they focus her preservation and cultural work including the white house renovation. watch american history tv this weekend on c-span3. in 1918 the flu pandemic altered american life in ways that are familiar to those living through today's coronavirus pandemic. conflicting information left people fearful. college classes were held outside. sporting events were cancelled and fines were imposed on americans who refused to wear masks. up next on american history tv, a look at how the u.s. dealt with those events a century ago and the lessons we can learn today held at southern methodist in dallas. this is an hour and 40 minutes. >> since the pandemic has begun, for our purposes since we shut down in march the thing that's really been driving our analysis here as historians, what is the

historical precedence and 1918 comes to mind and there's no one to tell us about 1918 than my good friend christopher nichols. he's the associate professor of history at oregon state. he's also director there at or onstate center for the humanities and the founder for the citizenship and crisis initiative. he also studied at harvard and wesleyan, and mel loeffler at the university of virginia. chris is an expert on the early parts of the 20th century, primarily and that's what his previous work has been on and he's expanding out and he and i before he came on we were just chatting about new work we have coming out on ideologies on u.s. foreign policy which was that book itself, which was that title that was a seminole book and i'm glad someone came in and decided to update it and there's

no better person than chris. he'll be talking to us about the 1918 pandemic and i would encourage you as you look at the zoom screen, on the bottom, you see a q and a button. please, hit that button and submit your questions. in fact, 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, just hit the thumbs up button and that actually will be helpful because it moves it up the cue. the more someone likes something the higher it gets in life and the higher it gets on the web and there is no chat function and we want people to focus on the q and a and please note that one of the things to do it on the web it is unruly. keep it civil, people. i'll ask ryan to turn on chris'

camera. there he is. how are you doing, buddy. i just gave you the intro and it looks like it's a sunny day there in corvallis and i will turn things over to you and people, i encourage you, chris will show us images and he'll walk us through as it's going and lay questions on us and he and i will have that discussion when he's done with the presentation. the floor is yours. >> yes. thank you so much. so first of all, i just want to say thank you to everyone who is here with us. we have a sort of record turnout for registrations. i hope i can keep you interested. this topic is inherently interesting and you don't need too much, but let's see if we can't make it exciting and special thank you for brian franklin who helped organize this and is behind the scenes and running the webinar and the functions and who helped get things set up and also of course, maybe most importantly, and many thank you to professor jeffrey engle and a fantastic colleague and collaborate and friend where we worked on a

project that will also be out next year, coming and re-thinking american grand strategy and the chapter in that book, but in any case, what i want to do today is a few things. i want to give you a march through of what happened in the pandemic of 1918. this is something that i started studying years ago when i was studying world war i with domestic and international politics and when i taught it to my survey and students and now no such thing and we were at tuned to the historical lessons that we learn from the previous most significant global pandemic that's comparable to the current one in 2020. i'll give you a compelling talk about that history and then i'll telescope out periodically to make comparisons to 2020 and to think more globally. so i'll give you the u.s. story with some enter national dimensions and then we'll periodically pause to sort of reflect on questions of comparison, historical

comparison, differences and similarities and i will say recently organize the roundtable of the historians working on the subject. we don't always agree and i was surprised by how much consensus there will be by the lessons in this. i can give you a brief rundown of what happens in the pandemic of 1918 and we'll telescope in and out and please keep your questions coming. so one of the things that i think is most important to consider when we go back to the 1918 moment and here's where we need to look at social history. it's the human suffering and the human cost. you know, it's -- i'll tack a little bit about the numbers and one of the crucial things to understand in the moment is the story of victor vaughn. vaughn was a really fascinating figure who was a distinguished leader of american medicine in 1918 and dean of the university of michigan medical school and he becomes the person in charge of the medical services and

founder of the clinical medicine and served as the colonel in the army and led the commission of communicable diseases and here's a guy that 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. in september 23, 1918, he traveled to massachusetts as parts of a team by the army surgeon general. he got there and he was devastated by what he saw. this was outside of boston, camp devins and he couldn't believe what he was seeing and it was far worse than any communicable disease that he'd been involved with. he had others crowd in and the faces soon had a bluish cash and a distressing cough brings up the blood spew. and the bodies were stacked and this was the sort of thing that medical doctors were seeing

throughout fall 1918, and because those barracks as part of the war effort were so integrally connected to those nearby very rapidly got to the civilian population despite what public health officials and army medical officials often said and so we need to think about this moment. this moment of 1918 in terms of the human costs and in terms of the humans involved and the human suffering because the numbers are staggering and these are the things that we can also think about with we think of the u.s. case. what happened in 1918 and 1919 and the pandemic was that the u.s. lost roughly 675,000 people. on the order of 50 million around the world died and there were some differences in terms of the estimates of those numbers between 20 and 100 million and the commonest mats by historians and public health scholars and in the u.s. this 20

to 30% of the population was infected and the u.s. lost more soldiers to flu and pneumonia and other diseases than in combat in world war i, and all of this in part of integrally kecked to the war effort and that's another piece for us to understand and think about. here we are. how did it begin? what happened? it all began in the u.s. context in winter 1918. in march 1918, kansas, you begin to see widespread illness of a seemingly new type in the american troops mustering there who are newly drafted and enlisted and as a soldier recalled that of the 12 men several were ill at one time. you saw something like 24 of the 36 major army bases in the u.s. fill out to capacity in the

medical wards and overwhelmed in the spring of 1918 by the influenza virus. there's a couple of different origin stories and i talk later about the spanish flu and what that was called and what it meant and in the u.s. context, what a lot of us scholars now believe is that the viral version that we think of as the pandemic version originated in kansas in february and march 1918. there is annen de epidemiologis others who track it to china and to france and when we think of it spreading around the world in 1918 comes out of kansas and you can watch that move. this is the thing that those of us who study presidential and u.s. political history know well. you can watch this move through army records in particular. we have amazing date on who got sick, when and why and that's largely because of army data and the u.s. government census data. if anyone says we don't have any precedence for this and we don't

have good data and information about how the flu spread in 1918 and 19, we historians know how it will look and you can get fine grained analysis. so one of the things we often note in 1918 and why it is so comparable to today is that it went around the world. a lot of historians have made different arguments related to this, with emily rosenberg and others that the world was effectively globalized before world war i and you see that playing out in terms of how the virus spreads. u.s. troops in particular arriving in france are conduits of transmission and they're vectors of disease and they first began arriving before the pandemic and in june 1917 and the u.s. doesn't really get its mobilization rafrmed up until 1918 and that roughly coincides with the spread of the flu.

