that were letsds essential, they were having significant problems, too. so one of the lessons they take from this moment, and you can see it in other countries, is that there is no such thing as business as usual in a pandemic. almost regardless of what public health measures are under taken, voluntary or mandatory, people make choices about their lives. loved oneses that are more prone to being sick or more fearful. some people need to work and that is another reason that in this moment the pandemic fell disproportiona disproportionately on people of lower socioeconomic status. soap these are the folks that you saw showing up.

here is the red cross, their ambulance team is drilling to get ready for their work. most male doctors, many male doctors, ahead been drafted to join the war effort and there was lots of nurses as well. so there was a nursing shortage and a doctor and medical shortage that were part of that moment. another thing to think about as you see so many images of the red cross, voluntary organizations essentially although they merge as a public-private area, americans did, and citizens around the world, they didn't think that the government would necessarily provide for all of their medical care, they often fell back on community resources, church groups, and other organizations. and national, state, and local ones like the red cross to help

out in times like this. but many of those groups were overwhelmed. these are probably women, 18-45, the determi the determine brafic likely to get hit the hardest. further chaser baiting and amply fieing the problems already there and social historians documented very beautifully and sadly that this these a loneliness, alienation, and fear by other people. as the pandemic goes on you had lots of relatively healthy people no longer being very willing to help their older relatives or neighbors because they had seen how many young people, healthy people, had been stricken down and killed very fast. one story that comes out is a pretty common one across the

u.s. frommidwest, to the east coast and the west coast. people being so fearful and challenged that they say things like here is an account from north carolina. we were almost afraid to grieve and go out. the fear was so great that people were aphrase to leave their homes or to talk to one another. another example come from washington dc. there was no school life, church life, it destroyed all family and community life. the terrifying aspect is when each day dawned you didn't know if you would be there when the sunset that day. and internal reports from lots of organizations sort of really amplified this. you see this in john berry's writing in particular. it concluded that fear and pandemics has been pref flint

virtually every part of the u.s. that is another part that is interesting. i think global and human. i have done some talks with psychologists. one of the things that other people are seeing is that this fear of the virus has manifested around the world. that everyone in the world would be experiencing something in realtime. and that is something that we have not paused to reflect on have much. i will keep you moving. so let's talk about nonfarm sunt kal interventions. this is a term for closure policies and social distancing and all of that stuff. here you see on the left the philadelphia inquirer after that great parade, a super spreader event, virtually nothing there about the disease. a few days later -- two weeks later to be honest, you see scientific nursing, later

scientific nursing, deaths on decreasing scale. an enormous number, right? so what happened? you have all probably seen and thought about this in cities like philadelphia you see a case that arrived 11 days before the parade. the sailors are coming into the port of philadelphia and then that super spreader event, right? it tracks pretty neatly on to late september. versus other cities that did better. absolute, their chief medical officer, the son of a civil war surgeon who was obsessed with infectious diseases. and he puts on significant closure policies rapidly in the city of st. louis and keeps them on for awhile. so the rapid complete closure policies that happen in tloes

and their long duration help to explain the difference in these two curves. you can look at when the parade happens and the enormous uptick that comes after that. where as st. louis which responded well, has a much more prolonged duration, but it is so much lower and is widely considered a success, right? so one of the things to think about is the way that this will also operate for us all. it is just around the corner, or perhaps also possibly in the spring. it is think of as three ways. we're thinking about going into a second wave now. so what happened there is st.

louis, denver, pittsburgh, not as big as the philadelphia one, but a comparable moment. but the -- another piece of the muzzle it is what happened in pittsburgh with it's big peak. one big element for us to think about and take away is that they closed in a layered strategy. there was a powerful lobby in the city and they wanted to keep the schools open longer. public schools closed and they had more exemptions for masses, sometimes outdoor, sometimes indoor, and the argument by public health scholars about this is that that is partly why you saw this first peak and a second peak here from october into early november, their

layered strategy of closing here, if you're going to close you close completely and you keep that on. if you're going to open you open in a layered fashion in a fazed strategy. these are pretty clear lessons. i have a citation to a great american journal category. let's talk about denver for a second. what happened in denver? this is what we're seeing in the u.s. today. as of august 2020. it is a premature reopening. there was a lobby, a set of lobby groups in denver. places like billiard halls. they pushed hard to reopen. as they saw some disease going down, as demonstrated in their hospitalizations, and what doctors were reporting, they thought they could.

