“21 million people? One sentence? Hello?”

From Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata.  Page 52. 

Alfred Crosby, puzzling over the epidemic’s impact, went to the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature from 1919 to 1921 and counted the column inches devoted to the influenza epidemic as compared with other topics. There were, he wrote, 13 inches citing articles on baseball, 20 inches on Bolshevism, and 47 on Prohibition. Just 8 inches of citaions referred to the flu.

Crosby looked at a recent edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The 1918 flu got three sentences. He looked at a recent edition of the Encyclopedia Americana. One sentence was devoted to the flu, and it said that the epidemic killed 21 million people. “That was a gross understatement,” Crosby says. But even so, he remarks, “21 million people? One sentence? Hello?”

When soldiers died of the flu, the cause of their deaths was sometimes hidden in euphemisms, Crosby notes. “At a memorial service for the pandemic dead at Fort Meade, Maryland, the presiding officer read the names of the dead one by one to a massed battalion, and as each name rang out, the sergeant of the man’s company saluted and responded, ‘Died on the field of honor, sir.’” 

When the history textbooks were written, recording for students the events that academic experts deemed important for them to know, once again the flu did not seem to be worth mentioning. Crosby examined college history textbooks, looking for the 1918 flu. He remarked that the epidemic was notable mostly by its absence. “Of the best-selling college texts in United States history, books by such historians as Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., C. Vann Woodward, and Carl Degler, only one so much as mentions the pandemic. Thomas A. Bailey in The American Pageant gives it one sentence and in that sentence understates the total number of deaths due to it by at least one-half.”

Medical scientists are amazed by the great silence, in view of the influenza epidemic’s dramatic impact, not just on mortality statistics or an army’s ability to fight but in everyday life. They recall that citizens wore white gauze masks in public in a vain attempt to protect themselves. Funerals were limited to fifteen minutes. Coffins were in short supply. Morticians and gravediggers could not keep up with the demand for their services. In Philadelphia, so many bodies had piled up in the morgue that the embalmers said the conditions were “so offensive” that they would not enter it. Public gatherings were prohibited in many cities and some places made it a crime to cough, sneeze, or spit in public. In Washington, D.C., even the Supreme Court adjourned so that, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, they could spare lawyers from having to “enter this crowded and infected place.” And Washington hospitals were so crowded that they stationed undertakers at their doors to remove each body as soon as death occurred to make room for another patient. “The living came in one door and the dead went out another,” one doctor noted. No one could avoid knowing that a deadly epidemic was stalking the land.

But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society’s collective memory.

Crosby calls the 1918 flu “America’s forgotten pandemic,” noting: “The important and almost incomprehensible fact about the Spanish flu is that it killed millions upon millions of people in a year or less. Nothing else—no infection, no war, no famine—has ever killed so many in as short a period. And yet it has never inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since, not among the citizens of any particular land and not among the citizens of the United States.