In the fall of 1918, seven young people were photographed wearing masks lined up near a railroad track in Mill Valley, California. One woman wore a sign around her neck: “Wear a Mask or Go To Jail.” The catalog record associated with the photograph lists the date, November 3, 1918, the photographer, Raymond Coyne, the title, “Locust Avenue, Masks On,” and a caption: “A group of people standing outdoors wearing masks over their mouths. This was probably during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.”
In late spring 2020, in the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, this photograph, available from the Mill Valley Library Historical Reading Room, as well as the phrase, wear a mask or go to jail, circulated widely through social media and in other publications. Masks and shirts with this slogan were available for purchase from numerous online vendors. The photograph and phrase have also been referenced in articles examining masks in 1918 as examples of health policy and resistance to mask wearing.
When we began our research on flu masks in May 2020, we hoped to contribute to scholarly discourse endorsing the use of masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Our research on mask mandates in American cities, on enforcement measures, on popular responses, and on the role of public health officials used empirical evidence and scholarly analysis to reinforce the essential message in summer and fall of 2020 that wearing masks in indoor spaces would slow the spread of disease, improve public health, and shorten the pandemic.
As we approach the third anniversary of the first widespread mask requirements in American history since 1918, we find ourselves rethinking the connections between historical analysis and contemporary behavior. Whereas three years ago we looked for ways to use history to urge changes in public behavior, the most recent debates about masks have raised questions about effectiveness that we thought had been resolved early in the pandemic. We now look back to the history of 1918 with a different question: how can we use history to understand collective and individual behaviors that are inconsistent with, and even directly oppositional to, scholarly consensus about best practices? This photograph of seven masked individuals, one wearing a sign, “Wear a mask or go to jail,” suggests more complex meanings to us now as the question of masking shifts from dealing with the current pandemic to anticipating the next one.