so they start to reopen. as they reopen in the end of october and into november, can what you find is they have not done enough. they're not really fully following data and disease. they're operating on a market logic hoping to get businesses back up and running. that is what we have seen in the u.s., in lots of parts of the world, and that combined with one other factor, lots of people went into the streets whether or not they were allowed, and they partied and they had fun and they met with other people, they were wearing masks where they threw them off. a lot of places like denver that started reopening you see a second peak. this is part and parcel from

what they take in this moment. don't pr matureematurprematurel. their recommended thresholds for we opening cities like denver didn't follow them. they were lead by folks that hoped to get back to business as usual. a reasonable thing to hope for, but it did not work out. another thing to think about in that moment, here it is really beautifully graphically, thinking about what is happening over these different periods. they adopt strategies eventually. the cities adopted strategies and cloture policies. closing schools and businesses, limiting numbers of people on trans transit. using ventilation tactics, opening windows, more air flow,

cleaning spaces, and later on into the fall you start to see more of the mask mandates that fall into the winter. so they have cities with peeks, they are particularly hard hit. as i have been commenting, and what you won't see here is dallas. so here you see on the left, a spraying machine to disinfect the throats and nasal passages of the soldiers. these are some of the bits of information that were suggested pi the s by the surgeon general. we know for sure what happened

in tallahassee, for instance, and in texas. we know that as the national press was covering the influenza, the health official warned his community to expect that it was coming and he wasn't wrong. loser to home something like 700 cases were reported among sold juries. we saw outbreaks in san antonio. and in an attempt to contain them and safeguard the troops they tried to quarantine camps. another thing we saw is that the quarantines of camps didn't work very well. they regularly left or got perhaps unlucky in terms of who they encountered. so if you think about sports today, for instance, bubbles work, right? an absolute quarantine, but even

a 99% quarantine doesn't work. that seemed to happen. so the case in dallas was that september 27th, but there was 15 cases and as you go on by october 3rd dallas had 119 dais cases by people like some young foals that died at st. paul's hospital. you had hospitals that started to execute their cases. things like ventilation, air, trying to keep people apart. and it worked pretty rapidly for special meetings and schools. by the middle of october, but the public health o officials were divided on how rad idly to close things down. if cases mounted that is when

they start. so if you talk a little more about it the point is that actually ultimately historians that study this really closely in the case of texas and dallas suggest that in fact despite the variations, and because flu was not a "report able bl"reportabl this moment." it would be reported as the grip and not the flu. remember that september 24th is when they started talking about this than pa tried in philadelphia is september 14th. so the epidemic death rates in dallas were in the range of 250

to 211, closer likely to the lower number. so they know better than most mid western communities like st. louis. people ask who got the flu? babe ruth did. there is a curse after that. as you may have heard of. he caught it, came back from it pretty rapidly. franklin d. roosevelt got the flu in september. at the time two very healthy individuals. prone to get this, woodrow wilson got it. there is an argument that part of the problems of his peace making in paris were related to having gotten the flu. they also think he had a minor

stroke. there is a hypothesis that woodrow wilson's minor stroke, if it was one, was directly related to the flu. . they can lead to strokes and blood clots and other things like that. here is a little university of oregon football star. so many football stars were drafted to go fight in the war. there was no professional football at that time so college football was the main thing. lots of people wanted to see football games and they could not. there was a fair number of colleges that did play. georgia tech played quite a few home games. games were canceled from big outbreaks. and you saw lost of teams that did not have full records.

many conferences also canceled, but they did, in fact, play. they played with fans wearing masks. that is an interesting dimension to that. the stanley cup, for instance, until i did my research i didn't know. it ended in a draw because most of the canadians in the middest of it, a number of games in, were too sick to play. so officially on the substantially cup the series was not completed because of the flu. this is one of the things we worry about for all of the sports out there. what will happen if a number of players get the virus. can they continue? baseball famously played games in masks. spring training, 1919, you might be able see behind me don larson throwing a perfect game.

players played in masks. there was one totally masked game. these were in california in spring training in 1919. by the time the season started, officially they were not playing in masks. a couple more images and global take aways. i see a lot of questions coming in. we think about some of the other comparisons to our current moment. flu causes and cures. how to make your own masks. this is very similar to the ways we have tried to personalize and individual ice how this is done. how the pretsz talks about what we can do to take agency in a moment of uncertainty. this is another way that things worked then. one thing was a large scale facility full of people who are sick. in new york, fins, they mustered

and built the center out and it wasn't filled up. on the left the nurse on that porch, that is the walter reis medical center in dc. i'm pulling us back around to the weaponization of the flu. don't spit, don't spread it, that sort of thing if is an injunction against that. i mentioned what are some of the techniques in that moment, we can talk more about it later if you want. patients were taken outside. it was thought of as an effective strategy. if you think about how we're being encouraged today to go outjoou outdoors, socially distanced drinks and barbecues, that was a piece of the puzzle they knew about then. masked medical officials and people staying outside. here is another set of ways to

grapple. one of the things that happened in a lot of cities is when schools were closed teachers were sent out to teach home economics. to teach ventilation strategies and hand hygiene. they knew about the germ theory. they knew it could be spread on door handles. they didn't want high touch surfaces left, and open windows to ventilate spaces to try to get less high dosage in the way that we would think about it. viral loads in small spaces. there was staffing crisis. this was a big problem for world war one. here you see the epidemic and spanish influ whinfluenza. we can't even call out groups of people to talk about what is going on because there is so much disease in the community from oklahoma into from

philadelphia to oklahoma you saw similar phenomena. you saw, again, the training, the police, the military providing the on tickets of mask wearing and a patriotic bush forward. you also saw something similar to what we see today. mask and other mandates. on the left you see a conductor telling them it is resonating today. lots of what happened that is comparable happened on the west coast and it is very well documented. frank frank in particular, they had courts outside. they thought at least they're outside and they didn't know

about viral transmission the way we do today, now they have masks. some women getting their hair attended to. as you get further to the fall people don't want to be out in the fall. other kinds of distances is something they're pursuing. classs are held outside, too. that is a physics class being held adjacent to a football stadium or a outdoor sports reck facility. i can't imagine that we really want to do out door classes, but anything is possible and this is the sort of thing you saw trying to get back to some normalcy. you saw them in a staged mask.

