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In 1918, a flu virus spread around the world in a matter of months and killed an estimated 50 million people before fizzling out in 1919. The few surviving photographs of the 1918-19 pandemic primarily feature rows of beds in makeshift hospitals and the masked faces of doctors, nurses, barbers and other workers. Documentaries, fictional films, stories, and images paint the Spanish Flu as a solemn crisis. But this collective memory of the Spanish Flu offers little insight into everyday life. We forget how people lived through the 1918 pandemic: through isolation, the temporary closure of schools and businesses, the proliferation of illness and death, the cancellation of sports. And we forget that levity can exist in even the most dire circumstances.

Take, as an example, poems everyday people wrote about the Spanish Flu, which were published widely in local and national newspapers. Media of the time labored under the close watch of World War I media censorship, which aimed to curb public dissent. However, newspapers did frequently publish poetry, providing an outlet for regular people to submit their work and vent their frustrations. Some papers contained specific pages for humorous pieces, “odd” facts, and anecdotes. Others placed poems in the midst of local or national news.

In 1918, like today, a lot of people thought the threat was overblown. A writer for the Vancouver Daily World, for example, published a poem that satirized widespread perceptions that influenza had been overhyped, interspersing lines such as “I think it is nothing but grippe—” and “But just a big scare” with onomatopoeic bouts of sneezing and coughing. During that pandemic, as today, health authorities asked people to combat the spread of the virus by wearing masks and avoiding crowds. And then, as now, people didn’t much like it.

As public health authorities encouraged, and sometimes required, people to cover their faces, mask humor emerged in print. Many of the jokes were highly gendered: The Bismarck Tribune printed, “Every woman secretly believes she would be fascinating in a harem veil. Wearing a flu mask is a good, safe way to try the effect.” Similarly, a writer for the Jasper Weekly Courier quipped, “‘Flu’ masks improve the appearance of many men, but when worn by women, they take much of the joy and beauty out of life.” While our collective memory of 1918’s Spanish Flu suggests that people universally cooperated with quarantines and mask-wearing, this poetry tells a different story.

“Social distancing” did not exist as a phrase, but manifested in concept as communities shut down public spaces. Many people writing about the flu took a personal approach, lamenting all the things they were missing. In “Flu Bound,” children’s author Edna Groff Diehl griped about this new reality:

The street crowd surged—but where to go?
The bar? The concert? Movies? No!
Old Influenza’s locked the door to Pleasure Land.
Oh what a bore!

Similarly, Jesse Daniel Boone published his poem “The Spanish Flu May Get You, Too” in his own newspaper, the Carolina Mountaineer. He described the quarantine, “This old world is in the lurch; For we cannot go to church; And the children cannot roam, For they now are kept at home, And they’ve put a good, strong ban on the moving pictures, man,” In the Greenville News, the first stanza of the very relatable poem “Spanish Flu” read:

Oh, we are quarantined, I guess
For ‘bout a million years
But if we don’t get out of here
We’ll burst right out in tears

One thing that the pandemic could alter, but not stop, was the First World War. As an October 23 “Wavelet” in the Evening Telegram stated, “The Kaiser and the Flu are running neck and neck in the world’s popularity contest.” The pandemic did not spare the military and many enlisted men became ill before ever leaving U.S. soil. A “local boy under quarantine at Naval Station” (John Culberson) began his poem, which also ran on October 25, in the Chattanooga News,

There’s a war going on in Europe,
So I’ve heard from newspaper talk;
But the only one I’m having
Is with influenza at the park

Culberson went on to contrast his expectation of combat with his reality of isolation at a naval training station in San Diego, concluding,

So, mother, take down the service flag—
I’m quarantined at Balboa Park

In October 1918, the war and pandemic together had halted professional baseball and football. With nothing to report on for his “Looking ‘Em Over” column, Washington Times sportswriter Louis A. Dougher created a mock line-up, featuring disease-stopping tools as players: “Fresh Air” as “tackle” and “Quinine” as “quarterback,” with the team rounded out by Antiseptic, Ice Pack, Gargle, Alcohol Rub, Castor Oil, Mask, and Sleep. Dougher concluded, “It is not believed that any team would have stopped so many others as has Spanish ‘Flu’ within the past month … Its record will stand for years.”

