The Film & More
Program Description
Early in the morning of March 11, 1918, a young private reported to the
Army hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of fever, sore throat, and
headache. Then, another sick soldier appeared, then another and another. By
noon, the hospital had more than one hundred cases; in a week, there were five
hundred. Forty-eight soldiers died at Fort Riley that spring. No one knew
why.
"Influenza 1918" is the story of the worst epidemic the United States has ever
known. Before it was over, the flu would kill more than 600,000 Americans--more
than all the combat deaths of this century combined.
"For the survivors we spoke to," says producer Robert Kenner, "the memory is
one of horror and fear--which may explain why many Americans were willing to
let those few terrible months fade into obscurity. Schoolchildren know more
about the Black Plague from centuries ago than they do about this episode in
our recent history."
America in 1918 was a nation at war. Draft call-ups, bond drives, troop
shipments were all in high gear when the flu epidemic appeared. American
soldiers from Fort Riley carried the disease to the trenches of Europe, where
it mutated into a killer virus. The disease would later be dubbed,
inaccurately, Spanish influenza. Spain had suffered from a devastating outbreak
of influenza in May and June of 1918. The country, being a non-combatant in the
war, did not censor news of the epidemic that was cutting through its
population and was therefore incorrectly identified as its place of origin.
Meanwhile, returning American troops were bringing the flu back home. First
hundreds, then thousands, of soldiers were lining up outside infirmaries and
hospitals at army bases across the country, falling ill with a swiftness that
defied belief. Dr. Victor Vaughan, Surgeon General of the Army, was stunned by
what he saw at Camp Devens just outside of Boston. "Every bed is full, yet
others crowd in," he wrote. "The faces wear a bluish cast; a cough brings up
the blood-stained sputum. In the morning, the dead bodies are stacked about the
morgue like cordwood." On the day Vaughan arrived, sixty-three men died at Camp
Devens.
In September, the disease spread to the civilian population. It moved swiftly
down the eastern seaboard to New York, Philadelphia, and beyond. Anna Milani
remembers sitting on her front step one day: "Diagonally across from us a
fifteen-year-old girl was just buried. Toward evening, we heard a lot of
screaming going on. In that same house, a little eighteen-month-old baby passed
away." That month, 12,000 Americans died of influenza.
It was a flu unlike any other. People could be healthy in the morning and dead
by nightfall. Others died more slowly, suffocating from the buildup of liquid
in their lungs.
Thanks to advances in microbiology, researchers had developed vaccines for many
bacterial diseases: smallpox, anthrax, rabies, diphtheria, meningitis. But
doctors were helpless to stop the influenza of 1918. Though they knew the
disease spread through the air, medical researchers were unable to see the tiny
virus through microscopes of the time and incorrectly identified its cause as a
bacteria. Vaccines they developed didn't work; the virus was too small, too
elusive.
With medical science powerless, many people turned to folk remedies: garlic,
camphor balls, kerosene on sugar, boneset tea. Public health officials
distributed masks, closed schools; laws forbade spitting on the streets.
Nothing worked. And the war was at cross-purposes with the epidemic: the war
effort brought people into the streets for rallies and bond drives. They
coughed on each other, infected each other. Soldiers traveled in crowded
transport ships. The disease spread everywhere.
October saw the epidemic's full horror: more than 195,000 people died in
America alone. There was a nationwide shortage of caskets. In Philadelphia, the
dead were left in gutters and stacked in caskets on the front porches. Trucks
drove the city streets, picking up the caskets and corpses. People hid indoors,
afraid to interact with their friends and neighbors.
"Everybody was living in deadly fear because it was so quick, so sudden, and so
terrifying," says William Sardo, the son of a funeral director whose home was
stacked with caskets of flu victims. "It destroyed the intimacy that existed
among people."
Surgeon General Vaughan reached a frightening conclusion. "If the epidemic
continues its mathematical rate of acceleration," he announced, "civilization
could easily disappear from the face of the earth within a few weeks."
Then, just as suddenly as it struck, the calamitous disease abruptly began to
vanish. By mid-November, the numbers of dead were plunging. "In light of our
knowledge of influenza," says Dr. Shirley Fannin, a Los Angeles County public
health official, "we do understand that it probably ran out of fuel. It ran out
of people who were susceptible and could be infected."
Over time, World War I and painful memories associated with the epidemic caused
it to be mostly forgotten. But for the survivors, the influenza of 1918 changed
their lives forever.
Film Credits
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