Philadelphia.
The greatest social distancing debacle in modern pandemic history occurred 102 years ago today in the City of Brotherly Love on Sept, 28, 1918. That was the day Philadelphia public health director Wilmer Krusen allowed the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, “cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles,” to proceed, as the second and far more deadly wave than the first of the Spanish Flu pandemic rolled out across the American landscape. Within a week of the rally an estimated 45,000 Philadelphians were afflicted with influenza.
Some 675,000 Americans would die in the pandemic, while the worldwide death toll was probably somewhere around 50 million. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 7.8 billion people today. How bad were things in September and October 1918, during the waning weeks of the First World War, in the United States? Some frontline public health scientists by October and November thought the United States on the verge of an extinction-level event. “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth within a matter of a few more weeks,” wrote Victor Vaughan, a former president of the American Medical Association (AMA), and head of the U.S. Army’s division of communicable diseases, as he sat in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army in October 1918.
John M. Barry’s 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, to my mind anyway, remains the definitive historical work to date in the field. Barry also serves as an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.
Wilmer Krusen’s actions – and inaction – as the case may be, in allowing the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, to proceed has been looked at again in recent years.
Both the Smithsonian magazine (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/philadelphia-threw-wwi-parade-gave-thousands-onlookers-flu-180970372/) and Quartz (https://qz.com/1754657/the-1918-parade-that-spread-death-in-philadelphia/) have published interesting pieces over the last couple of years on what happened in Philly in September and October 1918.
But what really struck me is the very, very rapid breakdown in public order, Barry chronicles, despite official protestations to the contrary.
Nurses, who were right on the front lines, and truly, truly heroic in the earliest stages of the pandemic, in many cases soon just stopped coming to work. Many, of course, were too sick to, gravely ill or dying themselves, but many who were still well stopped coming to work out of fear of becoming infected themselves, and perhaps also infecting their loved ones. The same happened across many different public offices.
Government in many cases, and particularly at the municipal level, pretty much ceased to function – and that happened very, very quickly. State and provincial governments weren’t much better in many cases, and federal governments were, to be very charitable, slow off the mark. The international institutions we have now, for the most didn’t exist in 1918.
Philadelphia is one of Barry’s chilling examples that has stayed with me. Things were so bad there in the fall of 1918, when the Spanish Flu pandemic arrived in the city, that a group of volunteer women, holding no official titles or offices, who lived on Philadelphia’s “Main Line,” home of the city’s old money and prestige, essentially took over the key functions of the city government and co-ordinated Philadelphia’s response to the pandemic.
In essence, the Ladies Auxiliary, albeit a very well off, and a very well connected one, saved the day in Philadelphia in 1918, but it was a very close thing indeed.
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