Influenza impacted other social activities as well, including courtship and dating. Edgar Leslie, Bert Kalmar, and Pete Wendling’s song “Take Your Girlie to the Movies If You Can’t Make Love at Home” recommended the theater for courtship, that a couple should “Pick a cozy corner where it’s nice and dark. Don’t catch influenza kissing in the park.” In “A Spanish Flu-Lay,” a writer mourned for his lost romance when his desired woman became ill: “But soon perhaps the flu will go, And masks be put away, And all the bills Dan Cupid owes, On ruby lips he’ll pay.”

Like those of us who wonder if every throat tickle is COVID-19, individuals in 1918 always felt on the look-out for the first sign of disease. In “The Last Wheeze,” Edmund Vance Cooke laid out this paranoia in the Washington Herald: “When you have appendicitis, parenchymatous nephritis, laryngitis or gastritis, It’s the Flu.” Likewise, the Winnipeg Tribune printed this anonymous poem:

The toothpaste didn’t taste right—
Spanish Flu!
The bath soap burned my eyes—
Spanish Flu!
My beard seemed to have grown pretty fast and tough overnight—
Spanish Flu!

“Everything’s Flu Now!” similarly concluded, “Have you stumped one of your toes? Have you just a bleeding nose? Or no matter what your woes—Spanish Flu.”

For those who did contract the virus, poetic prose conveyed the experience of having the disease, sometimes comically. Newspapers widely reprinted J. P. McEvoy’s “The Flu” from the Chicago Tribune, which began, “When your back is broke and your eyes are blurred, And your shin bones knock and your tongue is furred” and then wrapped up with “Some call it Flu—I call it hell.” Through couplets and various other rhyme schemes, people emphasized the painful persistent cough that “seems cutting like a knife,” as a September 11 Houston Post article “The Worst of It” detailed; a headache equal to “clamped screws on my cranium,” as C. Roy Miller wrote in the Miami Herald on October 24; as well as exhaustion, a lack of appetite, and the impact of fever—alternating between “burning” and “freezing,” according to one Walt Mason, writing in the Coffeyville Weekly Journal on November 21.

In December, when quarantines and mask requirements had been lifted, some people were still getting sick. “Lumberjack poet” Jack W. Yoes sorrowfully wrote in “Marooned,” which ran two days after Christmas in the Vancouver Sun, about missing out on the holiday festivities because he was hospitalized:

But our hearts are right,
And on Christmas night
We’ll jolly along with you,
Despite the pains and aches that come
In the trail of the gol-dinged “flu”

People were clever and creative in how they wrote about the pandemic. Plays on words were common: “What goes up the chimney? Flu!!!,” was published in the Evening Telegram on the October 23, while the Walnut Valley Times poem “Chop Suey,” which ran on November 26, read, “I flew from flu As you said to.” On October 23, the Evening Telegram also printed, “We are not wearing a flu mask, but now and then we meet a gent who makes us wish for a gas mask.”

Such jokes about the pandemic lightened the mood, much like today’s memes and tweets. Through the words influenza survivors left behind, we can relate our own conflicting feelings to theirs—demonstrating the transcending need for creative expression and taking permission to find the light during a dark time.

The post Quarantine Won’t Be Forever, but Pandemic Humor Is Timeless  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When American historians hear talk of “normalcy,” we think of Warren G. Harding. Harding did not invent normalcy. Not the word, nor the state of being. But he benefited from the appeal of both.

Elected president in 1920, Harding campaigned to put a keel beneath a nation buffeted by world war as well as the long and deadly 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. But finding the language for this was a struggle. Harding’s inept speeches saddled him with too many words—making “hope” and “inspiration” fight for breathing space.

But in a speech Harding gave in Boston in May 1920, he managed to convey a text that would be abnormally memorable.

First, Harding defined the problem of perspective, created by war and diseases. “There isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war,” he began. “Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational.”

And then Harding offered the cure: “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy.” It might have been simpler to end it there, but normalcy was just the first in a series of antonyms that Harding suggested, expressing his goals in the negative: “Not revolution but restoration; not agitation but adjustment; not surgery but serenity; not the dramatic but the dispassionate; not experiment but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

What did all that mean then, and what does it mean now? Let’s set aside the question of how heroics and healing play as opposites in Harding’s speechifying. (We can clearly recognize how wrong that rhetorical sleight of hand is when the heroism of the healers among us is so obvious in the world today.) Instead, let’s examine the strong echoes between his rhetoric and our 21st-century desires.

Calling for “sustainment in triumphant nationality” was Harding’s convoluted way of saying let’s make America great again. Elect me, he promised, and he would take America back to a bucolic pre-war, pre-pandemic time, a time of serenity. Mythic though it was, the vision worked. He won, in one of the largest political landslides in American history.

