March 10, 2021 • 36 mins
The comparison of the modern pandemic to the 1918 pandemic continues in part two. This time, the show covers ventilation, supply shortages, and vaccines.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Okay, if
you have missed our previous episode, we are revisiting the
(00:22):
flu pandemic, which we previously covered on the show. In
that episode, looking back on it, it's mostly just it's
an overview of the disease itself and it's international spread
that's most of its focus. That's not at all how
I would have approached that topic today after having lived
(00:43):
through the COVID nineteen pandemic for the last year. So
in part one of this episode, we talked a lot
about masks, uh and how they were used in the
flu pandemic and the general lack of an organized national
response in the United States. When I started on this,
I did not think those two things were going to
(01:04):
fill up an entire episode, but they did so uh
we made it a two part or I made it
a two parter. Today we are taking a shorter look
at a wider range of things that have caught my
attention over the last year and raised my curiosity about
how they compared to what happened in nineteen eighteen and
(01:24):
really nineteen nineteen and a little into nineteen twenty. Also, so,
something that's become increasingly clear over the course of the
COVID nineteen pandemic is that the virus spreads easily in
poorly ventilated areas. We have seen outdoor vaccine clinics and
outdoor dining and schools having class outside or even just
keeping windows open, plus discussions about what to do in
(01:47):
places where the windows cannot be opened, and at what
point the enclosure around an outdoor dining location isn't any
different from being indoors. Yeah, that's that's been a whole
process to Yeah, I feel like us you have been
asleep for the last twelve months. You have heard some
or all of these conversations in the public square, by
which I mean everywhere everywhere. Yeah. So there was also
(02:12):
a big focus on ventilation in the US, and really
even a bigger focus. The Anti Tuberculosis League distributed signs
that read quote keep your bedroom windows open, prevent influenza, deeumonia, tuberculosis.
As we noted in Part one, San Francisco ordered the
street cars to keep their windows open unless it was raining,
(02:35):
and the Board of health recommended that anything that could
not be moved outside in San Francisco be canceled. One
of the very most common public health recommendations nationwide during
the nineteen pandemic was to get plenty of fresh air
and to avoid crowded, stuffy indoor spaces. Some of this
(02:56):
was a response to the pandemic, but it was also
connected to an ongoing overall trend of seeing fresh air
as necessary to good health all the time, even when
there was not a disease outbreak. The fresh air movement,
established in the mid nineteenth century, was focused not just
on the health benefits of fresh air in general, but
also on taking children from urban areas, many of whom
(03:20):
were living in poverty, for outdoor experiences in the country
where they could breathe fresh, wholesome air. So at first,
this movement was rooted in the idea that my asthmas
or bad air were what caused disease, But around the
eighteen eighties, medical science built on the work of people
like Louis Pasteur and Robert Coke to conclude that microscopic pathogens,
(03:44):
rather than bad air, were what caused disease. But since
some of these pathogens seemed to be airborne. We now
know that some of them are airborne. Even as the
myasthma theory fell out of favor, this focus on fresh
air really did not. Fresh air also was not just
a preventative. It was also used as a treatment for
(04:06):
respiratory diseases, in particular tuberculosis. I feel like you see
this in all kinds of of older movies and books,
where it's like they took ill so they were sent
to the shore for fresh air. We have had it
come up in many episodes of the show when we
talked about people's biographies. The first really effective treatment for
tuberculosis was the antibiotics streptomycin, developed in nineteen For decades
(04:31):
before that point, tuberculosis treatment typically involved being sent to
a sanatorium, where people got plenty of rest and ate
nutritious food, and got lots of fresh air, including sleeping outside.
The idea that ventilation was generally necessary for healthy bedrooms
and other parts of your home that was also well
(04:51):
established by the late eighteen hundreds. For example, an eighteen
eighty nine article in Ladies Home Journal, which was written
by Kate Ups and Clark read quote, windows in sleeping
rooms should be kept wide open as much of the
time as possible when the apartments are unoccupied, and while
other chamber works should be done as soon as it
(05:12):
can be managed. After breakfast, Beds should be left to
air several hours if they can be conveniently allowed. The
air in bedrooms is often obscurely foul because the bed
does not get proper airing. People also slept on sleeping
porches or intense Wealthy people who had enough room for
(05:33):
it had just entire open air bedrooms built onto their houses,
who are living Rivendell style. I also, um just really
love the phrase obscurely foul, and I'm going to claim
that for my autobiography. UM. One article that has gone
viral during the COVID nineteen pandemic contends that steam radiators,
(05:56):
which are prevalent in a lot of older buildings in
the US, trace back to the pandemic. The basic idea
was that the radiator would intentionally make apartments and other
homes too hot to be comfortable. The solution open the window,
which would both cool things off and bring in fresh
air from outside. Yeah. Part of this whole argument is
(06:17):
that the reason that radiators are often under the windows
is because you were supposed to open the windows, but
really also like that was the coldest part of most rooms,
so it made sense to put the radiator there. And
also like the space under a window didn't have a
lot of other use a lot of the time, like
definitely more complicated than you're just supposed to leave the
(06:39):
window open. However, in addition to all that, the steam
radiator was invented in the mid nineteenth century, and over
the next couple of decades they were refined to a
design that still exists in many homes today. They are
in my home here, in the home I lived in
before this one. They were already an increasingly popular method
(07:02):
of home heating well before the nineteen eighteen pandemic started.