so this is a lot of buy in from the armed forces. and of course there is a lot of bad information. i'm trying to give you a quick walk through all of this. one of my favorites is the flu travels through the mouth piece of the telephone. also constant and continuous smoking to stall the flu. this gets at a more conspiracy point. they argued that there is no kaug for alarm if precautions are observed. in their later memoirs they didn't know what advice to heed. you see the surgeon general telling you to follow precautions spp precautions.

is it vicks havvapor rub? is it gargling salt water? is it a vaccine? closing schools, churches, theaters, health commissioners getting out in front of this. those sorts of operations and trying to communication what the risks were nap came too late for a lot of the u.s., for a lot of the suffering but it is sort of never too late is the lesson of the moment. here is a little of what was going on in organizatioegon. you can watch the first sold juries bring the disease down through the camps. on the coast, 120 cases that got done to other coastal towns and the one undertaker got sick. he was unable to take care of the bodies. as bodies mounted up, it hit

children disproportionate lit hard. the city cried out that they were unable to find and build enough child-sized coffins. when we look at this moment, medical facilities over whelmed, this is what we think of. coming in numbers that meant that it was impossible to carry on. one-third to half of the county came down with the flu in 1919 alone. how do you carry on. one of my favorite things they said that was it is easier to prevent than to cure. if you're distant, if you do hand hygiene, you can prevent it but it is harder to cure in your community. more on fazed reopenings.

the embargoes come off, lots of cities are eager to do this, and this is how we contract the data related to the phased reopening. slowly following data and disease. not a desire to go out to restaurants and bars that seem to minimize spread and they allow place that's did that more slow fazed reopening after a longer closure, so cities like philadelphia come out okay. so here is some more examples of the flu, the fazed reopenings. including sports. here is other examples as go through. no reason to believe it originated in spain. sometimes people they that is true.

all right, so i will conclude with take away remarks. november is coming fast. what happens if you have an election in a pandemic, is that possible? sure, it is and we have done it elections in 1918. woodrow wilson never once mentioned the pandemic. no public addresses or speeches about the pandemic at all. he made the war the key to what he hoped the democratic party would do in that election cycle. his prosecution of the war and bringing it almost to conclusion at that point, it wound up being a lost referendum. republicans get a bunch of seats, and there is a very low turnout. as i say, reports predicting polling places across the nation as the quietest in memory. some places didn't open up at all. most did. relatively few turnout is one key. and the election didn't map on as neatly to partisan -- a

partisan perspective on the virus as we see today. so what you see over there on the left is the saloon versus the church and the ways in which the two parties were arguing which areas should get closed first or reopened first, saloons and gambling houses versus churches, and some communities that mapped onto religious sentiment or anti-semitism or anti-catholic sentiment. remember, we're about to get rising prohibition about this. there was privilege to the virus but not reaction to the virus itself. they were handing out bon-bons at a polling place in new york, and one thing to remember is coming out of the pandemic and out of world war i pushing kind of restrictions to immigration,

return to normalcy and return to society as we know it. as we take our step back, we also saw pushback, protests and reemergence in that era. you may have heard about the anti-mask league. it was an organized league in san francisco in early 1919, tt pushed back against mask requirements that were mandatory. the anti-mask league was the only real organized one in the u.s., the number in the thousands. we see 4500 listed, and you see the mayor of san francisco saying, nope, we're not taking away the mask ordinance, we're convinced it's working. and if you look at the data, death and disease go down after the mask ordinances were put on, but it's unclear how much or whether the masks actually mattered. their liberty was at stake. this was an abridgement to civil liberty at any time or not, and

he questioned whether they were essential, that they were really doing the kind of sanitary work they supposedly did. there was pushback and there was opposition to the pushback. if you pushed back, there were fines. there was sometimes jail time for weeks, significant dollar amounts. there were more accounts, which i could talk more about, of mask slackers being held on charges of disturbing the peace because they refused to wear masks. there was at least one shooting -- there were several times the weapons were discharged in attempted apprehensions of people who wouldn't wear masks and insisted on riding public transit or going to businesses. going into court facilities, for instance, was another thing people did. and the mask slacker notice is something worth noting because it's the same concept as draft slackers. those who didn't do their wartime duty or go into the draft or join the military were thought of as slackers to their

