Flu season: Moving Picture World reports on pandemic influenza, 1918-19

As World War I came to an end in 1918, successive waves of deadly 'Spanish' influenza swept the world, the death toll far exceeding that inflicted by the war itself. In the United States alone, 675,000 'excess deaths' were attributed to the epidemic. But while the War would long be celebrated in song and story, and immediately recognized as a defining event in twentieth century history, the flu was almost too terrible to remember – 'America's forgotten pandemic', as Alfred Crosby called it.¹ The forgetting came on very quickly. With the dead still warm in their graves, the Moving Picture World's Kansas City correspondent reported that, 'The public is quickly forgetting that there ever was an epidemic of influenza'.

While the Spanish flu never returned, historians have occasionally revisited the epidemic as a way of addressing relevant issues of contemporary concern. In the past decade, books like John Barry's The Great Influenza or Gina Kolata's Flu, inspired by current debates surrounding immunology, public health programs, and civil rights issues, have 'followed the germs'.² They tell a medical story which focuses on medical researchers and their struggle to identify the infectious agent, care for the sick, and develop a vaccine. They offer body counts and chart the path of the infection, but are strangely silent about other significant issues, especially the economic effects of the epidemic.³ Disruption of such war-related activities as manufacture and transportation might be referred to, but few specifics are given. General Ludendorff's belief that the influenza fatally sapped German troop strength during the final 1918 offensive, thereby affecting the outcome of the war, is duly noted. Frivolous activities, like the motion picture business, are seldom even mentioned.

But for film historians 1918–19 is a crucial period for a different set of reasons. With many of the nation's key exhibitors already uniting in the First National Exhibitors Circuit, Adolph Zukor's production behemoth, Famous Players-Lasky, prepared to counter with an exhibition wing of its own. The so-called 'battle of the theatres' which followed was not pretty, with threats, intimidation, and (perhaps) violence all part of a corporate plan to coerce the weaker exhibitors. As Mae Huettig put it, 'Descriptions of the period sound like a journalist's account of war'.⁴ And not only was the relationship between producers and exhibitors changing forever, but when Zukor turned to Kuhn, Loeb to finance this spree, the relationship between producers and bankers changed as well.

Did the epidemic, striking at a crucial moment in this developing contest, affect the future of the American motion picture industry as well? Like the rest of the public, subsequent film historians seem to have forgotten all about it. Considerable attention has been given to the economic and industrial mechanics of this struggle in recent years, but the flu epidemic is no longer identified as having a role of any consequence. This is revisionist history of a high order, because earlier historians (and the reporters chronicling the plague in the pages of trade journals like the Moving Picture World), had no doubt that the effect of the epidemic was crucial.

The first generation of film historians, who had experienced all this at first hand, tended to rate the impact of the influenza epidemic much more highly than those who followed them. Benjamin Hampton, who played his own role in the battle for theatres, felt that the flu epidemic 'shook the industry to its very foundations'. He remembered that the disruptions of the war and the censorious agitation of 'Puritans' were 'as nothing' compared to the epidemic. 'Studios closed entirely, or operated on part time, and pessimists croaked that this was the beginning of the end.'⁵ He quotes Walter Irwin's testimony to the Federal Trade Commission, during its anti-trust investigation of Zukor's business practices, in which Irwin recalled...