Very, Very, Very Dreadful

by Albert Marrin

  Influenza forced many theaters, shops, restaurants, and other gathering spots to close. (1918) Credit 51

  Across the nation, places of amusement were hard-hit. Concert halls, dance halls, pool halls, circuses, skating rinks, public playgrounds, swimming pools, and county fairs had to shut down. New York City’s Broadway, the “Great White Way” lined with theaters, went dark. Because of movie-house closings, the fledgling motion picture industry came to a standstill. Gloom settled over Hollywood. Stars like Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” found themselves without paychecks, as did thousands of lesser folks: writers, musicians, camera crews, theater employees. As reported in Moving Picture World, the industry newspaper, before closing his theater, an owner with a sense of humor flashed a message on the screen:

  Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard

  To get her dog a stew.

  When she got there she tore her hair,

  For the stew had the Spanish Flu.

  Little Miss Muffett sat on a tuffet,

  The tuffet was covered with dew.

  Along came a spider and sat down beside her

  And they both caught the Spanish Flu.

  Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark

  The Flu is coming to town.

  “We’ll close the show till it goes,”

  Said the hell-th board.14

  Officials in some communities decided to bar outsiders entirely. The town of Gunnison, Colorado, for instance, isolated itself “against the world,” residents boasted. Sheriff’s deputies set up roadblocks, preventing motorists from entering town. When trains stopped to unload freight, conductors reminded passengers that they faced arrest, a stiff fine, and five days in quarantine if they stepped onto the platform to stretch their legs. Another Colorado town, Ouray, in the San Juan Mountains, went further. Ouray’s sheriff hired guards to enforce a “shotgun” quarantine against outsiders. No matter: influenza got in anyway, infecting 150 townspeople. St. Louis, Missouri, barred soldiers and sailors on leave from entering the city.15

  A pair of cartoons from the Health Bulletin warning North Carolinians about the spread of influenza. (1919) Credit 52

  Newspapers printed articles about families barricading themselves in their homes, a strategy tried in the plague years of the Middle Ages. The reason, one explained, was that “a little fresh air could be fatal.” Years later, Lee Reay of Meadow, Utah, described what it was like to hole up during the influenza panic:

  No one had ever seen the germs of the disease. No one knew where the germs were coming from. We only knew the germs were carried by the air and had gotten into our house. We plugged up the keyholes with cotton so air couldn’t get in, sealed the doors and the cracks around the doors because we thought the outside air was contaminated. One particular family, I remember, closed up every possible avenue of letting fresh air into the house….They plugged up keyholes on the door, sealed windows, and stayed inside, breathing their own air.16

  Families might seal their homes too well; some died of suffocation, especially if they used oxygen-gulping kerosene lamps. Yet the opposite was true in New York City. At Roosevelt Hospital, children suffering from influenza got the “roof treatment.” Nurses put the feverish youngsters to bed on the hospital’s roof with hot-water bottles, surrounded by screens to shelter them from the icy winds blowing off the Hudson River. Most of the children recovered.17

  Before the pandemic, Americans regarded unprotected coughing and sneezing as bad manners. Now they saw these, along with spitting, as crimes. Everywhere signs condemned “open-faced sneezers.” Buses and streetcars were plastered with a three-word slogan: SPIT SPREADS DEATH. Billboards along New York streets warned: “It Is Unlawful to Cough and Sneeze”; violators faced a $500 fine (a huge sum in 1918) and a year in jail. Chicago officials went all out, ordering the police to “arrest thousands, if necessary, to stop the sneezing in public!” The front doors of churches bore announcements such as this:

  NOTICE

  Any person having a cough or cold is not permitted

  to enter this Church.