so the u.s. troops criss-crossed the nation they brought the flu with them and i'll show you the newspapers as we go. we know when the flu arrived in portland here or oregon or philadelphia or dallas because it almost always arrived with u.s. soldiers or u.s. troop transmissions with the material and aid and civilian workers and that sort of thing. the globalized world spread the pandemic in a way that previous ones did not. the transmission of peoples, goods across borders including from war work and neutral countries spread the disease, as well. >> when you're looking around the world in 1918, what happened? when you start in 1918 and by may it's in shanghai and in new zealand and algeria by june. by 1919 australia has it, as well. sydney was particularly hard hit and so it goes around the world

within a year which is a really pretty amazing fact. it used to be very striking to those of us who study the pandemic and as we look at the current moment it's remarkably similar to look at what happened with the disease in late 1919 to be a worldwide pandemic declaration from the w.h.o. in march of this year. so the great war, though, helps explain the conflict and explain the ways in which the virus was transmitted, as i said globally. it helps us to understand a bit more about why the disease was discussed and how it was discussed and reported and what some of the major concerns were in talking about the virus or treat it and thinking more fully about the possibilities of taking public health measures. so as the u.s. enters the war in april 1915 or here you can look at french forces near the

western front, one thing that should immediately stand out to you is the opposite of social distancing and this is the opposite of the physical distancing that is being impressed upon all of us today is an essential way to stop the virus spread. well, the induction camps and the trenches in the western front if you can conjure those up and images here and they absolutely were prone to spread or super spreader, vents and one of the things that also should stand out to us as we think about comparison back and forth is between the 1918 epidemic and today, one real significant contrast is that the overwhelming majority of those who died in 1918 and 19 and 20 of that deadly influenza, something like a half or a third were in the 18 to 45 age bracket. that flu, the influenza of that era disproportionately hit young and healthy people. their immune systems overrespond

damaging their lungs and frankly having them drown with fluid in their lungs in a horrific way and it was something that dr. vaughn that they embodied so well and people were dropping awfully fast and it was not the most healthy at least in terms of fatality rate and we can talk about that more, and remember, i'm a historian and not an each deem y epidemiologist. i have a page of resources that i'll share with you at the end and we can share after the talk. so another thing that's important to think about the wartime consequences and shamg of the flu responses in the los of countries and particularly in the u.s. was patriotism and this may strike you as a contrast today and it may strike you as a continuity and i'm talking about this in the q and a and when you see here, these red cross women volunteers and workers, making

masks. if i fail, he dies and it's a war work kind of sign supporting the work cause and also a marshal language used to defeat the virus and we heard that from president trump with the invisible enemy. that's very much the kind of marshall language that we heard operationalized in 1918 and the fight against the virus and the determining it with the concept of spain and the spanish flu and trying to make visible the invisible virus so people would practice hand hygiene and even wear masks. >> so, but there's another piece and a more insidious piece to the wartime story and that is that nations like the united kingdom had path legislation, in this case, the defense of the realm act in 1914 that censored the mail and censored what the press could say and censored

what was distributed in terms of information about a wide array of topic that might pertain to the war. so one of the key elements here, communication in this case, is about limiting access to anything that might undermine the war effort. in the u.s. context, there were the espionage acts and 1917 and 1918 as this headline from the u.s. national archives says, i think it's the new york times headline and the sedition bill has been signed and one of the most drastic measures to punish enemy agents and civil lennerys related to anything that might undermine the war effort. political history and it also meant that journalists couldn't talk about these outbreaks at the bases very much or they had to minimize it because if you think of 24 of the 26 larger

bases that meant the troops were not combat effective and could not move across the country and across the atlantic and you understand better how this possible communication about the waves of the virus and its infectiousness and its fatalities might undermine the war effort. so you saw in this moment in the u.s. and in the uk and germany and france, censoring of the press and limiting the speech and information about the outbreaks themselves and that's a first-level takeaway for us to think about. historians are very clear on this. one of the huge problems of 1918 was a lack of rapid, honest and -- honest and continually updated information and leadership from nation states and the uk and off taustria, hu garry and germany and you can think about it in this context and don't talk. the web is fun for you with invisible threats and that

includes elements of the war effort itself or for instance, the draft and another thing that many american dissenters related to the war was talking about whether or not the draft was constitutional that hadn't been fully tested in the civil war era and world war i mobilizing millions of people for the war. many folks, say, socialist five-time candidate for president eugene debs spoke out against the draft saying it might not be constitutional to force them to serve and he, for instance, was thrown in jail for a speech he gave in canton, ohio. that's another example of the ways in which the war limited speech both about public health issues and dissent in a time of war. another kind of limitation that's worth us thinking about -- we hear about this today and we've heard this in the u.s. and are ways of minimizing the virus and this was more true in march or april than it is today, but you know, as the virus spread even into

the middle of october when the deadly second wave when the plurality of american gas happened and even into the fall, of the u.s. and you saw documents like this and the spanish influenza is a three-day fever or the flu and it's a new name for an old disease and there was a previous pandemic in the u.s. that had been in 1889 and 1990 and here you see these widely distributed information coming from the u.s. department of public health from rupert blue, the surgeon general who said it's simply the same old grip that swept around the world. don't worry about it. modern nursing and modern medical care will help handle this. you see it into the fall and this creates a lot of problems in the u.s. because americans don't know what to do. they don't know which policies to adopt at the local, state and federal level even, but they

