The Great Influenza (32 page)

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Krusen's public face remained nothing but reassuring. He now conceded that there were 'a few cases in the civilian population' and said that health inspectors were looking for cases among civilians 'to nip the epidemic in the bud.' But he did not say how.

On Saturday, September 21, the Board of Health made influenza a 'reportable' disease, requiring physicians to notify health officials of any cases they treated. This would provide information about its movement. For the board to act on a Saturday was extraordinary in itself, but the board nonetheless assured the city that it was 'fully convinced that the statement issued by Director Krusen that no epidemic of influenza prevails in the civil population at the present time is absolutely correct. Moreover, the Board feels strongly that if the general public will carefully and rigidly observe the recommendations [to] avoid contracting the influenza an epidemic can successfully be prevented.'

The board's advice: stay warm, keep the feet dry and the bowels open - this last piece of advice a remnant of the Hippocratic tradition. The board also advised people to avoid crowds.

Seven days later, on September 28, a great Liberty Loan parade, designed to sell millions of dollars of war bonds, was scheduled. Weeks of organizing had gone into the event, and it was to be the greatest parade in Philadelphia history, with thousands marching in it and hundreds of thousands expected to watch it.

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These were unusual times. The Great War made them so. One cannot look at the influenza pandemic without understanding the context. Wilson had realized his aims. The United States was waging total war.

Already two million U.S. troops were in France; it was expected that at least two million more would be needed. Every element of the nation, from farmers to elementary school teachers, was willingly or otherwise enlisted in the war. To Wilson, to Creel, to his entire administration, and for that matter to allies and enemies alike, the control of information mattered. Advertising was about to emerge as an industry; J. Walter Thompson (his advertising agency was already national, and his deputy became a senior Creel aide) was theorizing that it could engineer behavior; after the war the industry would claim the ability to 'sway the ideas of whole populations,' while Herbert Hoover said, 'The world lives by phrases' and called public relations 'an exact science.'

Total war requires sacrifice and good morale makes sacrifices acceptable, and therefore possible. The sacrifices included inconveniences in daily life. To contribute to the war effort, citizens across the country endured the 'meatless days' during the week, the one 'wheatless meal' every day. All these sacrifices were of course voluntary, completely voluntary - although Hoover's Food Administration could effectively close businesses that did not 'voluntarily' cooperate. And if someone chose to go for a drive in the country on a 'gasless Sunday,' when people were 'voluntarily' refraining from driving, that someone was pulled over by hostile police.

The Wilson administration intended to make the nation cohere. Wilson informed the head of the Boy Scouts that selling bonds would give 'every Scout a wonderful opportunity to do his share for the country under the slogan, 'Every Scout to Save a Soldier.'' Creel's one hundred fifty thousand Four Minute Men, those speakers who opened virtually every public gathering including movie and vaudeville shows, inspired giving. And when inspiration alone failed, other pressures could be exerted.

The preservation of morale itself became an aim. For if morale faltered, all else might as well. So free speech trembled. More than in the McCarthy period, more than during World War II itself, more than in the Civil War (when Lincoln was routinely vilified by opponents) free speech trembled indeed. The government had the two hundred thousand members of the American Protective League, who reported to the Justice Department's new internal security agency headed by J. Edgar Hoover and spied on neighbors and coworkers. Creel's organization advised citizens, 'Call the bluff of anyone who says he has 'inside information.' Tell him that it's his patriotic duty to help you find the source of what he's saying. If you find a disloyal person in your search, give his name to the Department of Justice in Washington and tell them where to find him.'

Socialists, German nationals, and especially the radical unionists in the International Workers of the World got far worse treatment. The
New York Times
declared, 'The IWW agitators are in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany. The Federal authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators against the United States.' The government did just that, raiding union halls, convicting nearly two hundred union men at mass trials in Illinois, California, and Oregon, and applying relentless pressure against all opponents; in Philadelphia on the same day that Krusen first discussed influenza with navy officials, five men who worked for the city's German-language paper
Tageblatt
were imprisoned.