  Anti-sneezing rules proved a blessing to hooky players: inhaling a pinch of pepper became a get-out-of-school-for-the-day pass.18

  A public health poster cautioning against careless ways of spreading the flu. (1925) Credit 53

  Shielding one’s face with a handkerchief when coughing or sneezing became a patriotic duty. Cartoons aimed at children taught the importance of the “snot rag.” My favorite shows a boy with a regular-size handkerchief asking his friend with a towel-size one: “Did ya get that fer yer birthday? Gee! That’s some handkerchief.” His proud friend replies: “Yeh, me mother made it fer me. It’s good for a hundred sneezes.” Posters of a dapper fellow covering his mouth with a handkerchief read: “Prevent Disease—Careless Spitting, Coughing, Sneezing, Spread Influenza and Tuberculosis.” Health officials urged that handkerchiefs “should be placed in boiling water as soon as possible after use.”19

  Face masks became the rage. Made of gauze, a type of loosely woven lightweight cotton fabric, surgical masks were standard in hospital operating rooms by 1918; doctors and nurses wore them to filter out dust and bacteria. However, the pandemic made masks, praised as “little gauze germ catchers,” essential for everyone. The American Red Cross and private companies turned them out by the millions. Sold for a dime, masks came in three styles. The Agincourt had a pointed snout, like the helmets worn by French knights at the time of the Black Death. The Ravioli was a square slab, popular with police officers. The Yashmak, modeled on harem-style women’s veils, was long, reaching below the chin.20

  People wore face masks everywhere: postal workers making deliveries, secretaries sitting at their desks, police officers on patrol, teachers in classrooms, and courting couples kissing. At baseball games, where allowed, players wore masks. Some imaginative people decorated theirs with a skull and crossbones, pirate-style, or a pink propeller, clown-style. Cigarette addicts had masks with a little round hole cut in front of their mouths to allow for inhaling the smoke and blowing it out. Criminals wore masks during holdups; since masks were so common, few paid attention to masked men walking the streets in broad daylight. Masks, however, did not raise people’s spirits. In Colorado Springs, for example, the local newspaper deplored “a city of masked faces, a city as grotesque as a masked carnival.”21

  San Francisco became mask-crazed. Mayor James Rolph announced, “Who leaves his mask behind, dies.” Villains called “mask slackers” were hauled into court and fined for the offense. A jingle blessed by the city fathers went:

  Obey the laws

  And wear the gauze

  Protect your jaws

  From septic paws.

  The Bellingham Herald reported on the sometimes deadly consequences—not just from exposure but from aggressive law enforcement—of not donning a mask. (1918) Credit 54

  Mask slacking was a serious offense, which explains why the police looked the other way when a health department inspector shot a blacksmith for refusing to “wear the gauze.”22

  In San Francisco, as throughout the nation, medical authorities, government officials, and the media supported the wearing of masks as a nearly foolproof way of avoiding the dread disease. Newspaper advertisements blared: “Wear a Mask and Save Your Life!” A gauze mask, it was said, “is ninety-nine percent Proof against Influenza” and the “only known preventative.”23

  The Illustrated Current News offered suggestions on how to prevent influenza. (1918) Credit 55

  Such statements were nonsense born of ignorance, fear, and hope. And also magical thinking, the notion that something happens just because we think about it or wish for it. But wish as people might, a gauze mask never shielded anyone from the flu virus. How could it? The virus is so tiny that loosely woven gauze has as much chance of intercepting it as a tennis racket has of snaring a speck of dust.

  Other “prevention” methods were equally worthless. Some people—probably Republicans—urged, in al
l seriousness, voting Republican, “and you need have no fear of the flu.” No, put sulfur in your shoes. No, pull out your teeth and tonsils. No, go about naked. The New York Herald quoted Boston physician Charles E. Page: “Influenza is caused chiefly by excessive clothing on an animal by nature naked….[So] we need not wonder at the high death rate.” The Denver Post urged readers to have “a clean mouth, a clean shirt and clean bowels” to avoid the disease. Finally, in Phoenix, Arizona, rumor had it that dogs carried influenza, so people shot their pets.24

