Aftermath: Mohandas Gandhi and The Spanish Flu

Annamaria on Monday

Eighteen to twenty million people died in India in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-20 - the worst death toll of any country in the world.  (In fact, ten percent of the total of all countries).

Under the yoke of British colonialism, some Indians believed that their oppressors were causing people to perish, by poisoning the wells to rid the subcontinent of unwanted population.  A writer in one newspaper claimed that the deaths came because poison gas from the trenches of France had drifted to India and killed thousands.  (If you think those people of old were a bunch of ignoramuses, think about how the ignoramuses of last April were retweeting the news that Covid-19 was the result of a chemical warfare agent escaping from a lab in Wuhan, China!)

In 1918, the real culprit was, of course, the H1-N1 virus, but the world knew nothing of such a critter in those days.  The bug first came to India with Indian troops returning to Bombay (now Mumbai) from service fighting with the British in Mesopotamia and East Africa.  On 29 May 1918, they disembarked and went home.  A few days later a policeman serving on the waterfront fell ill. Then in another three days, the illness had spread to more policemen, and eventually to many others who worked in the dockyards.  Soon it was laying people low throughout the country.

At this point, Mahatma Gandhi had been traveling by train around India, encouraging his countrymen to join the British in their war.  To his way of thinking at the time, Indians had become soft.  Becoming fighting men would harden them up.  Also, their helping to win the war would encourage the British to take a more beneficent attitude toward their Indian subjects.

Meanwhile, the flu was spreading and beginning to take lives.  Gandhi, too, fell ill.  On 17 August 1918, he wrote a letter that began, "I am on my back."  One might have said the same thing about his country.

And so the Mahatma and his country suffered in the ensuing months.

Bodies began to pile up around India, and when trains entered stations, the people descending were outnumbered by the corpses being carried off.  The colonial overlords could or would do nothing to stop the carnage.  Certain he was facing imminent death, Gandhi wrote many letters telling his wife and his friends and colleagues about how his thinking was changing.

"The more I contemplate this illness, the more deeply I realize what love of man to man must be.  And love of God...Nature is God, and God is love..My suffering is my own fault.  We get what we deserve...What have I done to bring this on....recruiting for the war effort.

"One need not  assume that heroism is to be acquired only by fighting in a war.  One can also do so by keeping out of it...We can cultivate manliness in another way, not to fight for the British but against them with non-violent means...Defy laws that are unfair..."

In those letters one can see Gandhi's thinking change and his commitment to nonviolence solidify.

He survived.  And though deeply wounded, India did too.  By January 1919, he was ready with a powerful message that would bring his countrymen to his way of thinking.  By the time of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar Massacre, he had convinced thousands to stand up non-violently for their right to independence.

On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Reginald Dyer, an acting Brigadier General in the British Army, ordered his men to fire on a crowd of unarmed Indian civilians.  At least 379 were killed and more than a thousand injured.  More corpses.  But this time, they died for the cause of independence.

It took another twenty-eight years and a great deal more work to reach their goal.  But it came.  On the 15th of August 1947.

We have no way of knowing for certain that the disease Gandhi suffered was the Spanish Flu, but his illness hit him at the exact time that the pandemic was spreading.  His daughter-in-law and her child died because of confirmed cases.

Two things we know for certain: it was during this illness that Gandhi's own thinking changed.  And the suffering from the pandemic and the societal ills of colonialism it laid bare awoke the will of the people to stand up and demand justice and freedom.

Let's contemplate what this lesson means to us.  In the face of our current woes.  And what we might achieve, in the next years, if we all stand up non-violently for justice. 

The memorial to Gandhi in Union Square that I salute
 several times a week.  These are the kinds of statues we
need to erect.

Aftermath: Woodrow Wilson and the Spanish Flu

Annamaria on Monday

My blogs so far on Aftermath have dwelt on general information about sweeping changes that have followed pandemics in the past.  There is no way of knowing, if—among those dead—there was a person who might have made great art, written great literature, or found a way, once and for all, to protect human beings from harmful viruses.  The potential of the lost died with them.

When it comes to the Spanish Flu, however, we have some inklings of how two very influential men, both of whom survived, may have been changed by their bout of the Spanish Flu.  For today, I take up the first of those two: President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson’s flaws were many: He was a for one thing a despicable racist.  Also, as President, he presided over a nation undergoing the worst pandemic since the Black Death.  He was absolutely silent about how his country might deal with the disease that was killing people in their thousands. He focused completely and exclusively on the US role in World War I.  He was also generally vindictive and vicious in attacking anyone who opposed him.  If a lot of this sounds familiar, here are two huge differences between President Wilson and the current denizen of his old stomping grounds in Washington, DC.  Wilson was a great orator.  And he had and faithfully promoted one brilliant and potentially world changing idea: The League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations.