patriotic duty, and the press took that same language, and many americans talked about it in terms of mask slacking, that your duty was to wear that mask to keep your community safe, not just yourself. and thfis was similarly seen in lots of glat creat cartoons in era, trying to normalize this. see, ma, even the horses are wearing them, says the kid as he's wearing his mask in fort wayne, indiana trying to teach people, normalizing it, even kissing through the mask. trying to teach your father or grandparents is another similar thing we see a lot in the c cartoons of this era. a lot of you are probably familiar with this, the people who won't take precautions, and the mask is just one example of these. very similar in the 1918-1919 moment. you won't catch me wearing one, and then there is an urgency to

go ahead and wear masks. another element, if you think about going through the christmas season, the holiday season, december 1918, you see all these shoppers wearing masks. this is in indiana. you also see these germs, these microbes. infernal masks spoil it all. we see mask concepts, even martial language being manifested in this moment. and finally, economic and political effects. there isn't that much data, but as i mentioned before, merchants in cities suggested that their businesses declined 40% to 70%. there was big decreases in mine output, big decreases in steel, and you also saw a significant u.s. recession. it was a judgment recession after the war of 1918-1919, the

largest recession in history in 1921 where there was a rampant cessation, and there were economic downturns in this period. historians argue that there is some relationship to the pandemic of 2020, fewer people coming into the u.s., more kind of an isolationist turn in politics and society, and in 1919, a rise of strikes and social tumult. people who had bought into the war effort, african-american soldiers, white laborers, ethnic laborers, poles and italians, they wanted what they were promised when working for lower wages and less hours. you see the boston police go on strike and get fired by calvin coolidge, all of them. you see race riots, american

strike breakers called in to beat up white strikers in s syracuse turning into racial violence, the tulsa massacre. so there is a relationship between the tumultuous influenza which killed 675,000 americans, and the wartime experience with this set of things that come after. we often warn people and wonder, how similar is this moment? how can we get past that, if possible, without succumbing to worse? a final bit of data. we're thinking global, we're thinking this moment, 1918 and 1919. this is mid-august 2020 data. if you're looking at those total deaths, total population, what's gone on, much lower percentage of the population has been killed lately, .05% in the u.s. thankfully we haven't suffered that much, and yet we've suffered terribly.

we're moving toward 200,000 deaths in the u.s. if you look at the world population, again, you should call it the spanish flu in quotes, because we don't want to succumb to using that language critically. you saw global fatalities in the 2.7% range. we have .01% globally now. roughly speaking, again, this comes from my colleague who wrote an article. but one thing that stands out is this thing here, and i wanted to leave it for a second and just think about this as we microscope and telescope the u.s. case in 1919 and 2020 in the world. in 1918-1919, a percent of the population versus covid. that is really striking and astounding, frankly, when you look at that comparison, right, that the u.s. percentage of population is around 14.2% and

yet we're at 29.9% of deaths from covid versus influenza which was something like 1.4%. it's a really striking change. i've got more takeaways and more things, but i want to talk more -- you've heard a lot from me. it's a sweeping set of comparisons to the president, and i think it's really important for us to take account of those social history, the human suffering, and then the political and social public health questions that are entailed in that. not least the fact that this disproportionately tends to fall on people of lower socioeconomic status, viral outbreaks, death and disease, even though viruses transcend all borders and people, races and everything else. main insights. one is that where there were cancellations, postponements of large events and gatherings, school closures, crowded measures, elt cetera, they workd well, as we've seen today.

most nations were involved in a war. woodrow wilson never spoke about the war. we had censorship. his administration really sought to hide risks. of course, the war was won, and that was a positive benefit, but it came with a cost of more infection and death. this meant, too, that citizens were ill-informed, right? it meant that the examples i gave about people being fearful dominated their social interactions and lives in ways that we're seeing in some ways today. it also led to distrust in government in local officials, but public officials in st. louis, for example, who did a good job with public officials in philadelphia. rapid information is obviously important. these layered closures don't seem to work as well. kind of closing the door

abruptly does, whereas reopening more gradually, tracking disease, being ready to close any moment is most important. then the final takeaway i have that you all probably thought of yourselves, in the u.s., the main actions were local, the governors and health officials weren't on the federal government. just like 2020, local government has been where the action has been. finally, here's a set of recommended resources. lots of great stuff. i've got some articles in there, but there are amazing books and articles free from the archive of the university of michigan. it's amazing. the library of congress has a great exhibit and there are a bunch of others. without further ado, let's see if jeff and i can have a good conversation. >> i can not only talk, but i can see myself. awesome. that was good. and impressive. and distressing. we've got a ton of questions, and i know i've got a ton of questions myself, but i'm going

to ask you to start off with the big picture, one historian to another, why don't we talk about this? i'm about to lecture world war i in my history course. i think the word flu might have come out of my mouth, but at the most it was a sentence. obviously this year i'm going to talk about it a lot more. if more people died from this flu in the united states, then t the united states lost in world war i and world war ii. why don't we talk about this more? >> they often talk about this as the forgotten virus. a forgotten moment in u.s. history. first of all, they're wrong. you can look at literature. an article that i put together shows how literature is full, literature in the '20s, '30s, '40s is full of literature on

