What Can Virginia Learn from the 1918 Pandemic?
Michael Pope
Welcome to Transition Virginia, the podcast that usually examines the transition of power in Virginia politics. This week, though, we're doing something a little different. We're going to get in our time machine and go back 100 years to the last pandemic. I'm Michael Pope.
Thomas Bowman
And I'm Thomas Bowman. Today on the podcast, the pandemic of 1918 and 1919. You might have heard people call it the Spanish flu, or maybe the Grip. We're gonna talk about how a previous generation handled many of the same issues. We're joined by a public historian, author, and tour guide. His book, "The Great War in America," puts the pandemic in its context, which is World War One. Garrett Peck, thank you for joining us.
Garrett Peck
It's great to be here. Thank you.
Michael Pope
Alright, Garrett, thank you so much for joining us on this. Let's start with the words that we use to talk about this thing, the Spanish flu. Now, before our current pandemic happened, I'd kind of heard about the Spanish flu, but I have to admit, I haven't really given it much thought or read about it much. What does Spanish flu mean, and did this actually come from Spain?
Garrett Peck
The flu actually did not come from Spain, but the king of Spain, in fact, did fall sick of the influenza virus. We believe that the ground zero for the virus, where it crossed over from animals to humans, was in western Kansas. So it came out of United States. World War One was going on at the time, the American troops made their way over to Europe, and then infected everyone over there. And it made its way, of course, down to Spain, Spain was not at war, and therefore had no censorship. And therefore, the Spanish journalist could write about Spanish virus. And when the king fell sick, people started calling it the Spanish flu.
Michael Pope
Well, so we could really actually call this thing, with some legitimacy, the Kansas flu?
Garrett Peck
Really we could.
Thomas Bowman
What's the matter with Kansas? All right, so you mentioned that it spread via soldiers fighting in World War One in Europe. But how else did it spread here within the United States?
Garrett Peck
It started off at, you know, probably a little farm, and then it moved to Camp Funston, which is, say, Fort Riley. And of course, the soldiers and all fell sick by it. And as they started moving on toward the east coast, towards the ports of embarkation, especially New York City, they took it with them. And of course, they spread it to the population. And then there was really nothing that the US government was doing about it. So therefore, to spread very quickly around the American population. And then when the soldiers of course, got on the ships, then they took it with them to Europe. So it's just like the pandemic of this year, it really is a socially transmitted disease, with people come in contact with each other. Most people had no immunity to it at all. And it was highly infectious. And so it simply just jumped from one person right to the next one. The virus, after all, is only looking for a host
Michael Pope
In terms of the name, the Spanish flu, you mentioned that the king of Spain got it. And that's kind of people's first knowledge of it, was that the king of Spain had it. So in their mind, there's this connection between Spain and this influenza strain. But there's also a role of the media that's important there, especially wartime media. What role did restrictions on newspapers play in how people thought about this pandemic?
Garrett Peck
Certainly, with the the Europeans, they had very strict censorship about what what what the what the journalists could report on. And even here in the United States, we didn't have such restrictions as a policy, but rather, we had the Creel commission, which had put in place rules basically saying you cannot criticize the government, and so all the press in the United States, effectively self censored themselves. And thus no one wanted to speak out against the government or criticize anything at all related to the war, because they were fearful of being charged for sedition or or something like that. And thus, many newspapers just would not discuss the issues of public health, because of the because of the virus.
Thomas Bowman
Michael, you came across some of the impacts of that censorship when you were actually doing research for this episode. What did you find or not find?
Michael Pope
You know, the newspapers of this era are really fascinating because the news coverage of it was really at the local level. So one fascinating thing here, is that you don't really find any coverage of the President doing or saying anything about this, you don't find any coverage of the Governor saying or doing anything about this. It's all at the local level. So your local health director has said, "We need to close our local schools," or, "We need to close the bowling alleys or the soda stands," that sort of thing. So another thing that really jumped out at me, about the newspaper coverage of this time, and Garrett, I'd love to get your perspective on this, is all the grifting that was going on. People used this as a way to sell products. And I would say about half of the word searches I pulled up on this, were not news coverage, they were ads for some junk science, snake oil that people were trying to sell you. What was...talk about the grifting that was going on in this period, Garrett.