It is definitely true that a lot of these earlier
radiator systems really overheated and in some cases still overheat
people's living spaces. But another big reason for that is
that the first thermostat used for home heating was not
introduced until nineteen oh six. Before that, and then until
(07:25):
people retrofitted their older systems with new thermostats, people had
to adjust their furnaces and boilers manually, and in a
lot of multi unit buildings. There was just no way
for people in individual units to adjust their boilers and
their radiators at all. So, while it's possible that the
pandemic accelerated some of these strands that were already under way,
(07:49):
radiators and fresh air as a health necessity like those
were already really well established. Also, just in case you
go looking around for it, snopes dot com has rated
this claim about steam radiators in the nineteen eighteen pandemic
as true. But most of the articles claiming that the
nineteen eighteen flu pandemic led to too hot radiator systems
(08:11):
all traced back to the same person, and we haven't
been able to confirm this idea through any other sources. Yeah,
there's like one person who's making that argument from what
I can tell, and a lot of other places picking
that same argument up. Moving on, during COVID nineteen, we
have seen a huge trend and people working from home
(08:31):
if their jobs are conducive to doing that. There really
were not nearly as many jobs that met that criteria
in nineteen eighteen, So a bigger trend in nineteen eighteen
was people just not going to work even though they
were not being paid because they were afraid of getting
sick and dying. In a lot of industries, concrete numbers
(08:52):
on this are hard to track, but anecdotally, absentee is
um was really high in businesses that weren't shut down
because of the pandemic. One industry that did keep good
records with shipyards. Shipyard workers were essential, especially in the
context of the war, and many shipyards had medical staff
on site, even as the pandemic led to such an
(09:14):
enormous shortage of medical workers. But in New England shipyards
the rate of absentee is um was often around fifty. Yeah,
some of those surely would have been folks who were sick,
but others were folks who were like not, I'm not
not doing it and other news. Remember when the COVID
nineteen pandemic started and nobody could find toilet paper or flour. Yes,
(09:36):
and there are still things I would want from the
grocery store that like just did still have that day
they're out of Uh. There were also shortages in nineteen eighteen,
as I started to wonder, but it was really not
necessarily because of the flu pandemic. Since the pandemics started
near the end of World War One, A lot of
basic necessities were already being rationed, so in general, things
(10:01):
like food and fuel were already in short supply because
of the war, so it's likely that existing shortages made
the pandemic more difficult, rather than the pandemic causing a
lot of shortages. Similarly, it's kind of hard to pinpoint
the impact of the pandemic on the US economy or
the global economy because it is largely overshadowed by the
(10:23):
economic impact of the war and then demobilization when the
war ended. Yeah, that's kind of like a thing where
the onion has two layers, but the layers have fused
and kind of crossed over into one another. You can't
really keeel them apart. The general conclusion is like the
pandemics impact on the economy, which is a nebulous thing,
(10:44):
was more shorter term and and more confined to specific
industries than like the total wartime and then demobilization impact.
One actual shortage that was connected to you the pandemic
was coal. Coal production in the US dropped by as
much as a sixth due to illnesses and absenteeism, and
(11:08):
this in turn created problems for the steel industry, railroad shipping,
and for heating and electricity, leading to a series of
government inquiries into the matter. In some cities, health authorities
took steps to make sure that quarantined families had enough
coal to heat their homes. So aside from this, there
was huge demand for every over the counter cold and
(11:32):
flu remedy in existence, along with disinfectants. None of that
seems really surprising to mean. People bought up all the
stock at their local pharmacies and drug stores of all
of these products. There was also a massive run on atomizers,
which people would use to miss themselves and the people
around them and the environment where they were. Sometimes these
(11:54):
were just spilled with water to keep the nasal passages moist,
but there were also anti septics and supposedly anti flu
preparations that people would missed with their atomizers. So we
are going to take a quick sponsor break, and then
we're going to talk about some vaccines. We mentioned in
(12:20):
part one of this episode that there was no vaccine
for influenza in and that before the pandemic, researchers thought
the culprit for the flu was a bacterium called Piper's
bacillus that was also known as Bacillus influenze. However, that
lack of knowledge did not stop health authorities from trying
(12:44):
to create vaccines and vaccinate people against the disease in
en and in some cases these vaccines were meant to
try to prevent bacterial pneumonia. This was a secondary infection
that did cause a lot of the pandemics, deaths and
other situations, though doctors really believe that they were targeting
the actual flu with their vaccines, or they were just
(13:07):
desperate enough to save people's lives that they were willing
to pretty much try anything. Hundreds of thousands of doses
of these vaccines, possibly more than a million doses were
administered during the pandemic. The federal government and the US
Public Health Service weren't really involved with this and didn't
create any kind of national development, testing, or distribution plan
(13:29):
for these vaccines. Instead, multiple different researchers and institutes were
working on this as quickly as they could, including the
Rockefeller Institute, the Pasteur Institute, and the Army Medical School.
State and local health departments were on the case as well.
William H. Park at the New York City Health Department
developed a vaccine that used heat killed fifers Bacsilus. In
(13:52):
early October nineteen eighteen, the Army Medical School created one
as well in Philadelphia. Doctor see why White created a
vaccine that combined killed bassillous influenze and two different strains
of new macaca. The list goes on and on. Over All,
the methods for creating and testing these vaccines were not
(14:12):
scientifically very rigorous. Even an established research centers. Timelines were
rushed and abbreviated. The very basic steps of killing a
bacterium and making it into an injectable form were not
all that difficult. So all kinds of people, with varying
levels of skill and experience, we're all working on this,
(14:34):
and in some cases we're making vaccines that were then
actually administered to people. These vaccines could not prevent the
flu though, since they had nothing to do with the
influenza virus, but they could potentially prevent bacterial pneumonia. Studies
into whether they actually did were also all over the place.
Article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases looked at thirteen
(14:56):
different vaccine studies that took place during the pandemic. None
of them were double blind or randomized, and their methods
were inconsistent, but Overall, this report estimated that the vaccines
used among civilian populations were thirty four percent effective at
preventing secondary pneumonia and showed a forty two percent reduction
(15:18):
in case fatality rate. In military populations, those numbers were
fifty seven percent and sevent Those thirteen studies do not
represent all the different vaccines that were in use, though,
and some of the papers that were published at the
time paint a far less rosy picture than that, one
(15:38):
that suggests that some of the vaccines did have some efficacy,
at least in treating secondary infections. For example, in nineteen nineteen,
the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results
of a vaccination effort using a vaccine that was supplied
by Dr. F. O. Tawny, who was the chief of
the laboratory of the Cargo Health Department. The recipients were
(16:03):
all in patient residence at a mental hospital, so that
had some medical ethics questions as well. This vaccine contained
Bacillus influenzae, four different types of new moccoci and two
types of Streptococcus. It's a lot in this case. More
(16:24):
vaccinated people developed influenza and secondary pneumonia, and more vaccinated
people died than unvaccinated people. The American Medical Association was
generally pretty pessimistic about the efficacy and the promise of
these vaccines during the pandemic, and just to be clear,
(16:44):
the preponderance of different vaccines in which were put into
use just a few months after the disease started to
spread was largely because the process of developing and testing
a vaccine wasn't yet standardized, and the development and testing
procedures that it exists we're often skipped over because the
situation was so dire, but that is not why vaccines
(17:06):
for COVID nineteen have been developed surprisingly quickly. The COVID
nineteen vaccines have built on years, or in some cases, decades,
of existing research into viruses, vaccines, and manufacturing methods. This
includes research into two other coronaviruses, which cause stars and
mers RNA. Vaccine technology has also been in the news
(17:27):
a lot, but it's been going on way before this
for more than a decade. Yeah. A big reason things
have gone so quickly with COVID vaccines is money. Governments
and philanthropists have funded vaccine research. Governments have also pre
ordered vaccines in bulk so that pharmaceutical companies are not
running the financial risk of making a vaccine that it
(17:49):
turns out nobody actually wants to buy. The influx of
funding has meant that pharmaceutical companies are willing and financially
able to work a lot faster and to run multiple
trials in parallel. That is something that would go a
lot more slowly without all that money. Okay, So moving on.
