Civil War Coda: The Sultana

The photograph above, taken on April 25, 1865, is believed to be the last picture of the Sultana, a coal-powered steamer that carried cargo and passengers up and down the Mississippi River.  Two days later, in the pre-dawn hours of April 27,  one and then two more of the Sultana's four boilers exploded, lighting flames all through the ship, which ultimately sank.  

As the photo suggests, the ship was very crowded.  It was designed to hold 376 passengers but at the time carried as many as 2,400.  By sunrise, about 1,800 passengers and crew members had drowned or died of burns. 

The Sultana incident is the most deadly in American maritime history, eclipsing the more often discussed loss of 1,500 lives when the Titanic plowed into an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage from England to the United States in 1912.

Maybe it's proportion.  The Titanic sinking occurred in peacetime, when large-scale deaths were rare.  The Sultana incident followed the Civil War, when the country was reeling from the loss of 620,000 combatants who had died of wounds and disease.  Another couple thousand lost lives may not have seemed to matter so much.

-----

The war had ended earlier that same April.  After several days of useless skirmishes in Virginia, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee answered a message from Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, saying, "I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood."  Two days later, on April 9, Lee signed surrender documents at Appomattox Courthouse. 

Less than a week after that, on April 15, Pres. Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth.  Booth was hunted down and shot dead on April 26.

In the south, Union prisoners were released from Cahaba Prison in Alabama and the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia.  Many made their way by train or on foot to Vicksburg, where they were to be transported up the Mississippi to their northern homes. 

One Union officer agreed that all 2,100 of the camp's remaining residents would be sent north on the Sultana, which already had booked a couple hundred other passengers, overloading it to many times its capacity.  The soldiers, accustomed to crowded prison life and very eager to go home, no doubt  boarded without complaint. 

In exchange for premium pricing from the US Army, the ship's captain agreed to pay a bribe to a Union quartermaster.  All wars attract profiteers, alas.

On April 26, the Sultana docked at Memphis and took on a new load of coal for fuel.  It left that evening and exploded around 2 a.m. after traveling about seven miles north.

Several reasons have been advanced for the explosion, starting with crowding on the passenger decks.  On the other hand, it has been noted that the steamer's cargo hold was largely empty and the overall weight of the ship was not extreme.

In addition, the first boiler to blow had been repaired with a metal patch on its side in its most recent stop at Vicksburg.  The repair may have been done badly.

And finally, the winter of 1864-5 had been an unusually rainy one.   The runoff in the river was much heavier than usual, creating a stronger southbound current against which the Sultana made its way north. 

The current, fed by ice-cold runoff from distant mountains, made survival particularly difficult for the former war prisoners who went into the water.  Most were malnourished and  emaciated, and many were suffering from diseases contracted in prison camps.   And, in that day, few people knew how to swim.  

Boats from shore rescued some people, and another steamer heading south stopped and pulled as many as 150 passengers out of the river.  But most of the passengers and all of the ship's crew died.

Books

The Civil War has been a preoccupation of American historians, professional and amateur, for150 years.  I spent an afternoon recently at the downtown Nashville library, reading from books about the Sultana and its sad end.

From "Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors," (edited by Chester D. Berry, published by the University of Tennessee Press, 2005), comes one many soldiers' stories:

"My first recollection was that I was on my feet and enveloped in a cloud of hot steam, and was considerably scalded in the face.  After the steam had risen I said to Corporal Irons what is the matter.  He said the boat had blown up.  He seemed to be very much excited, and told me they thought they could make it to shore.  These were the last words he said to me, but as the boys kept jumping off from the boat into the river he kept calling for them not to for they would all be saved.

      "I then began to look around to devise some means of escape.  I stepped back to where some of my company's boys were untying a yawl; I thought that I would help them get it down, and then I thought if I did they would all jump for it and perhaps be lost, which I learned afterward was the case.  I then got a shutter and board from off the pilot house and tied them together with a pair of drawers.  By that time the flames had come through.  I then got over the railing behind the wheel house and climbed down to the lower deck.  By this time all was confusion and men were jumping into the river to get away from the flames.  I looked around for a clear space to jump, for I knew that if I jumped in where men were struggling they would seize my board and I would be lost, for I could swim but little.