Garrett Peck
Yeah, yeah, it's, we, we did have some vaccinations and so on at that point here, but so but there's a long record in American history of people coming up with fact science and coming up with the ways that's gonna kind of protect you. And I certain even from the, from the government side, I in and from some cities, I saw things of things to do to protect yourself, and they would, you know, list like, you know, keep the keep the bowels open, and all these other things that are like, "Okay, that doesn't really help at all," you know. So, but people didn't really understand what how the virus communicated, and how it transmitted from person to person. They could not yet see the virus, we didn't have electron microscopes yet. So we could see germs, but viruses are a lot smaller than germs are. So they were kind of making it making it up. And some people thought, "Well, here's a commercial opportunity to sell something that I'm sure that some some sucker out there who thinks this is actually going to help them so I'm more than willing to take their money."
Michael Pope
You know, another thing that popped out at me from the newspaper coverage, was a full page article with maps and visuals and images in the Richmond Times Dispatch, which is a ton of column inches for this era for 1918. You know, the newspaper was only a few pages long. And a lot of new stories were no more than a paragraph. So to have an entire page devoted to a topic is a really, really big deal. And it was written by this guy, Dr. Gordon Henry Hirschberg. And the point of this very long story, and I can put this on our Facebook page for people who want to take a look at this, was a theory that this flu and this pandemic had its origins in Germany, and that this evil German flu would actually come to America. And that's what is what was causing problems in America, was this behind enemy lines in Germany. Garrett, was there some political stuff going on there with Germany, of course, being the enemy in World War One?
Garrett Peck
Yeah, obviously, that that's the, you hit the nail on the head right there. We're at war with Germany. And essentially, that this guy is Hertzberg, who himself is of German descent. But it's a convenient way, especially during during World War One when we had a fair amount of what we call super patriotism, where everyone really had to prove that they were patriotic, and it becomes really easy to slip into xenophobia, you know, hyphenism was really opposed. That is to say, people were like German hyphen, Americans. And you know, there was only Americans, that's it, you know, love it or leave it kind of attitude. So you know, it a lot of ways it doesn't surprise me that Herzberg would write something like this, it's a convenient way to blame, with lack of understanding how the virus actually works, it was a way to blame the Germans as being the bad guys again, and we're at war with them. So yeah, it's one more bad thing the Germans did, even though it's totally not their fault.
Thomas Bowman
Let's take a step back real quick, because I'm realizing that we just kind of got right into it. Maybe we should spend a couple minutes talking about how did this virus transmit? And how is it communicable? And how many people did it kill? And like, what were the traits of this virus itself?
Garrett Peck
The virus itself, it started in western Kansas, and we believe it probably started in a pig, which then jumped to a chicken. And then that chicken then infected the human. So it jumped twice. And this was an H1N1 virus. So similar in that sense, from the 2009 pandemic, we've already forgotten about that one. But we actually had a pandemic, in Barack Obama's first year in office, and we all got a vaccine, he might not, you might have forgotten about that. But they made vaccines for it as well. But it's highly, highly infectious. And again, they couldn't see this virus because we didn't have the microscopes yet that were strong enough to be able to see that. But highly, highly infectious. And so it made people sick fairly quickly. I mean, within, typically, within one day, sometimes even less, but more typically about two days or so it was the incubation period, and then you'd fall ill and if you've got a full dose of it, oh, you could die within hours. It was really, really awful. That it's a little bit different from today's, of course, where you know, you may never have symptoms, and you may be walking around transmitting it to a whole bunch of other people, and you don't even realize it, but this thing hit really quickly. And they kind of uh, the amazing thing about it was that it really hit young adults the hardest. I mean, if you look at a big graph, it looks like a bell curve, where, you know, little kids aren't affected by it so much. In fact, many places like New York City never shut their schools down. They're like, "Kids aren't falling sick, let's not shut the schools down." And at the other end, older people who seemed fairly immune to it, which is kind of, it's kind of interesting, because typically, older people are the people who die from the flu, overwhelming, even today, but we believe that probably around the 1870s or so, there was an earlier flu virus, a similar virus, that went through American society, and in fact, a lot of people. And that's older people probably had some kind of immunity to it. The people who are mostly affected by it were the people who are the soldiers age. And, as we would call it, today, they were hit by a cytokine storm, it's where your body over reacts, and just starts producing this huge effect to try to combat the virus and it fills your lungs up full of fluid, as it's trying to combat pneumonia, what not. And ultimately, it's then your body's overreaction to this, that's what kills you.