(18:09):
Something that didn't come up at all zero times in
our original episode on the nineteen eighteen flu was the
fact that there was a mid term election in nineteen eighteen.
And uh, it seems like a little bit of a
weird omission having lived through November. But if you're looking
at it not having had the hind sight of an
(18:30):
election year during a pandemic, it just may not be
the thing that bubbles up now. In nineteen eighteen, voting
in general was most accessible to white men in theory,
under the fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, quote, the rights
of citizens of the United States to vote shall not
be denied or abridged by the United States or by
(18:51):
any State on account of race, color, or previous condition
of service sude. But in practice, discriminatory voting laws made
it much harder or even impossible for most people of
color to vote. Indigenous people and many Asian people were
not considered citizens, and the Nineteenth Amendment had not been
passed yet, so women had the right to vote in
(19:11):
some places but not in others. In November of nineteen eighteen,
the pandemic had largely peaked in the eastern part of
the US, and many Eastern cities and states had returned
or were returning to business as usual, so effects on
the election there were pretty minimal, but in the Midwest
and the West Coast, the pandemic flew was still spreading rapidly.
(19:33):
Especially in these areas, candidates did a lot more of
their campaigning by mail and gave interviews in newspapers. This
was especially true in places where large gatherings and door
to door canvassing were banned for the sake of public health,
and sometimes these bands led to accusations of partisan interference.
For example, Democratic Party leaders in New York were outraged
(19:56):
when an all Republican board of health ordered the Democrat
at a candidate, Alfred E. Smith, could only give a
planned speech if it were moved to an open air location.
As for election day itself. People in high risk areas
tried to time their trip to the polls to avoid crowds.
Some of the votes in Salt Lake City were cast
(20:17):
intense in some places faced a shortage of poll workers
because they were sick. And since this was happening in
Western states, where mask requirements were already a lot more common,
a lot of jurisdictions specifically required voters to wear masks
to the polls. For example, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver,
Colorado published an article titled quote Precautions at the Polls
(20:41):
Ordered to Prevent the spread of Plague, which advised people
to wear the standard red cross mask, not crowd polling places,
and refrain from assembling in groups for political discussions, which
I kind of love. And Toledo, Ohio police reinforce the
need to close the saloons, restaurants and other public places
(21:03):
on election day and night, and probably some people just
didn't vote or in some other way didn't participate in
the election. In Oakland, California, a quarter of the election
board resigned because of fear of the pandemic. Nationwide, voter
turnout was about ten percent lower than the previous two
midterm elections. Although some of the drop is probably because
(21:25):
so many men were away at war, and in some places,
flu cases increased sharply after election day, something that happened
again in the wake of celebrations following the November eleventh,
nineteen eighteen Armistice. We are going to take a quick
sponsor break before talking about some of the disparities and
how the nineteen eighteen flew affected different communities across the
(21:56):
board Around the world, the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic was
hardest on the poorest people. Although the virus could and
did strike people of all social and economic classes, poor
people were the most likely to get sick and the
most likely to die. Data on how different racial and
ethnic groups were affected is spottier. Even in places where
(22:18):
overall record keeping was generally good, the sheer magnitude of
illnesses and deaths often overwhelmed the system entirely. In most
of the US, demographic data was less granular than it
often is today, with populations grouped as white and non white.
But even with those caveats, it's clear that some of
the same disparities we've seen during the COVID nineteen pandemic
(22:41):
we're also there in nineteen eighteen. This really isn't something
that we talked about much when we discussed the pandemic
back in. One exception was a brief mention of the
fact that the pandemic was incredibly devastating to the Inupiat
population of Alaska, killing as any as nine percent of
(23:01):
the residents, and some of those communities. The pandemic was
particularly deadly among other Alaska Native people's as well. This
was not confined to Alaska. Globally, Indigenous people were some
of the most profoundly affected by the nineteen eighteen pandemic.
Death Rates were also particularly high among Inuit peoples in
Northern Canada and Greenland. The same was true for Aboriginal
(23:25):
peoples in Northern Australia, Maori in New Zealand, and Indigenous
peoples from several Pacific islands, including Western Samoa, Nauru, Tahiti,
and Tonga. Looking at death rates by continent is tricky
because within one continent there could be a huge variation
from country to country or region to region, and taking
(23:47):
a continent wide view of the pandemic also excludes the
Pacific islands that we just mentioned, where the death toll
was truly catastrophic. However, some sources do look at this
data by continent, and when you look at death tolls
that way, the place with the highest average mortality rate
in the world was Sub Saharan Africa, in addition to
(24:10):
factors stemming from things like economics, resources, racism, and colonialism.
A possible reason for this was that the pandemic's first
wave in the first half of nineteen eighteen mostly seems
to have stopped in northern Africa and a small area
in southeastern Africa, without nearly as much spread elsewhere on
the continent. Then, the virus mutated before it's particularly lethal
(24:35):
second wave around October of that year, so when the
more lethal strain of the virus made its way to
Sub Saharan Africa, mostly introduced through European ships involved in
World War One, most people had no immunity to it,
and it spread particularly easily and the United States specifically,
the mortality rate for indigenous people was four times high
(25:00):
eier than that of the general population, although those numbers
did vary widely among different indigenous tribes and nations. Black
people in the United States had a lower mortality rate
overall than white people during the pandemic. According to a
twenty nineteen article in the International Journal of Environmental Research
in Public Health, nineteen eighteen was the only year in
(25:23):
the twentieth century when that was the case. However, black
Americans had a higher case fatality rate that white Americans
did in the nineteen eighteen pandemic, and this suggests that
black Americans were somewhat less likely to contract the disease,
but more likely to become seriously ill and die when
they did. The exact cause of this combination is not
(25:48):
entirely clear, but it was surely affected by racism within
the health care system, including doctors and hospitals that did
not treat black patients even in the middle of a pandemic.