But history didn’t end there. Neither Harding nor normalcy would succeed. These failures, considered exactly a century later, hold lessons for those who seek restoration in our time of fear, disease, and death.

What Harding sought 100 years ago has much in common with what many of us say we seek today, and tomorrow, when the pandemic recedes. We want our lives back.

We want to get away from the volatile and frightening economics of pandemic, to something that feels, well, normal. So did Harding. “If we put an end to false economics which lure humanity to utter chaos, ours will be the commanding example of world leadership today,” he pledged in that same speech.

But Harding-style restoration of economy meant, for many, freewheeling consumption and giddy speculation. As the stock market and the nation’s cities began to roar in the exciting heedlessness of the Jazz Age, nary a caution was raised—except by the most astute observers.

Lack of regulation was a virtue to Harding, a balm after all the rules and restrictions of war and disease. “The world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation,” Harding had said, again in the same speech, “and that quantity of statutory enactment and excess of government offer no substitute for quality of citizenship.”

Normalcy and restoration, to us as to Warren Harding, means and meant the return of a status quo of safety. Can’t our terrible vulnerability be ended? The Roaring Twenties might have been fun, but it left those who weren’t white or privileged more vulnerable to the tilt-a-whirl economy of the era. There was no net to catch them, and economic growth had no backstop or safety mechanism.

Harding led to Coolidge; Coolidge led to Hoover. It would take the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s anything-but-normal presidency to create the social protections of the New Deal.

As we now contemplate what a return to normal will look like, we need to face whether it will merely shore up old unfairness and maintain a ripped safety net, leaving the sick, the uninsured, the homeless, the unemployed, and the furloughed to mostly fend for themselves.

Harding also promised a return to a more normal politics and a restored government “under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government rather than what the government may do for individuals,” as he said in Boston. “No government,” he added, “is worthy of the name which is directed by influence on the one hand, or moved by intimidation on the other.” It is depressing to see this, today, as a lofty ambition rather than a statement of what ought to be obvious.

Good government aims and claims notwithstanding, Harding would ultimately be known mostly for the criminality that occurred in his administration. The Teapot Dome scandal was the highest level of government lawbreaking before Watergate, and it all took place right under his nose, within his cabinet. The scandal—which involved leases to pump oil in California and at the Teapot Dome in Wyoming—put men in prison but, more importantly, crumpled people’s faith in leaders and government.

It’s significant today that Teapot Dome scandal was about oil, already a booming business then and one that would only grow, making America—and more than a few Americans—significantly richer, while dirtying the environment for billions of people around the world. During this time of COVID-19, as we marvel at the cleaner air and the animals reclaiming space after we retreated into our homes, do we really want to return to our cars and the petroleum-rich version of American normalcy?

Today, we look backward, to technological changes of the past, and wish for greater and faster innovation. In Harding’s time, radio and communications technologies arrived with great promises of easier and cheaper connection, much as Zoom suggests new ways of being together now. But by the end of the decade—and from then on—the technology enabled a wave of populist demagogues who saw the chance for audience and influence both, and took it. Where will the technologies that promise us community today lead us, if we’re not sufficiently wary of them?

It’s striking how well Harding recognized the ways that war and disease had exposed America’s problems with equality. To his credit, he advanced plans for racial equity, but they foundered. And in retrospect it seems obvious that getting back to normalcy for some Americans meant keeping the color line sharply drawn. Similarly, today COVID shows us the inequalities we considered “normal” just three months ago, and demonstrates how easily we labeled some workers essential and some not—and how those labels are resulting in higher death rates.

For Harding, normalcy and restoration also meant a retreat from the world, and from seeking to end war elsewhere, so that we could think of America first. “Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad,” he said in that same speech. But retreat did not spare us or spare the world, as the 1920s saw forces rise in Europe and Asia that would draw the United States into a Second World War.

The lesson from Harding’s time is that “going back to normal” is not safe; it’s actually dangerous.

In that long list of sober virtues from that May 1920 speech, Warren Harding also offered “equipoise,” which is hardly a conventional political promise. Equipoise—defined by Merriam-Webster as a state of equilibrium—may have its attractions to people recovering from years of death. But equilibrium, and the return to a status quo at the expense of experimentation, also means giving in to passivity.

As we think ahead, we can do better. Let’s put normalcy at least off to the side, as we try to find our way out of all this.

The post How Warren Harding’s Campaign for ‘Normalcy’ Led to Catastrophe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.