Michael Pope
I'm curious about the language that people used at this time period to talk about this. So we talked about Spanish flu and sort of where that came from. The word, "pandemic," really didn't have a lot of currency back then. You do find it used every now and then. But most of the time, people called it either influenza, or the Spanish flu, or also the Grip. Now, when I saw the Grip, I thought it actually meant that the flu had a grip on you. But Garrett, there's something else going on with the language there. Explain the Grip and where that expression comes from?
Garrett Peck
Yeah, so we picked up that word from the German immigrants, because even to this day, the Germans use the phrase, "Grippe," and so we get the word grip, which Americans don't really use anymore. But it comes from Germany.
Thomas Bowman
That's fascinating. I did my own family genealogical research on this and learned that my great grandfather, when he was 19, nearly succumbed to this flu. He was on his deathbed, and it got to the point that it was so bad, where the doctor said, "If he makes it through the night he'll live. If he doesn't, obviously, he would die." And it was a real question for a lot of families back then, like, what would happen once you got this virus? So you mentioned that it kicked in very fast. What were the symptoms? And how long did it take to run its course?
Garrett Peck
The the first variation of the virus was in the spring of 1918. And that one didn't kill very many people. And that's, by the way, that's the version that the king was paying failure to. And people generally fell sick for about three days or so, then they got better. And then over the summer, the virus mutated. And that is probably one of the most deadliest viruses in human history. I mean, it just killed all kinds of people, you know, between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide. So this was the deadliest pandemic, in world history. And this one here, it was really, truly awful. I mean, people it would fill up people's lungs so quickly, when their bodies were responded to it, that people would come in to the hospital, and they'd be they'd be blue, they'd be choking to death. Some people, of course, bled out of their ears, and also out of their eyes. It was it was really, truly awful. And obviously, the majority of people did survive it, who fell ill. I think the estimate is that about that about 28% of American society came into contact with the virus. It was interesting that, you know, okay, we never actually reached herd immunity, which is more around the 60 percentile range, but the virus mutated again, it became less deadly. And, you know, struck again in the spring of 1919. And Woodrow Wilson fell ill of that. And he was ill for, gosh, probably a week and a half or so. I mean, just like it knocked you out. I mean, you were in bed, and you had the sniffles. It was like having the sniffles times 10. I mean, just just awful.
Michael Pope
Can I pause you on the Woodrow Wilson part of the story, which is also fascinating, because I'm going to tap your expertise here as a World War One expert. When Wilson fell ill, to the flu, the Grip, he was, wasn't he like in the process of negotiating the peace? And he went into the peace negotiations, really hoping that the war to end all wars, would be the last war, and you'd negotiate a peace in a way that didn't totally demolish your enemy because of his strategical and not creating a future war. But then he fell ill to the Spanish flu and wasn't thinking right. He just wasn't fully with it. And he let people talk him into going so hard on Germany, that there were all of these terrible repercussions for Germany that essentially created the basis for World War Two. So if Wilson had not fallen ill to this flu, World History might have played out very differently in the 20th century.
Garrett Peck
I think that very well could be, yeah. Anyone who's ever had the flu, you're not thinking correctly while you're while you're sick. You're delirious. And you know, here's Wilson, he wouldn't step out of the Paris Peace Conference out of out of the negotiations, he was negotiating from his bed. The other conveners all came in, came into his bedroom, and they kept the negotiations going on, which is just incredible. The bigger thing, of course, I do fault Wilson for, was the fact that he believed he had to go negotiate a treaty, it generally is not a president's job to negotiate a peace treaty, you delegate that. That's why you have the State Department for. But he didn't particularly respect his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, and believe that only he was a little bit of hubris right there, that he could create this framework here for world peace. And yeah, as he was coming getting better from the influenza, he started giving things away. For example, he gave to the Italians, he let, let them have their, their big waring they wanted to have which was Tyrolia, a German speaking part of Austria, that kind of sticks down like a triangle into Italian soil. And the Italians wanted, that's why they went to war. And so to this day, we got a section of Italy, that's still German speaking, and people are tall and blond and blue eyed. And, yeah, and of course, the you know, the French really wanted security. They had been attacked by the Germans twice in 1870, and again in 1914. And they basically wanted to castrate Germany. And so hence, they wanted to effectively cripple the German economy.
Michael Pope
Well, Garrett, this is what I was getting at. Didn't Wilson's illness cause him to not think clearly, and not press for what he wanted, which was the war to end all wars and peace without totally humiliating and destroying Germany as we know it. And he let the French, in his illness, in his weakened state, let the French talk him into sticking it to the Germans.