There were a few places in the US and around
the world that managed to protect themselves from the nineteen
eighteen pandemic or at least severely limit its impact. A
(26:09):
two thousand and six report by the University of Michigan
Medical School looked at seven communities in the US that
didn't have many flu cases during the pandemic's deadly second
wave and also had no more than one death. They
were the San Francisco Naval Training Station at your Babuena
Island that's in California, of course, Gunnison, Colorado, Princeton University
(26:32):
in New Jersey, the Western Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind
in Pittsburgh, Trudeau Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Seranic Lake, New York,
Brent Mark College in Pennsylvania, and Fletcher, Vermont. It is
not entirely clear why these communities were relatively spared, though
(26:53):
most of them implemented the same types of non pharmaceutical
interventions that we talked about in Part one, things like
masks and social distancing and hand hygiene, inclosing schools and
banning large gatherings. In other words, they were doing a
lot of the same basic things that a lot of
other places were also doing, but with apparently better results.
(27:13):
But some of these communities also showed some relatively risky behaviors. Fletcher, Vermont,
for example, held a Red Cross dance in September, and
some of its residents traveled to Essex, Vermont for a fair.
A soldier from Camp Devon's, Massachusetts also traveled to Fletcher
for his wedding while Camp Devons was in the middle
(27:34):
of an outbreak that infected almost one third of the camp.
But somehow the flu nearly skipped past Fletcher entirely. Okay,
that wedding part especially feels almost like, you know, a
twenty super spreader headline in the making. So among the
report's conclusions, quote the escape of a community from the
brunt of the pandemic was likely the result of multiple
(27:57):
factors in the cases we studied, not least of which
included good fortune, viral normalization patterns, and geographical separation. We
should not be seduced into thinking we can easily translate
these historical examples into contemporary situations. Beyond the scope of
this study. There were some island communities that were able
(28:19):
to delay the pandemic at least somewhat. American Samoa required
all ships to quarantine for five days, and actually kept
that requirement in place until nine. By the time the
flu was introduced there, it had mutated into a milder form,
and American Samoa reported no deaths. American Samoa and Western Samoa,
(28:40):
now the independent State of Samoa, are part of the
same island chain, and as we noted earlier, Western Samoa
was particularly hard hit. More than a fifth of its
population died of the disease after it was introduced by
people aboard the steamship to Loon. The harbor Master and
Appia Western Samoa had not realized that there was an
(29:01):
outbreak at the ship's departure point of Auckland, New Zealand,
and had allowed people to disembark. Australia also quarantined strictly
every ship that arrived through most of the pandemic, but
in January of nineteen nineteen, disease spread from ship to shore,
possibly through medical workers who were treating six sailors. The
(29:22):
strain of the virus that spread around Australia in January
and February of nineteen nineteen was less lethal than the
one that had peaked around the world the prior October. Consequently,
Australia had one of the lowest death rates in the
world two point seven per one thousand people, but that
still meant that at least fifteen thousand people died. The
(29:44):
island of Tasmania was even more isolated and did not
start seeing cases at all until August of nineteen nineteen.
Other places that saw relatively low mortality rates included Denmark
and China, although it's not entirely clear why. Yeah, there's
a lot of not quite sure. Like some of the
(30:04):
first cases that are usually noted as like these were
the first pandemic flu cases were in UH in the
United States at Fort Riley, Kansas. But there's some some
suggestion that possibly this basic same virus was circulating in
a lot of places earlier, and that it just mutated
into a form that became more noteworthy at that point. UM.
(30:27):
And so one idea is that maybe some of these
other places that had relatively low numbers of cases had
been some of the places that this earlier, much more
mild version of the of the flu was circulating, so
people already had some immunity. One last thing before we
close out these episodes, I know, during the COVID nineteen pandemic,
a lot of us have been trying to find ways
(30:47):
to stay active while also not really being able to
get out much UH. This was also true obviously in
nineteen nine, and not just because people were trying to
reduce their exposure to other people. It was also because,
as this was during World War One and a lot
of people were being held as prisoners of war or
otherwise being interned around the world. Joseph Hubertus Pilates was
(31:10):
a German national who was living in Britain during World
War One. After the war started, he was interned as
an enemy alien at Nacolo Camp on the Isle of Man.
Polates was an athlete, a gymnast, and a boxer, and
he worked out ways to try to keep himself and
his fellow internees fit while they were incarcerated. For the
rest of his life, Pilates would claim that when the
(31:31):
pandemic struck, no one at Nacolo Camp who was doing
his exercises got sick. Of course, there's a lot in
this story that's a little hard to pin down today.
There were definitely flew outbreaks at Nacolo, and the so
called enemy aliens at the camp were blamed for introducing
the virus to the rest of the Isle of Man.
(31:53):
That's probably as much about xenophobia as it was about
people actually being brought to this camp. But Knocolay was
also divided up into multiple compounds that were pretty isolated
from each other, and it's not entirely clear if there
was an outbreak in the compound where Polates was actually housed.
This did become part of the origin story of the
(32:15):
Polates exercise method, though I'm sure many people are doing
it at home because it is easy to do on
your own in your house. You don't need a reformer.
I'm riding an exercise bike and playing ring Fit Adventure.
I'm just lifting my cats fifty times a day now,
I'm kidding. Yeah. For a while I was doing nothing
(32:38):
except walking outside when the weather permitted, and then as
as it got a lot snowier and colder here in Massachusetts,
the weather was not permitting nearly as often, and I
was like, I feel bad never moving. I need to
address this. Yes, I am very thankful that we have
had a treadmill in our house for a long time,
(32:58):
because it's been really the um. You know what else
is handy? Yeah? Listener mail? You got some? I do?
I do? I have listener mail? Okay, this is This
is a reference to an episode from quite some time ago,
but it's honestly one of my favorite episodes and I
love it every time we get an email like this.
This is from Jennifer Um. Jennifer has um the subject
(33:19):
line of this email Thanks to you, I found out
my mom was a smuggler. Nice uh, And so the
email begins, No, seriously, dear Holly and Tracy, longtime listener,
never a writer of fan mail, but this has been
long overdue. I wanted to thank you for your episode
back in TWI Butter versus Margarine. I grew up in Wisconsin,
but had never learned about the banning of Margarine. Perhaps
(33:42):
some folks were still nursing grudges with a smiley emog
But what was truly the delight of the episode was
the conversation that led to with my mom, now eight four.