  Once people fell ill with influenza, as the best physicians knew, medical science could do nothing to cure them; curing lay in the hands of God and in their own immune systems. After the war, Dr. Herbert French, an English flu expert admired in America, was brutally frank. “No matter what treatment was adopted,” he declared, “it was extremely difficult, if possible at all, to modify the course of the disease in the least….One would be only too thankful if one knew anything which would with any certainty check the disease process, but one met nothing that was in the least degree successful in this respect.”25

  However, as in ancient times, physicians in 1918 felt duty-bound to try something—anything. Not a few declared a positive attitude a useful preventive. Dr. William C. Woodward, Boston’s heath commissioner, advised people not to be afraid, because “fear would lower the vitality of those exposed to influenza.” He failed to explain how seeing death all around could not frighten them. Other physicians held extreme, even crackpot, views. Despite their good intentions, they inflicted “treatments” that had no effect on the disease but actually weakened patients, increasing the odds against their survival. We need mention only a few to see what these were like.26

  Physicians prescribed mustard plasters, an old-time remedy made of mustard-seed paste, to stimulate healing. When, for example, Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865, his doctors covered the dying president’s chest with mustard plasters. Influenza patients also received enemas of soapy water or warm milk. Some physicians thought it a good idea to rub goose grease on a patient’s chest. Rupert Blue, the U.S. surgeon general, touted his favorite remedy:

  Saturate a ball of cotton as large as a one-inch marble with spirits of alcohol. Add three drops of chloroform to each ball of cotton. Place it in between the patient’s teeth. Let the patient inhale the fumes for 15 minutes, then rest 15 minutes, or longer, if needed. Then inhale again 15 minutes and repeat the operation as directed 24 times. The result will be that the lungs will expand to their normal condition.

  Dr. Blue did not say if he used this treatment on real patients, let alone on his loved ones, or if they survived.27

  An advertisement for an influenza “miracle prevention.” Like most, this atomizer would have been useless in combating the spread of the virus. (1918) Credit 56

  As in plague-ravaged London in 1665, unscrupulous people tried to line their pockets. Until the 1930s, the United States had no laws to regulate patent medicines, drugs sold without a doctor’s prescription. Makers of nonprescription medicines did not have to prove their products safe and effective, or list ingredients on the label, or have medical or scientific training. As a result, each year saw a fresh crop of drugs, many containing opium, a highly addictive narcotic, for various ailments: stomach cramps, constipation, diarrhea, bed-wetting, fatigue, and “female monthly disorders.”

  The pandemic gave rise to scores of “miracle drugs.” Newspapers carried ads for marvels: “Influ-BALM Prevents Spanish Flu,” “Benetol, a powerful bulwark for the prevention and treatment of Spanish influenza.” Another ad asked: “Sick with influenza? Use Ely’s cream Balm. No more snuffling. No struggling for breath.” A similar ad praised a competing drug: “Use Oil of Hyomi. Bathe your breathing organs with antiseptic balsam.” Munyon’s Paw Paw Pills guaranteed “influenza insurance.” C. I. Hood & Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, offered three anti-influenza potions: Hood’s Sarsaparilla, which, its ad boasted, was ideal for “impure, exhausted blood”; Hood’s Pills, which would “regulate the bowels to a nicety”; and Hood’s Pepitron (chocolate pills), which would fortify the entire body. Ads for Tanlac Reconstructive Tonic told the truth in one respect: “Influenza Claims More Victims Than German Bullets.”28

  Desperate people also turned to folk medicine, traditional remedies favored over generations within various societies. Often they put their faith in magical objects. Southern mountain folk, for example, kept shotguns under sickbeds to “draw out” the fever. Elsewhere, to ward off infection, people hung cloth bags filled with camphor around their necks, or they swallowed doses of red pepper, powdered asparagus, or “kerosene on sugar.” Recipes called for wearing a necklace of chicken feathers or asafetida, also known as “devil’s dung” an herb that “smelled like rotten flesh.” The idea was that foul odors could chase influenza “germs” away. During outbreaks of the Black Death, Europeans had inhaled the stench from latrines for the same reason. Some Americans swore by the curative powers of onions. An Oregon woman boasted that she doused her sick four-year-old daughter with onion syrup and buried her from head to toe for three days in freshly cut, eye-watering onions. She said the child recovered—to the delight of onion growers.29

