The influenza epidemic had caused thousands of men and women to go about fearfully with white cloth masks over their faces

About 150 books stand in stacks by my bed, slowly being worked through. Another 400 or so stand in stacks in my office.

I do try and prune, to archive, even to, shudder, dispose. But it is not especially noticeable. The stacks remain. Replenishing themselves in some mysterious way.

Among those in the library stacks, I pick up The Big Change by Frederick Lewis Allen for a quick review. The Big Change is a social history of the US from 1900-1950, published in 1952.

His prose style is fine and I keep it for later reading. However, given our current circumstances, there is something I want to check.

Obviously World War 1 was a big event in that fifty year window, with 117,000 American soldiers dead between 1917 and 1918.

Even larger, was the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 in which 650,000 Americans died at a time when the national population was some 105 million. The equivalent of nearly 2 million deaths against today's population.

My question was, how many pages in this 300 odd page history of the US from 1900 to 1950 are devoted to the Spanish Flu?

None.

Great Depression - 16 citations
WWI - 13 citations
WWII - 29 citations

Spanish flu, Influenza, Epidemic? 0.

I leaf through the pages. The closest I can find is on page 202.

Indeed the cumulative change in this respect since 1900 had been prodigious. The death rate for a number of diseases which in 1900 had stuck dismay into people's hearts had been cut way down: for influenza and pneumonia, from 181.5 (per 100,000 people) to 38.7 in 1948.

He goes on to cite similar plunges in other diseases such as tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever - diseases now largely a cultural memory.

So perhaps the absence of the Spanish Flu is that it occurred towards the beginning of the fifty year cycle and the single largest outbreak was lost in the overall plunge in the death rate.

Now I am curious though. Allen's breakthrough history was Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s published in 1931. Only a decade out. Maybe the Spanish Flu has more prominence in that book.

No results for Spanish Flu. There is a single mention of influenza in a passage describing the immediate aftermath of the Armistice in November 1918.

“But a million men—to paraphrase Bryan—cannot spring from arms overnight. There were still over three and a half million Americans in the military service, over two million of them in Europe. Uniforms were everywhere. Even after the tumult and shouting of November 11th had died, the Expeditionary Forces were still in the trenches, making ready for the long, cautious march into Germany; civilians were still saving sugar and eating strange dark breads and saving coal; it was not until ten days had passed that the "lightless" edict of the Fuel Administration was withdrawn, and Broadway and a dozen lesser white ways in other cities blazed once more; the railroads were still operated by the government, and one bought one's tickets at United States Railroad Administration Consolidated Ticket Offices; the influenza epidemic, which had taken more American lives than had the Germans, and had caused thousands of men and women to go about fearfully with white cloth masks over their faces, was only just abating; the newspapers were packed with reports from the armies in Europe, news of the revolution in Germany, of Mr. Wilson's peace preparations, of the United War Work Campaign, to the exclusion of almost everything else; and day after day, week after week, month after month, the casualty lists went on, and from Maine to Oregon men and women searched them in daily apprehension.

As a reality check, I take a look at The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds of which I have read about 1/3 in intermittent snatches. Published in 2013, it has the advantage of hindsight.

Four references, all of them a variation on:

As a result, the official death toll was only 116,516 (0.4 percent of males aged fifteen to forty-nine). Even that is a misleading figure, because combat deaths accounted for only 53,402 of the total. More Doughboys succumbed to influenza than to German bullets, and roughly half the flu victims died in the United States.

This amnesia of what now strikes us in distant hindsight as an epic event is more than passing strange.