Dispatches from a Desperate Time
04/20/20
Compiled by Paul Durica
The Quarantine Times, in partnership with the Newberry Library, presents the first in a series of dispatches by Chicago historian Paul Durica detailing how the city responded to the influenza epidemic of 1918 and how that moment helps us understand where we are today. Read Part II here.
I: Crisis
Burns Clothing of Husband, Five Children, All Ill
With her husband, William Baum, desperately ill of influenza and their five children, four of them girls, so far gone that some of them were delirious, Mrs. Baum yesterday took all of their clothes into the back yard, poured oil on them and set them on fire. The family lived at 3718 West Fifty-sixth place, Chicago Lawn.—Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1918
The first cases appeared at the naval training base at the end of summer, and then the sickness spread south along the lake, through the affluent suburbs, before reaching Chicago. At the Sherman Hotel, the assembled medical men, including the city’s health commissioner John Dill Robertson and the state’s director of public health C. St. Clair Drake, predicted the sickness would infect “fifty, or even as many as sixty out of every 100 persons in Chicago”—but not to fear, as the ill had “better than 99 out of 100 chances to recover.” These men of medicine set policy while the politicians, the Mayor and the Governor, stayed quiet. Newspapers repeated daily Robertson’s belief that the crisis could be contained: “Don’t Worry! There were eleven fewer deaths in Chicago during the last sixteen days than during the same period last year, in spite of the impending epidemic.” A column over, they shared stories of local desperation, ones in which Mrs. Baum sets fire to her family’s clothes and Angelo Padula strikes out from the two-room apartment where his wife and four young children lay ill to find a doctor. The next day a watchman finds Padula’s coat on the 22nd Street bridge, and the police drag the river for his body.
II: Lid
Influenza Board Deadlocked on Closing Order
Among the gathering places said to have been discussed were the following:
Churches Saloons
Clubs Political meetings
Dry cabarets Ice cream parlors
Athletic contests Museums and exhibits
Conventions Banquets
Poolrooms Bowling alleys
Labor union meetings Parades
—Chicago Tribune, October 16, 1918
On the day the “executive committee of the emergency committee” convened to consider putting a lid on all forms of public gathering, deaths attributed to the sickness reached a new daily high in Chicago with 317. An order had already gone into effect across the state shuttering “all theaters, lodges, and public night schools,” but the committee remained divided on what else to close. A consensus was reached in the next few days that left churches and saloons open but closed practically everything else. Schools also remained open in the belief that the young were spared from the sickness’s worst effects—although nearby Oak Park disagreed and shut down theirs. The Chicago Defender pointed to one place the committee had forgotten, the police stations which were “huddling numerous prisoners together, holding them sometimes thirty-six hours without any medical examination,” making them a “breeder of disease,” a representative of an “uncivilized and barbaric age.”
III: Cure
No Whisky at Great Lakes
The story that several carloads of whisky were shipped to the Great Lakes Naval Training station to be used as a preventative of Spanish influenza has been widely circulated. As a result many people are drinking whisky, believing that it must possess some merit if used in such large quantities by navy doctors.—Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1918
Out of Washington came a warning: no vaccine to treat the sickness had “gone beyond the experimental stage” and the public should be wary of any “sure cures.” Advertisements in the newspapers told a different story, offering up Dobell’s Solution—“not a patent medicine”—to keep the nose clean while the Surgeon General’s “three C’s” for prevention, “A Clean Mouth, Clean Skin, and Clean Clothes” made the case for using Kolynos Dental Cream. In Minnesota the Mayo brothers worked on a promising serum, while a University of Chicago bacteriologist proclaimed that the wrong sickness had been identified—diphtheria was to blame for the deaths. Elsewhere, the blood of the recently recovered was injected into the ill as a means to lessen the symptoms. Persistent rumors of a treatment having been discovered at the naval training base prompted the acting commandant, O. G. Christgate, to issue a statement: “As a matter of fact, alcoholic liquors are never used as a preventive of disease.”
IV: Scofflaws
Saloons Raided, Crowds Taken in Battle on ‘Flu’:
Whole City Warned to Wear Masks as Crisis Nears
The raiding squad went first to the saloon of Max Simon at 226 North Clark street. They found twenty men, several of whom were sleeping on benches. Ten sleepers were taken to the central station where they were given sanitary cells to sleep in.—Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1918
A week before that fall’s midterm elections, Methodist ministers from across the city gathered to denounce the candidacies of Thomas F. Scully for county judge and Anton J. Cermak for county sheriff due to their opposition to national prohibition; the ministers also passed a resolution commending Health Commissioner Robertson for “his service during the influenza epidemic.” Upon learning this, Robertson phoned the ministers to ask why they were meeting together at the First Methodist Episcopal Church in violation of the city’s ban on public gatherings. The ministers claimed a simple misunderstanding and adjourned. Other scofflaws were less innocent—those who crowded the saloons, smoked on street cars, or congregated in churches and funeral parlors to mourn their dead. More serious still were the hospitals that ignored a state edict to suspend elective surgeries and refused to admit those suffering from the sickness—they were threatened with a loss of their license. Not all scofflaws got off with a warning or a fine: an anonymous tip led to the arrest of six “safe blowers” who’d holed up together, three of them “flat on their backs with influenza.”
V: Sacrifice
First Quarantine Marriage Performed at Great Lakes
For the first time in the history of Great Lakes Naval station a quarantine marriage has been celebrated. Despite the fact her husband-to-be was in quarantine in Camp Perry, Miss Mattie O. McCoy of Kansas City married Charles Clayburn Etheridge in camp headquarters today.—Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1918
With the theaters and cabarets closed due to the sickness, many actors and actresses took jobs in munitions plants and their meals from an unlikely source, the local Elks Club. “In the past theatrical people have been good to us,” said W.D. Bartholomew, head of the lodge. “They have freely contributed their services at Elk entertainments and we are not ungrateful.” In Washington, four young men from Chicago gave of themselves in a different way as sailors who “volunteered to be inoculated with the Spanish influenza serum in order that medical officers of the navy might learn some specific facts regarding the disease and possible means of its prevention.” Closer to home the editor of Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe, thought it was her civic duty to forward to the Chicago Tribune a copy of the letter she’d sent to the offices of the Chicago Surface Lines in which she detailed an unpleasant experience on the back platform of a car she’d boarded at State and Cedar streets: not a window in the car was open despite the “influenza epidemic” and “the menace to public health of unventilated cars.” Her request to open the windows denied by Surface Line staff, she concluded her letter with the observation, “Evidently your company has not properly instructed its conductors.”
Paul Durica is the Director of Exhibitions at the Newberry Library. For seven years he ran a series of free talks, walks, and participatory reenactments dealing with Chicago’s past under the name Pocket Guide to Hell.