      "I waited a short time and when there was an opening large enough I threw my board in, jumped on and went down under quite a way, but came up all right and floated away from the boat.  After I had gone four or five rods a bundle of clothing came floating along and I took it in with my right hand and held on to the board with my left.  I then floated with the current. . . .

       "I was picked up four miles below Memphis by two men in a yawl and rowed to a gunboat . . . where I was taken in . . . eleven miles from the disaster.   I wish to state here that there were thirteen of my company on board the Sultana, and but two besides myself were saved."

Daniel Carber

Passengers threw boards, hay bales, doors and shutters into the river, then held onto them to float.  There were fights in the water for these handholds, and the losers drowned.  As people on the Sultana prepared to jump, they found the water crowded with other people, some drowning, and so had to spend time looking for clear spots of into which to leap.

Others were not so fortunate.  The boilers' explosion dislodged large pieces of the cabin walls, which pinned down some passengers who, their colleagues observed, "roasted to death."  Many of the burn victims begged to be thrown into the water to die there rather than endure the pain of the flames.

Some other Sultana titles:

Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy:  American's Greatest Maritime Disaster," Pelican Publishing Company, 1992.   

Alan Huffman, "Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, Harper Collins, 2009.

Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi: The Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865," Naval Institute Press, 1996.

Notes

--Like D-Day veterans or relatives of those who died on 9/11, the Sultana survivors gathered in various cities regularly on the anniversary of its occasion.  The last known survivor, a Midwestern man, died in 1935.

--The remains of the Sultana were located in 1982, under an Arkansas soybean field.  (The river, appropriately called Big Muddy, had changed course over intervening years and deposited so much silt that the Sultana's final resting stop was two miles inland.)  

         The nearby city of Marion, Ark., opened a small museum commemorating the Sultana last year and plans to increase the range and size of its exhibit over time. 

The Election of 1828

The other day I visited Andrew Jackson's estate, the Hermitage, just outside Nashville.

It's a handsome spread, but after I left I found myself thinking more about the presidential election of 1828, which was described in some detail in the associated historical displays.

Here's a bit of a recap of the personalities and the race.

The Candidates

The incumbent president, John Quincy Adams, was the son of John Adams, our second president. The two of them, elites from Massachusetts, and a bunch of Virginia aristocrats had held the presidency since the founding of the republic.  JQA was extremely well educated and had a distinguished career as an American diplomat in Europe. Before becoming president, he served eight years as secretary of state.

Andrew Jackson, born in the Carolinas, was a self-made man.  At 13 he joined a Carolina militia in the American Revolution and then was captured and held prisoner.  By war's end, all his immediate family were dead.  He got a law degree, moved to Tennessee as a prosecutor, bought land, served in public positions and became the general of the state militia.  His national reputation was made in the 10-day Battle of New Orleans, when he led a force that outfoxed and defeated a  much larger British naval and ground assault.


Background

Jackson was nominated for the presidency in 1824 by the Tennessee legislature.  There were four candidates that year; Jackson received the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, but not a majority.  For the first and only time, the election was decided by a vote in the House of Representatives.  Henry Clay, a Virginia candidate who loathed Jackson, threw his support behind Adams, who won.  After the election, Adams made Clay his secretary of state.

Jackson supporters called the result a "corrupt bargain." Jackson resigned his Senate seat, returned home to Nashville and began to campaign for 1828.  His affronted supporters formed Hickory Clubs (Old Hickory was Jackson's nickname) to promote his candidacy.

Adams spent his term in office pushing for transportation improvements and signing an 1828 bill known in the hinterlands as the Tariff of Abominations.  The tariff benefitted New England and disadvantaged southern and western states.  It inflamed America's early battle over whether the federal government or state governments were primary.

This states' rights view was held largely in the western and southern states, including by Thomas Jefferson, who shifted his support to Jackson before his death in 1826; this helped Jackson two years later.


The Campaign

Adams was a brilliant man but not a people person, and certainly not a charismatic leader.  Americans were still finding their footing with the presidential election process, and Adams' view seems to have been that campaigning for office was beneath his dignity.  Given his scholarly character, it has been suggested that he ran in 1824 only because his parents, stern people both, expected him to do so.

Jackson was more motivated, and he almost certainly had a large chip on his shoulder. He entertained influential people in his Nashville home and wrote opinion pieces for newspapers across the country.  His was the first populist campaign in the country, and he made a point of pledging himself to represent the "common folk."