I asked her if she remembered the Marjarine band, Oh yes,
and what she thought of it. She was quiet for
a moment and then mentioned that she used to drive
(34:02):
ladies from Church down to Illinois in her car, and
they used to fill up the trunk with their OLEO
purchases and then drive back north. My mother was a smuggler,
and I'd never have known it if it weren't for you,
So thank you. I've attached a picture of her. You'd
never guessed this high school princess was going to turn rebel,
would you. Also? I've been working on my family genealogy
(34:23):
and my great grandfather, Mom's grandpa was a dairy farmer,
which I knew. What I didn't know is that he
helped lead what I am personally calling the Great Swiss
Cheese Rebellion of nineteen thirty six. It turns out the
Feds were demanding Swiss cheese be made with a certain
percentage of butterfat, and the farmers were saying that percentage
was terrible, and they demanded it be changed to the
(34:45):
percent they thought made a more delicious Swiss cheese. They
withheld their milk until demands were met. I'm pleased to
report they won, and that their specific Swiss cheese butterfat
percentage is now codified in US law Title on Section
one three three point one nine five of the FDA's
Regulations on Food for Human Consumption. Apparently I come from
(35:08):
a line of daring dairy ne'er do wells, and I'm
so happy to know this. Thank you again and again
for these shows. They are fun to listen to you
and they have sparked some great family conversations. Cheers, ladies,
keep up the great work. Thank you so much, Jennifer
for this for this email. I love both of these
stories so much. I love the whole weirdness about the
(35:29):
fight between Butter and Margarine, and I love the Olio
smuggling and I love the rebellion over how much butter
fat is in the Swiss cheese listen always more, Always more. Um.
Last night, my spouse was cooking our dinner and I
saw him put an entire third of a stick of
butter and the carrots. I think that sounds about right.
(35:52):
It was amazing. The carrots were fantastic, so um, and
I just felt like everyone needed to know about our
better anyway. Uh, if you'd like to write to us
about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at
I heart radio dot com. And we're also all over
social media ad Missed in History, which is where you'll
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can
(36:14):
subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app
and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you get your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(36:35):
listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Okay, if
you have missed our previous episode, we are revisiting the
(00:22):
flu pandemic, which we previously covered on the show. In
that episode, looking back on it, it's mostly just it's
an overview of the disease itself and it's international spread
that's most of its focus. That's not at all how
I would have approached that topic today after having lived
(00:43):
through the COVID nineteen pandemic for the last year. So
in part one of this episode, we talked a lot
about masks, uh and how they were used in the
flu pandemic and the general lack of an organized national
response in the United States. When I started on this,
I did not think those two things were going to
(01:04):
fill up an entire episode, but they did so uh
we made it a two part or I made it
a two parter. Today we are taking a shorter look
at a wider range of things that have caught my
attention over the last year and raised my curiosity about
how they compared to what happened in nineteen eighteen and
(01:24):
really nineteen nineteen and a little into nineteen twenty. Also, so,
something that's become increasingly clear over the course of the
COVID nineteen pandemic is that the virus spreads easily in
poorly ventilated areas. We have seen outdoor vaccine clinics and
outdoor dining and schools having class outside or even just
keeping windows open, plus discussions about what to do in
(01:47):
places where the windows cannot be opened, and at what
point the enclosure around an outdoor dining location isn't any
different from being indoors. Yeah, that's that's been a whole
process to Yeah, I feel like us you have been
asleep for the last twelve months. You have heard some
or all of these conversations in the public square, by
which I mean everywhere everywhere. Yeah. So there was also
(02:12):
a big focus on ventilation in the US, and really
even a bigger focus. The Anti Tuberculosis League distributed signs
that read quote keep your bedroom windows open, prevent influenza, deeumonia, tuberculosis.
As we noted in Part one, San Francisco ordered the
street cars to keep their windows open unless it was raining,
(02:35):
and the Board of health recommended that anything that could
not be moved outside in San Francisco be canceled. One
of the very most common public health recommendations nationwide during
the nineteen pandemic was to get plenty of fresh air
and to avoid crowded, stuffy indoor spaces. Some of this
(02:56):
was a response to the pandemic, but it was also
connected to an ongoing overall trend of seeing fresh air
as necessary to good health all the time, even when
there was not a disease outbreak. The fresh air movement,
established in the mid nineteenth century, was focused not just
on the health benefits of fresh air in general, but
also on taking children from urban areas, many of whom
(03:20):
were living in poverty, for outdoor experiences in the country
where they could breathe fresh, wholesome air. So at first,
this movement was rooted in the idea that my asthmas
or bad air were what caused disease, But around the
eighteen eighties, medical science built on the work of people
like Louis Pasteur and Robert Coke to conclude that microscopic pathogens,
(03:44):
rather than bad air, were what caused disease. But since
some of these pathogens seemed to be airborne. We now
know that some of them are airborne. Even as the
myasthma theory fell out of favor, this focus on fresh
air really did not. Fresh air also was not just
a preventative. It was also used as a treatment for
(04:06):
respiratory diseases, in particular tuberculosis. I feel like you see
this in all kinds of of older movies and books,
where it's like they took ill so they were sent
to the shore for fresh air. We have had it
come up in many episodes of the show when we
talked about people's biographies. The first really effective treatment for
tuberculosis was the antibiotics streptomycin, developed in nineteen For decades
(04:31):
before that point, tuberculosis treatment typically involved being sent to
a sanatorium, where people got plenty of rest and ate
nutritious food, and got lots of fresh air, including sleeping outside.
The idea that ventilation was generally necessary for healthy bedrooms
and other parts of your home that was also well
(04:51):
established by the late eighteen hundreds. For example, an eighteen
eighty nine article in Ladies Home Journal, which was written
by Kate Ups and Clark read quote, windows in sleeping
rooms should be kept wide open as much of the
time as possible when the apartments are unoccupied, and while
other chamber works should be done as soon as it
(05:12):
can be managed. After breakfast, Beds should be left to
air several hours if they can be conveniently allowed. The
air in bedrooms is often obscurely foul because the bed
does not get proper airing. People also slept on sleeping
porches or intense Wealthy people who had enough room for
(05:33):
it had just entire open air bedrooms built onto their houses,
who are living Rivendell style. I also, um just really
love the phrase obscurely foul, and I'm going to claim
that for my autobiography. UM. One article that has gone
viral during the COVID nineteen pandemic contends that steam radiators,
(05:56):
which are prevalent in a lot of older buildings in
the US, trace back to the pandemic. The basic idea
was that the radiator would intentionally make apartments and other
homes too hot to be comfortable. The solution open the window,
which would both cool things off and bring in fresh
air from outside. Yeah. Part of this whole argument is
(06:17):
that the reason that radiators are often under the windows
is because you were supposed to open the windows, but
really also like that was the coldest part of most rooms,
so it made sense to put the radiator there. And
also like the space under a window didn't have a
lot of other use a lot of the time, like
definitely more complicated than you're just supposed to leave the
(06:39):
window open. However, in addition to all that, the steam
radiator was invented in the mid nineteenth century, and over
the next couple of decades they were refined to a
design that still exists in many homes today. They are
in my home here, in the home I lived in
before this one. They were already an increasingly popular method
(07:02):
of home heating well before the nineteen eighteen pandemic started.