What the government didn't do, vigilantes did. There were the twelve hundred IWW members locked in boxcars in Arizona and left on a siding in the desert. There was IWW member Frank Little, tied to a car and dragged through streets in Butte, Montana, until his kneecaps were scraped off, then hung by the neck from a railroad trestle. There was Robert Prager, born in Germany but who had tried to enlist in the navy, attacked by a crowd outside St. Louis, beaten, stripped, bound in an American flag, and lynched because he uttered a positive word about his country of origin. And, after that mob's leaders were acquitted, there was the juror's shout, 'I guess nobody can say we aren't loyal now!' Meanwhile, a
Washington Post
editorial commented, 'In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.'

Socialist Eugene Debs, who in the 1912 presidential election had received nearly one million votes, was sentenced to ten years in prison for opposing the war, and in an unrelated trial Wisconsin congressman Victor Berger was sentenced to twenty years for doing the same. The House of Representatives thereupon expelled him and when his constituents reelected him anyway the House refused to seat him. All this was to protect the American way of life.

Few elites in America enjoyed more luxuries than did Philadelphia society, with its Biddles and Whartons. Yet the
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported approvingly that at 'a dinner on the Main Line a dozen men were gathered at the table, and there was some criticism of the way the government was handling things. The host rose and said, 'Gentlemen, it is not my business to tell you what to say but there are four Secret Service agents here this evening.' It was a tactful way of putting a stop to conversation for which he did not care.'

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo believed that during the Civil War the government had made a 'fundamental error' not selling bonds to average citizens: 'Any great war must necessarily be a popular movement. It is a crusade; and, like all crusades, it sweeps along on a powerful stream of romanticism. [Lincoln's treasury secretary Salmon] Chase did not attempt to capitalize the emotions of the people. We went direct to the people, and that means to everybody - to businessmen, workmen, farmers, bankers, millionaires, schoolteachers, laborers. We capitalized on the profound impulse called patriotism. It is the quality of coherence that holds a nation together; it is one of the deepest and most powerful of human motives.' He went still further and declared, 'Every person who refuses to subscribe or who takes the attitude of let the other fellow do it, is a friend of Germany and I would like nothing better than to tell it to him to his face. A man who can't lend his govt $1.25 a week at the rate of 4% interest is not entitled to be an American citizen.'

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The Liberty Loan campaign would raise millions of dollars in Philadelphia alone. The city had a quota to meet. Central to meeting that quota was the parade scheduled for September 28.

Several doctors (practicing physicians, public health experts at medical schools, infectious disease experts) urged Krusen to cancel the parade. Howard Anders tried to generate public pressure to stop it, telling newspaper reporters the rally would spread influenza and kill. No newspaper quoted his warning (such a comment might after all hurt morale) so he demanded of at least one editor that the paper print his warning that the rally would bring together 'a ready-made inflammable mass for a conflagration.' The editor refused.

Influenza was a disease spread in crowds. 'Avoid crowds' was the advice Krusen and the Philadelphia Board of Health gave. To prevent crowding the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company had just limited the number of passengers in streetcars.

Army camps had already become so overwhelmed by influenza that on September 26 Provost Marshal Enoch Crowder canceled the next scheduled draft call. That same day, Massachusetts governor Samuel McCall formally pleaded for federal help and for doctors, nurses, and supplies from neighboring states.

If influenza was only beginning its assault on Philadelphia, it was already roaring full speed through the Navy Yard. Fourteen hundred sailors were now hospitalized with the disease. The Red Cross was converting the United Service Center at Twenty-second and Walnut into a five-hundred-bed hospital for the sole use of the navy. Krusen saw those reports and heard from those who wanted to cancel the parade, all right, but he did not seem to be listening. All he did was forbid the entertainment of soldiers or sailors by any organization or private party in the city. But military personnel could still visit stores, ride streetcars, go to vaudeville shows or moving picture houses.