Each candidate was qualified, in his way, and their individual platforms, while different, reflected honest divisions of opinion within the country.


Press Coverage

Newspapers of the day were house organs of political groups.  Both candidates were accused of low behavior, and almost all the accusations were laughable.

--Adams was called a "pimp" for procuring a young American woman's company to the czar during Adams' tenure as ambassador to Russia.  Absolutely false.

--Jackson's mother was described as whore who married a mulatto man (with African as well as Caucasian blood) and had three children by him.  Also false.

--Adams was accused of bringing gambling into the White House.  The evidence included a chess set and a billiards table, the latter of which Adams bought with his own funds.

--Jackson was charged with personally killing six militia deserters in his term as general.  Executing deserters was common in that period, but a cartoon of six black coffins laying the full blame at his feet was pretty harsh.

The most famous charge was that Jackson was an adulterer and his wife a bigamist.  She had left an abusive marriage before they met, and they claimed that they believed her divorce was finalized before they married.  Later, when the divorce was finalized and after Rachel Jackson's first husband had remarried as well, they had another marriage ceremony.  Divorce was controversial then, but by 1828 the Jacksons had been married for 37 years.  Mrs. Jackson died just after the election, apparently of a heart attack for which Jackson blamed her accusers.  He hated them and mourned her for the rest of his life.


Result

With the Virginia support and that of the western states, Jackson won a decisive victory in 1828 and was re-elected in 1832.

As for his part, Adams returned to the House of Representatives, where he served for many years.  To his credit, he spent the rest of his life agitating for the abolition of slavery.


Note

The press of 1828 did not acquit itself well in the Jackson-Adams election.  This year's press coverage also has been a disappointing.  More on that tomorrow.

World Trade Center: From Concept to 2001

The Name

Below is a picture of New York's first World Trade Center building, part of the 1939 World Fair in Flushing Meadows, a neighborhood of Queens. (If you squint a little, you can make out the words near the entry.)

The World Fair was organized during the depths of the Depression with the goal of promoting economic activity.

In fact, the World Trade Center building was an afterthought, put together only after China declined the space allotted for its exhibit.   The empty slot was offered to the International Chamber of Commerce and similar groups.  It was built with the motto of "world peace through world trade."

By the time the fair closed, World War II had begun and the pursuit of world peace through war occupied everyone's attention for the next six years.

After the war, the idea of a World Trade Center lingered in the minds of Gotham leaders. A state agency was created to plan a permanent trade exhibition space in the city for the display and promotion of products for sale and trade.

The trade center never was built because leaders agreed that investments in ports and infrastructure would yield greater benefits.  Today, trade exhibitions in New York mostly are held in the enormous Javits Convention Center on 11th Avenue.

Still, the World Trade Center name animated the imaginations of big thinkers, including uber-planner Robert Moses and businessman David Rockefeller.  Over time, a project came to shape and was planned for lower Manhattan, which was home to many small businesses but was seen as losing ground to newer skyscrapers in Midtown.


The Port Authority 

World Trade Center planning was taken up by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a two-state agency created in the 1921 to develop ports and transit within a 25-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty.

A key piece of real estate, a large two-block train station that anchored a Newark-lower Manhattan train line was acquired along with a bankrupt railroad, now known as the Path (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) in 1962. Many other buildings were condemned, bought and razed -- often over owners' strong objections -- to assemble the final 16-acre site.

What was planned was an eight-building office complex with the two prominent square towers, World Trade Center 1 and World Trade Center 2.  Wags at the time said initial mockups of the towers looked like the packing boxes for the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, Midtown's two most prominent skyscrapers.

The towers, which opened in 1973, were the tallest in the world at their time.  In a sad irony remembered only later, construction plans stressed that either tower could withstand the impact of a plane as large as a Boeing 707.  (There were no Boeing 767 airliners then.)

A Good Idea?

The World Trade Center was an example of city planning writ large.

No agency smaller than the port authority could have pulled the thing off.  It required government involvement to assemble the necessary properties and to sell bonds to fund the construction.  (New York's financial situation was not good at the time; the city nearly went broke in 1975.)