It is definitely true that a lot of these earlier
radiator systems really overheated and in some cases still overheat
people's living spaces. But another big reason for that is
that the first thermostat used for home heating was not
introduced until nineteen oh six. Before that, and then until
(07:25):
people retrofitted their older systems with new thermostats, people had
to adjust their furnaces and boilers manually, and in a
lot of multi unit buildings. There was just no way
for people in individual units to adjust their boilers and
their radiators at all. So, while it's possible that the
pandemic accelerated some of these strands that were already under way,
(07:49):
radiators and fresh air as a health necessity like those
were already really well established. Also, just in case you
go looking around for it, snopes dot com has rated
this claim about steam radiators in the nineteen eighteen pandemic
as true. But most of the articles claiming that the
nineteen eighteen flu pandemic led to too hot radiator systems
(08:11):
all traced back to the same person, and we haven't
been able to confirm this idea through any other sources. Yeah,
there's like one person who's making that argument from what
I can tell, and a lot of other places picking
that same argument up. Moving on, during COVID nineteen, we
have seen a huge trend and people working from home
(08:31):
if their jobs are conducive to doing that. There really
were not nearly as many jobs that met that criteria
in nineteen eighteen, So a bigger trend in nineteen eighteen
was people just not going to work even though they
were not being paid because they were afraid of getting
sick and dying. In a lot of industries, concrete numbers
(08:52):
on this are hard to track, but anecdotally, absentee is
um was really high in businesses that weren't shut down
because of the pandemic. One industry that did keep good
records with shipyards. Shipyard workers were essential, especially in the
context of the war, and many shipyards had medical staff
on site, even as the pandemic led to such an
(09:14):
enormous shortage of medical workers. But in New England shipyards
the rate of absentee is um was often around fifty. Yeah,
some of those surely would have been folks who were sick,
but others were folks who were like not, I'm not
not doing it and other news. Remember when the COVID
nineteen pandemic started and nobody could find toilet paper or flour. Yes,
(09:36):
and there are still things I would want from the
grocery store that like just did still have that day
they're out of Uh. There were also shortages in nineteen eighteen,
as I started to wonder, but it was really not
necessarily because of the flu pandemic. Since the pandemics started
near the end of World War One, A lot of
basic necessities were already being rationed, so in general, things
(10:01):
like food and fuel were already in short supply because
of the war, so it's likely that existing shortages made
the pandemic more difficult, rather than the pandemic causing a
lot of shortages. Similarly, it's kind of hard to pinpoint
the impact of the pandemic on the US economy or
the global economy because it is largely overshadowed by the
(10:23):
economic impact of the war and then demobilization when the
war ended. Yeah, that's kind of like a thing where
the onion has two layers, but the layers have fused
and kind of crossed over into one another. You can't
really keeel them apart. The general conclusion is like the
pandemics impact on the economy, which is a nebulous thing,
(10:44):
was more shorter term and and more confined to specific
industries than like the total wartime and then demobilization impact.
One actual shortage that was connected to you the pandemic
was coal. Coal production in the US dropped by as
much as a sixth due to illnesses and absenteeism, and
(11:08):
this in turn created problems for the steel industry, railroad shipping,
and for heating and electricity, leading to a series of
government inquiries into the matter. In some cities, health authorities
took steps to make sure that quarantined families had enough
coal to heat their homes. So aside from this, there
was huge demand for every over the counter cold and
(11:32):
flu remedy in existence, along with disinfectants. None of that
seems really surprising to mean. People bought up all the
stock at their local pharmacies and drug stores of all
of these products. There was also a massive run on atomizers,
which people would use to miss themselves and the people
around them and the environment where they were. Sometimes these
(11:54):
were just spilled with water to keep the nasal passages moist,
but there were also anti septics and supposedly anti flu
preparations that people would missed with their atomizers. So we
are going to take a quick sponsor break, and then
we're going to talk about some vaccines. We mentioned in
(12:20):
part one of this episode that there was no vaccine
for influenza in and that before the pandemic, researchers thought
the culprit for the flu was a bacterium called Piper's
bacillus that was also known as Bacillus influenze. However, that
lack of knowledge did not stop health authorities from trying
(12:44):
to create vaccines and vaccinate people against the disease in
en and in some cases these vaccines were meant to
try to prevent bacterial pneumonia. This was a secondary infection
that did cause a lot of the pandemics, deaths and
other situations, though doctors really believe that they were targeting
the actual flu with their vaccines, or they were just
(13:07):
desperate enough to save people's lives that they were willing
to pretty much try anything. Hundreds of thousands of doses
of these vaccines, possibly more than a million doses were
administered during the pandemic. The federal government and the US
Public Health Service weren't really involved with this and didn't
create any kind of national development, testing, or distribution plan
(13:29):
for these vaccines. Instead, multiple different researchers and institutes were
working on this as quickly as they could, including the
Rockefeller Institute, the Pasteur Institute, and the Army Medical School.
State and local health departments were on the case as well.
William H. Park at the New York City Health Department
developed a vaccine that used heat killed fifers Bacsilus. In
(13:52):
early October nineteen eighteen, the Army Medical School created one
as well in Philadelphia. Doctor see why White created a
vaccine that combined killed bassillous influenze and two different strains
of new macaca. The list goes on and on. Over All,
the methods for creating and testing these vaccines were not
(14:12):
scientifically very rigorous. Even an established research centers. Timelines were
rushed and abbreviated. The very basic steps of killing a
bacterium and making it into an injectable form were not
all that difficult. So all kinds of people, with varying
levels of skill and experience, we're all working on this,
(14:34):
and in some cases we're making vaccines that were then
actually administered to people. These vaccines could not prevent the
flu though, since they had nothing to do with the
influenza virus, but they could potentially prevent bacterial pneumonia. Studies
into whether they actually did were also all over the place.