Garrett Peck
Yeah, not completely sticking it to the Germans, um, he did turn down the French quite a bit, but not nearly enough. He also, of course, came up with the idea, which I think was a huge mistake, of for the for Reparations, which terrified the Germans. And they put into the treaty that a commission would meet at a future date and decide how much the Germans would owe, rather than telling them right at the beginning, "Hey, here's what you're going to owe." So the Germans were terrified of that, and of course, also paid a huge amount of propaganda around that. So that was Wilson's idea. And he had settled on that earlier on. So as a way of compromise measure just to be able to get the Treaty through, that kind of punting the issue of Reparations to a later date. So yeah, lots of mistakes were made, obviously. I think, definitely the virus, the influenza of 1819 definitely had a role to play in this. But there's also some other major reasons that were going to lead to World War Two regardless, I think. So I wouldn't entirely blame it on the influenza virus of 1918/1919. But it had a role in it.
Thomas Bowman
You mentioned some of these mistakes. And that might be a good jumping off point. We are here with Garrett Peck, author of "The Great War in America," and we're discussing the flu of 1918. We'll be right back.
Michael Pope
And we're back on Transition Virginia, we're talking about the pandemic. No, not the one you're about to get a vaccine for, the last pandemic, the one that happened 100 years ago, which came to us in waves. There was the first wave and the second wave, and maybe even later waves. And we know when this pandemic first hit us, our modern pandemic first hit us, I actually called up Garrett Peck and interviewed him for the radio. And he said a number of things that stuck in my brain. One of them though, Garrett, was that the first wave is not, wasn't the deadliest, that there were later waves that were way more deadly than the initial onset. Talk to us about what happened after the first wave of this influenza pandemic from 100 years ago.
Garrett Peck
So this one here hits really March of 1918. And as I said earlier, it made people sick for about three days or so. But it actually, it's kind of incredible, it had infected the German army by that point. And so we actually believe that the Germans had to delay a lot of their springtime offensives, because so many of their soldiers are sick, and let's say weren't able to...they had a big offensive starting in March. And then it had this big long, a couple months long pause, before they got under their next defensive. And so we believe so many of the German soldiers were ill, it robbed the Germans of their offensive capability for a couple months. Again, this is a virus, that this iteration of the virus was not particularly deadly. And people generally survived it just fine after a couple days they got better.
Thomas Bowman
So wave one not so bad, wave two, on the other hand, terrible. So you would imagine that maybe the federal government might have wanted to do something about it. Garrett, what was the federal response?
Garrett Peck
The federal government did absolutely nothing. There was, in a lot of ways, there was no, we didn't have any kind of emergency management system. We had we we had no CDC yet, centers for disease control. And, of course, the federal government was a lot smaller back then. And every eye that point was working on the war effort. So including President Wilson, who never said a single word publicly about the influenza virus or about what you should do about it. So every, all the whole nation national effort was focusing upon winning the war against Germany. And that's there was no national response to this thing at all. It really just left things up to the local communities and communities were really not certain what they could say publicly about the...about the influenza virus because of wartime, the belief of wartime restrictions on freedom of speech, and so therefore, it was, it was more prudent that they thought not to speak out. Otherwise, you might be deemed seditious for being critical against the war effort.
Michael Pope
From our perspective, it is fascinating that Wilson not only had no federal response to this thing, but didn't even talk about it. Like there's no, you know, there is no public statement that Wilson made about this at all. And even if you get to the state level, the Governor at the time was a guy by the name of Westmoreland Davis. And I don't think he made any statements about this, the totality of the response here is your local leaders, your mayor, and in many cases, the local public health board. So there was no federal response, there was not much of a state state response, at least that I can find. It's really your local community is responding. So what we what we, if you look at the newspapers from this time period, you'll see that the local response was like in Petersburg, where they closed the schools and they closed the soda stands in Roanoke, where they closed the churches and the bowling alleys. Garrett, what was going on in local communities across the country about like how they saw this happening, and they knew they had to do something? How did local communities in Virginia and across the country deal with this thing?