When completed in 1974, the trade center was a collection of big office buildings that happened to house some port authority offices. Despite its name, the project had little if anything to do with trade.  For years, people questioned why an agency whose mandate included ports, airports, tunnels and bridges had got itself into the office-building business.

Early on, the World Trade Center complex had trouble leasing its office space.  It filled up with time, but it is fair to ask whether a similar neighborhood transformation would have happened anyway.

The other notable feature of lower Manhattan is the New York Stock Exchange, the symbolic heart of the city's financial district.  In fact, financial employment went wild in the years after the WTC opened.

According to a 1991 Bureau of Labor Statistics report on New York employment, there were 101,000 banking jobs in the city in 1960.

Thirty years later, banking employment had rise to 166,000, and a new financial category, securities and commodities brokers, accounted for another 129,000 jobs.

At this point, the financial institutions were making very good money.  At least two investment banks planned their own privately funded skyscrapers near the NYSE building.  Others might have done so as well if the World Trade Center had not been built.


Next

We know what happened to the Twin Towers in September, 2001.

On Wednesday, I'll discuss changes to the World Trade Center between 9/11 and the current day.

Carnage on the Somme

 "It is a commentary on modern war that commanders should fear lest the soldiers on each side become friendly . . . . If whole armies fraternised politicians on both sides would be sore set to solve their problems. Yet it is possible that if there had been a truce for a fortnight on the whole trench  line at any time after the Battle of the Somme the war might have ended . . . ."     

Staff Officer,
Suffolk Regiment

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, a five-month slog of trench warfare that utterly changed the British view of World War I.

Commonwealth forces entered the battle confident that their military was superior to those of the Germans or the French, which had been tied up in the attrition battle at Verdun, which lasted even longer, 10 months in all.

Unfortunately, the English planning was flawed.  It underestimated the depth and strength of German fortifications.  The battle plan was understood beforehand by the German commanders.  Even the timing of the Allied attack was revealed by field telephone communications intercepted by the Germans.

The battle started with the British launch of more than 1.7 million shells to soften the German battlements.  There followed wave after wave of infantrymen who faced German shells and lacerating machine gun fire.

By the end of the day the German forces had been moved back a bit, but nothing had been resolved. More than 19,000 British soldiers had died, and more than 38,000 were injured or missing.  The smaller French force, presumably redeployed from Verdun, reported 2,000 casualties.

When all the shooting was over, on November 18, the dead and injured on both sides ran to 1.5 million.

                  "As a matter of fact we have to take special precautions during a battle to post 
                  police, to prevent more unwounded men than are necessary from accompanying 
                  a wounded  man back from the firing line."

 General Douglas Haig

British commander, 

Battle of the Somme

The British army learned things from the battle, but the improvements in armaments and strategy were paid for with the blood of its soldiers and the disillusionment of citizens aghast at the seemingly casual sacrifice of their children's lives.

The Germans may have suffered more over the course of the battle because their supply of young men for cannon fodder was less than that of Britain's empire.

Still, the trench battles continued for another two years.

Below is a pretty good open-source documentary made by the BBC on the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme and what it has meant to the British ever since.

Fathers and Sons: Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

      "Tis easy to see, hard to foresee."

 Poor Richard's Almanack

Benjamin Franklin was possibly the most resourceful of our founders.  Born the son of a candle-maker, with almost no education, he became a writer and printer, the founder of the best newspaper in the country in its time and a prolific inventor.  He established the country's first libraries and was the joint colonial postmaster general, responsible for improvements in mail delivery in the British colonies.

The oldest of Ben's three children, William, was a bastard whose mother's identity remains uncertain.  Ben married a year later and with his wife raised the boy. William was with his father when Ben conducted his famous electricity experiment with a kite and key in the middle of a thunderstorm.

William Franklin

Ben took his son to England in 1757, at least partly to advance William's career.  Five years later, William had become an attorney, had been awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree at Oxford University and, best, had been named, at Ben's request, to the prestigious position of Royal Governor of the New Jersey Colony.

After returning home and seeing his son installed in the new office, Franklin returned to England where he acted as liaison between several colonies and the British government.   As tensions mounted in the restive colonies, Ben came to sympathize with his American fellows and returned in 1775 to participate in the Continental Congress and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

At this most significant juncture in either of their lives, father and son parted ways.