Article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases looked at thirteen
(14:56):
different vaccine studies that took place during the pandemic. None
of them were double blind or randomized, and their methods
were inconsistent, but Overall, this report estimated that the vaccines
used among civilian populations were thirty four percent effective at
preventing secondary pneumonia and showed a forty two percent reduction
(15:18):
in case fatality rate. In military populations, those numbers were
fifty seven percent and sevent Those thirteen studies do not
represent all the different vaccines that were in use, though,
and some of the papers that were published at the
time paint a far less rosy picture than that, one
(15:38):
that suggests that some of the vaccines did have some efficacy,
at least in treating secondary infections. For example, in nineteen nineteen,
the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results
of a vaccination effort using a vaccine that was supplied
by Dr. F. O. Tawny, who was the chief of
the laboratory of the Cargo Health Department. The recipients were
(16:03):
all in patient residence at a mental hospital, so that
had some medical ethics questions as well. This vaccine contained
Bacillus influenzae, four different types of new moccoci and two
types of Streptococcus. It's a lot in this case. More
(16:24):
vaccinated people developed influenza and secondary pneumonia, and more vaccinated
people died than unvaccinated people. The American Medical Association was
generally pretty pessimistic about the efficacy and the promise of
these vaccines during the pandemic, and just to be clear,
(16:44):
the preponderance of different vaccines in which were put into
use just a few months after the disease started to
spread was largely because the process of developing and testing
a vaccine wasn't yet standardized, and the development and testing
procedures that it exists we're often skipped over because the
situation was so dire, but that is not why vaccines
(17:06):
for COVID nineteen have been developed surprisingly quickly. The COVID
nineteen vaccines have built on years, or in some cases, decades,
of existing research into viruses, vaccines, and manufacturing methods. This
includes research into two other coronaviruses, which cause stars and
mers RNA. Vaccine technology has also been in the news
(17:27):
a lot, but it's been going on way before this
for more than a decade. Yeah. A big reason things
have gone so quickly with COVID vaccines is money. Governments
and philanthropists have funded vaccine research. Governments have also pre
ordered vaccines in bulk so that pharmaceutical companies are not
running the financial risk of making a vaccine that it
(17:49):
turns out nobody actually wants to buy. The influx of
funding has meant that pharmaceutical companies are willing and financially
able to work a lot faster and to run multiple
trials in parallel. That is something that would go a
lot more slowly without all that money. Okay, So moving on.
(18:09):
Something that didn't come up at all zero times in
our original episode on the nineteen eighteen flu was the
fact that there was a mid term election in nineteen eighteen.
And uh, it seems like a little bit of a
weird omission having lived through November. But if you're looking
at it not having had the hind sight of an
(18:30):
election year during a pandemic, it just may not be
the thing that bubbles up now. In nineteen eighteen, voting
in general was most accessible to white men in theory,
under the fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, quote, the rights
of citizens of the United States to vote shall not
be denied or abridged by the United States or by
(18:51):
any State on account of race, color, or previous condition
of service sude. But in practice, discriminatory voting laws made
it much harder or even impossible for most people of
color to vote. Indigenous people and many Asian people were
not considered citizens, and the Nineteenth Amendment had not been
passed yet, so women had the right to vote in
(19:11):
some places but not in others. In November of nineteen eighteen,
the pandemic had largely peaked in the eastern part of
the US, and many Eastern cities and states had returned
or were returning to business as usual, so effects on
the election there were pretty minimal, but in the Midwest
and the West Coast, the pandemic flew was still spreading rapidly.
(19:33):
Especially in these areas, candidates did a lot more of
their campaigning by mail and gave interviews in newspapers. This
was especially true in places where large gatherings and door
to door canvassing were banned for the sake of public health,
and sometimes these bands led to accusations of partisan interference.
For example, Democratic Party leaders in New York were outraged
(19:56):
when an all Republican board of health ordered the Democrat
at a candidate, Alfred E. Smith, could only give a
planned speech if it were moved to an open air location.
As for election day itself. People in high risk areas
tried to time their trip to the polls to avoid crowds.
Some of the votes in Salt Lake City were cast
(20:17):
intense in some places faced a shortage of poll workers
because they were sick. And since this was happening in
Western states, where mask requirements were already a lot more common,
a lot of jurisdictions specifically required voters to wear masks
to the polls. For example, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver,
Colorado published an article titled quote Precautions at the Polls
(20:41):
Ordered to Prevent the spread of Plague, which advised people
to wear the standard red cross mask, not crowd polling places,
and refrain from assembling in groups for political discussions, which
I kind of love. And Toledo, Ohio police reinforce the
need to close the saloons, restaurants and other public places
(21:03):
on election day and night, and probably some people just
didn't vote or in some other way didn't participate in
the election. In Oakland, California, a quarter of the election
board resigned because of fear of the pandemic. Nationwide, voter
turnout was about ten percent lower than the previous two
midterm elections. Although some of the drop is probably because
(21:25):
so many men were away at war, and in some places,
flu cases increased sharply after election day, something that happened
again in the wake of celebrations following the November eleventh,
nineteen eighteen Armistice. We are going to take a quick
sponsor break before talking about some of the disparities and
how the nineteen eighteen flew affected different communities across the
(21:56):
board Around the world, the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic was
hardest on the poorest people. Although the virus could and
did strike people of all social and economic classes, poor
people were the most likely to get sick and the
most likely to die. Data on how different racial and
ethnic groups were affected is spottier. Even in places where
(22:18):
overall record keeping was generally good, the sheer magnitude of
illnesses and deaths often overwhelmed the system entirely. In most
of the US, demographic data was less granular than it
often is today, with populations grouped as white and non white.
But even with those caveats, it's clear that some of
the same disparities we've seen during the COVID nineteen pandemic
(22:41):
we're also there in nineteen eighteen. This really isn't something
that we talked about much when we discussed the pandemic
back in. One exception was a brief mention of the
fact that the pandemic was incredibly devastating to the Inupiat
population of Alaska, killing as any as nine percent of
(23:01):
the residents, and some of those communities. The pandemic was
particularly deadly among other Alaska Native people's as well. This
was not confined to Alaska. Globally, Indigenous people were some
of the most profoundly affected by the nineteen eighteen pandemic.
Death Rates were also particularly high among Inuit peoples in
Northern Canada and Greenland. The same was true for Aboriginal
(23:25):
peoples in Northern Australia, Maori in New Zealand, and Indigenous
peoples from several Pacific islands, including Western Samoa, Nauru, Tahiti,
and Tonga. Looking at death rates by continent is tricky
because within one continent there could be a huge variation
from country to country or region to region, and taking
(23:47):
a continent wide view of the pandemic also excludes the
Pacific islands that we just mentioned, where the death toll
was truly catastrophic. However, some sources do look at this
data by continent, and when you look at death tolls
that way, the place with the highest average mortality rate
in the world was Sub Saharan Africa, in addition to
(24:10):
factors stemming from things like economics, resources, racism, and colonialism.
