American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (review)

In the final months of 1918 and the earliest months of 1919, a pandemic—of all such tidal waves of infection arithmetically the worst ever in absolute numbers of sick and dead—swept over our species. As many as one-third of all human beings fell ill and fifty million may have died, several times over as many as in combat in the World War to which the pandemic provided the continuo.

This world-wide detonation of influenza was colossal, yet generations passed with only a few serious observers of the human experience—historians, poets, epidemiologists, and the like—paying it much attention. Examine the works of the most famous of America’s literary masters of the first half of the twentieth century: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, et al. You will find little about the 1918 flu. One outstanding exception is Pale Horse, Pale Rider (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939). Its author, Katherine Anne Porter, was not a master, but a mistress of the literature, an exception that is worth thinking about.

Older standard textbooks of American history often included acres of print about the 1900–20 decades, the years of Progressivism, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and trench warfare. Whole pages have been devoted to official heroes such as General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, and to the likes of folk heroes such as Sergeant Alvin York, who was destined for Hollywood immortality. But up until mid-century, we were interested in traditional heroes, not microscopic mega-villains.

When my book Epidemic and Peace 1918 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1976) was published, it had the advantage of being unique in the field, yet despite the swine flu that broke out that very year, the book languished until Cambridge University Press picked it up in 1989 and re-branded it America’s Forgotten Pandemic. A second edition was issued by Cambridge in 2003 in the wake of the emergence of a new pulmonary virus that was known at the time as severe acute respiratory syndrome. A number of books on the topic have followed in the twenty-first century, notably Gina Kolata’s Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 (New York: Touchstone, 2001) and John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). George Dehner’s Influenza: A Century of Science and Public Health Response (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) contains a chapter “The Forgotten Pandemic Remembered” that presents in concise form the course of the pandemic from the first wave in early 1918 through the third wave in 1919 and concludes with remarks on the peculiar way in which the pandemic was erased from institutional, if not individual memory until recently.

In other words, since 1976 or so, we Americans have produced a respectable collection of books about the influenza pandemic of 1918. What has changed? Perhaps an additional world war—a worldlier war— was required. And then in the new century, the virus was reconstituted, genetically sequenced, and tested on laboratory animals.

Now among the best of the post-Second World War publications on the great pandemic of the First World War is American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic by Nancy K. Bristow. Among her book’s virtues is its voluminous bibliography stretching for pages and pages, which ranks as essential for all students of the subject.

Bristow has, in addition, done us all a favor in taking on the task of filling in some of the vacancies where the 1918 flu should reside in our curricula and anthologies—indeed in our whole culture, from the scientific to the mythic. How can it be that most American college graduates know more about the fourteenth-century Black Death than about the deadliest convulsion of disease in our own epidemiologically wobbly era...