Trickle Down Episode 6: War, Disease & Amnesia (Sample)
The 1918 Pandemic was a deadly outbreak of influenza that killed tens of millions globally. It was also forgotten by historians for a generation.
Medical officers in charge of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I were confident that they could stop all infectious diseases in their tracks. The previous advances in medical science showed them that wartime epidemics could be stopped through sanitary measures. But when the flu pandemic ripped through their ranks, they didn’t know what to do. And the government was too focused on winning the war to offer much help to the civilian population. After the war, authorities were unable to deal with the horrors of the disease in an honest way. They preferred to forget. And so for decades afterwards, the horrors of the 1918 pandemic were erased from the cultural consciousness.
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Written by Travis View. Theme by Nick Sena (https://nicksenamusic.com). Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
REFERENCES
Arnold, Catharine (2018) Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts From the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Medical History
Byerly, Carol (2005) Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I
Barry, John M. (2018) The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic In History
Crosby, Alfred (1989) America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918
In April, 1918, Army Surgeon General William Crawford Gorgas received a letter from Major General Hugh Scott,
commander of the 78th Division at Camp Dix in New Jersey.
Scott was worried about disease in this camp, saying this, I feel perturbed over the pneumonia and scarlet fever situation.
No one here seems to be able to give me a cause sufficient for the effects I see.
The camp is as clean as a hound's tooth.
Gorgas responded quickly.
He acknowledged the problem of pneumonia and recalled a time earlier in his career when he beat back a disease that threatened men in his care.
He wrote back this, It is now just like yellow fever before we used mosquito precautions.
We know perfectly well that we can control pneumonia absolutely if we could avoid crowding the men.
But it is not practicable in military life to avoid this crowding.
Gorgas assured Scott that despite these practical obstacles, medical science endowed them with all the knowledge necessary to control the outbreak.
I haven't the least doubt that if you, tomorrow, could give every man in Camp Dix his own individual hut, The pneumonia would ease at once.
This note, sent during the pandemic of 1918, revealed that Gorgas was overconfident and did not appreciate the scale of the problem that he faced.
The influenza outbreak was rapidly spreading and mutating in the trenches of World War I. The virus would soon be responsible for more deaths of American soldiers than combat, and would spread all over the world.
Even after the pandemic subsided, the failure of men like Gorgas to fully control, or reckon with, or even understand the pandemic would become an afterthought.
He was overwhelmed by the all-reaching war propaganda machine.
What's more, the inconvenience of the pandemic would cause its story to be nearly erased from cultural consciousness for decades afterwards.
I'm Travis Few, and this is Trickle Down, a podcast about what happens when bad ideas flow from the top.
With me are Julian Field and Jake Rokitansky.
Episode 6, War, Disease, and Amnesia.
[MUSIC]
You know, like a lot of people, as a consequence of the pandemic we're still living through today,
I became interested in the pandemic of 19.
This one is commonly referred to as the Spanish Influenza after the erroneous belief that it originated in Spain.
Its only real competition for the title of the deadliest pandemic in history is the Black Death.
It is estimated that about 500 million people, or one-third of the world's population, became infected with the virus.
The number of deaths is estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide, with about 675,000 occurring in the United States alone.
Even remote and isolated communities of people were not spared.
Some native villages in Alaska were decimated.
20% of western Samoans perished.
It was an unimaginably horrifying event, made even more horrifying by the fact that there was a lot less understanding of influenza then than there is now.
The human influenza virus was not isolated until 1933.
So despite the fact that this pandemic was hugely significant and global, I was surprised to learn that one of its first comprehensive histories was published in 1976, And it was republished in 1989 under the title, America's Forgotten Pandemic.
I was a little confused like how something that impactful could be forgotten.
And what I discovered was that despite the pandemic significance, it was ignored by historians for about a generation.
And not just historians, it was also ignored, minimized, and glossed over by contemporary observers.
For example, in 1919, the New York Tribune columnist Heywood Brown published a book of his columns about the war called, Our Army at the Front.
None of these columns mention the pandemic once, despite the fact that the flu killed more soldiers than bombs or bullets.
To cite another example, in 1924, Encyclopædia Britannica published a two-volume collection of essays titled, These Eventful Years, The Twentieth Century and the Making, as told by many of its makers.
This book promised to present, quote, the dramatic story of all that has happened throughout the world during the most momentous period in all of history.
Yet in that book's 1,300 pages, the influenza virus that ravaged the world just five years earlier is not mentioned once.
Which is wholly absurd.
Imagine if someone wrote a history of the 21st century in 2024-2025 and decided to completely omit COVID-19.
Now, the silence wasn't universal.
I mean, it had to be acknowledged to some extent.
It sickened and killed so many people.
But the silence was pervasive.
And even when the pandemic was discussed or mentioned, it was glossed over or downplayed.
And that's baffling when you compare it to, like, I don't know, the sinking of the Titanic.
You know, this was a disaster that resulted in the death of just 1,500 people.
But it was remembered with, like, songs and books and memorabilia and museum displays and movies.
It was a horrible shipwreck and it was immediately part of the Western cultural consciousness and then stayed in the cultural memory for generations.
But the 1918 pandemic, which was orders of magnitude more horrible, Partly it was because the pandemic came at an inconvenient time.
That was in the middle of World War One.
There was just a lot going on, you know?
Even while the pandemic was happening, people in positions of power and authority mostly only cared about it to the extent that it affected the war effort.
The story of the pandemic's impact was just smothered by war propaganda, and this silence continued even after the war ended.
And partly it's because medical authorities really believed that they could conquer contagious disease, thanks to advances in medical science.
And when it turned out that they couldn't, they treated the pandemic as a weird exception or anomaly.
Now, there were many medical heroes of the pandemic of 1918.
First and foremost was the countless doctors, nurses, and orderlies who threw themselves in between the disease and the patients.
Their service often cost them their health and their lives.
There were also the medical researchers who performed experiments day and night in hopes of learning more about the virus and finding some kind of treatment.
But this is not a podcast about heroes, so I'm not going to focus on them.
For my purposes, I'm going to focus on a more narrow aspect on the history of the pandemic, specifically how the war and the virus collaborated to make the plague, and how medical officers, made arrogant by advances in science, were caught flat-footed by the spread of the disease.
I'll talk about how they discounted the significance of the epidemic as a medical event instead of being honest about their failures.
I also talk about how the federal government and the media were so intensely focused on winning the war that they simply did not care to be honest about what was happening to the health of the world.
Hey there!
You've been listening to a sample clip of Trickle Down.
This is a side project that I've been working on.
It's a 10 episode series about misinformation and bad ideas that flow from high authority sources.
I think it's fascinating and I mean it's a way for I guess me to explore the way people who Should know what they're talking about.
Don't always, actually.
Not gonna lie, some of it's kind of a bummer, but if you're anything like me, that's actually more of a reason to dive into the subject matter.
Like with the premium episodes of QAnon Anonymous, all the episodes of Trickle Down are available to people who support us through Patreon.
Still the same five bucks a month, double the extra content, same price that we've been doing since 2018.