also don't know what information to trust and so i'll show you some more images from the era about that and another piece of the puzzle is where it came from. so one thing that a lot of us historians have had to talk about lately has been should we call flus by their nation of origin or the city of origin. what does that even mean since viruses are global and not limited to nation states. why was it called the spanish flu? some of you may know this. the wartime nations were censoring their oppressors. spain was a neutral in the world. king alfonso xiii though they had direct ties to austria and hungary in the aristocracy although lots of nations in europe did, too, as many of you probably know and they kept under the war effort, but in may 1918 the king, a number of other

major figures in the elite circles in spain came down with the flu and the spanish press started treating this with lots of sensational coverage. there's accounts where they say a man walking down the street suddenly felt congested and his chest, head, face falls down and is dead within a day and though that sounds sensational, the very similar accounts in the u.s. of incredibly strong people, men, all-american and football players, one of the strongest lumberjacks in the pacific northwest division at the u.s. army, cutting down trees for the war effort and they also would sometimes just fall down dead. so the spanish press covering this when it came out you saw first the british press cover this and they used terms like the hygiene and environment in spain were giving rise to this flu or that the spanish weren't able to deal with it because of

their social -- because of the society. these kind of subtle racist or heavily racialized terms and you can find it and google it yourself and get adopted more widely in the anglo-american press and you wind up seeing the u.s. and the british spending more time calling it the spanish flu and before long, throughout the summer of 1918 into the fall it's become the spanish flu, but of course, by the fall of 1918, public health officials in the u.s. and the uk much less around the world understood that the origins of the flu weren't in spain. they no longer said that, but the term had caught on. this kind of weaponized racialized nationalist version of the flu caught on. another thing that's worth noting is the spanish called it the french flu because they blamed french workers coming from the war effort for that. the germans called it the russian test and russians ultimately called it by several

other names including the chinese flu. until you see in this moment something we've seen today in the near past. this kind of urge to weaponize and nationalize the flu or virus and perhaps to diminish it and to better operationalize a way forward that virus. as we're thinking about the moment and thinking through the conflict, you also find that the -- on the front, a number of places and a number of french posts, for instance, british posts do have significant flu outbreaks throughout the spring into the summer of 1918, but what most of them note is that, for instance, in the british navy. some 10,000 sailors go down with the flu and something only like four or five die. there are a few posts of the french where everyone is sick, but very few die, and then all of a sudden in the late summer

something seems to change. it changes in the reporting and it changes in the intelligence that we get from u.s. and british sources that we can look back on now, and it changes most importantly, in the virulence of the virus. and virulence of the virus. by late in summer 1918, in places that were known to the u.s. and british to have very good medical care, you found widespread disease. and it was knocking out more people not just from combat effectiveness, but also from life itself. either if they were recovered and they couldn't breathe well enough. they had such long damage that they couldn't live well or they were fatalities to the disease. so what you see in this moment, what's really interesting to look back on is that british and american intelligence officers are reporting back in documents that are marked secret and confidential saying things like, the disease that's now epidemic

throughout switzerland is known as the black plague and we must deal with this now. the affliction is resurfaced in significant form. they're taking the virus seriously. but, of course, as any of you who knows this history, who knows anything about this story, the wartime imperatives as you might imagine, as you may well understand, triumphed over that. and so you saw in the u.s. as troops bring back from france, it looks like that virulent form, you see americans taking the advice of people like the surgeon general and public health officials, despite warnings in lots of cities, in lots of states, going ahead with major events, going ahead with business as usual, as you might call it.

september 28th, 1918 is in famous moment, philadelphia parade. it was the largest parade to date in philadelphia history. this was a moment to sell liberty loan bonds. this was an era when the u.s. attempted to fund its war through citizens which we no longer do that. here's an image of an aircraft hull traveling down parade route philly and of course what you all may know about what comes next is how horrific that superspreader event was. doctors urged the public health officials and the mayor to cancel the parade. they were 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 the public health said something as follows, i'll

paraphrase, now present in the civilian population is some type of flu. but let's not be, quote, panic-stricken over exaggerated reports. you look at details like this, the philadelphia evening bulletin a little bit later reported in some families there are none left to care -- to take care of burying their dead and others are unable to bury them or cannot get under taken. husband and infant dead in a few hours. after the parade, it got much worse. the hospitals fill up, they build sup meantle hospitals. they fill up. at one point you're getting 700-plus people dying in one day at its worse. priests who drove carriages to pick up the bodies couldn't pick up. that's how bad it got. when you think about what historians having hollering about since march, there's a great report on the cdc website

about the history of the pandemic, this is what we worry about when we think about football games, parades, large-scale activities, we worry a lot about this kind of moment. because philadelphia could not keep up. in the modern par lens, the curve could not be flattened and the city was utterly devastated because of that. so across the country, public health officials continue alonged those lines, however, and that's one thing we learn. here's more from philly and about the ambiguity of that moment. the surgeon general said there's no cause for alarm if precautions are observed. as i have up here, president of the west philadelphia medical association began an antiscare campaign arguing that the public should be educated to the fact that the disease is not as deadly as many believe. think back to the image of the young girl with the mortally ill sister, in that case, actually.

the editors of the philly enquirer said the orders went too far. they made a case, as i say here, shutting down schools, churches, et cetera, largely promoted and unreasonable amount of fear. and here you see an antispitting campaign among others. but you don't see masks or social distancing campaign. and 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 conflicting information and you saw people worried about very similar things to today. the question of whether or not the measures to stop the virus were worse than the virus itself. the city of philadelphia seemingly was proving that the virus was pretty terrible and even within philadelphia you see these kinds of -- this kind of information. i'm often asked -- historians are asked, what about the economy? here's a great example. again, october 1918, the height of the deadliest second wave of

the pandemic. several hundred thousand die in just six weeks. it's as bad as it gets. here's "the wall street journal." in some parts of the country the pandemic has cause add decrease in production of approximately 50%. and almost everywhere it's occasioned more or less falling off. loss of trade which the merchants have met with has been very large. impairment of efficiency has been noticeable. the war is still on. there never has been in this country so complete domination by an epidemic as has been the case with this one. most cities had closure orders throughout the u.s., but not all. essential activity was still war work. war industrial plants were open, making munitions, rifles, tanks and all sorts of things. in those industries, you saw reported 40, 50, 60% of folks not showing up to work. they weren't all sick. they were taking and making a