Ben encouraged his son to join the Americans, but William refused and remained a British loyalist. At the beginning of the war, American militias put him under house arrest in New Jersey.  Later he was jailed in Connecticut and finally released in a prisoner exchange to British-held New York, where he became the president of the Board of Associated Loyalists. After the war ended, in 1782, William returned to England and never returned.

Ben spent the war in France as the American ambassador to the country that supported the revolution most.

The break between father and son never really healed.

In England, William became active in the Loyalist community which, given the War of 1812, presumably was pretty active after the end of the American Revolution.

In France, Ben participated in negotiations for the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended the war.  He took a very strong position against offering compensation or amnesty to loyalists like his son.

The next year, William attempted reconciliation in a letter to his father.  Ben responded coolly with his own letter.  "[We] will endeavor, as you propose mutually to forget what has happened relating to it, as well we can," wrote the father.

On his way home from France in 1785, Ben stopped in England for a brief visit with William to resolve legal matters.  It was the last time they saw each other.

Benjamin Franklin died a wealthy man three years later and bequeathed most of his goods to his surviving daughter, her husband and their children. There were other bequests for more distant relatives, and generous gifts for public education and infrastructure.

For William, Ben left very little:  some books and papers, forgiveness of any loans outstanding and a bit of land in Nova Scotia that cannot have mattered much to either of them.

Ben was very clear about his reasons: "The part (William) acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavoured to deprive me of."

Harry Wu, RIP

Hary Wu on a return visit to China

Very few people survive the great outrages of history.  Fewer still stand up and force the world to pay attention.

One of these, Harry Wu, died two weeks ago.

Wu was raised in Shanghai and by age 23 in 1960 considered himself a communist during the period of the country's grotesquely named Great Leap Forward.  As he was completing his college degree in geology, he made two insufficiently servile comments about the elite status of Communist Party members and the USSR's 1956 invasion of Hungary.

For these, he was hustled off to a forced labor camp where he learned that he had received a life sentence. His family did not know what happened to him for years (during which period his father was tortured and a brother was persecuted and tortured until he descended into madness.)  When his stepmother learned his fate, she killed herself.

Wu spent 19 years in 12 camps, being tortured and beaten, working 12-hour shifts in coal mines and fields and augmenting his starvation diet by foraging in rats' nests for concealed seeds.  In 1979, three years after the death of Mao Zedong, Wu was released and returned to the study of geology.

A year later, he was offered a non-paid teaching job in the geology department at the University of California, Berkeley.  He arrived in the U.S. with $40 in his pocket and stayed a week with a sister who had immigrated many years earlier and made clear that he was not welcome in her Bay Area home.

He worked days and slept nights in parks or on commuter trains.  Eventually he got a (probably illegal) job making donuts on the midnight shift, which allowed him to feed himself and sleep in Berkeley libraries during the daytime hours when he was not teaching.

Gradually he shared his labor camp stories with colleagues who encouraged him to speak out in his new country, where a person could say what he wished without being sent to prison.

This became his life's work.  Wu wrote three books about laogai (the name of the Chinese labor camp system, which translates as "reform through work"), the system that enslaved him and millions of other Chinese citizens, many of whom died of starvation and execution and untreated diseases.

One of the books, "Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag," was described this way in a Los Angeles Times book review:

        "Bitter Winds" deserves to be compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag
       Archipelago" as an achingly intimate account of what happened to millions of
       innocent  men and women in the secret penal realm of the People's Republic. And
       there's a strong dose of Kafka and Orwell in Wu's tales of a world so twisted by
       revolutionary ardor that every decent human impulse became a crime.

Starting in 1992, Wu returned to China several times, at great personal risk, to document that the laogai system still was operating.  He demonstrated that the government was harvesting the body organs of dead prisoners for transplants and that officials of the one-child policy were forcing women to abort unapproved pregnancies.

Significantly, he proved that more than a few of the products China was shipping to U.S. under new open-trade policies were manufactured by political prisoners.  This was not what people in the George H.W. Bush administration wanted to hear.

Later, after earning U.S. citizenship in 1994, Wu made another documentation trip in 1995.  This time, he was caught, jailed and sentenced to a 15-year prison term.

I lived in the Bay Area during this period.  People there knew Wu's story, admired his courage and agitated for his release.

