ALL PANDEMICS IS LOCAL

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

MRS. STUDEBAKER DEAD.

Today, those words mean little, if anything. But on Christmas Day, 1918, the headline in that afternoon’s Jefferson Bee would have undoubtedly knocked the wind out of the community.

That is, what wind was left to spare.

Dozens locally that December were in the fight of their lives against pneumonia, brought on by an H1N1 virus of avian origin that remains something of a mystery more than a century later.

What made the so-called Spanish flu — the most severe pandemic in modern history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — so unnerving was its ability to ravage the healthiest of citizens.

Olga Studebaker, 32, had quickly endeared herself to the community as the high school principal’s charming and cerebral better half when they arrived in Jefferson in 1914. A member of Friday Club who was as sweet as she was smart — a lady of “unusual intellectual qualities,” the Jefferson Herald wrote in mourning her death from influenza — Olga and husband C.H. (Claud Harmon) were soon Scranton’s gain when C.H. Studebaker was named superintendent of schools there in the fall of 1917.

MRS. STUDEBAKER DEAD.

The news of her death from the “dread pneumonia” was as unbelievable as it was believable.

Young adults between the ages of 20 and 40, who were otherwise perfectly healthy, suffered especially high mortality rates during the flu pandemic of 1918, according to the CDC.

The 1918 influenza pandemic is still the one by which all pandemics are judged, and hopefully once COVID-19 — the first pandemic caused by a new coronavirus — passes through us, the worst remains in the past.

Still, you’ve no doubt seen or heard news stories in recent days about the lessons of 1918, when an estimated 50 million people worldwide died of the flu, including 675,000 in the U.S.

In many ways, the world today looks nothing like the one in 1918.

Until 1930, when influenza was isolated, it wasn’t even known for sure whether the flu was caused by a virus or a bacterium. Not that it really mattered in 1918 —  a flu vaccine didn’t exist, and there were no antibiotics to treat secondary infections.

But in other ways, human life is just as susceptible today as it was then to a novel virus, which plays strictly by nature’s rules, making a mockery of borders, economies and personal beliefs.

That’s why states and localities have closed schools, movie theaters, restaurants and other places of public gathering, and are encouraging “social distancing,” in order to gain the upper hand on COVID-19 — tactics in 1918 that were so unevenly applied that scores of people likely could have been spared.

According to a search of the local newspaper archives, the Spanish flu left an indelible mark on life in Greene County — not all bad, actually — when it arrived in October 1918, preying on even the most able-bodied.

Nationally, the virus killed an estimated 195,000 Americans the month of October alone, having been gestating since spring in the densely crowded military camps of World War I.

By month’s end, in fact, at least 14 Greene County soldiers were dead — not on the battlefields of the Western Front, but bed-ridden at places like Camp Dodge, just 60 miles from home.

Martin LeGore was the first soldier from Scranton to die in World War I, and he died of pneumonia in an Army hospital at Camp Dodge. He was all of 21.

A fellow soldier at Camp Dodge from Greene County, Earl Hall, took it upon himself to write to the Jefferson Herald, imploring people to believe the hype.

“Martin LeGore, the Scranton lad who fell victim to the influenza, was possessed of so much grit that he refused to admit he was sick until his condition was critical,” Hall wrote, adding, “Of course, the outbreak is entirely without precedent, and the authorities have doubtless learned many things which would aid them in the event of a recurrence of the scourge.”

And, yet, here we are, debating whether or not we’re “overdoing it” in the response to COVID-19.

From Greene County’s experience, the primary lesson from 1918 is that local elections matter — much more than we currently think, given the paltry voter turnout of 21.26 percent earlier this month in the special election for Jefferson city council.

During the flu pandemic of 1918, it was the city council acting as the city board of health, not the state, that responded decisively to protect residents.

I happened to catch a story Tuesday morning on NPR about the 1918 flu pandemic, and one historian noted that President Woodrow Wilson uttered nary a word about the pandemic, despite the fact that the flu killed far more (more than five times as many) Americans than would die in World War I.

Closer to home, the state board of health ended up placing all of Iowa under quarantine — forbidding public gatherings — on Oct. 18, 1918, according to the Influenza Encyclopedia, a website produced by the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine.

The city of Des Moines had already gone ahead with a local quarantine on Oct. 10, closing places of amusement, schools and churches — a move that gets high praise a century later as “an incredibly sophisticated understanding of how best to handle an influenza epidemic,” according to the Influenza Encyclopedia.

