BRIAN: If we step back a little bit and look at the optimism about stamping out infectious diseases at the turn of the 20th century, there’s a real parallel there. And the parallel is to the optimism, believe it or not, of stamping out great wars. People believed very strongly that better transportation, more trade was bringing the world together. Do you see any parallels between the optimism on the war front and the disease front and then in fact what World War I and this pandemic led to?
NANCY BRISTOW: I do. What’s interesting for me is the way it plays in the aftermath, which is that in the aftermath of both the flu and the war, the nation is able to retain its optimism. And it retains it, I think, because of that war and what it does. So that in the public sphere, Americans feel bigger, stronger, and more important in the aftermath of the war, despite the disappointment and the disillusionment that the war brought. We see it in the 1920s with the explosion of the American economy and a great deal of belief that the way we are doing things is the way we should do things, and the withdrawal in fact from government activism, for instance. But in the aftermath of the pandemic, it’s much harder to draw kind of optimistic picture.
BRIAN: Does that mean that the war eclipses the pandemic quite quickly in people’s memory?
NANCY BRISTOW: That’s exactly what happens. The pandemic, as you know, is referred to by many and most famously by Alfred Crosby, the great historian, as the forgotten pandemic. And there are a number of reasons that that happens. But certainly the war eclipses it, and in part because the war is a better story. The pandemic is the wrong story for where the nation sees itself in the aftermath of World War I. And I think it’s much easier to subsume it under this glorious victory of the war. And as a result, to simply forget it in terms of its place in the public eye. There are no memorials. There are no anniversaries held for those who died or for those who quote, fought the pandemic. It just disappears.
BRIAN: Nancy Bristow is a historian at the University of Puget Sound, and the author of American Pandemic– the Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.
I think that Nancy Bristow raised a really great point. I mean why is it we don’t have memorials to those who died in the pandemic and those who fought that pandemic? We’ve got memorials for the soldiers who died in World War I. Well, medical professionals and volunteers knew that they were risking their lives by taking care of the sick, just like soldiers knew they were risking their lives by fighting in the war.
JOANNE: They knew that. The question is if you’re talking about how he remember those people, that’s a different question. That’s a question of how do other people perceive what they’re doing and that risk. And do they understand that there’s literally an invader that’s being attacked?
BRIAN: Right So I get it. So you’re saying that today in an age of antibiotics and where some people of course do die from the flu every year, but where we don’t have millions of people dying, today we just don’t recognize the heroism or those public health officials. Got it.
JOANNE: Or the threat, right? Or the threat. I mean, the fact of the matter is even just this year, there’s this sort of low hum of a refrain this year, of like, hey guys, like this year is a little more serious. Like, it’s a little more serious. People are actually dying. And it’s taken quite a lot for that message to even sort of begin to whisper its way into the public. I mean I just think maybe we do sort of take for granted, just as you’re saying, that well, it’s a disease and diseases have cures.
BRIAN: So your answer, Joanne, is that we’ve failed as historians.
JOANNE: Oh gosh.
NATHAN: That’s a nice optimistic note.
JOANNE: Gee, thanks, Brian.