Meantime, then-first lady Hillary Clinton was planning to attend a UN women's conference in China, and she seemed to view Wu's situation as an irritating distraction from her travel plans.  Ironically, perhaps, Wu was released after 66 days in prison, almost certainly to placate the Clinton administration.

Once back, Wu founded the Laogai Research Foundation and started a Laogai Museum in Washington, D.C.  He hoped one day to move both to China.

As relations between the U.S. and China became increasingly normalized, Wu's activism came to be regarded as annoying.  The idea here seemed to be this:  Things are better in China now, so why don't you pipe down?

If I had spent 19 years in slave labor camps for no good reason, I don't think I'd be willing to move on so fast myself.

Wu's goal, he said in one speech, was to place the laogai in its historical context -- with Nazi exterminations, Stalinist gulags and the Pol Pot regime's killing of 25 percent of the population of Cambodia.

He did not try to exact vengeance but to set the record straight.  He took an outrageous life experience and forced the larger facts of the matter into the open.  He left this world a better place than he found it.


The Chinese Memory Hole

China has been opening up in recent years, but there are parts of its 20th century history that the ruling Communist Party would like to pretend never happened.

Harry Wu made this difficult for the Chinese leadership, but he was not the only one.

In 1989, Chinese students staged an uprising in Tiananman Square in Beijing.  What they wanted was democracy.  The army was turned on the students, and an unknown number were killed.
         Liu Xiaobo, a university professor, supported the students and for this lost his job.  He wrote books about Chinese human rights violations (published elsewhere of course) and has been in and out of Chinese jails ever since.  In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts and, presumably, to make him prominent enough to avoid the worst depradations of his government.
          Liu is still under house arrest in China.  Chinese schools are still do not teach about the Tiananmen Square uprising.


In 2008 came the release of "Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962," a remarkable compilation of history and personal death records. Its author, journalist Yang Jisheng, spent more than 15 years researching information that might never have come to light otherwise.
          Tombstone is the story of a man-made famine (ascribed to naive-to-totalitarian central planning) in which 36 million Chinese people starved.  Later commenters have suggested the death toll was greater by several million or more.
          Tombstone of course is banned in China, but a version was published in western countries in 2012. Yang remains in China, but two months ago the government denied him the right to visit the U.S. and receive an award for his book.

Last year, I wrote about Ai WeiWei, a prominent Chinese artist who has been beaten, jailed and harrassed.
           Also last year, a dissident journalist trying to leave the country was tracked down in Thailand, returned to China and jailed.
           Last year and the year before, Hong Kong students mounted massive and increasingly violent protests against China's suppression of democratic elections.  The concept, when Britain turned Hong Kong over to China, was "one country, two systems," but Beijing seems not to be totally on board with the two-systems part of the deal.


Note

Brave Chinese individuals continue to resist a top-down government that hides unpleasant truths.  But the truth will come out eventually.

As of this year, more than 300,000 Chinese students are enrolled at American universities, and thousands of others study at schools in other Western countries.

While those students are here, they have access to websites of Chinese commentary that are blocked inside China.  They have access to news reports and histories of post-war China that are not available at home. While they study abroad, they can observe other government systems and consider what changes they might like to see in their own country.

Herbert Hoover in Belgium

Herbert Hoover, at right

Do you know why so many schools, parks, and streets in Belgium are named after Herbert Hoover?

One hundred years ago, Belgium was in a perilous situation.  It had declared itself neutral in World War I but was invaded anyway by a German army on its way to France. The Germans killed civilians, smashed what had been a healthy economy and looted Belgium of everything of value, including food.

A future U.S. president, Herbert Hoover, was in England at the time.  He took up the Belgian cause, employing his engineering skills and boundless energy to raise relief funds and direct food supplies to the Belgian people.

Three decades later, after the end of World War II, Hoover went to Eastern Europe and took up the same cause.

Whatever you think of Hoover's political career, he deserves to be remembered, here as well as in Belgium, as an honorable humanitarian.

I have posted an article about his World War I efforts in my companion blog, theidiosyncratist.tumblr.com.

Stories from the Flu Pandemic

from flu.gov

In the fall of 1918, a flu pandemic swept the world.  In the United States, an estimated 25 percent of the population fell sick and 675,000 people died.