influenza. you just have to look for it. people have memories of not being able to walk up stairs, or family members who are departed too soon. they're not necessarily lost generation references to the war, but rather they're about the flu. we often import into that this perspective that it must be the war, and i succumb to that, too, myself sometimes. one, it's there. it's not totally forgotten. but unlike the war, there weren't memorials built. so in the '20s, you see a lot of, say, sports -- i don't know if it's true here, but in dallas there is a memorial of some type that probably had its origins in world war i for sports, playing football. we see a lot of that coming out of the flu and the closure policies. memorializing the war but actually doing something that was lost because of the pandemic, not the war. so those war memorials sometimes have a direct reference to the

pandemic, you just need to look for it. why else don't we talk about it? because some of the things i said there, you heard my historian to historian heavily qualified language, right? do those riots and tumults coming out of the war, is it the wart or the pandemic? how do you aggregate the two? you can't, so the simple answer is always the war. it may not be a great one, the same reason you have to say flu rather than readjustment demobilization, or the question of labor activism coming out of the war along the same lines. the other thing that's interesting, the reason that i wanted to write about this a few times is that my fellow historians of this era the first half of the 20th century all say what you just said, why don't they talk more about the flu? one of the things is they didn't have the resources, frankly. we didn't have the resources, and now so much has been scanned in the last decade order so, s

all the images i get, it's easier to track it over time. now you have my resources and i'll send you my slides and you can do 20 minutes on the flu. >> forget it, i'll just show them this video, then i.n don't have to teach that day. >> there you go. >> i'm not going to judge the answer to this particular question, which is whether or not you watched the democratic or republican convention. but vice president pence said several times in his speech something that i thought was patently obviously false, and it wasn't what anyone else in the country was worried about except a historian. he said several times speaking to the relief workers, speaking to the first responders of our day, 2020, we will not forget you. and i said, oh, yeah, we will. there is no historical evidence that we're going to remember these people at all. i'm just curious if the fact that we have our interconnected world, if you think there is any

reason to think that's going to change from how we've prioritized war deaths over pandemic deaths? >> that's a really good insight. you know, it's sharp. i wonder -- so there is this thing that's happened in a lot of cities where at 7:00 p.m. people applaud and they thank medical workers. and that is -- it's an international phenomenon in a way that we didn't see that related to medical workers certainly in 1918 and 1919. i wonder if any of those kinds of practices will have a long echo because we've been doing them collectively in a way we didn't in the past. but the other piece of it is, you know, the incredible suffering in death is almost always localized, right? that's why i started with those examples that were so sad. one thing that's interesting about the 1918 moment and today, it's tragic.

every time i've given a talk on this, eep deem yolpidemiologist talked to me about viral load. those symptoms you're feeling can mean you get a worst case. medical folks tend to get it worse, or are more likely to. and that seems very true in 1918. we don't have enough to make that conclusion definitively, but, you know, i wonder if memorializing medical deaths -- i'm pivoting to wartime, that martial language -- rather than the suffering of individuals who, say, are dying at home. one of the worst cases in 1918 that i sometimes refer to is islanders and he eskimos out of alaska, 82 were dead. they found so many bodies decomposing, they didn't know

whofls who was alive or dead. red cross workers then got the virus out of this and they were sick. it's a terrible story that's only in red cross history, it's not even in your typical history of the flu pandemic. this is probably a long way of affirming your point, which is to say i can't imagine we'll be memorializing the front line workers for this for very long. however, i think a very interesting narrative about this moment is a rapid global march to a vaccine in science and development, research science and development, and then it's the production could very well be the story of this moment, something you don't anticipate, that you billions of doses as fast as ever in human history, and the hero is whoever can do the production stuff. maybe it's businesses, maybe it's individuals, maybe it's institutions or universities. i could imagine those people being celebrated like soc in

polio. >> i can imagine, jonah soc is saying, this is my moment. another thing you alluded to was that distant death and lethality of the 1919 pandemic compared to ours. how should we understand that? has a historian i'm confused, because i say to myself, okay, what if they had had antibiotics and ventilators, how many people would have died? can i really say covid-19 is less lethal than the influenza of 1918, or simply that we are better at dealing with them? >> yeah, you know, i think my honest answer as a historian is i can't say, and i don't think our medical establishment can come up with a clear answer to that. probably until we see this out

farther. there are really good history of medicine accounts that explain the viral changes and the mutations that attempt to talk about those for that deadly second wa second wave, which is so much worse. all the sailors are sick, but very few die. americans get sick and very few die. then that second wave when it comes back across the atlantic, call it the atlantic rebound, right, boom, much worse. at first this year i thought to myself, we're using the same medical treatment strategies, and what's interesting in this comparison is that 1918 is like 1920, both like in the medicine and public health closures. closure policies, non-pharmaceutical interventions and no good treatment strategies. first they were throwing everything at covid and nothing seemed to work. in fact, some things seemed to be exacerbating death and disease. my sense of the data for 1918 is that the disproportionate death of healthy people versus our

