First off, I have nothing new to say about this topic. I am not a professional historian; I am a high school history teacher who was lucky enough to be trained by some amazing historians at a public university in Massachusetts.
But I may be the only person in your social media circles to point this out. So here goes.
When I teach my elective on the World Wars, I spend time on the interwar period, from 1919-1939. In the American societal imagination, the "Roaring Twenties" was a decade dominated by films, flappers, and flaunting the 18th Amendment. All cares were thrown to the wind.
The Great War? Over!
The Drys? Horsefeathers!
The Spanish Flu? Gone!
This rendering of American social history, like any other, is warped in some way. Like the Mercator projection of the world map, it distorts some aspects of the truth to make a clearer, more easily digestible picture. Let me take that last point above and expand on it.
When I first did my research for the World Wars elective, I was sure I was wrong on the following fact. It simply could not be that professional historians put the global death count for the 1918 Flu Pandemic between 50 million and 100 million people. Yet no matter where I looked, those numbers popped up again and again. Total deaths from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, globally: 50 million minimum, 100 million maximum.
When I tell this to my students, the ones who are paying attention snap upright.
"Miss DiTullio! How is that reasonable? How can they not know for sure how many people died?"
We then break it down:
- The Great War (later renamed World War I) was just about to end, and physical devastation, as well as physical exhaustion, reigned across Europe and its colonial territories. The last thing on most people's minds as a pandemic and a war ravaged their region was a careful accounting of the dead.
- Speaking of colonial territories, the people who had been called on or forced to service their colonial rulers' national needs during the war were returning from where they had served, some of them from European battlefields, and they brought the virus with them.
- Again on the point of colonies, European countries saw no problem with neglecting their colonial subjects, who were more susceptible to European diseases if they had had little previous contact with Europeans, or did not have the hospitals and medical infrastructure that the defenders of colonialism swore existed. (For example, 22% of native Samoans died in the pandemic due to colonial neglect and malpractice.)
You see it, right? The perfect storm for a pandemic.
But back to the Roaring Twenties.
We remember the fun parts of this period. The parties, the speakeasies, the hats and dresses. But as any writer of this Lost Generation has told you, as any person who had experienced trauma in the endless cataclysms of 1914-1919 could have told you, it was all a farce. Were they right? For some people, no--for others, yes.
But, you might say, why should we have to remember the horrors of makeshift hospitals, of hundreds of bodies in Philadelphia piling up each day that hateful year, or of people young and old gasping for breath as they slowly drowned in their own lung fluids?
This is what history can teach us: We have faced cataclysms before, and not all of us survived. Not all of us made it out whole. So we have to take new cataclysms (whether they be war, pandemic, or economic collapse) seriously.
The study of history can teach us to listen to the experts who back up their advice with evidence. The study of history can teach us to value the helpers who sacrifice their time, efforts, money, and selves to save lives. The study of history can teach us to look for who is being left out of the life-saving efforts, and to not leave them behind.
The study of history can help us to do better as humans in the face of the unimaginable.