risk calculation in that moment about whether or not it was worth it to go in to work in those -- essential war work industries. you can imagine how other jobs that were less essential, those other industries were having significant problems too. one of the lessons historians take from this moment -- and you can see this in lots of other countries, is that there's no such thing as business as usual in a pandemic. almost regardless of what public health measures are undertaken, voluntary, mandatory, people make choices about their lives, loved ones who might be more prone to be sick, people who are fear full. some people need to work and that's another reason why in this moment, 1918 and '19, the pandemic fell disproportionately on people of lower economic stat status, people of color, and indigenous people as well. these are the sorts of people

you saw showing up. here's the st. louis red cross motor corps. another piece of the puzzle in 1918 and '19, most male doctors had been drafted or joined the war effort. and there were lots of nurses as well overseas. and so there was a nursing shortage and a doctor medical staff shortage that was a part of that moment. there were lots of calls for needing more nurses and medical care in that era. another thing to think about, as you see so many images of the red cross and civil society organizations, voluntary organizations essentially, the red cross merges as a public/private hybrid, is that american expectations of public health were different in this era. 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 dire times like this. the challenge was, in cities like philadelphia and elsewhere, they were overwhelmed. many of these groups, these are probably women 18 to 45 which is the demographic most likely to be hit hardest by this virus. so you had lots of medical professionals, volunteers and nurses getting sick in 1918 and '19 further exacerbating the problems that were already there and social historians have documented beautifully and sadly, this led to a loneliness, alienation and fear by lots of other people. as the pandemic goes on into late fall and winter in the beginning of 1919, you had lots of healthy people no longer being willing to help their older relatives or neighbors because they had seen how many healthy people had been stricken down and killed very fast. there was less volunteering and one story that comes out from the histories of john berry and

nancy bristow is a common one from across the midwest of people being so fearful and so challenged by this moment that they say things like -- here's an account from north carolina. we were almost afraid to breathe. you were afraid to go out. the fear was so great, people were afraid to leave their homes. afraid to talk to one another. another example comes from washington, d.c. if i kept people apart, you had no school life, no church life, you had nothing. it completely destroyed all family and community life. the terrifying aspect was when each day dawned, you didn't know whether you would be there when the sunset that day. and internal reports from lots of organizations sort of really amplify this. you see this in john berry's writing in particular. the american red cross concluded that fear and pandemic of the influenza, akin to terror of the

middle ages regarding the black plague, has been prevalent in virtually every community in the u.s. that's another element of this that is interesting. and i think global and human. i've done some talks with psychologists and one thing that people are seeing in other countries, that this fear of the virus has manifested itself in social relations around the world. and it's a kind of unique thing that we rarely see in history or world history that everyone around the world would be experiencing something pretty much in realtime. and that's something event paused to reflect on very much and there may be longer consequences to that. i'll keep you moving. let's talk about nonpharmaceutical interventions. this is the term for closure policies and social distancing and all that sort of stuff. here you see on the left, "the philadelphia inquirer" after that great parade, virtually nothing there about the disease. a few days later -- i think

that's two weeks later, to be honest, you see scientific nursing halting the episode. deaths now on deceasing scale. cases average only 1,875 daily. an enormous number. what happened? you all have probably seen and thought about this. in cities like philadelphia where you had that parade, you could see a first case that arrives 11 days before the parade in the sailors who are coming into the port of philadelphia. and then you see that superspreader event. it tracks pretty neatly onto late september, how horrific the case is versus other cities that did better. st. louis, their chief medical office was obsessed with infectious diseases had been following closely what was going on in the east coast. he's empowered by the mayor and puts on significant closure policies rapidly in the city of st. louis and keeps them on for a while.

both the proactive, rapid, complete closure policies that happened in st. louis and their long duration helped to explain the difference in these two curves. here's another way of looking at it. you can look at september 28th when that parade happens and the enormous uptick that comes after that whereas st. louis, which responded well, has a much more prolonged duration, but it's so much lower and widely considered a success, right? one of the things to think about is the way that this will operate for us all in the fall when there's likely to be a second wave, which is just around the corner, or perhaps even in the winter or spring. usually thought of as three waves to the influenza pandemic of '18 and '19 and we're looking into going into a second wave now, you might argue. assuming we ever ended the first in the u.s., that is. what happened in some of the other cities? what can we learn from them?

there's st. louis, denver, pittsburgh, similar phenomenon in new york with another series of big events. not as big as the philadelphia one. it's a comparable moment. what happened in denver is something i'm going to talk about in a moment. but the -- another piece of the puzzle is what happened in pittsburgh with its big peak and one element to that, which i think is useful for us to think about and you to take away, they closed in a layered strategy. there was very powerful catholic lobby in the city and they wanted to keep the parochial schools longer. public schools closed but not parochial schools. and they had more exemptions for masses and other activities, sometimes outdoor, sometimes indoor, only 30-minute masses. the argument by scholars about this, that's partly why you saw this first peak and a second

pear here in october into early november, their layered strategy of closing was not a good one. the lesson that historians note, 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 phrased strategy. you don't open completely. these are pretty clear lessons. i have a citation to a great journal piece on this, you can see lots of comparative cities. there's more to it than that. let's talk about denver for a second. what happened in denver? this is what we're seeing in a lot of the u.s. today. as of august 2020. it is -- there was a premature reopening. there was a set of lobby groups in the city of denver. we now call them the amusements lobby, places like billiard halls, theaters, restaurants. they really pushed hard to reopen. and as they saw some disease going down, as demonstrated in

their hospitalizations and what democrats were reporting, they thought that they could. so they start to reopen. as they reopen in the end of october into november, what you find is that they haven't really done enough to get rid -- they're not really fully following data and disease. what they're operating on is a market logic of hoping to get businesses back up and running. and that's what we've seen in a lot of the u.s. and franklin in lots of parts of the world. that combined with one other factor that no one knew was coming, november 11th, armistice day. lots of people went out into the streets, whether or not they were allowed in most cities in the u.s., and they partied and they had fun and they met with other people in places where they were wearing masks. they threw them off. in lots of cities, but especially places like denver that had begun reopening, you see a second peak. so this is part and parcel of the lesson that historians,

