Twentieth Century Blues
What was the aftermath of the 1918 pandemic really like?
On October 25, 1918, an alcohol-fueled exodus began in Philadelphia. Thousands of men and women lined up and boarded ferries to cross the Delaware River, headed for Camden’s waterfront. The bars and saloons in Philly were closed because of the influenza pandemic, but that day Camden’s bars and saloons re-opened, and so the city’s revelers turned east. In Camden, “veritable bedlam” ensued, as the “thirsty visitors” disembarked in search of liquor. The Trenton Evening News described the situation as a “wild orgy” and a “disgraceful debauch.” Intoxicated crowds “staggered over the sidewalks, bottles in their hands.” “Every one [was] apparently determined to get drunk in the shortest possible time,” the Evening News observed.
Ten hours later, the saloons were shut in an attempt to control the chaos. Camden’s short-lived celebration became fodder for pro-Prohibition newspaper columnists, who argued that the scene proved outlawing alcohol was necessary to curb crime (a measure to make Camden “dry” failed to pass that November, but Prohibition would become national law in 1920). When Philadelphia’s bars were re-opened on October 30, police officers were assigned to guard each saloon “to thwart undue enthusiasm” and to “prevent repetition of the incidents enacted in Camden.”
Philadelphians’ “undue enthusiasm” seems to be an example of the kind of unhinged excess that some of us imagine is waiting on the other side of Covid-19. This Roaring 20s hypothesis is rooted in the idea that now we can better understand why the sequined indulgences of the 1920s followed on the heels of a pandemic; after a period of lockdown and fear, the prospect of drinking, carousing, and dancing is much more enticing than it was before. But did people leap from wartime quarantine straight into parties and glitter and champagne and joy? What happened when restrictions were lifted and case numbers began to drop?
It’s hard to cleanly parse the difference between celebration that erupted in 1918 because of the pandemic’s end and celebration that erupted because of the war’s end. People at the time often understood the pandemic to be part of the country’s struggle in World War I; they talked about it using military language; they blamed its emergence in the U.S. on the Germans. And they counted soldiers and sailors who had died from the flu among the war dead. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some of the end-of-the-war catharsis was also end-of-the-plague release, especially for American civilians for whom the pandemic became the primary source of hardship and loss during the war. The ending of the worst of Philadelphia’s bout with Spanish flu happened to coincide with the armistice; on October 31, the Inquirer reported that there had been 11,811 local deaths from the disease since September 30, but that October represented the pandemic’s grisly peak.
When news of the armistice reached the city on November 11, the Inquirer said the public celebration “surpassed any event in history” in Philadelphia. It began in the early hours of the morning with whistles, cannons, tin horns, and church bells, all clanging in recognition of the new peace. As people woke up and learned that the war was over, they “left their beds with tumbled hair and sleepy eyes,” and began to march toward Center City, where confetti rained down on their heads like snow, rockets and lanterns and lamps made the air glow, and “many sang, without shame, with streaming eyes.” People banged on dishes and kissed the Liberty Bell and waved flags and draped their trucks in bunting. Shops and schools and workplaces were closed. People were so tightly packed together in front of City Hall that “a light object tossed into the crowd was bandied about like a floating trifle on the surface of rough water.”
Philadelphia’s spontaneous victory parades were preceded by a similar spontaneous celebration on November 7, when false reports about the war’s ending spread across the country. From Chicago to Baltimore, Louisville to Boston, Americans reacted with unrestrained glee to this initial news; the New York Times reported that joyful New Yorkers refused to accept that the news wasn’t true, tearing up newspapers with headlines that announced the celebration was premature. The fact that so many cities had already spent a jubilant day in the streets on November 7 doesn’t seem to have stopped any of them from doing it again on November 11—which is its own clue to how much people needed to get out of their houses and commune with their neighbors over common cause. Despite the elation over the armistice, the influenza pandemic did not disappear in 1918; just as Covid-19 has, outbreaks flared in different cities at different times, and scanning headlines from 1919 into the early 1920s reveals that some people were still dying from the flu even as Prohibition passed and America entered a new era.
In the 1933 movie Cavalcade, which begins on New Year’s Eve 1900 and traces the lives of two British families over three decades, one of the characters, Fanny, sings a melancholy tune called “Twentieth Century Blues” at a jazz club while wearing a collar of beaded feathers, carrying a feathered fan, and leaning on a white piano. The lyrics are dark and her voice is mournful: “What is there to strive for, love or keep alive for… Nothing to win or to lose, it’s getting me down. Blues, escape those dreary twentieth-century blues.” Cavalcade dramatizes the sweep of the first 33 years of the 20th century in the U.K., and the movie’s conclusion is that the years after World War I were full of vice, disorder, and disintegrating morality. Fanny’s performance at the club appears amid a montage of dire headlines clearly linked to the cultural tumult of the 1920s.
Like so much literature and film about this period that would come later, Cavalcade doesn’t mention influenza. When Variety reviewed the film in 1933, the writer commended its thoroughness: “Nothing of world importance is lost sight of.” This kind of absence is why some historians have labeled the 1918 pandemic “forgotten,” a question about why there weren’t more novels and songs and movies made about the flu (there are a few exceptions, like Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel) when the flu killed more than twice as many people as the war had. There are many answers to this question, none of them entirely satisfactory, but I think it has much to do with our human preference for untimely death that arrives with a defined cause, attached to a heroic crusade or collective ideal we can use to make sense of the senseless. Disease doesn’t offer the condolence of easy meaning to survivors or to artists, but wars, even hapless wars like the Great War, do.
An example of the ways that the plague of 1918 could puncture the war’s narrative comes in Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which closes with its protagonist, Miranda, in a hospital ward, fighting to recover from influenza in the fall of 1918. From her bed, she hears the bells and songs of the armistice celebration, but the jubilation registers differently in her delirious ears. To her, “the sound of rejoicing was a clamor of pain,” “hopeless voices” asking “Oh say, can you see?” Miranda hears the discordant note in the swell of joy; she “smells death” in the room with her, and she seems conscious in a way that her merry compatriots are not and cannot be in this moment that their bliss is the bliss of a people whose abandon has come at a terrible cost.
One of Cavalcade’s most affecting scenes takes place at Trafalgar Square, on the night that Britons took to the streets of London to celebrate the armistice in November 1918. The matriarch of the family, Jane, whose son has just been killed in the war, wanders into the singing crowds, and for a few moments the camera freezes on her face, pale and shocked and sad, one lost woman swaying on the spot while everyone around her carries on shouting and grinning and pushing, oblivious.
Watching Jane as she halfheartedly begins to sing along, the strain of her grief still visible in her eyes, is a reminder about the complicated reality of what the immediate aftermath of our own ongoing crises will look like. It might look like the spontaneous street celebrations that swept the country after Joe Biden’s victory. It might look like packed clubs and grandiose parties and binge drinking and the pursuit of pleasure. It might look like diversion and delighted excess, leaving future scholars to gawk at what seems to be mutual amnesia. But I think this idea that a crowd in exultation is a crowd unencumbered by tragedy is too simple; it is not only that every happy drove has its Janes, reluctant participants whose sorrow is magnified by the heights of the mood around them. It is also that public joy can act as a mask or a distraction. And sometimes, public joy—even when unbridled and loud, and maybe especially then—can be an expression of private pain.
Miranda’s unease during the armistice celebrations, her recognition that “no more war, no more plague” will be followed by “dazed silence,” doesn’t mean she can’t imagine a different tomorrow, a tomorrow that holds her suffering but also her stubborn will to live. “Now,” she thinks, “there would be time for everything.”