Garrett Peck
Yeah, it really depended upon the individual community and the community health leaders. And like some cities like like Roanoke, when you had someone who was strong enough, and he was willing to speak out and basically saying, "Hey, everyone, you know, social as we would say, today, flatten the curve, socially distance. But you know, don't go to church, don't go to the bowling alley, don't go to the theater, where everyone's gonna be all crowded, because everyone's going to get sick." And those cities, you saw the curve flattened very quickly. So effectively, they were social distancing, by having everyone stay at home. And actually, it was a pretty good strategy. Other cities, for example, like, like Philadelphia was hit horrendously by the virus. Key reason, in, I think, September of 1918, they had a huge parade to the city. And of course, if you've ever been to a parade, it's just wall to wall, people lined up on the sidewalks, and then all the soldiers were marching down there. This was a super spreader event, as we would call it today. And the city was just devastated. Within a couple of days, I mean, thousands of people died. So just just awful. And society tried to be shut down during this time and people weren't willing, doctors would not come to people's houses, the funeral homes would not come pick up the bodies, etc. It was like people stopped supporting each other. I mean, we are after all, a social species. And we are in community with each other. But it was like society had broken down in cities like Philadelphia because people are so fearful for their lives, that they would not leave their houses.
Thomas Bowman
You know, this era was the first time we saw public health responses such as localized lockdowns and quarantines, as well as mask ordinances. How did the public respond to those and were any of them overturned in court later on?
Garrett Peck
I'm not aware of anything being overturned in court. But there was certainly, for many of the local health officials, and the Red Cross as well, were pushing the gauze masks, and those didn't seem to have much impact at all. At the time, I'm sure it probably did actually protect people somewhat. But they didn't have a surgical mask that we have today. So they were simply taping gauze to people's faces to try to curtail the spreading of the virus. They'd figured out early on that, of course, it was transmitted through people breathing on each other. And of course, this thing was incredibly infectious. So you do see a lot of the photos from that time, whether whether it's hospital wards, or American Red Cross photos of the ambulance drivers and then the women's staff and so on, and they are in fact wearing their gauze masks. Now was that across the entire population, probably not. I mean, look at today, we can't get everyone to like wear a mask, even though it's the simplest thing just put it on mask on.
Michael Pope
What, I'm curious about, I mean, at the at the root of what Thomas is asking about is, what about the resistance? You know, were there people who resisted the advice of the public health community? I'm also kind of curious about another dimension of that, which is conspiracy theories. I mean, obviously, in our modern context, we have more conspiracy theories then we can count, or even have the time to follow. Did, was there sort of similar kind of conspiracy theories floating around 100 years ago?
Garrett Peck
I'm sure there were some, and you certainly saw the one there from Hirschberg, you know, effectively blaming it on the Germans, as if the Germans had cooked this thing up and then shipped it over to the US and to kill everyone. Like, no, I mean, it's not the way it works. In fact, the virus started here in the United States, but we didn't, you know, take responsibility for that.
Michael Pope
I'm curious about how they ended up beating this thing. So like, today, we've got our vaccine that we're now rolling out, and we're all going to get the vaccine. But that didn't happen. 100 years ago, they didn't have a vaccine to cure this thing. They essentially waited it out, right? So like, how did they end up beating this thing?
Garrett Peck
Yeah, basically through time, and the time was fairly short. And especially given our comparison to today, the worst of the second wave of the virus was really, the fall, so September, through through about December. So really, about three months period was when everyone died, and then suddenly people stopped dying. Just the virus had mutated, and stopped killing people. So right about the time after World War One had ended. It's kind of remarkable, you know, so again, some cities did the responsible thing by shutting everything down. Other cities didn't do anything at all, but we saw them by the winter, when normally that's actually when flu gets the worst, things actually started getting better. Yeah, not just in the United States, but all around the world. So it's kind of incredible.
Michael Pope
You know, I'm also curious about how we remember this pandemic, or perhaps more to the point, how we don't remember this pandemic. So you know, on one level, it was overshadowed by World War One. But that's only really part of the story. In my mind, I'm really curious, and maybe there's no answer to this question. But I'll ask it anyway. Why don't we have more art and culture about this? Like, why don't we, we're not aware of any songs that have been written about this. There's no novel that we know about, about that covers this pandemic, or talks about this pandemic. There's not a lot of art. And there's not any really, art and culture that reflects this pandemic. Garrett Peck, why has this just been erased from the cultural landscape?
Garrett Peck
I think in part because people never recognized it, really, as a national experience, or even a global experience, even though it totally was. It affected every person on the earth. Everyone had their lives disrupted by this pandemic, but because of the war was going on, that was taking all the news. And people were leery, especially journalists, were leery about writing about this thing. And therefore, it kind of stayed below the surface in people's minds, even though everyone knew how dangerous this thing was. And then of course, right, right, about the same time as the virus really started to weaken, that's when the war ends. And of course, everyone celebrating, "Yay, the war is over," this incredibly deadly war, which killed you know, about 20 million people worldwide, which is possibly one fifth the number of people that were killed by the pandemic. But the war had captured everyone's attention. This is what you know, every single day in the newspaper was about the war itself. And the pandemic was definitely not first in line, ultimately.
