The Spanish Flu pandemic that began in 1918 was one of the most devastating in human history.
In total, between 20 and 50 million people died over the course of two years — and
a few very famous faces were caught right in the middle of it.
Most famous for Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's novels are on pretty
much every high school reading list, and it's no wonder. Like nobody else, Steinbeck was
able to capture a bygone America, and the lives of Americans who are too often overlooked
by history. But those books came very close to never being written.
Steinbeck was 16 years old in 1918, and by that point he already knew that he wanted
to be a writer. But, to steal an obvious phrase, the best laid plans of mice and men often
go awry — and not only did Steinbeck contract Spanish flu, but he nearly died from it, too.
In fact, his case was so bad that his infected lung filled with fluid, and in order for a
local doctor to get in and drain it, he needed to have a rib removed. Steinbeck survived,
of course, but his missing rib gave him grief for the rest of his life. Always the writer,
he would later recall the experience:
"I went down and down, until the wingtips of angels brushed my eyes."
If ever there were proof that the world can change for want of a nail, it'd be the nameless
man who sent a young ambulance driver named Walt Disney home to recover from a bout of
Spanish flu.
Disney had convinced his parents to let him join the Red Cross's American Ambulance Corps,
changed his age on his documentation, and headed off to Camp Scott near Chicago. He
was there when Spanish flu swept through the facility, and the powers-that-be decided to
send him home. Disney was already deathly ill at the time, and they sent him home only
because the death rate was so high in the hospital, and they had more patients than
they could handle. Several of his friends had already died in hospital care, and Disney
later recalled:
"One guy said to me, [...] 'Can we take you home. You've got a better chance at home.
If we take you to the hospital, you may never come out.' And I said, 'Yes, you can take
me home.'"
So they took him home on a stretcher. Disney's mother nursed him back to health, and caught
the flu herself, for her trouble — although she too survived. By the time Disney was back
on his feet, the Armistice had been signed and the war was over.
During the time in which Spanish flu was spreading across the globe, Mary Pickford and Lillian
Gish were two of the biggest film stars in the world.
"He killed the only thing in life I love. He did that to me, and I don't care what happens
to him now."
When they came down with Spanish flu, their illnesses — along with the closure of movie
theaters — changed the face of the whole industry.
Not only did the pandemic spell the end of mom-and-pop style theaters, but it also changed
the way movie companies were organized, and laid the groundwork for today's industry.
Sadly, Hollywood was particularly hard hit by the consequences of Spanish flu in part
thanks to male movie stars who refused to wear masks — because they wanted to appear
manly and masculine.
One incredibly popular star, Harold Lockwood, didn't survive the pandemic, having died within
days of coming down with the flu. When Pickford caught it soon after, she was rushed to the
hospital alongside her equally famous brother, Jack Pickford. Jack's stay required an operation,
but ultimately, he, Mary, and Gish all survived.
Interestingly, Mary Pickford's 1919 film Daddy Long Legs features a blink-and-you'll-miss-it
nod to Spanish flu. The actress is on the crowded platform of a train station when she
sneezes... and causes a mass panic amongst the crowd.
The Spanish flu reached India on board a military transport ship that had docked in what is
now Mumbai in June 1918. It wasn't long before it had spread across the country — and it's
really no wonder, considering the advice published in The Times of India at the time was "go
to bed and not worry."
Mahatma Gandhi was living in an ashram in western India when he came down with the flu,
and based on what he wrote in letters to his family, it was a severe case indeed. In August,
he wrote in two separate letters that he was "too weak to get up or walk" and wondered
in another:
"Perhaps this will be my deliverance."
Gandhi thought the Spanish flu was a form of penance, delivered by a divine being who
was angry at the world for having strayed so far — specifically, he believed that
it was a divine condemnation of colonialism. Gandhi didn't do himself many favors during
his illness, refusing to obey many of his doctors' orders, because he objected to many
of them — such as drinking milk — on ethical grounds. Ultimately, he did concede a few
of his protests and later recovered — but both his daughter-in-law and grandson ended
up succumbing to the disease.
Leo Szilard might not be a household name, but it's undeniable that, without him, the
world would be a very different place indeed.
Szilard was born in Budapest in 1898, and by the time World War I rolled around, he
was just the right age to be drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army. That didn't happen,
however, because he came down with a nasty bout of Spanish flu that took him out of the
running for active duty.
Szilard survived his illness, and after the war, he headed to Berlin to finish his schooling.
From there, he partnered with Albert Einstein on multiple projects, one of which included
a refrigeration system that would later become the basis for the atomic reactor. Then, in
1933, he came up with the idea for the nuclear chain reaction.
Szilard moved to New York in 1940 and became involved with the United State's nuclear weapons
programs. Crucially, he insisted that all of the program's research be classified, and
that nothing should be published until after the war. As unhappy as he was about the military
applications of the nuclear reactors he helped build, Szilard was instrumental in the development
of the atomic bomb — and in crafting the policies that kept that technology out of
the hands of the Nazis. Quite rightly, the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller later referred
to him as, quote, “the most ingenious person I ever met.”