He devoted himself to and surrounded himself with men who supported the formation of a body bent on achieving world peace though cooperation and mutual support among the nations.  After the November armistice, in January of 1919, Wilson went to France intent on influencing in this direction the heads of state who met to negotiate the treaty of Versailles.  Crowds greeted him as if he were a conquering hero.

To achieve his end, Wilson took a firm stand: that the Allies must not impose heavy penalties on the Germans.  Wilson argued strongly that over taxing the Germans would throw them into such dire straights that the populace would rise up, creating trouble that could spill over into the world at large.  Wilson preferred that the Germans be set up for prosperity, not for suffering—as the surest way to secure peace for the generations to come. 

The other participants did not agree.  Particularly Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France, who demanded harsh punishment for the Germans.  After all, Germany had started a war that killed more than 1.3 Million French soldiers (not counting civilians). Scores of French towns had been obliterated.  Clemenceau insisted that Germany had to pay reparations and cede territory.

Through January, February, and March, the heads of state battled it out, sometimes heatedly.  Tempers rose to the point were Clemenceau accused Wilson of being “pro-German.”

They then adjourned for lunch.

That afternoon, Wilson uncharacteristically stood when he spoke.  His physician who was in the room, describes the scene like this:

Turning to M. Clemenceau, with his eyes ablaze, he (Wilson)said: “And yet you this morning told me that I should be wearing the kaiser’s helmet. And why? Because I have protested against laying a taxation upon Germany which will make life so unattractive to the little children and the children yet unborn that existence would be a running sore and dreams of vengeance an obsession. I am not thinking only of Germany. I am thinking about the future of the world. (Quoted in The Atlantic in August 2008) 

That was April 1.

Then on April 3, Wilson began to cough, ran a high fever, had trouble breathing, and gastric upset—all symptoms of Spanish flu, which had been circulating in Paris at the time.  Wilson’s doctor and others in his entourage described him as deathly ill, and also reported that he began to exhibit another behavior also typical of that pernicious flu—mental distress.  Wilson became delusional!  He babbled about issues in completely different ways from those his staff were used to.  Some of his aides resigned, because they saw in Wilson’s mental state a reversal of his previous passion for international cooperation.  (Note: we have no way to prove scientifically that what Woodrow Wilson had was Spanish Flu, but now, in the 21^st Century, all concerned with the question think it is a very safe assumption.)

When, weakened and tentative, he returned to the negotiations, he completely capitulated to all the harsh punishments the British and the French demanded be imposed on Germany.

We all know the upshot of that!

In 1940—just twenty-one years later—those little children and yet unborn children from 1919 marched into France again.

WWII took the lives of 80 million people.

Suppose Woodrow Wilson had not gotten the flu.    

Aftermath 2020: The Pollyanna Prognostications

Annamaria on Monday

At this moment, no one seems to know when or how to safely restart the economy of a medium-size city anywhere in the world without risking a new epidemic spike and more deaths.  So how can little me, all by myself, possibly foresee the aftermath of Covid-19.  I can’t.  But I do have a glimpse of what to hope for.

My studies of the aftermath of previous pandemics, as I have reported in these precincts over the past three weeks, have revealed that events like the Black Death and the Spanish Flu sped up some of the trends already taking place and slowed down or stopped others.  So I think it is safest for me to look at the trends that were already in process and talk about what I hope for in their regard.

In the United States, the country I know best, the greatest effect of the terrifying disease that has shut us down has been to lay bare the flaws in our society, the existence of which will not be news to anyone.  The difference now is that we can see those flaws as critical issues, because, in the worst cases, their existence has greatly contributed the virus induced pain and suffering.  My cock-eyed optimistic hope is that with the flaws now so obvious, we will find ways to fix them.

Let’s start with some really easy issues.  Pre-Covid, it had become unusual for families in the US to eat their meals together.  This was a trend I have known about from personal observation since the 1980s.  But during lock-down, families have been keeping at home and many more are together for all their meals.  This strengthens their bonds, a very important thing for parents and children.  To work their magic, these  gatherings need to look, NOT like this:

But more like this:

Wouldn’t it be nice, once the gyms are open and soccer practice is allowable, if families continue to gather and talk at dinner, if not daily, at least several times a week.

