World War I ended on November 11, 1918 – nine months after the first cases of the so-called “Spanish flu” were reported in the United States. Against the backdrop of war, the 1918 influenza pandemic exploded at a time when people were already experiencing a shortage of daily supplies, facing having loved ones serving overseas and living in a war economy. .
A second global crisis had erupted before the end of the first.
World War I was devastating, resulting in an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide. The deaths from the 1918 pandemic were even more appalling: at least 50 million people, including 675,000 Americans, died from the disease. But the legacy of World War I has eclipsed the pandemic, making the unprecedented loss of life from the flu almost an afterthought.
“When the impact of the flu resolved, people engaged in a kind of collective amnesia,” says Monica Schoch-Spana, PhD, a medical anthropologist specializing in public health emergency preparedness at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. “At the same time, however, there was still the collective trauma of the war. And so you had processes of post-war rituals, memories and monuments. ”
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Investment in World War I memorials
EM Viquesney’s ‘Spirit of the Doughboy’ statue, a tribute to World War I soldiers, outside the Chicago Bears football field, 2014.
Raymond Boyd / Getty Images
For an event to become part of the collective memory, the public must actively engage in remembering it, according to Maria Luisa Lima and José Manuel Sobral in Endangered societies: a multidisciplinary approach. This happens by referencing the event among family members and in daily conversations, as well as commemorating it in monuments, rituals, records and narratives.
“The contrast between the investment in the commemoration of the war and what happened with the Spanish flu is huge,” say Lima and Sobral. They point out that, unlike wars, pandemics do not offer the same “monumental landmarks” that lend themselves to a monument or public commemoration, such as a particular battle or the signing of a treaty.
World War I commemorations appeared quickly in the aftermath of the war – and in various forms. Textbook stories were updated, Veterans Day was established, and monuments and memorials were placed in sites across the country.
In the 1920s and 1930s alone, thousands of monuments and memorials – from plaques and statues to architectural monuments – were erected across the United States by state and local governments, as well as by colleges, businesses, clubs, veterans groups and homes. cult, according to the United States’ WWI Centennial Commission.
One of the most recognizable and widely used World War I memorials is EM Viquesney’s “Spirit of American Doughboy” sculpture. Mass-produced in three different variations, the statue has been placed in parks, town squares and other federal properties in 39 states. At least 145 of these statues still exist today. They all depict a WWI soldier known as “Doughboy” holding a rifle in his left hand and a grenade in his right hand, with his right fist raised in victory.
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1918 flu memorials – far fewer and built later
The grave of Army Soldier Carl Axel Carlson, who died of the 1918 influenza pandemic, is seen among others who suffered a similar fate at a cemetery in Bisbee, Arizona. The train that brought his body back to Bisbee brought the deadly flu with it.
Frédéric J. Brown / AFP / Getty Images
While hundreds of World War I monuments and memorials have been lost in time, very few dedicated structures and sculptures commemorating civilian lives lost in the 1918 pandemic were built in the first place. Some of the closest equivalents are World War I memorials that include soldiers who died of influenza.
The “Flu Epidemic Monument” at Camp Funston in the Fort Riley Military Reservation in Kansas features a pyramid of stacked stones in honor of a unit of medical care soldiers who died in the flu outbreak. The most common iteration is that of World War I memorials which also include the names of soldiers who died of influenza alongside those who perished in combat, such as the stone obelisk at the Camp Merritt military base. in Bergen County, New Jersey.
A small handful of other 1918 pandemic memorials scattered across the country were, for the most part, erected much later – in the 2000s. Several are located in cemeteries or on mass grave sites containing a unknown number of people who died from influenza, including examples in Butler County, PA (erected in 2002); Evergreen Park outside of Chicago (2007), Springdale, Pennsylvania (2013) and Earlington, Kentucky (2019). A few other memorials were erected in 2018, marking the centennial of the pandemic, including those in Camp Devens, Massachusetts and Barre, Vermont.
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The pride of World War I against medical failure
Why such a gap between World War I and pandemic memorials? One factor may be pride: World War I was seen as a show of military force, while the 1918 pandemic was seen as a weakness. Even though American medicine and public health had advanced, the medical field was unable to defeat the deadly strain of the flu.
“At a time when medicine was racking up victories over health problems, this epidemic has clearly challenged medical knowledge and called into question the medical ability to cope with disease,” say Lima and Sobral.
Having very few physical monuments commemorating the 1918 influenza pandemic contributed to its disappearance from public consciousness. But the 1918 pandemic was finally brought back into the limelight – a century later. As the world grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, the 1918 flu offered a historic example of the devastation of a large-scale global health crisis.
READ MORE: See all pandemic coverage here.