public health scholars take from this moment. don't prematurely reopen. now, look, you're never going to know for sure. but this data suggests you need to get to lower numbers. as you've all been following, there are recommended thresholds for reopening in cities, and cities like denver didn't follow them. it did not work out. another thing to think about in that moment -- here it is really beautifully, graphically arrayed, is to think about what happened over these ten-week periods as they adopt strategies from september 8th to november 23rd, as cities adopted closure policies, closing schools, businesses, limits numbers of people on public transit, practicing hand hygiene, using ventilation tactics, opening

windows, creating more air flow, cleaning spaces and then eventually later on into the fall, that's when you begin to see more of the mask mandates, fall into the winter. what you see are city that is have second peaks, for instance, or that are particularly hard hit like philadelphia or pittsburgh. as i've been commenting. what you won't see is dallas. i'll tell you a little bit about that shortly. you won't see tommy otho many o places. here you see on the left, a spraying machine used to disinfect the throats and nasal passages of soldiers. there's a picture of that happening there, courtesy of the dallas morning news. and these are some of the bits of information that were suggested by the surgeon general to people -- presented on the

front page of the dallas morning news in october of 1918. we know what happened in dallas, for instance, and in texas. we know that roughly september 24th, as the national press was covering escalating influenza on the east coast, dallas' main health official warned his community to expect it was coming and he wasn't wrong. closer to home, 700 cases of influenza were reported among soldiers and an attempt to safeguard the troops, medical officials tried to quarantine camps. another thing we saw in this era was that the quarantines of camps didn't work well. the troops very regularly left or got perhaps unlucky in terms of who they encountered and that then led into civilian populations. and so, you know, if you think about sports today, for instance, bubbles work, right,

an absolute quarantine. anything short of that, even 99% quarantine doesn't seem to work. and that's what happened at a lot of these camps in fall 1918. and the case in dallas was that by september 27th, three days later, there were 15 cases in dallas. five of which were in dallas emergency hospital and as you go on and -- by october 3rd, dallas had 119 cases, including some young folks, like a 15-year-old who died at st. paul's hospital. you had hospitals beginning to isolate their cases and physicians adopting the strategies that you saw from the east coast, ventilation, air, trying to keep people apart. and they worked rapidly to call special meetings, to close schools. by the middle of october. but the public health officials in dallas, like in lots of other places were divided on how rapidly to close things down.

and as cases mounted in dallas schools and in hospitals and in social settings, that's when they start that. and so we could talk a little bit more about it. but the point is, actually, ultimately, historians who studied this really closely in the case of texas and dallas suggest that in fact despite variations in figures -- it's hard to know what the cases were. this is because flu wasn't a, quote/unquote, reportable disease in this moment. some people would go to the hospital and die of something called a heavy cold or have it be reported as the grip and not influenza. the numbers vary. it's clear that dallas faired better than most american cities at the time in part because of the early -- remember, that's september 24th is when they start talking about this. and that parade in philadelphia is september 28th. dallas officials were on the scene thinking about this more rapidly than others in some other cities. and so the epidemic death rates

were in the range of 250 and 511 per hundred thousand. likely closer to the low number. historians note, better than new orleans, better than birmingham, and better than most midwestern communities like st. louis that did very well. some people asked questions about like who got the flu? babe ruth got the flu. the world series ends early because of the flu. the red sox when. then there's a curse after that, as you may have heard of. he caught it. came back from it pretty rapidly. franklin delano roosevelt got the flu in september on a ship. these are two very healthy individuals, more prone to get this. in his case as well, the press suggests it's not that much. in 1919, woodrow wilson got it. there's an argument that part of

the problems were related to having gotten the flu. sometimes people think he had a minor stroke and there's a hypothesis that woodrow wilson's minor stroke was directly related to the flu which as we know now, some of the cardiovascular problems can lead to blood clots and things like that. you're probably thinking about sports. here's a university of oregon football star. so many of the football stars of that era had been drafted and went off to fight in the war and that was a big piece of that moment. there was no professional football at that time. so college football was the main thing. the baseball season had concluded and lots of people, then like now, wanted to see football games. unlike now, they couldn't go. there's an example. no rooters to see the game. there were a fair number of colleges that did play. georgia tech played. games in canceled in cities that

had big outbreaks. you have lots of teams that did not have full records. many conferences also canceled. but they did in fact play. they often played without fans. in some cases they played with fans wearing masks which is an interesting dimension to that. the stanley cup is another example of this. the stanley cup ended in a draw and that's because most of the canadians who were in the midst of it, number of games in, they were too sick to play. and so officially on the stanley cup, montreal canadians, series not completed. this is what we worry about when by think of soccer, baseball, all the sports that are out there, what will happen if a number of players get the virus. can they continue? baseball famously played some games in masks. spring training january 1919. i'm a big baseball fan, you

might see -- don larson throwing a perfect game. there was one totally masked game in 1919 in california. by the time the season started officially, they were not playing in masks. i'll give you a couple more images and some global takeaways as we get to q&a. i see a bunch of questions coming in. as we think about some of the other comparisons to our current moment, flu causes and cures, you saw this, how to make your own mask. this is very similar to our current moment -- the current ways in which we have tried to personalize and individualize how this is done, how the press talks about what we can do to take agency in a moment of uncertainty. here's another example of the ways in which things worked then. one thing we haven't seen in the u.s. that you did see in china was large-scale facilities full

of people who were sick. in new york, for instance, they built the javits center, but it wasn't filled up. and that's walter reed medical hospital in d.c. i'm pulling this back around to the weaponization of the flu. spanish influenza has endangered the war in europe. don't spit. don't spread it. that sort of thing. i did mention what are some of the techniques happening in the moment. tents and patients at emergency hospitals like here in brook line mass or taken outside. some was because of overflow. if you think about how we're being encouraged today to go outdoors, to have kids play, see our friends, that's a piece of this puzzle that they knew then. there you see masked medical officials and people staying