Curiously, the youngest were among the most vulnerable, particularly young adults.  Older Americans seemed to have acquired a certain immunity during an earlier flu season before the turn of the century.

In 1918, doctors believed the flu was a bacterial infection.  In fact, it was a virus, but viruses were little understood at the time.  The distinction made no difference: There were no medicines in 1918 to treat infections of either kind.  Treatment consisted of rest, aspirin and patent medicines.

People retreated to their homes.  Public gatherings were cancelled, many schools were closed and church attendance stopped for several months.  Cities including San Francisco required everyone to wear gauze masks in public and jailed those who did not wear such masks.  In retrospect it was revealed that gauze masks offered little if any protection.

A New York mailman, from archives.gov

Family Stories

There are a few oral history sources of people's memories of the 1918 flu.  I culled the quotes below from flu.gov and historymatters.gmu.edu.  They are lightly edited but intact in substance.

From Pennsylvania:

     -- "My grandmother had a separate room curtained off when seven of their children got sick with the pandemic flu.  When she entered the room, she wore gauze over her nose and mouth.  Of the seven children that got sick, four of them died . . . . My aunt said that she knew when one of them was not going to live because her mother would sit with the child in the family's rocking chair and sing to him/her.  The rocking chair would creak and when it stopped, she knew they were gone."

From Missouri:

     -- A younger daughter stayed home in December 1918 when her parents and older siblings went for a sleigh ride.  Afterward, "all four children caught the flu; all four died within one week.  It was so cold they put the bodies outside.  Before he died, one of the boys said to 'just put me outside, I will join the others in a few days.'"


From South Carolina

     -- "My grandfather William, a merchant, met his wife Lily at a church gathering.  They had five children, three boys and two girls.  William registered for the draft but was not called to serve.  His business was very prosperous and became more so when the flu epidemic began -- due to increased demands for his livery (taxi) service.  As soldiers returned home with the flu, William picked them up from the train station.  As the numbers of flu stricken soldiers grew, he stopped charging for this service.
         "Sadly William contracted the flu and died in January 1919 at the age of 38.  Lily never remarried and life was very hard for the widowed mother and their children."

From Kentucky, a 95-year-old coal miner's memories:

     "And every, nearly every porch that I'd look at had -- would have a casket box sittin' on it.  Men were a diggin' graves just as hard as they could and the mines had to shut down there wasn't nary a man, there wasn't a mine arunnin' a lump of coal or runnin' no work.  Stayed that way for about six weeks."

From Colorado:

      -- Above is the burial site of an entire family lost:  two parents and their children aged 19, 16, 10, 8 and 4 years old.  (The family name was misspelled on the tombstone.)


A Nurse's Story

Nurse Carla R. Morrisey wrote an article, "The Influenza Epidemic of 1918," that is part of the Navy Department Library.  In it, she recalls what she was told by her great aunt, also a nurse, of caring for sick sailors at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois.  Here are some excerpts:

"With a room of 42 beds and twice that many sick sailors, Josie often worked 18 hours a day. 'As the boys were brought in we would put winding sheets on them even if they weren't dead.  You would always leave the left big toe exposed and tag it with the boy's name, rank and next of kin.' As one boy lay dying in bed, one waited on a stretcher on the floor for the bed to empty.  Each morning as the ambulance drivers would bring in more sick boys they would carry the dead bodies out.   Josie often said she felt sorry for the poor boy on the bottom. . . . As the weeks dragged on the truck loads of caskets left daily for the train station to destinations listed on the 'tag' as next of kin.

"Nursing was nine-tenths of the battle in recovering from influenza.  Since there were only palliatives for the flu and pneumonia it developed into, doctors were not the essential ingredient in fighting the disease . . . . Josie would work endless hours trying to relieve the high fevers and nosebleeds before the lungs filled with blood and face turned blue."


Conclusion

There have been many advances in medical treatment since 1918.  Vaccines and retroviral medicines have taken most of the sting out the flu.  Polio vaccinations, developed in the early 1950s, eradicated a childhood disease that killed thousands and paralyzed many thousands more in the United States, including an American president.  Worldwide, polio has been defeated almost everywhere.

On the whole, we are much healthier than people in 1918, but other challenges -- malaria, chikungunya, Ebola, Lyme disease -- are with us.  With time, new diseases are sure to arise.