Telecommuting has been on the rise for some years, but Covid made it the only way many people can get their jobs done while observing social distancing.  Highways in heavy commuting areas have gone from this:

To this:

The result is good for the planet.  It also saves a lot of wear and tear on people’s nerves and frees up more personal time.  Once they can, people will want to go to the office, but I think not all the time.  I imagine that a goodly percentage of them will begin to split their time more judiciously between commuting and working from home.  And now that they have had a chance to get used to this new normal, managements will be more comfortable believing that their employees are on the job, even if they are not in the same building.

Is there any wonder why our healthcare system doesn't work?

The fair distribution of health care in the US has been lagging behind the rest of the world since the aftermath of the Spanish Flu a hundred years ago.  The current pandemic has shown that our lopsided system makes whole swaths of our citizenry extremely vulnerable.  Many of the least served by the system have been—by current designation—essential workers.  We now can see clearly that we need to protect everyone.

  

In fact, the whole of idea of who is important in our society has been set on its head.  There are the first responders: cops, doctors, firemen, etc.  We have known for some time how important they are.  But six months ago, who would have expected the people who check us out in the grocery store or who restock the shelves, the warehouse workers or the pizza delivery guy, the bus and subway drivers, the orderlies in the hospitals, the people who kill and package the chickens or pick the peppers and the avocados would be essential.  But there are, and they risk their lives to keep the rest of us going.  We need them a whole lot more than we need the sharks on Wall Street.  Now we know that.  I hope it means we will try to get them better paid and cared for.

For decades now, public education has been a victim of budget cuts and teachers have been grossly undervalued.  I can’t help but imagine that all those people who have been trying to educate their own children at home have woken up to how skilled a person really needs to be to teach a six-year-old how to read or a fourteen-year-old how to do algebra. When it comes to getting respect for teachers, will we begin to vote accordingly?

  

All of the people mentioned here need more respect, better pay, and healthcare that’s as good as everyone else’s

In order for the aftermath of 2020 to bring about the needed improvements, the underlying issues are what really need to be addressed.  In the USA, this means making the country a real democracy that works on the principle of one person-one vote, not one dollar-one vote.  And we need to stop allowing people to amass and keep more wealth than they or their progeny could possible spend in a thousand lifetimes.  The top five richest people in the world now own more billions than the GDPs of 131 countries.  These top five have combined net worth more than the GDPs of 164 countries.

If you want to understand the ramifications of these last statistics, well… even if you don’t, I urge you to see the documentary Capital in the Twenty-first Century.  It was made pre-Covid.  What it says is even more important than now that we may be facing a worldwide depression.

We are going through a lot of pain.  There may be a great deal more just over the horizon.  At the very least, let’s support the people who are helping us make it through.  And let’s do what we can to make sure our societies come out of all this suffering in better shape than when we went in.

Aftermath: 2 - Spanish Flu 1918 -1920

Annamaria on Monday

There is a big difficulty in assessing how the Spanish Flu changed the world, because it came toward the end of a long, drawn-out and devastating war.   Ensuing changes can be traced to war the and to the pandemic, but which is which is somewhat tricky to parse out.  Before we give that question a go, a little background.

One of the results of both wars and pandemics is that, when they hit, they often speed or slow the pace of changes already in process.  In the hundred and fifty years before the 1914-20 two-fisted attack, the life expectancy of humans had doubled in all regions the world.  The war-plus-epidemic knocked that progress back sixty years.  A Finn who could have expected to live until forty-five in 1916, suddenly could expect to live till only thirty.  Part of this result stemmed from the war, but most of it came from the pandemic. 

The Spanish flu wasn’t really Spanish at all.  The latest research proved it was an avian virus, type H1-N1 that first produced an epidemic in New York City.  Best guess at this point, however, is that it entered the human population in Kentucky where the first Americans to go to World War I had been in training.  The troops came to New York to embark for France, brought the bug with them, and spread it around before they left.  They also took it with them.  At least this is the conclusion of the latest and best research.

The combatants in the war—both the Allies and those fighting with Germany did not want to admit that their troops were infected, because that would have adversely affected their hopes of victory.   So on both sides they forbade the press to report on flu deaths.  Spain was neutral, so their newspapers carried the story, and their nationality also became the flu’s.