Thomas Bowman
Well, let's take one more break. And when we come back, we're going to discuss the lessons learned and apply it to what's happening today.
Michael Pope
And we're back on Transition Virginia. We're talking about the last pandemic, the pandemic that happened 100 years ago. And we're joined by Garrett Peck, who's going to help us understand what lessons we can learn. So, you know, Garrett, looking at all these things that happened 100 years ago, and we saw different localities respond in different ways. We saw Philadelphia respond very irresponsibly, we saw Roanoke respond very responsibly. What lessons can we learn from this era?
Garrett Peck
I think a key thing is communications and transparency. It's, the cities that did well had leaders who are willing to speak out and trusted leaders, like public health advisors, or mayors and so on, who said, "Hey, this thing is dangerous. Let's take it seriously, let's not gather in public for this time." And those are the cities where it would actually save a lot of people's lives. So again, being able to have trusted authorities, the experts, to lean to, the public health experts, is absolutely vital in a time like a pandemic.
Thomas Bowman
So transparency, I would call it aggressively telling the truth, right? So aggressive communication on, you know, what's going on. And well, how would we apply these lessons to today, beyond just communication then?
Garrett Peck
In having the public taking the pandemic seriously. In other words, you have to have people actually believe that it exists. You certainly, when you have a group of people who keep demanding that it's a hoax, they're not going to obey the public orders, regardless, because everyone kind of got their blinders up. And they would, they're going to believe what they want to believe. And you've seen this in pandemic after pandemic, going way back centuries and centuries. Some of the great literature that comes out from earlier pandemics from the Black Plague and like, what's the name, Boccaccio, people believing, of course, if you had to wear certain clothes, or put garlic on your clothes, etc, it would protect you. These things, of course, were, I don't want to say they're hoaxes, but they didn't provide any protection at all. So what it ultimately came down to was social distancing, and being able to separate yourself from your fellow human being. So you didn't get get infected as well.
Michael Pope
Social distancing and masks. I mean, can't we also look at this era and say, "Hey, breaking news. Everybody, masks work. Even if we look at this Richmond Times Dispatch full page article here from Dr. Hirschberg, there's a section of it, that shows, there's actually an image of a person wearing a mask. And it's it's it the implication is masks work. So even in this sort of alternative history here, where the guy is trying to convince us that it's coming from Germany, he's also saying, "Hey, you should protect yourself by making sure that it that, not only do you wear a mask, but it's more important that the person who is actually infected by this thing is wearing the mask." So is it also one lesson we can learn from this, that social distancing helped, was helpful, but also masks played a very important role 100 years ago?
Garrett Peck
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the individual as well as the community all had a role to play. And everyone, of course, if you have some, some individuals who are gonna say, ''Hey, you know what, I'm not gonna play by those rules, I'm gonna make an exception for myself," Well, then this is how the virus ends up spreading further and further within the communities. So people have to make their choices, that they're going to line up and support the policy, of social distancing, and wearing masks, and not going to churches or crowded restaurants or whatever, where the virus that can easily transmit from one person to the next.
Michael Pope
What, so on churches, was there resistance? I mean, I, when you start closing churches, you know, people have all kinds of reactions to that. I mean, was there, do we do we know of any pushback to churches being closed?
Garrett Peck
I'm sure there was pushback to it. Fortunately, it was a fairly short lived thing, you know, for...it was basically during during the time of the crisis that didn't last all that many months. And so the churches were able to reopen fairly quickly. What we're seeing today, of course, is much longer.
Michael Pope
Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because that is a, I mean, we're talking about the similarities between what happened 100 years ago, and what's happening now. But the timeline is actually one of the most notable different things because this 1918, 1919 pandemic was really here and gone in a flash, I mean, like, people caught it and were sick in it in a very short period of time. And then, as you mentioned earlier, it went away in a very short period of time. What we're dealing with now is much more protracted. And maybe this is more of a scientific reason. But like why is it that it the what happened 100 years ago was, you know, here and gone within a very relatively short period of time, versus what we're dealing with now, which is going on for close to a year now?
