Influenza and Inequality: One Town's Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918

Epilogue

126 5 epilogue One final aspect of the 1918 influenza epidemic needs to be addressed: its absence from the collective social memory of Americans. In all the wealth of our shared history, this cataclysmic event went almost unnoticed until recent disease outbreaks brought it to the forefront. Globally, some 20 to 30 million people died in 1918 of this unusually virulent strain of influenza. In the United States, the death toll was well over 500,000. Despite this massive loss of life, chronicles of the pandemic are missing from many, if not most, general histories of this period in national history. No mythology, no art, no body of literature emerged from this American experience.1 Researchers offer various explanations: that during the 1918 pandemic the world and the media were distracted by war; that influenza itself was not as horrific or macabre as the plague, or cholera, or yellow fever; that the epidemic had no real impact on social institutions or organizations .2 These arguments seem an inadequate explanation for a nation to forget more than half a million lives. Several factors need to be considered in order to explain this phenomenal memory loss. First, the 1918 influenza pandemic lasted for less than a year. At a time when the world was at war (and later, celebrating the end of war), the epidemic may have seemed simply like another aspect of the conflict, another hardship to withstand. This brevity also may help account for the lack of literature, art, or legend built up around the disease. The plagues that ravaged medieval Europe and the AIDS epidemic, the two most prominent subjects in disease literature and art, suggest that it may be only when a disease continues for years— ever present, lurking in the shadows, accumulating a steadily increasing number of victims—that it makes its way into our collective memory. When disease slowly tears away at the social fabric of a cul- ture, artists begin to capture the tragedy and the pain. The 1918 influenza epidemic was different. It was frightening but it was over fast. People became sick, recovered, or died within days or weeks. Once it had passed, there was no great fear that the victim totals would increase exponentially for years to come. Coupled with these notions of brevity and wartime is the reality of who the primary victims were. They were, for the most part, not leaders but rank and file. Alfred Crosby writes, “If the pandemic had killed one or more of the really famous figures of the nation or the world it would have been remembered. . . . Spanish influenza characteristically killed young adults and therefore rarely men in positions of great authority.”3 Robert Swenson’s observations echo this same notion of unimportance when he writes that “despite being the largest epidemic in history, it had little long term effect, because . . . the population losses were rapidly replaced.”4 Yet Crosby also notes that “if one turns to intimate accounts, to autobiographies of those who were not in positions of authority, to collections of letters written by friend to friend and husband to wife in the fall of 1918, and, especially, if one asks those who lived through the pandemic for their reminiscences, then it becomes apparent that Americans did notice, . . . that they remember the pandemic quite clearly and often acknowledge it as one of the most influential experiences of their lives.”5 The sharpness of these memories and the impact of the epidemic on the lives of those who lived through those weeks lead to the question of who writes history and the political problem of whose experiences count as lasting knowledge in national history. “Nations do not remember spontaneously and collectively,” James Fentress and Chris Wickham write in their analysis of social memory. “The bearers of national memory . . . are the upper middle classes and the intelligentsia.”6 Institutionalized social memories are created by the privileged. And often, as Geoffrey Hartman states, “The greatest danger to public memory is the official story.” Once created, these “official” memories are reinforced over time by the media, historians, and teachers. Through these sources, memory filters down to the general public and becomes embedded in the collective consciousness of a nation. Those living on the margins of a culture or a comepilogue 127 munity do not have access to these memory-makers. Consequently, their stories are often omitted in the creation of a history.7 What is...