In Philadelphia on September 27, the day before the parade, hospitals admitted two hundred more people (123 of them civilians) suffering from influenza.

Krusen felt intense and increasing pressure to cancel the parade, pressure coming from colleagues in medicine, from the news out of Massachusetts, from the fact that the army had canceled the draft. The decision whether to proceed or not was likely entirely his own. Had he sought guidance from the mayor, he would have found none. For a magistrate had just issued an arrest warrant for the mayor, who was now closeted with his lawyer, distracted and impossible to reach. Earlier, for the good of the city and the war effort, an uneasy truce had been forged between the Vare machine and the city's elite. Now Mrs. Edward Biddle, president of the Civic Club, married to a descendant of the founder of the Bank of the United States, resigned from a board the mayor had appointed her to, ending that truce, adding to the chaos in City Hall.

Krusen did hear some good news. Paul Lewis believed he was making progress in identifying the pathogen, the cause of influenza. If so, work on a serum and a vaccine could proceed rapidly. The press headlined this good news, although it did not report that Lewis, a careful scientist, was unsure of his findings.

Krusen declared that the Liberty Loan parade and associated rallies would proceed.

None of the anxiety of the moment was reported in any of the city's five daily papers, and if any reporter questioned either Krusen or the Board of Health about the wisdom of the parade's proceeding, no mention of it appeared in print.

On September 28, marchers in the greatest parade in the city's history proudly stepped forward. The paraders stretched at least two miles, two miles of bands, flags, Boy Scouts, women's auxiliaries, marines, sailors, and soldiers. Several hundred thousand people jammed the parade route, crushing against each other to get a better look, the ranks behind shouting encouragement over shoulders and past faces to the brave young men. It was a grand sight indeed.

Krusen had assured them they were in no danger.

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The incubation period of influenza is twenty-four to seventy-two hours. Two days after the parade, Krusen issued a somber statement: 'The epidemic is now present in the civilian population and is assuming the type found in naval stations and cantonments.'

To understand the full meaning of that statement, one must understand precisely what was occurring in the army camps.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

D
EVENS HAD BEEN STRUCK
by surprise. The other cantonments and navy bases were not. Gorgas's office had issued immediate warnings of the disease, and medical staffs around the country took heed. Even so, the virus reached first and with most lethality into these military posts, invading the close cluster of young men in their barracks beds. Camp Grant was neither the worst hit, nor the least. Indeed, except for one particular and individual tragedy, it was quite typical.

The camp sprawled across rolling but mostly level country on the Rock River outside Rockford, Illinois. The soil there was rich and lush, and its first commandant had planted fifteen hundred acres on the base with sweet corn and 'hog corn,' hay, wheat and winter wheat, potatoes, and oats. Most recruits there came from northern Illinois and Wisconsin, farm boys with straw-colored hair and flush cheeks who knew how to raise the crops and produced them in plenty.

It was a remarkably orderly place, given the haste with which it had been built. It had neat rows of wooden barracks, and more rows and rows of large barrack-tents, eighteen men to each. All the roads were dirt and in the late summer dust filled the air, except when rain turned the roads to mud. The hospital was situated at one end of the camp and had two thousand beds, although the most patients it had cared for at one time was 852; several infirmaries were also scattered throughout the base.

In June 1918, Welch, Cole, Russell, and Richard Pearce of the National Research Council (who rarely left Washington, usually being too busy coordinating research efforts) had inspected the camp and come away impressed. Welch judged Grant's chief medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel H. C. Michie, 'capable and energetic,' the hospital laboratory 'excellent,' the pathologist 'a good man,' while Joe Capps, a friend of Cole, was 'of course an excellent chief of service' at the hospital itself. The veterinarian, who was responsible for several hundred horses and assorted livestock, had also impressed them favorably.