Amelia Earhart's life story has it all: a shattered glass ceiling, a daring sense of
adventure, and a mysterious disappearance that stunned fans around the globe. She wasn't
always going to be a pilot, though; in fact, Earhart originally trained as a nurse.
As soldiers began to return from the war, Earhart helped the war effort by volunteering
for the Red Cross. While she wasn't originally involved in the medical side of things, she
cooked and handed out meals and medicine to the wounded men.
A year later, she contracted the Spanish flu, and spent much of November and December of
1918 in the hospital. Her bout of flu quickly turned into a bout of pneumonia that was so
severe that she needed to undergo surgery for her sinuses. The result was a lifelong
struggle with chronic sinusitis, which could get so bad that it sometimes necessitated
the wearing of a drainage tube.
Earhart eventually recovered, however, and initially intended on continuing her medical
training to become a nurse. A 10-minute flight on an aeroplane in 1920 changed that, however,
and the rest, as they say, is history.
One strange phenomenon surrounding the Spanish flu is that, despite the fact that it was
so widespread and deadly, few depictions of it exist in contemporary art. It's been suggested
that this might be because most artists were preoccupied with the war. But there's one
major artist who not only depicted the Spanish flu in his work, but survived it, too — Edvard
Munch.
Munch is more well-known as the artist behind The Scream, but he was a wildly prolific artist
who also painted Self-Portrait With the Spanish Flu and Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu.
Munch's art also drew from the illnesses he'd suffered his entire life. He had been diagnosed
with neurasthenia, a disease characterized by heavy fatigue after mental or physical
exertion, and which is often accompanied by hypochondria. To fall ill with a deadly disease
had to be more terrifying for Munch than most, and that sense of terror is reflected in his
work and his writing. As he himself once said:
"Illness, insanity, and death... kept watch over my cradle, and accompanied me all my
life."
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was published four years after the Spanish flu made an appearance
on the world stage, and he wrote much of the work while he was recovering from the illness.
The pandemic is reflected in such lines as:
"He who was living is now dead, We who were living are now dying, With a little patience."
Both Eliot and his wife became sick with the Spanish flu, and even though her case was
much, much worse, they were convinced it had permanently changed them both. As for his
wife, Vivienne, Eliot wrote in a letter that:
"[It] affected her nerves so that she can hardly sleep at all."
But they also believed that the disease had an impact on Eliot's own brain chemistry.
It was his wife who, in her correspondence, wrote:
"His mind is not acting as it used to do."
Read through the lens of terror, illness, and atrophy, The Waste Land is a terrifyingly
relevant piece of literature in the wake of any deadly pandemic.
Woodrow Wilson was president when the Spanish flu descended on a world already reeling from
global conflict, and, according to experts, he absolutely made it worse. As the author
and historian John M. Barry says:
"So to keep morale up, [...] the government lied. […] National public health leaders
said things like, 'This is ordinary influenza by another name.' They tried to minimize it.
As a result, more people died than would have otherwise."
Wilson was in Paris when he caught the flu, and it was so bad that at first, his doctors
didn't even recognize it. In the midst of an intense bout of hallucinations, doctors
briefly suspected that there had been an assassination attempt, and that someone had dosed him with
poison.
Even as he struggled to survive the deadly illness, the public was told that Wilson had
merely come down with a bit of a cold, and that everything was otherwise a-okay. But
everything was not a-okay, and those closest to him noted that something truly strange
was happening in his mind — and that he was never quite the same afterwards.
Wilson's bout of Spanish flu may have had far-reaching consequences, too. Instead of
actively participating in the peace negotiations at the end of the war, he simply agreed to
support Europe's demands for incredibly harsh terms against Germany — and facilitated
a treaty that has been credited for helping start World War II.
When future president and then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt came
down with a case of Spanish flu, the nation was — perhaps predictably — lied to about
it. Even as they were told his illness wasn't regarded as serious, FDR was fighting off
a bout of double pneumonia.
FDR had been traveling across Europe inspecting U.S. troops, and it was on his return to the
States aboard the USS Leviathan in late 1918 that he — and many others on board — got
sick. He was so sick, in fact, that he was unable to walk off the ship under his own
power and needed to be carried ashore. FDR recovered, of course, and infamously came
down with Polio a few years later, but it's entirely possible that neither of those ended
up being a bad thing... historically speaking, that is.
When USA Today polled historians to see which president they thought would be best equipped
to deal with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, FDR was a favorite.
"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself!"
Historian Douglas Brinkley put it this way:
"He really understood how a virus could attack a human body."
That understanding — coupled with his optimism, trustworthiness, and his ability to get people
to volunteer for the greater good — made him one of history's favorite leaders.
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