Trying to conclude how many people died in the Spanish Flu Pandemic has been challenging.  Statistics like the ones we learn every day now, were not accurately kept.   Many studies have tried to pinpoint the number.  As of now, the most respected of them says almost certainly 50 million died, but it very well could have been double that.  Compare this to the war’s toll: Military and civilian casualties of the war were great—somewhere be fifteen and nineteen million were killed.  Horrifying, to be sure, but still only a fraction of what the flu took—which was between 2.7% and 5.4% of the world population.

Because the average age of humans was much lower than today’s, the pandemic took may more young people, who also seemed to be particularly vulnerable.  Perhaps because they had not developed immunities from previous bouts with similar bugs, e.g. the Russian flu pandemic of 1889-90.  Twenty to forty-year-olds accounted for almost half of the dead.  One theory is that their strong immune systems over-reacted and, in trying to attack the virus, attacked their lungs. 

Because the countries fighting in WWI were hiding the facts, they lagged in declaring war on the virus.  We have all heard enough I am sure about the aftermath of giving a pandemic virus the least bit of leeway.  As far as we now know, Albert Gitchel, the cook at Camp Fuston in Kansas came down with coughing, fever, and headaches on the 4^th of March 1918.  The Americans who left for the front via NYC were the folks he helped to feed.  By later that spring three-quarters of the French soldiers and half the British combatants fell ill.  By May the bug was in North Africa and Bombay.  In June it reached China, and by July Australia.

No preventative measures were taken until August 1918.  Until then, with thousands on both sides of the war sick and dying, the existence of the disease among the troops was a military secret.  Once the cat was out of the bag, it became de rigueur to do many of the things now familiar to all of us.  That first wave of disease seems to have been mild by comparison to what came later.  There is evidence that the virus mutated into an even more deadly form and then went with the troops from Plymouth, England and reached the ends of the earth in a second wave.  There was also a third wave that hit twelve thousand Australians, and among many others King Alphonso XIII of Spain and Woodrow Wilson while he was attending the peace talks in Versailles.  Both heads of countries survived.   The virus itself petered out in 1920 in Japan.

When it was all over, somewhere around 500 million people worldwide had become infected.  One-tenth of them had died.

The first change brought on by the Spanish Flu Pandemic was the end of World War I.  The battles had pretty much reached a stalemate, but the combatant sides couldn’t find a way to end the war to end all wars.  By August 1918, when the death toll from the virus could no longer be hidden and the troops could no longer be expected to fight, they finally found a way to broker a cease fire.

Unfortunately, the very next thing made the flu pandemic worse: on 11 November 1918 celebrations and parades brought together gatherings of thousand all over the world.  I don’t have to tell you that the virus turned out the big winner at those events.

The following winter millions were infected, thousands died, hospitals were overwhelmed and the shortage of doctors and nurses became acute.  I can’t bring myself to describe it all in detail.  You know what’s happening today say in New York City, what has happened in Milan….  Multiply that several fold and you will get an idea of what the world was like. 

The Spanish Flu Pandemic led to enormous improvements in public health, health education, development of techniques to prevent the spread of disease.  More research was funded.

  

Then as now, more of the poor died than the rich.  In those days, the upper classes believed that the poor were more likely to fall ill because they were inferior types of human beings.   But when the King of Spain and the President of the United States got sick, that theory went out the window.  Good riddance!

In the wake of the devastation, healthcare for all, free of charge became the rule in many countries.  Many nations also created more coordinated government health care efforts, and countries learned to cooperate by sharing information, especially on epidemics.  By 1919 the League of Nations had a health branch than eventually became the World Health Organization.

Governments learned to be on their guard. 

But then…

Last week, my research told me that before the Black Death, things had gotten so good that people were more healthy and stronger and then—boom, along came the plague.

Then half a millennium later, the life expectancy of humans had relatively recently doubled.  There was everything to feel good about and then—boom, along came the Spanish Flu.

Then a hundred years later, the best-off people in my country decided it was time to forget what we learned from 50 million deaths that plagued our great grandparents.   We didn’t need to be prepared for pandemic disease.  And then—BOOM!

We have a lot to learn from what’s happening now.  That’s my topic for next week.

In the meanwhile, let’s not forget this:

Thank you, Nurses

Thank you, Doctors

Thank you, Technicians

Thank you, Orderlies.

We pray you will be safe!

Aftermath: One--The Black Plague

Annamaria on Monday

Mostly, I imagine, what we have all been wondering is when will we go back to normal life.  We've had enough time to reflect and ruminate, so most of us have figured out for ourselves something many government leaders have taken too long to conclude: Any return to normalcy will have to be gradual and cautious.

