As a historian who has studied and written about the Spanish Flu of August 1918, it’s one thing to look objectively at the past, one hundred years ago, and document what occurred then. It’s quite another thing, indeed, to absorb its meaning from a more personal and present-day context. As I watch the news now in horror, as the coronavirus pandemic exacts its deadly toll on a global stage, I find myself masked and gloved, scurrying to fill my shopping cart with enough food and toilet paper to live through our quarantine, and to call my family near and far to ensure that they’re ok. I’m reminded of the Great War when influenza effectively paralyzed the world with extraordinarily deadly results.
Spanish Flu, Fort Riley, Kansas courtesy of Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine
In the United States the flu first appeared as a fairly benign and local illness targeting Boston’s military encampments and became more widespread as it affected military and civilian populations throughout the country. At first, sixty-eight U.S. sailors were taken off of their ships at Boston’s Commonwealth Pier and admitted to the Chelsea Naval Hospital, three miles north of the city. In early September, the press reported that influenza victims filled all the hospital beds at the forts in Boston Harbor. Thirty-five miles west of Boston, at Camp Devens army cantonment in Ayer, 1,543 soldiers became ill with the disease, and by September 22, nine-thousand were on sick report with six-thousand filling every bed, corridor, and spare room at the base hospital. An extra-long barracks was evacuated where “bodies were piled up,” and trains were arranged to carry away the dead. Following a “Win the War for Freedom” parade that featured four-thousand men, soldiers and residents alike became ill with the virus. One-thousand civilians died in September alone. Boston novelist William Martin recalled that his forty-year old grandmother, Josephine Walsh Martin, contracted the disease and died within a twenty-four-hour period, leaving ten children motherless, including his two-year old father. All Boston gathering places were closed, including theatres, clubs, restaurants and schools, but actions to contain the illness seemed fruitless. Rose Howes Galbraith, a twenty-five-year old Liggett-Rexall pharmaceutical saleswoman, who traveled by train each week from New York to Boston, witnessed a spike in sales during this period for an oral antiseptic product called Listerine. Many hoped this germicide, and other sanitary measures, would prevent the spread of the disease, to no avail. The Spanish Flu traveled from Boston throughout the country—to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, to the Puget Sound Navy Base in Washington state, to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago, to the Newport Rhode Island Naval Base, and on the steamer Harold Walker to New Orleans, among many other places.
Army and navy installations were incubators for disease. Today, reports indicate that during World War I, 675,000 people died of influenza in the United States, over four-thousand in Boston alone. Worldwide, estimates suggest that as many as one-hundred-million people perished from the Spanish flu.
Dr. Karl Muck Portrait courtesy of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig
In the fall of 1918, at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, Dr. Karl Muck, the world renowned German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra waited in fear. Having been blackmailed for his sexual indiscretion with a New England Conservatory soprano, as part of a regional rivalry between Boston and New York, Muck was interned there in April of that year on a trumped up charge of “dangerous enemy alien.” In this confined space, several-thousand inmates became ill from the epidemic, and over fifty died. Emergency vehicles trekked in and out of Oglethorpe day and night bringing sick prisoners to the hospital. While almost half of the camp became afflicted, the remaining inmates were anxious as to whether their comrades would ever return to their quarters. Rapidly-developing symptoms included pneumonia that violently snapped rib-cages and tore abdominal muscles, nose bleeds, hemoptysis or coughing-up blood, ear-bleeding, headaches, and vomiting. Within hours, victims developed cyanosis, a condition that turned the skin dark blue due to the lungs inability to supply oxygen to the blood. Internees complained of incompetent medical care, and yet, brave doctors and nurses were equally susceptible to the disease, which had no obvious cure, leaving many hospital wards with minimal staffing. Camp quarantines were implemented to contain the outbreak. All recreational activities were cancelled. Horse stables were converted to temporary morgues. Life in confinement was particularly miserable. The camp newsletter reported that:
The big death came into the country. It also came here ... Someone died and someone else, the number five man and the number thirteen, the men’s resistance to the disease had been paralyzed by long detention or insidious illnesses which were in them and which had gnawed at their marrow of life like evil rats. Death laid on the prison camp like a shadow: it went round for a long time... More than fifty people died ... they would not see home again; their home which had borne them. But one thought is a consolation to us, who have been brushed by but passed over by death with its icy breath: they died as Germans. They had lived here as Germans, like us.
While this federally enforced wartime internment was intended to crush dissent and enforce national conformity among mostly German internees, the United States’ treatment of these prisoners inspired many to become more German at heart and less American, and to develop solidarity with fellow inmates, for all suffered unspeakable hardships. Dr. Hugo Letchtentritt of Harvard University, music critic of the Berlin Vossische Zeitung newspaper, remembered conversations with Muck about confinement at Fort Oglethorpe. Muck’s three companions at the camp, Cincinnati Orchestra conductor Ernst Kunwald, Harvard professor Dr. Bertling, and Burkhardt Brewing Company manager Ferdinand von Scholley, all spoke of their time there without enthusiasm. Disposed of behind steel wire and machine gun turrets, the men became each other’s greatest supporters and life-long friends. Certainly, Muck’s relationships with fellow musicians and academics greatly eased his hardship.
Fort Oglethorpe Hospital in Prison Barracks courtesy of National Archives Records Administration
Muck’s internment at Fort Oglethorpe lasted from April 1918 to August 1919, almost a year and a half. While he found companionship to ease his burdens, the psychological impact of his experience cannot be understated. He was traumatized by his arrest, internment, and by the panic and fear surrounding the influenza epidemic. The distress of that episode remained with him throughout his life. As he admitted later, he never truly recovered from his incarceration. Perhaps, today, as the coronavirus mercilessly continues its deadly assault, I can understand Karl Muck’s circumstance just a little bit better.
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Melissa D. Burrage, The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America (Boydell and Brewer/University of Rochester Press, 2019).
John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking, 2004)
Conversation with historical novelist William Martin on April 19, 2018.
Conversation with historian Robert J. Allison on April 18, 2018 about his grandmother Rose.
Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston A to Z (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)
Erich Posselt, “Prisoner of War Number 3598,” American Mercury Magazine.
Richard B. Goldschmidt, In and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Autobiography of Richard B. Goldschmidt (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960).
Gerald H. Davis, “Orgelsdorf: A World War 1 Internment Camp in America” Yearbook of German American Studies 26 (1991).
Sixth Cavalry Museum, 2 Barnhardt Circle, Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.
Orgelsdorfer Eulenspiegel [3].