Garrett Peck
Yeah, the virus in 1918, 1919, that H1N1 virus, that was a virus that's prone to mutating, and it mutated itself out of a really, really deadly variation into something that was far, less sickening. So that was hugely, hugely helpful. In our own time, of course, we've got the Coronavirus, this thing here, it seems to be fairly static. I mean, it does mutate as well. But it does have some mechanisms within itself to correct against DNA mutations. And so we believe it's probably going to be fairly static over over the years, just like measles is static, and thus, we can create vaccines that will be effective against it for many, many years. So yeah, the, in 1918, 1919, effectively, if you look at the big picture, we basically just let the virus run its course. And eventually it burned itself out. And that was that. What we have done today, fairly successfully, but not nearly successfully enough, is we have, we flattened the curve. You remember the huge big wave that hit us in March and April. And then very quickly, we got everyone to embrace, especially in the cities, to socially distance themselves, and boom, the death rate just plummeted as did the new infection rate. And then everyone's kind of thinking like, "Oh, well, that doesn't really apply to me or whatever." And, you know, people started socializing again, or it reached new parts of the country, like the rural areas, where people thought this was only a city disease. And of course, they weren't social distancing at all, they were still going to churches, they weren't wearing masks, and you know, the virus, this is where it gets you, it's just looking for one little way to find a new host. So yeah, we didn't have near, we didn't have nearly the obedience, that's the right word for this for everyone to, to to embrace social distancing, and masks this year. And thus, we effectively flattened the curve, but not nearly enough. So the virus was this kind of a slow burn, and just looking for new hosts and finding them, unfortunately. And that's why this thing has gone on now for you know, better part of a year.
Michael Pope
Another key distinction or difference between our current era and 100 years ago, is that we're not in the midst of a great war right now. So like, if you look at the history of pandemics, they often happen following wars. So there's this great pandemic from 100 years ago. But I mean, if you look at the history of warfare, when wars are done, you often see outbreaks of Smallpox or Cholera or Typhoid or Yellow Fever. That's, this is another key distinction that's curious, is that we don't have some sort of mass wartime event. That's essentially, you know, a world war. Garrett, what role did international travel, that was related to the war, play in the spread of this thing 100 years ago?
Garrett Peck
Yeah, that was obviously a huge issue. I mean, globalism has been out, for out here for a while, trade moves these things around quite a bit. And human movement moves these things around. And you saw this year, whether or not we had World War One, I think this virus was still going to spread around the world, maybe not at the same rate that it did, but it still would have made the rounds, because again, this was a new virus. And we had no immunity to this thing. So the fact that it, that the American doughboys took it with him to France, well, if it wasn't a Doughboy, it would have been a business person who jumped on one of the ocean liners and took it across, and infected some people in London, or Southampton or Paris, and it would spread. These viruses are highly, highly contagious, and we have no, for the most part, no collective immunity to it. And thus, they tap their way into people and start spreading very quickly, all by us breathing the same air.
Michael Pope
So we, and when we look back at things that happen in the past, we often tend to think of them being backwards, or, "Gosh, those rubes and they didn't have science." But if you put yourself in their mindset in 1918, they're the most advanced, most scientific community that's ever existed. And they did have some things they were building on right, there was a previous pandemic that happened in the late 1880s, that they were building upon what they had learned back in the 1890s. In fact, I think the emergence of the public health communities that said, "You need to close your bowling alley, and you need to close your churches," those local health boards existed because of a previous pandemic. So they had actually learned the lessons from their recent past, hadn't they?
Garrett Peck
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. They they just by observing the virus. So where are people getting sick from? And they were, they were very quickly they had seized upon public gatherings, especially indoors, this is where people are getting sick. And of course, they knew it was getting spread, spread by people breathing on each other, or sharing the same air basically. And that's why they seized on so quickly on, "Hey, close these public facilities where large numbers of people gather like like movie theaters, because it's going to be a, what we call today is super spreader event." So they figured that one out pretty early on to stop people from gathering in big crowds. And you'll contain the virus fairly quickly.
Thomas Bowman
You know, that's an interesting point you make because the World Health Organization, in April, warned of dual pandemics occurring, one of course, being the COVID outbreak, but the other being an info-demic of misinformation, where people who have gotten to live in their bubble, with their own facts, are now up against the hard realities of cold science. And there is a certain level of cognitive dissonance, in addition to, I would call it, politically motivated spreading of conspiracy theories, and bogus science, like hydrochloroquine, and people are just used to being able to solicit and seek out their own facts without consequence. And Garrett, I guess you've really illustrated for us the havoc that's wreaked on American society today in 2020.