Things may loosen up a bit before we have a vaccine for covid-19.  But not until we do will we be able to go about as we once did.  Normal, at that point, will be in flux.  Of this I am sure.  Our collective idea of what normal ought to be and our personal ideas of what we want it to be will have shifted.  

I have been trying to imagine that new normal.  I have no doubt that an event as far reaching and dramatic as this pandemic will result in change, probably not all for the good, but also not all for the bad.  So, as one of the resident historicals here on MIE,  I have been going back to history (what else would a nerd like me do) to try to inform my guesses.

Today let's start with the impact of the most drastic demographic disaster ever to hit the world - the Black Death.

It lasted from 1347 to 1453 and killed somewhere between seventeen and twenty-eight million Europeans before it finally petered out in the hinterlands of Russia.  It was more contagious and even deadlier than bubonic plague.  Some historians think it might have been a combination of bubonic, typhus, and anthrax.  Others think it was a particularly virulent strain of bubonic, just as covid-19 is a particularly virulent strain of corona virus. Regardless of the exact nature of the bug that brought it, it changed the medieval world.

Historians are still arguing about its exact long-term consequences, but we can use the trends of those days to postulate what might be ahead for our world.  “Foreseeable” is not word that can apply to right now.

Much of what I read to prepare for this blog was published during the H1-N1 and Ebola outbreaks.  Here is what I learned.

Like our current virus attack, the Black Death descended on the population when, in much of Europe, society in general had never had it so good—at least when it came to the necessities of life.  They had just come out of a long period of robust economic growth and concomitant innovation.  For them, the new technologies were long-distance commerce, manufacturing, and improvements in agriculture.  But thanks to this prosperity people in general were already becoming unhappy about their imperfect institutions and monetary imbalances.  The lords were extremely rich compared to the peasants, who were underpaid and knew it.  There were already murmurs of popular rebellion against the lopsided way society dished out its rewards, with the distribution so heavily skewed toward the aristocracy.  Sound familiar?

As we are seeing now with the current pandemic, death rates varied by region and by socio-economic group.  A great deal of the demographic damage stemmed from the recurrence of the epidemic.  The disease returned as many as thirty times between 1351 and 1485, so the population numbers did not have an opportunity to rebound before another attack.  This increased the severity of the social and economic consequences.

In England, somewhere between five and twenty-five percent of the aristocracy perished, but among the clergy forty-five to sixty percent. Forty to fifty percent died in France, eighty percent in Tuscany, sixty-six in Hamburg, and seventy in Bremen. Also as we have seen in 2020, people in cities were more likely to die.

  

As the virus returned from time to time, it took more of the young than the old.  Some historians attribute this to the recurrences.  Adults, they conclude, who had been exposed and survived previous bouts were less likely to take sick than children who had not had the opportunity to develop their own immunity.  That it took children certainly magnified its impact, both demographically and emotionally.  Population numbers did not return to the pre-plague levels for about a hundred years after the curse went away.  More men than women perished, but that seems always to be the case.  Some scholars, investigating in 2014, concluded that the Black Death took a greater toll among the elderly and those whose immune systems were already compromised. 

The aftermath was as dramatic as the event itself, if I can call something that went on for over a century an event.

  

The death rate depressed the labor pool.  So, after the plague hit, finding enough people to staff the farms became more difficult, which forced the lords to better compensate the peasants.  Before the plague, they might have gotten away with just giving the workers a share of the fruits of their own labors.  But afterwards they had to pay them in cash money.  And that gave the peasants much more economic freedom.  A plowman, who got 3s in 1349 could demand and get 10s in 1350.  Peasants also bargained for better working conditions and lightened workloads.  Pushback on the parts of the lords generally had no effect.   And recurrences of the fever solidified the change.  Before long, some farm workers could buy their own land.  The most successful of them were yeomen by the end of the century. 

The standard of living (of the living) went up.  With more wealth flowing to the lower levls of society came a demand for manufactured goods.  And with too much experience of death all around them, folks adopted an eat-drink-and-be-merry attitude.  

The plague emboldened the underclasses.  Their demands for a fair share picked up volume and speed.  To avoid a total upheaval, the ruling classes began to see the wisdom of resolving rather than ignoring or trying to suppress workers’ grievances. 

It occurred in increments, but the eventual upshot of the Black Death was world changing.  Feudalism gave way to capitalism.     

What came next was the Age of Enlightenment.