Spanish Flu

Science Diction

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Friday, Society & Culture, Science, Origin, Culture, Words, History, Word, Language

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the fall of 1918, Philadelphia newspapers announced that a new virus had arrived in the city, the so-called “Spanish flu.” But the facts and scope were muddy and uncertain, and the city decided to push forward with a highly-anticipated parade. About 200,000 people showed up, and packed onto sidewalks. Halfway across the country, St. Louis, Missouri looked very different that fall. Businesses shuttered, movie theatres went dark, and students stayed home. Just like today, cities across the U.S. responded to the 1918 influenza pandemic differently—with very different results. In this episode, we go back to 1918 and a pandemic which wasn’t Spanish at all. Footnotes And Further Reading: Get into the nitty gritty of viral evolution with "1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics” which reviews the 1918 pandemic and all outbreaks it later spawned. The CDC’s Pandemic Influenza Storybook paints a vivid picture of life during the pandemic. We first learned about Philadelphia’s Liberty Loan Parade from the Washington Post’s reporting. For this story, we read many old articles from newspapers across the country, all archived on newspapers.com (available with a subscription). Credits: Science Diction is hosted and produced by Johanna Mayer. Our producer and editor is Elah Feder. We had additional story editing from Nathan Tobey, and fact checking help from Michelle Harris. Our composer is Daniel Peterschmidt. We also included audio from "The Liberty Loan March," performed by the United States Marine Band, which is in the public domain. Special thanks to Alan Kraut, a professor of history at American University who’s written extensively on the topic of immigration, disease, and prejudice. And to Chris Naffziger, who spoke to us about St. Louis’s response to the 1918 pandemic. You can read more of his reporting for St. Louis Magazine.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On September 28th, 1918, the city of Philadelphia was ready to party. The United States was in the final stretch of World War I, and Philly, like a bunch of other cities, wanted to raise some money for the war efforts. So they decided, why not have some fun? Sell some war bonds with the
0:22.6	parade. And they were ready to pull out all the stops. Marching bands, they had them. Uniform troops,
0:30.7	military planes on grand display, a full two miles of floats and flags and some much-needed good spirits.
0:41.5	But this parade, it would turn it to be a colossal mistake, because something else was
0:48.1	snaking through the city that day. A viver said people called the Spanish flu.
0:54.6	From Science Friday, this is science diction.
0:57.4	I'm Johanna Mayer.
0:58.6	Today, we're talking about the Spanish flu and how it really wasn't Spanish at all.
1:26.6	Okay. When this flu pandemic first struck in the U.S., no one realized that that's what was happening.
1:30.6	It was the spring of 1918, and across the country,
1:36.5	young soldiers were crammed together in military training camps, getting ready to go fight the Germans.
1:41.7	And it was in one of those training camps that the virus first showed up.
1:46.9	Over the course of just three weeks, over a thousand soldiers were hospitalized with aches, chills, a high fever. And from there, it quickly spread. Over the next
1:53.9	couple of months, it hit more than a dozen of these training camps. But the vast majority of
1:59.7	soldiers recovered. By summer, it all basically died away,
2:03.6	and everybody could get back to what they really cared about. The war. A few months passed.
2:11.4	And then, it came back. And this wave was much, much deadlier. And it moved fast. In the summer and fall, the
2:23.1	virus hit nearly every continent. Europe, Africa, Asia, it got as far as New Zealand. In early August,
2:30.8	it hit the U.S., starting in Boston and quickly spreading west.
2:35.4	In Philadelphia, by late September, there were already hundreds sick.
2:41.2	And it was then in the middle of what was shaping up to be a horrific global pandemic
2:47.6	that Philadelphia decided to go through with this big, fancy parade.
	...

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