Garrett Peck
Mm hmm. Yeah, it's it should not have been this bad as it as it is. And I think some of the responsibility, I do give credit to the president, to President Trump for fast tracking the creation of the vaccine. It's astonishing that we created a vaccine in 11 months, that's a record in world history, unreal. At the same time, you know, he really early on, he knew how dangerous thing this thing was. And yet he totally punted on the on the issue because he wanted to run for re-election on the strength of the American economy. And by sort of denying that this virus was such a profound threat to our lives, and also to our economy, you effectively allowed it to spread, he punted the issue to the governors and said, "Here, you guys handle it," and then you pressure all them to reopen the economy, because he wanted again, to run a re-election for the strength of the economy. And, and by that point, the virus was just running wild in the US population. And the only way he could shut it down is by shutting down big parts of the economy, like restaurants and tourism and hotels, that kind of stuff. So, you know, look at the airline industry, it's still, you know, not doing too well, it's gonna take a while for all these things to recover. And you sort of wonder, then, okay, how do we take in our medicine from the very beginning, you know, back in March, if we had basically told everyone, "Hey, we might not need to lock down, but everyone, everyone go home and just start socially distancing yourselves for about, you know, six to eight weeks, and you would see the initial infection rates and merely just stop right there, and the virus wouldn't be able to find new hosts. And you would really keep control of it right there." I think, that could have been a possibility, had our government taken it seriously, from the very beginning.
Thomas Bowman
Well, that's a good place to leave it. Public Health is not a partisan issue. Wear your damn mask, stay home, don't infect your friends and family.
Garrett Peck
The virus doesn't care about your politics. It's just looking for a host. That's it.
Thomas Bowman
All right. Well, we've been interviewing Garrett Peck, the author of "The Great War in America," and you also have a new book, "A Decade of Disruption: America and the New Millennium." What's the book about? And where can listeners find it?
Garrett Peck
The book is, I know, we're all living in a normally disruptive time right now, so probably another decade of disruption. But the book itself is about the basically 2000 to 2010, which is a hugely disruptive decade. So you know, really bookended by two huge financial crises, the.com meltdown, and then the Great Recession, which is fueled by the housing bubble bursting, and then, of course, everything in between, from, from 9/11, to Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war, and so on. So it's a, you know, I lived through these years, and so I wanted to write something from you know, our own collective experience. You...both of these books, "The Great War in America," and as well as, "A Decade of Disruption" can be found at your local bookstores. You know, certainly Amazon has it and so on. But, um, and I'm not anti Amazon, but I do encourage people, given the fact that we're in this very extensive recession here right now, the pandemic recession, I am encouraging people to buy their books from local bookshops.
Michael Pope
Amen to that brother. Let me strong double down on that, please support your local bookstores. I also, am with you. I'm not against Amazon, I use Amazon myself. And you can find my books on Amazon. But I love my local bookstores. And I strongly encourage listeners, if you want q book, walk or drive, get in your car, and go to your local bookstore to get it. Wear a mask while you to do it.
Garrett Peck
Yeah, all these local bookshops, they've all had to be resilient here, in the in this recession, because oftentimes, they can't have customers coming into browse. And so they've all figured out they have to do ecommerce, too. And so you can call up your local bookstore or go online and order any book, and they'll get it for you. And you are giving them a financial lifeline.
Michael Pope
And they're very happy to do that, too. I mean, there's a local bookstore here in Old Town Alexandria that I frequent. And yeah, they of course, like every other business, had to figure out how they were going to switch to a sort of virtual model. And they are more than happy to set your book aside, and you can, you don't have to go in there and browse, you can but you can still get your books from your local bookstores who need your support.
Garrett Peck
Yeah, this is a key way we all make this collective choice to support our local establishments. We can helpm I believem forestall a retail apocalypse that otherwise would would just devastate the commercial sector and so many jobs and so on. That'll take a long time to recover from if these businesses don't survive this recession.
Michael Pope
So that's it for this episode of Transition Virginia, but if you have any comments or questions about what you've just heard or maybe you want to tell us how much you love the podcast, write us an email and send it to TransitionVApodcast@gmail.com. We might even read it on the air. Subscribe to Transition Virginia anywhere pods are cast, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook. Find us on the web at transitionvirginia.com. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you can enjoy the next episode of Transition Virginia.