  Onions offered no protection against influenza—but ample opportunity for profit. (1918) Credit 57

  The clergy turned to prayer. Billy Sunday spoke for his colleagues of all faiths. At a prayer meeting in his Providence, Rhode Island, tabernacle, Sunday mounted the speaker’s platform brimming with confidence. After a moment’s pause to survey the thousands of upturned faces, he threw his arms wide. “We can,” he cried, “meet here tonight and pray down the epidemic just as well as we can pray down a German victory.” We cannot say if this message reassured anybody. For as Sunday spoke, feverish members of the congregation collapsed and ushers carried them from the building.30

  THE RANKS OF DEATH

  The week of October 23, 1918, is unique in American history. Within seven days, influenza claimed 21,000 lives, still the highest number of deaths from any cause ever recorded in a week in this country. Not even the horror days of the Civil War were so deadly.31

  Credit 58

  On October 23, health department records show, 851 New Yorkers died of the disease, the highest daily figure ever recorded in the city, and for several days the death toll did not fall below 800. But in Philadelphia, the death toll that week was even worse: 5,270 people died in the “City of Brotherly Love”—more than 700 times above the normal death rate for all causes. Stunned Red Cross volunteers noted that daily death notices “fill an entire [newspaper] page, seven columns of small print with a repetitious litany: ‘…of pneumonia, age 21,’ ‘…of influenza, age 26.’ The toll is heaviest among young adults.”32

  Few Americans, then as now, had ever seen a person die, let alone touched a corpse. This was not the case during the pandemic. Flu-ravaged cities seemed like the plague-torn London of 1665. Victims’ bodies accumulated in beds and closets and odd corners of homes until corpse collectors took them away. In Philadelphia, the nation’s worst-hit city, the police ordered families to leave their dead on their porches or on the sidewalks in front of their homes. Each body had to be wrapped in a bedsheet “for sanitary reasons.”

  As in Daniel Defoe’s London, Philadelphia had so-called dead wagons. A survivor recalled, “An open truck came through the neighborhoods and picked up the bodies.” Families took this hard—very hard. “It was just too much to bear, having to put your loved one on the street for a truck to take them away,” said Harriet Ferrell. In normal times, residents put their trash barrels on the curb for sanitation workers to pick up.33

  The dead wagons rumbled through backstreets, stopping only to allow volunteers to collect bodies. Selma Epp lost her brother Daniel. “My aunt,” the Philadelphian remembered years later, “saw the horse-drawn wagon coming down the street. The strongest person in our family carried Daniel’s body to the sidewalk. Everyone was too weak to protest. There were no coffins in the wagon, just bodies pil
ed on top of each other. Daniel was two; he was just a little boy. They put his body in the wagon and took him away.”34

  There were so many bodies that coffins became scarce nearly everywhere. As demand rose, “coffin ghouls”—greedy manufacturers—jacked up prices, even to $500, as much as poor families earned in a year. Desperate people did desperate things to give loved ones a decent burial. “We had caskets stacked up outside the funeral home,” an undertaker said. “We had to have guards kept on them because people were stealing the caskets.” In Germany, by contrast, families had to rent coffins for funerals and then return them empty at the end of the day. Poor Japanese families fashioned coffins from wooden barrels, cardboard, and paper.35

  American funerals were often anything but “proper.” Many gravediggers were themselves ill with flu, or were terrified of it, forcing the deceased’s family to take over. “It was either that or they weren’t going to get the grave open,” a man recalled. On especially busy days in Philadelphia, the Bureau of Highways used a steam shovel to dig trenches in which to bury the poor. In Norway, where the ground froze deep in winter, families hung their dead in trees until the spring thaw.36