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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| How Woodrow Wilson Let Flu Deaths Go Viral in the Great War |
| 2020-04-13 |
| [Real Clear Investigations] The last time the United States faced a worldwide pandemic — the "Spanish flu" of 1918 and 1919 -- cities rolled up the sidewalks, closed theaters, and shuttered saloons. Firemen, policemen, nurses and panicked citizens covered their faces with gauze masks. The virulent influenza emerged in the last year of World War I, incubated in American army camps and spread overseas on troop ships. By the time the influenza finally burned itself out, over 45,000 Americans in uniform and some 600,000 American civilians were dead of the disease. It’s estimated that the Spanish flu killed 50 million worldwide. When the crisis hit, the country was led by a president viewed by many as among the most capable of American leaders, Woodrow Wilson. A favorite of progressives, Wilson has been hailed for expanding the federal government and celebrated for his commitment to international institutions. He has regularly been in historians’ polls of the top 10 presidents, an assessment that has only slipped in recent years as Wilson's unreconstructed racism has been publicized. Still, one would expect a skilled advocate of federal authority to have used every power of his office to confront a scourge that was killing Americans by the hundreds of thousands. Surely his response would be a model of presidential leadership. Not quite. "Frankly, I don’t think Wilson gave much attention to the flu," John M. Cooper, emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells RealClearInvestigations. "From going through his papers, there just isn’t much there," says Cooper, the dean of Wilson scholars. "President Woodrow Wilson had been extraordinarily close-mouthed about the epidemic from the first," writes Sandra Opdycke in "The Flu Epidemic of 1918: America’s Experience in the Global Health Crisis." Historians "have been unable to find a single occasion on which he mentioned it in public." |
| Posted by:Besoeker |