ability today to cordon off our most at-risk people is the biggest difference. and so should a large society in the world today not be able to cordon off its most at-risk people, you might see much higher fatality rates than we are, since we don't yet have treatments or vaccine yet of that kind. that's also a piece of flattening the curve. like that philadelphia story is like, wow, with all those hospitals full, you're going to have more death. and they did. >> one of my questions has to do, of course, not surprisingly, with the politics of this. two questions, in effect. the first one, as you mentioned, this does not become a partisan issue in 1919 in the same way that it does today. explained. but secondly, how much are you seeing about trying to interpret the 1918 election in this context? because, obviously, again, the way i tell the story, the way i

think all those foreign relations guys tell the story is in the campaign, vote for me in the congressional election in order to ratify my views on foreign policy, and he loses. and judging from our own experience right now, people aren't happy right now, and when people aren't happy, they take it out on the incumbent, period. so absent the flu, is there a chance that wilson actually is able to do different things with at least the numbers in the senate? >> oh, that's interesting. first we'll do the partisan thing. one of the things that surprised me the most in this moment, although it shouldn't as a historian of politics and foreign policy, is how partisan this public health moment has become, in part because the history of public health disasters has not been particularly partisan. certainly some agencies are. we could think about fema, we could think about political appointees being perhaps not up to the task. that's one thing. but that the response would map on to party politics at the

individual level, and my decision to socially distance or to deny that that would have any close correlation to my party affiliation or my voting patterns, it seems to me to be -- it's not necessarily logical, let's just talk about it that way, right? so being diplomatic about it. the 1918 moment, i think, is indicative of something i said, perhaps buried a bit. the public health expectations of citizens were much lower then, so they weren't thinking that the wilson administration would be the leader on this. people were, as my account suggests, uncertain about how to respond because they got so much different information, and, of course, they were suffering, particularly in the places where it was worse before the election. but the main piece of the puzzle is what you said, which is the war, right? so famously wilson campaigned in 1916 and he kept us out of war. world war i was not popular in

the u.s. in roughly 11 states the national guard was called out because there was that much draft dodging going on, which is why you get that draft dodger kind of concept, which latches onto the mask slacker concept and not doing your patriotic good. the war was not over by the election. november 11 is armistice, third, fourth, you finish the election cycle. so there's that piece. but absent the pandemic, i wonder, i think perhaps certainly it depresses turnout depending on which analysis you look at, you see turnout falling 10% to 14% in 1918, so understandable but not that remarkable because it's a midterm election. by 1920, you're back to pretty normal turnout despite the fact there is still lingering flu in that season. that's usually thought of the as

the first continual wave of this version of the flu as opposed to another wave in and of itself. it's the first season, if you will. so that's interesting. then -- what was the second part? how do i pivot from partisan mapping? >> it's not even factual, it's so ridiculous posturally. but if the american people are not suffering through a flu and they're about to win a war -- i mean, the war was in its final days, or at least it seemed closer to the end than the beginning, let's put it that way. that sounds like a recipe for voting for the party in power. and, of course, the party in power gets voted out. so is it just the misery of the american people that makes that critical delta? >> it's interesting, because it's close. it's not that many seats that the republicans win, but they're on their way back to taking

over, you know, with harding in 1920. for me the big part -- because i'm primarily, as you know well, as you said in the introduction, deal with ideas in u.s. foreign policy. one of the reasons i got interested in this topic was because i was writing on dissent politics of power in the future, and socialists in the south who were rejecting the war effort, and anti-war southern democrats who were fire-breathing segregationists, usually democrats. there were some republicans in these ranks who also are against the war, and they think it's against american interest, and they don't want to send their offspring, their constituents out, and they have a hard time reconciling that with the kind of martial sensibility, the southern honor culture that also certainly comes out as we think of civil war. so it was very odd to me to

see -- one problem was you couldn't hold as many rallies into the fall. so the kinds of campaigning, at least at the grassroots level that you need, presidents didn't campaign much back then, as we know, but lower level politicians went out a lot, and you couldn't do as much of that because of the influenza pandemic. so you see republicans win -- in my opinion, win more and be more appealing and democrats be less appealing because of kind of disillusionment with the war and a broader set of beliefs that also doesn't tend to make it into our lectures, for instance, or survey classes, at least, which is not only is the war really unpopular, but americans really question the role of the u.s. as a world leader. so from my perspective in studying that, that helps explain why the u.s. rejects or the senate rejects the treaty of versailles, doesn't want the u.s. to be in the league of nations. there is some reason to think

that americans like the abstract idea of the league. this is why it's raved about in victory of power. wilson can't campaign on that and they reject it. so for me the flu is a piece of that, but the war and the american reluctance to take a leadership role in the world and be embroiled in the conflict is a bigger piece of that story. >> let's talk for a few minutes more. >> sure. >> it is amazing that woodrow wilson is not remembered for the flu, but maybe we shouldn't be surprised at that, because, a, it's something he doesn't mention, and b, something nobody expects him to mention. so the fact we expect federal response today, and the fact we expect the president to know what's going on in every locality today despite what the state constitutions say, does that tell us the president has

