Philadelphia launched a World War I parade that gave thousands of spectators the flu | History

It was a parade as no Philadelphia had ever seen it.

In the summer of 1918, when the Great War was raging and the American doughboys fell on the battlefields of Europe, the City of Brotherly Love organized a great show. To boost morale and support the war effort, a procession brought together puppet groups, scouts, women's auxiliaries and uniformed troops to promote Liberty loans – government bonds designed to pay for the war. The day would end with a concert directed by the "King King" himself, John Philip Sousa.

When the parade of the fourth Liberty Loan Drive took place on September 28, some 200,000 people blocked Broad Street, wildly encouraging the line of protesters stretching for two miles. Floats introduced the latest addition to the US arsenal – floating biplanes built in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Brassy tunes filled the air along a road where spectators were crushed like sardines in a can. Every time the music stopped, the bail vendors chose the war widows in the crowd, a gesture to build sympathy and help Philadelphia reach its Liberty lending quota.

But the aggressive peddlers of Liberty Loan were far from the biggest threat that day. An invisible danger known as flu is hiding among the multitudes – and he loves the crowds. Philadelphians have been mass-exposed to a deadly contagion known as "Spanish flu," an improper term created in 1918 when the first published information on a mysterious outbreak was published by a Madrid-based news service.

For Philadelphia, the fallout was quick and deadly. Two days after the parade, the city's director of public health, Wilmer Krusen, said: "The epidemic is now present in the civilian population and is located in naval stations and cantonments. [army camps]. "

Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia's 31 hospitals was filled. In the week ending October 5th, some 2,600 people in Philadelphia died of the flu or its complications. A week later, that number rose to more than 4,500. Many of the city's medical professionals who had done their military service, Philadelphia was not prepared for this death deluge.

Attempting to slow the carnage, city leaders essentially shut down Philadelphia. On October 3, officials closed most public spaces, including schools, churches, theaters, and billiard halls. But the calamity was relentless. Poor hospitals were paralyzed. Mortuaries and funeral parlors could not keep pace with the demand. Families in mourning had to bury their own dead. Coffins prices have skyrocketed. The phrase "stacked bodies like wood" has become a common refrain. And news and rumors soon spread that the Germans – the "Huns" – had triggered the epidemic.

The oldest epidemic of this highly virulent flu was recorded in March 1918, when millions of men volunteered or were enlisted. Some of the earliest stories of an unusual deadly disease came from rural Kansas, where recruits were crowded at Camp Funston, one of the dozens of bases hastily built to train Americans into combat. A large number of Funston trainees went to the infirmary with a bad "flu," as it was often called. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that these young men – many healthy farmboys, they said – were flattened with high fever, suffering from violent coughing and excruciating pain. Some died soon, becoming blue before smothering with their own mucus and blood.

When tons of American soldiers were shipped, the virus accompanied them. In May 1918, one million boys had landed in France. And the flu quickly spread throughout Europe, passing like a trail of powder through a dry brush. This had a direct impact on the war, as more than 200,000 French and British soldiers were too sick to fight and the Great British Fleet was unable to weigh anchor in May. US soldiers fought against German gas attacks and flu, and on the other side of the barbed wire, a major German offensive stopped in June when the Kaiser ranks were too sick.

With the summer, the Spanish flu seemed to calm down. But the killer was just waiting, ready to return in the fall and winter – peak season of the flu – more lethal than before. While Philadelphia planned its parade, to be a big gathering, the public health director Krusen had ignored the growing concerns of other medical experts and allowed the parade to continue, even though a deadly epidemic was raging at nearby military bases.

A politician, Krusen has publicly denied that the flu was a threat, saying with certainty that the few military deaths were "an old flu or a handful." He promised a campaign against coughs, spitting and sneezing, parade, the nation's monthly draft order had been canceled because the army camps, including Camp Ten in New Jersey and the Camp Meade in Maryland, were overwhelmed by a virulent influenza fire. The Philadelphia parade poured gasoline on the flames.