outside. here you see another set of ways to grapple with it. in the lower right, you see world war i era. when schools were closed, teachers were sent out to teach home economics, home ventilation and hygiene. they knew it could be spread on door handles and surfaces. they wanted people to clean the surfaces out. and open windows and ventilate spaces to try to get less sort of high dosage in the way that we would think about it, viral loads operating in small spaces. there were staffing crisis. this was a big problem for world war i. you see epidemic spanish influenza hampering operation of the depot. in another example, groups of people, agricultural workers and folks to talk about what's going

on because there's so much disease in the community from oklahoma, from philadelphia to oklahoma, you saw similar phenomenon related to the government and the role of the flu. you saw, again, these sorts of training. the police and the military providing the optics of mask-wearing and of a kind of patriotic push forward. you saw this in other walks of life. civil servants and other workers and you saw something similar to what we've seen today. mask mandates and other kinds of mandates. on the left you see a conductor telling someone who is not wearing a mask that they cannot ride on public transit. that's a piece of the story from that era that very much resonates with us today. lots of what happened that's comparable happened on the west coast and it's very well documented. san francisco is a great case study that had courts outside. obviously if we look at that, we think social distancing and possible spread. they thought at least they're

outside and they didn't know about viral transmission the way we do today. you can see court cases, open barbershops. now they have masks. not those getting their hair attended to. that's in berkeley. masks inside for barbershops in cincinnati. people don't want to be outside in the cold. that's part of why we worry so much about what a deadly second wave will look like. but masks and other kinds of distancing can help and that was something they were pursuing in 1918. classes were being held outside too in 1919. that's a physics class being held adjacent to a -- either a football statement or an outdoor sports facility. i can't imagine that we want to do outdoor classes, b anything is possible to minimize the spread. here you see troops on a ship watching a staged boxing match

also all in masks. so, again, this was a really important moment. there was a lot of buy-in from the armed forces and other agents of the government. there of course was lots of bad information. i would love to talk more about this. i'm trying to give you a quick walk through all of this. one of my favorites is this one, the flu travels through the mouthpiece of the telephone. quick talking so much. and constant and continuous smoking to stall the flu. this gets at a serious point, big takeaway, that the surgeon general argued there's no cause for alarm if precautions are observed. for americans we find in their writings, personal letters, in their later memoirs, they didn't know which advice to heed. you see that you shouldn't talk on the phone. you shouldn't smoke constantly. you see the surgeon general telling you to follow your precautions. which ones? is it vick's vapor rub? is it getting a vaccine which didn't work on the other side? which one is it?

is it all of the above? proactive policies, obviously, were the keys to thinking about that moment and that's why historians say it's so similar to today. nonpharmaceutical v nonpharmaceutical interventions. those sorts of operations. and trying to communicate honestly and rapidly what the risks were. that came too late for a lot of the u.s., for a lot of the suffering. but it's never too late is one lesson of the 1918 and '19 moment. here's a little of what was going on in oregon. i'll give you one terrible example. you can watch the first soldiers from seattle bring the disease down to oregon through the camps. on the coast, 120 cases at fort stevens, it got down to other towns. the one undertaker got sick and he was unable to take care of the bodies.

and as bodies mounted up, it seemed to hit children hard in the city. the city cried out that they were unable to find and build enough child-sized coffins. when historians, when public health officials look at this moment, when you look at medical facilities overwhelmed and people in distress, this is what we think of. civilian succumbing to the disease in numbers that meant it was impossible to carry on. in billings, montana, one-third to one-half of the county came down with the flu in fall of 1919 alone. how do you carry on? that's what we see in account and account of this moment. and one thing they said is that it's easier to prevent than to cure. if you follow the nonpharmaceutical interventions, if you have closure policies, if you're distanced, if you do hand hygiene. you can prevent it. but it's harder to cure once it's in your community.

a little bit more on phased reopenings as they reopened, lifting closure orders, the embargoes come off, lots of cities were eager to do this and this is how we can track the data to that phased reopening. following data and disease. it allowed places that did that more slow phased reopening after a longer closure to exist in that way for longer. actually, cities like philadelphia come out okay in 1919 after suffering through some terrible stuff and finally closing fully. here's some more examples of the flu and the phased reopenings. flu coming off, gradual reopenings taking place in chicago, for instance, including supports. here's some other examples as we go through how to avoid. no reason to believe it originated in spain. sometimes people think that's true that this is coming from the primary sources of that era

from the u.s. surgeon general himself. all right, i'll conclude with some takeaway remarks. you're thinking about, as jeff engle noted, november is coming fast. what happens if you have an election in a pandemic? is that possible? sure, it is, and we've done it before. there were in fact midterm 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 his -- 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. republicans get a bunch of seats. and there's a very low turnout. some places didn't open up at all. most did. very relatively few turn out is one key.

and the election didn't map on as neatly to partisan -- partisan perspective on the virus as we see today. what you see 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 in some communities that mapped onto religious sentiment or anti-semitism or anti-catholic sentiment. you're about to get prohibition coming out of this. it mapped onto particular politics of parties of different regions but not reaction to the virus itself. we can talk more about that too. there's the sufficieragettes hag out bonbons. warren harding ran on an america first platform coming out of the

pandemic and out of world war i, pushing a kind of restrictions to immigration, return to normalcy and return to society as we know it. as we take our step back, we saw push back, protests and reemergence in that area. you may have heard about the antimask league. it was an organized league in san francisco in 1919 that pushed back against mask requirements. that were mandatory. and the antimask league was the only real large one in the u.s. we see 4500 listed. you see the mayor of san francisco say, nope, we're not taking off the mask ordinance. we're convinced it's working. if you look at the data, death and disease go sit down after the mask ordinances were put on. but it's unclear whether and how much the masks actually mattered. the key argument, much like those today, was that their liberty was at stake.