However, whereas Des Moines lifted its quarantine after 18 days, Jefferson kept its own quarantine in place for 12 weeks.

Even as the state eased rules on gatherings, Jefferson held firm.

In enacting a quarantine on Oct. 14 — a move that closed the schools, canceled church services, darkened the movie theater and banned all meetings of clubs and societies — the city board of health hoped to “prevent an epidemic rather than try to stop one after it broke out,” the Herald reported.

Other communities tried to carry on as usual, to deadly effect.

On Dec. 4, 1918, the Bee reported that half the people who attended a basketball game in nearby Glidden fell sick with the flu.

That same issue of the Bee carried word of a new Jefferson city council order: homes of those sick with influenza would be tagged with a large, red placard warning away visitors.

Three dozen homes were tagged.

The placards were credited with stopping “the ravages of the disease in a pronounced way,” the Bee reported on Dec. 18.

‘Yells like bloody murder’

Jefferson at the time was under the leadership of Mayor Frank Forbes, who even traveled to Chicago in December to lend his voice to a special meeting of mayors and health officials to address the pandemic — a move akin to descending into the heart of darkness, given that 38,000 cases of influenza were reported in the Windy City between September and November. Forbes was nevertheless determined to sit in on the Dec. 10 meeting of the American Public Health Association.

With each city acting independently, he reported that Chicago “seems to be running wide open.”

Indeed, restrictions on public gatherings had been lifted on Nov. 16. Chicago schools never closed.

Even still, Jefferson’s quarantine held, and wouldn’t be lifted until the first week of January, 1919.

Victor Hugo Lovejoy, the  outspoken and well-known editor of the Jefferson Bee, wrote on Jan. 15, 1919, that the city board of health was to be admired and commended for passing a flu ordinance with meaning.

In his “Seasonable Sermon” that week on Page 1, Lovejoy unloaded on the state of Iowa, criticizing the “weakness” of the state board of health in its handling of the influenza pandemic. 

But he reserved his very best ire for the city of Des Moines, whose theater owners, pool halls and department stores “let out yells like bloody murder” when a quarantine was attempted.

He alleged that the state ordered nothing that didn’t “fit” the business climate in Des Moines.

“All this,” he hissed, “because the Almighty dollar is worth more than human life in Des Moines.”

In particular, Lovejoy took issue with an assertion that any quarantine wasn’t enforceable because “Spanish influenza” wasn’t specifically mentioned in state law — meaning that if someone quarantined for “flu” sued, they could be entitled to money.

Using the state’s logic, Jefferson’s quarantine could very well have been challenged in court.

“Think of it, you folks who lost loved ones!” Lovejoy wrote. “Think of the supreme ridiculousness of such a thing!”

“All the fooling, finessing, fiddling and fuming over the enforcement of a quarantine,” he said, “has been because somebody was afraid they would lose financially.”

Make no mistake, though — people did die throughout Greene County, including Jefferson.

By Lovejoy’s count, 16 Jefferson residents were killed by the flu.

It came for white-collar residents like Ralph Curtis Cutting, the eminently successful 39-year-old manager of the New Telephone Co., with the same intensity that killed blue-collar ones like Floyd Guiter, 40, who worked for the railroad.

Cutting’s special order of “anti-influenza serum” from Mayo Hospital in Minnesota was, in hindsight, simply a waste of money.

Outside of Jefferson, influenza took down an unspecified number of people, including former Churdan mailman Ernest Toole.

But no death in Greene County was more tragic than that in Scranton of the charming Mrs. Studebaker, who gave birth to a daughter the day before her death. The baby, too, perished, all just days before Christmas, 1918.

Her husband, Scranton school superintendent C.H. Studebaker, was so sick himself, he couldn’t attend her burial — which took place on the couple’s fifth wedding anniversary.

Like it always does, and always will, life somehow resumed once the virus ran its course.

But if there’s a lasting legacy in Greene County of the flu pandemic of 1918, it’s carried on in the work of Ann Hicks, Mary Pedersen and Jill Wanninger — our school nurses in Jefferson.

When school in Jefferson finally resumed in January of 1919, it did so under the watchful eye of Miss Helen Greene, R.N., a Red Cross nurse from Chicago.

Seen almost as a quirky concept, no school in Greene County had ever had a nurse — and if Vic Lovejoy, writing in the Bee on Jan. 15, had his way, never again would they be without.

“The school nurse told us last week that there was an unusual lot of sore throats among the children. She sent some of them home. Their parents didn’t know it!” he wrote. “That’s the advantage of a trained nurse, and in this we recognize her supreme value at this time.”