become more powerful over time and that federalism itself has changed in the american perception? >> great question. so what perplexed me about this moment when i first started researching it, this is the most powerful the federal government has arguably ever been. you could say maybe the union in the civil war. so the wilson administration has price controls, it's got troops mobilized, the federal structures that we think of of the imperial presidency are much more present in the wilson administration than they were with roosevelt, mckinley, as they expand in the cuban-philipine war, et cetera. that wilson doesn't exercise that power is fascinating. that there wasn't an empowered surgeon general and public health structure from the surgeon general is also interesting and useful. canada develops a public health infrastructure.

the u.s. does not. coming out of world war i, the u.s. demobilizes so fast, that the classic anecdote you're calling that agricultural services sector in d.c. from nebraska and nobody picks up the phone because it's been disconnected. that's how fast the u.s. demobilizes. so that small federal government ethos continued in public health disasters and in wars right after, and is indicative, i think, of that moment in general. another thing that shocks me, woodrow wilson did not ever issue a public speech about the pandemic. it's killing hundreds of thousands of americans. he is just laser focused on world war i. he's the first president to travel abroad during his term. he goes into paris, millions of people come out. all he cares about is really the war at that point. and everything else falls to the wayside. so i think he deserves a lot of scorn, frankly. if you're a president, you

should handle this better. when u.s. troop ships arrive in france in late summer and fall, they're met by ambulances and hearses because of the number of american troops who suffered and died on the course of going across the atlantic. that was never publicly reported in that period, partly out of censorship, partly out of patriotism. you can understand why that would happen, but that's how tragic it is. the same is true when they're coming back from france. they're coming back from being decommissioned or getting leave and they're being met by ambulances, or they're being quarantined off the port of philadelphia and then you see it come in. someone gets leave, right? a couple mps come in, suddenly the virus is everywhere. again, that's a place where you can really judge harshly in the wilson administration. that's all for the war effort. you know, but i think one thing that's surprising, one reason i emphasize the war and martial language so much, it does

eventually get kbortd inimportee public health response, but it's amazing that woodrow wilson doesn't say, it's your duty to close your business, to pay your employees as much as you can. it another thing that's a contrast and leaves me devastated at times is in six to eight weeks, the virus ravaged the u.s., maybe because they took proactive measures. that's one thing we haven't been able to do with this pandemic. it's totally worse for deaths per capita and suffering, and we should know better. we have access to this history. that we haven't acted on it in a more proactive way is devastating. >> i understand how you feel, and it's made me reconsider how i understand time itself.

you and i could have a conversation and say, oh, yeah, the pandemic in 1918-1919 was about 14 months. we could say, oh, yeah, that's no big deal. here we are in month 6 and we're tired of it. big picture question, then. it's been 100 years. is there anything that we have learned that is actually being usefully applied in the ways that we're dealing with this today? because it seems we're doing the same sorts of things, but i don't see necessarily that we're doing the same sorts of things, social distancing, et cetera, wearing masks, because of the experience of the flu. it seems like we're doing those things because that's how we think disease works. is there anything in particular to the 1918 pandemic that left its mark on how we're affecting things today? >> yeah. well, i think one thing that was speculated about in 1918 that i reflect on a lot, and i would encourage everybody who is watching and thinking about this

to do the same, is what practices that we had before the pandemic will endure after our return, and which ones will go away or be harder to accomplish, both personally just because of fear or new patterns, or because of new behavior based on what we think impossible. so hand shaking and masks. if you look at sars and mers, the countries, mostly asian countries that were hard-hit and developed cultural patterns of mask wearing, for instance, have done better in this current pandemic. so what, say, in the u.s. or broader western societies is likely to endure now having come through this? you could look back to 1918-1919, and one interesting thing which i alluded to and really didn't mention -- i'm a sports fan so i add some good sports in there and it's fun to see, but partly because it reflects cultural patterns and behaviors that are international or transnational.

so the king of spain, alfonso xiii, one of the things he missed most was soccer. he commissioned in 1920 a new football club that belongs real madrid. most people miss public gatherings and they want to create space for that. so there becomes large coliseums for football teams, for baseball teams is part of that experience of sheltering and worrying about crowds and then thing about what are the regional patterns and behaviors we want to have, including being outside? a different kind of appreciation in 1921 about being outside from 1918-1919, which also maps onto the war, right? having to sacrifice for the war effort and that sort of thing. what other things? in some ways everything in my talk is the foundation for every federal government's response around the world, right? we know that non-pharmaceutical interventions work. if you clamp them on fast, if

