ECHOES OF 1918

It was September when the flu was first mentioned in Concord newspapers. There were 80 cases of it. The next day, there were 102. The day after that, 204.

The worst pandemic since the Middle Ages had reached New Hampshire. More than 2,500 people would die in just four months. Across the country, more than 675,000.

“What New York City is going through now, almost every community in New England went through in 1918,” says Bryon Champlin, an independent historian who has researched and written about the “Great Influenza,” often called the “Spanish flu,” and how it played out in Concord.

The flu, a virulent H1N1 virus, hit the capital city in full force during September and October of 1918. As the gravity of the situation became clear, Champlin says, city officials “closed theaters, soda shops, barbershops and other places where people congregated. Churches discontinued Sunday services. Schools closed and public meetings of all sorts were voluntarily canceled in hopes of slowing the contagion.”

Despite the rising toll, the danger was downplayed. Champlin points to an admonition from Dr. Charles Duncan, a state Board of Health official at the time: “[W]e want a calm, cool public citizen to work with and not one ‘panicky’ and ‘jumpy,’ who will think a hand clap is a clap of thunder.”

But it was a clap of thunder. Champlin says the city’s two hospitals were quickly overwhelmed with patients; an emergency hospital was opened at the Elks Club building. At one hospital, 25 of the 26 nurses got sick and one died. Priests who had been performing last rites died. There was one funeral after the other, sometimes a double funeral for two members of a family. Orphaned children were taken in by neighbors.

The devastation in Concord and elsewhere was part of a “second wave” of the flu. After circulating in a mild form in this country in the spring of 1918, it found its way to Europe with the troops sent to fight in WWI. It mutated there, returning here in the fall as a much more deadly flu. Champlin says, “There was no attempt to flatten the curve. When it peaked, it peaked strongly and fatally, most of its victims young men in the prime of life.” By late winter, though, it had run its course and life began to return to normal.

What is happening now in the pandemic of 2020 is such an echo of the 1918 pandemic that it’s curious that so few people know about it; it seems to have been forgotten. Champlin thinks the reason is twofold: “On the one hand, the big news of that period was WWI, the war coming to an end in November of 1918. The other thing is, I think it was such a traumatic event that people just wanted to put it behind them; they didn’t want to dredge up those memories.”