Krusen's decision to let the parade continue was based on two fears. He thought that a quarantine could cause a general panic. In fact, when city officials closed public gatherings, the Philadelphia skeptic Searcher reprimanded the decision. "Talk about happy things instead of illness," urged the Searcher October 5th. "The authorities seem to go to hell. What are they trying to do, scare everyone to death?

And, like many local officials, Krusen was under extreme pressure to meet duty quotas as a measure of patriotism. Taken between the demands of federal public servants and the public welfare, he chose wrongly.

A few weeks earlier, a parade in Boston had already played a deadly role in spreading the pandemic. At the end of August, some sailors arrived at the Boston Commonwealth Pier Hospital with high fever, severe joint pains, severe headaches and debilitating weakness. With astounding rapidity, the disease ravaged Boston's large military population.

On September 3, seafarers and civil sailors marched through the city at the "Win the War for Freedom" rally in Boston. The next day, the flu had entered Cambridge, the brand new Harvard Navy Radio School, where 5,000 students were in training. Soon, all of Boston, surrounding Massachusetts, and finally most of New England, faced an unprecedented medical disaster.

But there was a war to fight. Some of these Boston sailors were sent to the Philadelphia Naval Yard. A few days after their arrival, 600 men were hospitalized there and two of them died a week before the Philadelphia parade. The next day he was 14 and 20 more the next day.

The mariners also carried the virus to New Orleans, the Puget Sound shipyard in Washington State, at the Great Lakes training station near Chicago and Quebec. The flu followed the fleets and then mounted on the troop trains. Ports and cities with military installations nearby were among the hardest hit, highlighting the deadly link between the war and the Spanish flu.

Back in Massachusetts, the flu devastated Camp Devens near Boston, where 50,000 men were drilling for the war. By mid-September, 8,000 men needed treatment at a camp hospital designed for 2,000 patients. Then nurses and doctors started to fall. Confused by this specter, an army doctor observed worryingly, "It must be a new type of infection or plague."

There were few effective treatments for influenza. Vaccines and antibiotics would not be developed for decades. The icon of the Spanish flu, the "mask against the flu" – a gauze mask required by law in many cities – has done almost nothing.

Even after the war ended, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the devastation of the flu did not cease. In the spontaneous celebrations marking the armistice, the ecstatic Americans scrambled the streets of the city to celebrate the end of the "Great War". The Philadelphians flocked to Broad Street, although the health authorities knew that And it did.

In April 1919, President Woodrow Wilson fell seriously ill in Paris – he had the flu. "At the time of physical and nervous exhaustion, Woodrow Wilson was struck by a viral infection that had neurological ramifications," writes biographer A. Scott Berg. Wilson. "Generally predictable in his actions, Wilson began to scramble the unexpected orders." Never the same after this illness, Wilson would make unexpected concessions in the discussions that produced the Treaty of Versailles.

The pandemic has affected every inhabited continent and remote island in the world, ultimately killing an estimated 100 million people worldwide and 675,000 Americans – far exceeding the terrible losses of the war. Few American towns or cities were intact. But Philadelphia had been one of the hottest areas.

After his initial failure to prevent the epidemic from exploding, Wilmer Krusen had attempted to resolve the crisis, largely to no avail. He asked the US military to stop drafting local doctors, allocate funds to hire more medical workers, mobilized the sanitation service to clean the city and perhaps the most important, clear bodies of the street. It was too little, too late. In one day in October, 759 people died in the city and more than 12,000 Philadelphians would die in a few weeks.

After the epidemic, Philadelphia officially reorganized its public health department, which Krusen continued to lead until it entered the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, the country's oldest pharmacy school. He was president of the school from 1927 to 1941, before his death in 1943.

As the nation and the world prepare to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the end of "The War to End All Wars" on November 11, parades and public ceremonies will mark the tremendous loss and lasting impact of this conflict. world. But it will also be a good time to remember the devastating costs of short-sighted medical decisions shaped by politics in a pandemic more deadly than war.

Kenneth C. Davis is the author of More deadly than the war: the hidden history of the Spanish flu and the First World War (Holt), from which this article was adapted, and Do not know much about the history. His website is www.dontknowmuch.com