Dispatches from a Desperate Time, Part II
05/04/20
Compiled by Paul Durica
For the past month, under the shelter in place directive, I’ve been reading through issues of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Defender to get a sense of what everyday life was like during the so-called Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918—fixating on the differences as much as the similarities; learning that no one’s hands were clean. Read Part I here.
VI: Race
Help Wanted—White
In a recent issue of the daily papers we are informed that more than 300 telephone girls have been stricken with influenza and the Chicago Telephone company is advertising for young women to take their places. What we would like to know is whether or not this company is willing to accept applications from our girls, and if not why not? We have hundreds of competent, honest young women of prepossessing appearance, many of them graduates of the public schools of this city.—Chicago Defender, November 2, 1918
As the sickness spread through the city, the Defender reported on the efforts of Ms. M. J. Gordon, who, with the support of the Chicago Urban League, put together a team of women to track and register influenza cases in the Black community. A crisis of this scale did not respect assigned roles, and soon the women were taking direct action to mitigate the suffering, whether by cleaning the homes of the ill, securing medical care for the infected, or facilitating the removal of the dead. In one examplary case, they assisted a father forced by his job to leave unattended his wife and five children, all infected. Stories of simple acts of care like these filled the pages of the Defender as it reported on the effects of the epidemic across the country. While in a regular public health column Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams of Provident Hospital stressed the need for preventive measures given the “scarcity of doctors and nurses,” the paper noted that skilled individuals like Olive Walker, a “trained nurse of Cleveland,” were “denied the privilege of helping the Red Cross” in Ohio on account of “her racial identity.”
VII: Sports
More Influenza Retards Maroon
A renewed and vigorous influenza outbreak threw another monkey wrench into football plans at the University of Chicago yesterday. A newly reported contingent of 140 drafted men, mechanics, assigned to the university for training, developed thirty cases.—Chicago Tribune, October 22, 1918
Two days before the first Saturday in November, the Purple of Northwestern awaited the decision of the Evanston health commissioner as to whether a match against Ohio State could be played. Not far to the south, Chicago’s health commissioner, John Dill Robertson, had already forbidden football playing in the city that weekend, further complicating a difficult year for the University of Chicago Maroons. With several players lost to military service and only one remaining game against a Big Ten rival, the Maroons decided to cede their home field advantage and head to Indiana, where regulations against public gatherings were more lax. There, a 20-year winning streak against Purdue would end, and the Maroons would finish with 0-5 in the conference and 4-6-1 on the year—still better than Northwestern, who would play a total of only five games, the one against Ohio State scratched by the sickness. The Purple bested Knox College 47-7 the following weekend on November 9th, the day that former Chicago White Sox outfielder Larry Chapelle died. One of many athletes to succumb to the sickness, he was a “private in the medical corps” at the time and thus considered a casualty of the War.
VIII: Service
City Doctor Dies a Martyr to Work for Flu Victims
Dr. Harold R. Dwyer of 3144 Lincoln avenue, a city health officer for sixteen years, died yesterday at the contagious disease hospital, a martyr to his work for influenza victims. He had worked incessantly since the beginning of the epidemic and in so doing contracted diphtheria. His death was sudden.—Chicago Tribune, October 21, 1918
In early October, Dr. A. Augustus O’Neill of the Red Cross, charged with coordinating operations in Chicago, received from the main office in Washington an “urgent appeal for doctors to fight the epidemic.” Physicians who offered “service outside Illinois” would “receive the same pay as a captain in the army—$200 a month and expenses.” Within days, O’Neill was looking locally for help; he asked all “trained nurses, registered nurses, practicing nurses, and nurses’ aids” to join the fight, many of them by taking up temporary residence in the home of one of the infected. “Will you accept the position, with pay, as trained nurse in the home of an influenza patient?” asked one appeal, before adding, “Will you accept a position, with pay, to aid with the housework in such a home?”. One who benefitted from the crisis and the public’s trust was Julia Lyons, “woman of diamonds and furs, silken ankles and jails, gem studded fingers and aliases by the dozen,” who posed as a “flu nurse” and conned several patients by selling them medicine at inflated price—“$100 for a can of oxygen worth $5.60”—, when not stealing their possessions. Of the eight patients she attended, three died.
IX: Return
All Bans Off: Chicago Healthiest City in the World, says Robertson
If you want to dodge the “flu” and the “pneu” Chicago is the best place to be in. The epidemic here is over. Dr. John Dill Robertson, commissioner of health, in a letter to Lucius Teter, president of the Chicago Association of Commerce, yesterday declared that, as far as pneumonia and influenza are concerned, Chicago is the safest place in the United States—Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1918
Starting Tuesday and extending through Friday, first in the north and then, with each passing day, a little farther south, the “Chicago quarantine lid” was lifted—cabarets reopened first, with music allowed but no dancing, followed by the theaters and picture palaces, and then political gatherings (the midterm elections were eight days away), all with a 10pm curfew to “check celebrating tendencies” and leave “time to get plenty of sleep.” Finally, on Saturday, November 2, 1918, dancing returned to the city of Chicago. “We are practically out of the woods,” said Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson. “All bans are off. In a few days I am sure I shall again be justified in stating that Chicago is the healthiest city in the world.” On November 11, the War ended; people filled the streets, partied, and paraded. By early December, 601 cases and 54 deaths were being reported in a single day, with Robertson concluding the “present epidemic seemed to have started at the north of the city and was passing over to the south.” He suggested Chicagoans stop shaking hands. “If Santa Claus makes any house-to-house trips in Illinois Christmas eve and morning,” State Health Director St. Clair Drake told the Tribune on December 22, “he will have to wear a ‘flu’ mask.”
X: 1918
Steam Shovel Digs Grave of Victims of Flu
New York—A steam shovel was used in one of New York’s cemeteries today to dig a trench in which to inter temporarily the bodies of victims of Spanish influenza. This extraordinary procedure was made necessary by a shortage of grave diggers, coupled with the large number of deaths. At another cemetery there were 400 unburried bodies and city laborers have been drafted to prepare graves.
‘Gen.’ Rosalie Gets Five Millions and Socialism
New York—“Gen.” Rosalie Jones, who gained fame by leading a suffrage army on Albany a few years ago, has inherited $5,000,000 more or less and turned Socialist—a red card Socialist in which she accepts the party principles in full. She said: “I feel that the present two controlling parties have seen their day and are not looking forward. The Socialists are the thinking part of the political body. I don’t think it fair, any way, to say that Socialists are disloyal. There is a sharp distinction between disloyalty and unloyalty. By unloyalty I mean more or less passive. Furthermore, I believe that the majority of women in time will vote the Socialist ticket.—Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1918
One above the other, these articles appear on the newspaper page. While I set out to consider the impact of the Spanish influenza epidemic on Chicago—the end result was over 8,500 dead, while as I write this, on May 1, 2020, 2,457 residents of Illinois have died from Covid-19—I keep returning to these two articles: how profoundly we’ve failed as a people, they suggest, if our current moment, more than a century removed, doesn’t feel remote but close. While the past provides perspective, sometimes comfort and inspiration, the story of “Gen.” Jones reminds me that our responsibility to one another is a fight we must each wage in the present.
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.