and they questioned whether they were essential, that they were doing the kind of sanitary working that they supposedly did. and there was pushback and there was pushback to the pushback. if you have an ordinance, if it's a requirement, there are fines. in some places there were fines of significant jail time, significant dollar amounts and a number of accounts which i could talk more about of mask slackers, being held on charges of disturbing the piece because they refused to wear masks. there was at least one shooting -- there were several times that weapons were discharged in attempted apprehensions of people who wouldn't wear masks and insisted on riding public transit or going into businesses, court facilities was another thing that people did. and the mask slacker language is something that's worth noting. it's the same as the wartime concept of draft slackers. those who didn't do their

wartime duty, didn't go into the draft were thought of slackers, and the press took that same language and many americans talked about it in terms of mask slacking. your duty was to wear that mask to keep your community safe, not just yourself. and this was similarly seen in lots of great cartoons in the era, trying to normalize that behavior. there's a great one. even the horses are wearing them, says that kid as they're walking with their masks. this is from ft. wayne, indiana. even kissing through masks, other behaviors through masks, or trying to teach your father or grandparents is another similar thing that we used to see -- we see a lot in the cartoons of this era. you all are probably familiar with this. the phenomenon of people who won't take precautions and the mask is one example of these. and, again, very similar in the

1918, '19 moment. there's this urgency to go ahead and wear masks. another element, if you think about going all the way through the christmas season, the holiday season, december 1918, you see all of the shoppers wearing masks. this is from indiana. what you also see are these germs, these microbes. the masks spoil it all. here you see germ theory, mask concepts, the kind of -- even to come extent martial language being manifested in this moment. and finally economic and political effects. there isn't that much data. as i mentioned before, merchants in cities suggested that their businesses declined 40 to 70%. big deceases in steel, 50% or more. and you also saw a significant u.s. recession.

it was a rejauadjustment sessio after the war. there was rampant inflation and more than that. the roaring '20s of the economy is a little bit of an illusion and there were -- there was some episodic downturns in this period. historians argue there's some relationship between the pandemic and the election of 1920, return to normalcy, immigration restriction, wanting fewer people to come into the u.s., more xenophobia, more of an isolationist turn in politics and in '18, '19, laborers, polls, irish and italians, they want what they were promised when they took lower wages and worked more hours. you get the biggest steel strikes in u.s. history, you see the boston police go on strike

and get fired, all of them. you see african-american strikebreakers called in to beat up white strikers in places like syracuse. you have the tulsa massacre. historians speculate there's a relationship between the social tumult of the influenza and the wartime experience with this set of things that came after. we often warn people and wonder how similar is this moment? how can we get past that if possible? final bit of data for thinking global, thinking this moment, 1918 and '19. mid-august 2020 dad. if if you look at what's going on, much lower percent of the population has been killed lately. .05% in the u.s.

thankfully we haven't suffered that much. and yet we suffered terribly. we're moving towards 200,000 deaths in the u.s. if you look at the world population, again, you should call it the spanish flu with quotes because we don't want to succumb to using that language uncritically. you saw a kind of global fatalities in the 2.7% range. we have .01% globally now. this comes from my colleague with who i've worked, wrote an article. one thing that stands out is this one here. i wanted to leave it for a second and think about this as we microscope and telescope the cases. 50 million let's say in the world. 1918, '19 and the percent of world population versus covid. that is really striking and astounding when you look at that comparison, right?

that the percentage of world population is around 2.4% and we're at 21.9% of world deaths from influenza. from covid versus influenza which was something like 1.4%. it's a striking change. i have 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 present and i think it's important for us to take account of that 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 falls on people of lower socioeconomic status even though viruses transcend all borders and peoples, groups, races and everything else. where there were cancellations, postponements of large events, anticrowding measures, et cetera, they worked well.

they slowed the spread as we've seen today. most western nations were involved in the war, they attempted to control information. woodrow wilson never spoke about the war. we had censorship. his committee on public information sought to minimize and hide infections and risk. in the service of the war effort and, of course, the war was won, but it came with a cost of more infection and death. this meant that citizens were ill informed, right? it meant examples i gave about people being fearful, it dominated their lives. it also led to distrust in government and messaging from state, federal, and other officials. although there was more trust in local officials, say public health officials, mayors in st. louis, for instance, who did a good job against the public health officials and mayors and

philadelphia. honest information. rapid is obviously important. these laiyered closures don't seem to work as well. tracking data and disease, being ready to close at any moment is most important. and the final takeaway that i have that you all have probably experienced and thought yourselves n the u.s., the main actions were local, by mayors, governors, they weren't on the federal government just like 2020. local government has been where the action has been. and finally here's a set of recommended resources, lots of great stuff. i have articles in there. there are amazing books and articles, library of congress has a great exhibit and there are a bumpl of others. without further adieu, let's see if jeff and i can have a good conversation. >> that was great and depressing

and distressing. we have a ton of questions. i know i have a ton of questions myself. i'm going to ask you, big picture, one historian to another, why don't we talk about this? i'm about to lecture on world war i. i think maybe half the time the word flu might come out of my mouth. at most, it might be a sentence. this year, i'm going to talk about it a lot more. if more people died from this flu in the united states than the united states lost both in world war i and in world war ii, why don't we talk about this more? >> that's a great question. historians -- through the 1960s talked about this as the forgotten virus and so -- 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 references to influenza. people who have trouble walking upstairs, people have memories of being locked inside homes, rem references to lung issues or family members who are departed too soon. they're not lost generation references to the war, but rather about the flu. we import into that this perspective that it must be the war. and i succumb to that myself sometimes. one, it's there. it's not totally forgotten. up like the war, there weren't memorials built. in the '20s you see a lot of sports -- i don't know if it's -- i bet there's a memorial coliseum that has its origins in world war i for playing football, for sports. 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 didn't we talk about it? some of the things we said there, due to the riots coming out of the war, are they more attributable to the pandemic or the conflict itself? the simpler answer is always the it's the war. but it may not be the right one. it's the reason why you have to say flu even when you say readjustment, demobilization or, you know, the question of labor activism coming out of the war along those same lines. the reason that i wound up writing about this a few times was that my fellow historians of this era, the first half of the 20th century, all say what you just said. why don't i talk more about the flu? one of the things is, they didn't have the resources, frankly. we didn't have the resources. and we now have -- so much has

been scanned in the last decade or so, all the images -- i give a long time in part because it's so amazing to look at all of this and track it over time. now you have the resources and i'll send you my slides and you can do a -- you know, 20 minutes on the flu. >> i'm just going to show them this video. then i don't have to teach that day and it's great. let me drill down into the point about memorization. i'm not going to judge the answer to this question which is whether or not you've been watching the democratic and republican convention. but vice president pence said several times in his speech something that i thought was obviously false and it wasn't what anybody else in the country was worried about except a historian. he said several times speaking to, you know, 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's no historical evidence that we're going to remember these people at all.