you really trace and track. this goes way back in pandemic history. the term quarantine literally comes from the 40 days you're supposed to sit off ports. venice was big on its quarantine policy to keep out the plague, for instance. these are longstanding behaviors in combatting germs and infectious diseases. you're right to say what's new from 1918? hard to say for sure. in some ways everything that we've done is part of that matrix, and as i said, the reason why historians of this moment are so kind of shocked is that it's so eerily similar, and it mirrors what's happening in the u.s., that pushback for full federal leadership for a variety of reasons that we discussed, the non-pharmaceutical interventions, the gradual nature of this, the lobby groups that pushed for things. one thing i was studying in my

project was religious groups and the ways that they advocated for exemptions, saying this was an essential civil liberty question, we need to worship. then the conundrum of, yes, but we also want to make sure you live. then we also want to make sure that people who don't worship where you do or in the way that you do aren't exposed to what you then perhaps transmit. that was something they debated quite a bit back then, and one thing that's a comparison between then and now is that there was more reverence and trust in experts to some extent, and hierarchies. so what's striking is there was pushback in lots of cities and states that had ordinances of various types of closures. but at the end of the day, people tended to behave. they tended to follow. they said, okay, these mds, these politicians have said we need to do this for the public

good. we will do it. what we have seen in the u.s. has been sometimes a much more scattered sense, and in some ways if you compare the two, a kind of emancipation of individual rights by politicians say, well, it's up to you. we free you to take your individual concerns into your own account. maybe you do wear that mask with a loved one who is immune compromised, but maybe you don't wear it out when you go to a grocery store. whereas in 1918, they said, this is it, and you see far fewer accounts of people not doing that. as i showed you, by no means was that universal. plenty of people pushed back. that there would be a referendum on fauci and there is distrust in him, in some ways not just partisan issues, but as an expert who might have his own agenda. the 1918 moment was not one that public health officials were dismissed because of their own

agendas. >> i think this is why the comparison is perhaps doubly painful for americans. we often talk about ourselves as miss to historians with the goddesses of syria. maybe we should say they're not going to listen to us, so why bother? you showed a remarkable picture from love field in dallas of ant acce antiseptic being sprayed into the mouths and noses and so forth. i have to ask, was that bleach? >> it was not bleach, no, sir, the antiseptic was often saline-based or had alcohol in them. i did a little dallas research

to make sure we got our texas in, and i can highly recommend some different resources on that. but one thing that's interesting about that moment was the army tried really hard to make sure they were combat-effective. they tried a lot of different treatment strategies, including throwing everything at the wall in terms of different vaccines. nothing worked, but they produced several million doses of vaccine, they rushed them across the country to try to get them to bases where they thought outbreaks were going to happen, they used a gargling and sanitation procedures, which seemed to have little to no effect from what we know now of viruses. they kind of pioneered medical military health policies. then were the kinds of things you could see the cdc much later using as lessons for what they would try to do to vaccinate troops before they go to certain

places. we think about this in terms of malaria or other diseases when they're deployed in the field, but it's also true that the army needs to take account of the fact that -- or the u.s. military more broadly, u.s. troops can be vectors of disease in the u.s. which is a weird sort of way to think about this. when i came to this research, i never thought about that, that the military would be concerned about its own transmission within the country in the way they do wind up worrying. that's why we have incredible records of this. u.s. military doctors are copious note takers like other bureaucrats, right? but also because they care so much about the people who are suffering, and as i started this talk, because so many troops were coming down and dying. the really healthiest people were having these storms, their lungs were filling up with fluid, they were turning blue, asphyxiating fast. it was really terrible. another peeiece of that puzzle

which was interesting was what was going on at love field. they had quarantines, and there are recent reports by other folks talking about whether or not quarantines really work. you have to be so certain that you've got 100%. anything short of that does not work out. we can look at that in the records of 1918 to show how military quarantines almost never work, that they almost never kept the flu from civilian populations, despite them saying, we can keep it away from civilians. but dallas is pro action. it's the mayors and city health officials that took proactive acti acti action, bottom line. that's one of the lessons from this moment. >> talking about the quarantine in the military didn't work, it's almost as though 18 to

20-year-olds don't do what we tell them to. >> yep. >> chris, this has been helpful. you couldn't have kicked off our season better. i wish we didn't have to talk about this topic, but i'm glad we had you to listen to about it. i don't know how we get people to applaud you if they can't hear or see, but i will. well done, sir. you're watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span3, explore our nation's past. c p-span3 created by our americ television companies as a service and brought to you today by your television provider. weeknights this month we feature american history tv programs to preview what's available every weekend on c-span3. in the 2000 presidential election, texas governor george w. bush defeated vice president al gore in one of the most highly contested races in u.s. history. the outcome was not decided

until five weeks after voters went to the polls when the u.s. supreme court stopped a florida recount. this ultimately awarded the state's electoral votes and the presidency to governor bush. tonight we begin with al gore's concession speech from december 13th, 2000 followed by george w. bush's victory remarks later that same evening from austin, texas. watch beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. 20 years ago one of the most highly contested races in america took place, the contest between texas governor george w. bush and vice president al gore. saturday morning at 8:30 eastern we look back at the election with columnist a.j.