and i'm curious if the fact that we have, you know, our interconnected world, if you think there's 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. it's sharp. i wonder -- there's this thing that has happened in a lot of cities where 7:00 p.m. people applaud and 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 '19. i wonder if any of those kind of practices will have a long echo because we've been doing them collectively. the other piece of it is, the incredible suffering and death is almost always localized. that's why i started with those exampling, those searing examples that are so sad. one thing that is interesting about the 1918 moment today,

ever since i started giving talks about this, epidemiologists have been in touch with me and we talked about viral load and how that could -- the amount of virus that you're exposed to, general speaking, can mean that you get a worse case. so medical folks tend to get it worse or -- or more likely to. that seems very true in 1918 data. we don't have enough to make that conclusion definitively. but i wonder if memorizing medical deaths, pivoting to as wartime, that martial language, rather than the suffering of the individuals who are dying at home or, you know -- one of the worst cases in 1918 that i sometimes refer to is aleutian islanders in alaska were horribly hit. there was a village of 80 people. 72 were dead. when the red cross workers got

there, they found so many bodies decomposing, they weren't sure of who was alive and dead. but it's a story -- it's a terrible story that is in red cross histories. it's not even in your typical, you know, history of the flu pandemic to some extent. probably a long-winded way of affirming your point which is saying, i can't imagine we'll be memorializing the frontline workers for very long. the most rapid global march to a vaccine in science and development and its -- then it's the production and the -- could very well be the story of this moment. something we don't anticipate that. you get billions of doses as fast as ever in human history and the heroes may be whoever can do the production stuff. maybe it's businesses, maybe it's individuals, maybe it's

institutions or universities. i can imagine those being celebrated. >> let me -- we've got a bunch of questions and one of the themes that has emerged from the questions is actually something that you've been alluding to which is the death and legality of the 1918 pandemic compared to ours. how should we understand that? as a historian, again, 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. i think my honest answer as a historian is that i can't say. 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 -- or attempt to talk about those for that deadly second wave. the first wave, all of those british soldiers, all the sailors are sick, but very few died. the americans who get sick, very few died. the second wave, when it comes back from across the atlantic, boom, much worse. and they're using -- you know, i think at first this year i thought to myself, we're using the same medical treatment strategies and what's interesting in the comparison, 1918 is like 1920, both in the medicine and the public health measures. closure policies, nonpharmaceutical interventions and no good treatment strategies. they were throwing everything at covid and nothing seemed to work. in fact some things seemed to be exacerbating death and disease. i think the -- 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. should a large society in the world today not be about to cordon off its most at risk people, you might see much higher fatality rates than we are since we don't have treatments or vaccine of that kind. that philadelphia story is, wow, if all of our hospitals are full, you're going to have more death. and sure enough, they did. >> interesting. one of the other things that's emerged from our questions has to do with the politics of this. two questions in effect. intermingle them as you like. you mentioned this does not become a partisan issue in 1918 in the same way it does today. explain. but secondly, see more about trying to interpret the 1918

election in this context. obviously, the way i tell the story, the way i think all of us formulation guys tell the story, woodrow wilson campaigns on vote for me in your congressional election in order to ratify my ideas on foreign policy and he loses. 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. >> right. >> absent the flu, is there a chance that wilson is able to do different things with at least the numbers in the senate? >> 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 moment as become. the history has not been particularly partisan. certainly some agencies are. we can think about fema, we can think about political appointees

being perhaps not up to the task. that's one thing. but the respond would map onto party politics at the individual level. and my decision to deny that that would have any close correlation to my party affiliation or my voting patterns, seems to me to be -- it's not necessarily logical. let's just talk about it that way, right? being diplomatic about it. and the 1918 moment i think is indicative of something i said, perhaps varied a bit, the health expectations of citizens were much lower then. they weren't thinking that the wilson administration would be the leader on this. as my contract suggests, people were 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 they -- the main piece of the puzzle is what you said, which is the war, right? famously wilson campaigned in 1916. he kept us out of war, right?

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 go on which maps onto the mask slacker concept, doing your patriotic good. the lack of popularity of the war, the war was not over by the election, november 11th is armistice. 3rd, 4th you finish the election cycle. there's that piece. but absent the pandemic, i wonder, i think perhaps -- certainly it depresses turnout depending on which political science analysis you look at. you see a depressed turnout between 10 and 40% in fall of 1918. very significant. but not that remarkable because it's a midterm election, right? by 1920, you're back to pretty normal turnout despite the fact

that there's still lingering flu in that season. it's the first season, if you will. so that's interesting. then the -- what was the second part? how do i pivot from partisan mapping on -- >> complete -- it's not even counter factual. it's ridiculous to postulate. if the american people are not suffering through a flu and they're about to win a war, the war was in its final days, or it seemed like it was -- 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. of course, the party in power gets voted out for all intents and purposes. is it just the misery of the american people that makes that critical delta? >> it's interesting.

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 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. once americans hear more about that and wilson can't campaign on that, 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 about wilson 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 infrastructure at the federal level is also interesting.

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. in fact, here's a really telling detail. 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 imported into the 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. another thing that's a contrast and leaves me devastated at times is in six to eight weeks, a lot of the virus burned out in 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. regardless of politics. >> i understand how you feel,