A possible reason for this was that the pandemic's first
wave in the first half of nineteen eighteen mostly seems
to have stopped in northern Africa and a small area
in southeastern Africa, without nearly as much spread elsewhere on
the continent. Then, the virus mutated before it's particularly lethal
(24:35):
second wave around October of that year, so when the
more lethal strain of the virus made its way to
Sub Saharan Africa, mostly introduced through European ships involved in
World War One, most people had no immunity to it,
and it spread particularly easily and the United States specifically,
the mortality rate for indigenous people was four times high
(25:00):
eier than that of the general population, although those numbers
did vary widely among different indigenous tribes and nations. Black
people in the United States had a lower mortality rate
overall than white people during the pandemic. According to a
twenty nineteen article in the International Journal of Environmental Research
in Public Health, nineteen eighteen was the only year in
(25:23):
the twentieth century when that was the case. However, black
Americans had a higher case fatality rate that white Americans
did in the nineteen eighteen pandemic, and this suggests that
black Americans were somewhat less likely to contract the disease,
but more likely to become seriously ill and die when
they did. The exact cause of this combination is not
(25:48):
entirely clear, but it was surely affected by racism within
the health care system, including doctors and hospitals that did
not treat black patients even in the middle of a pandemic.
There were a few places in the US and around
the world that managed to protect themselves from the nineteen
eighteen pandemic or at least severely limit its impact. A
(26:09):
two thousand and six report by the University of Michigan
Medical School looked at seven communities in the US that
didn't have many flu cases during the pandemic's deadly second
wave and also had no more than one death. They
were the San Francisco Naval Training Station at your Babuena
Island that's in California, of course, Gunnison, Colorado, Princeton University
(26:32):
in New Jersey, the Western Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind
in Pittsburgh, Trudeau Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Seranic Lake, New York,
Brent Mark College in Pennsylvania, and Fletcher, Vermont. It is
not entirely clear why these communities were relatively spared, though
(26:53):
most of them implemented the same types of non pharmaceutical
interventions that we talked about in Part one, things like
masks and social distancing and hand hygiene, inclosing schools and
banning large gatherings. In other words, they were doing a
lot of the same basic things that a lot of
other places were also doing, but with apparently better results.
(27:13):
But some of these communities also showed some relatively risky behaviors. Fletcher, Vermont,
for example, held a Red Cross dance in September, and
some of its residents traveled to Essex, Vermont for a fair.
A soldier from Camp Devon's, Massachusetts also traveled to Fletcher
for his wedding while Camp Devons was in the middle
(27:34):
of an outbreak that infected almost one third of the camp.
But somehow the flu nearly skipped past Fletcher entirely. Okay,
that wedding part especially feels almost like, you know, a
twenty super spreader headline in the making. So among the
report's conclusions, quote the escape of a community from the
brunt of the pandemic was likely the result of multiple
(27:57):
factors in the cases we studied, not least of which
included good fortune, viral normalization patterns, and geographical separation. We
should not be seduced into thinking we can easily translate
these historical examples into contemporary situations. Beyond the scope of
this study. There were some island communities that were able
(28:19):
to delay the pandemic at least somewhat. American Samoa required
all ships to quarantine for five days, and actually kept
that requirement in place until nine. By the time the
flu was introduced there, it had mutated into a milder form,
and American Samoa reported no deaths. American Samoa and Western Samoa,
(28:40):
now the independent State of Samoa, are part of the
same island chain, and as we noted earlier, Western Samoa
was particularly hard hit. More than a fifth of its
population died of the disease after it was introduced by
people aboard the steamship to Loon. The harbor Master and
Appia Western Samoa had not realized that there was an
(29:01):
outbreak at the ship's departure point of Auckland, New Zealand,
and had allowed people to disembark. Australia also quarantined strictly
every ship that arrived through most of the pandemic, but
in January of nineteen nineteen, disease spread from ship to shore,
possibly through medical workers who were treating six sailors. The
(29:22):
strain of the virus that spread around Australia in January
and February of nineteen nineteen was less lethal than the
one that had peaked around the world the prior October. Consequently,
Australia had one of the lowest death rates in the
world two point seven per one thousand people, but that
still meant that at least fifteen thousand people died. The
(29:44):
island of Tasmania was even more isolated and did not
start seeing cases at all until August of nineteen nineteen.
Other places that saw relatively low mortality rates included Denmark
and China, although it's not entirely clear why. Yeah, there's
a lot of not quite sure. Like some of the
(30:04):
first cases that are usually noted as like these were
the first pandemic flu cases were in UH in the
United States at Fort Riley, Kansas. But there's some some
suggestion that possibly this basic same virus was circulating in
a lot of places earlier, and that it just mutated
into a form that became more noteworthy at that point. UM.
(30:27):
And so one idea is that maybe some of these
other places that had relatively low numbers of cases had
been some of the places that this earlier, much more
mild version of the of the flu was circulating, so
people already had some immunity. One last thing before we
close out these episodes, I know, during the COVID nineteen pandemic,
a lot of us have been trying to find ways
(30:47):
to stay active while also not really being able to
get out much UH. This was also true obviously in
nineteen nine, and not just because people were trying to
reduce their exposure to other people. It was also because,
as this was during World War One and a lot
of people were being held as prisoners of war or
otherwise being interned around the world. Joseph Hubertus Pilates was
(31:10):
a German national who was living in Britain during World
War One. After the war started, he was interned as
an enemy alien at Nacolo Camp on the Isle of Man.
Polates was an athlete, a gymnast, and a boxer, and
he worked out ways to try to keep himself and
his fellow internees fit while they were incarcerated. For the
rest of his life, Pilates would claim that when the
(31:31):
pandemic struck, no one at Nacolo Camp who was doing
his exercises got sick. Of course, there's a lot in
this story that's a little hard to pin down today.
There were definitely flew outbreaks at Nacolo, and the so
called enemy aliens at the camp were blamed for introducing
the virus to the rest of the Isle of Man.
(31:53):
That's probably as much about xenophobia as it was about
people actually being brought to this camp. But Knocolay was
also divided up into multiple compounds that were pretty isolated
from each other, and it's not entirely clear if there
was an outbreak in the compound where Polates was actually housed.
This did become part of the origin story of the
(32:15):
Polates exercise method, though I'm sure many people are doing
it at home because it is easy to do on
your own in your house. You don't need a reformer.
I'm riding an exercise bike and playing ring Fit Adventure.
I'm just lifting my cats fifty times a day now,
I'm kidding. Yeah. For a while I was doing nothing
(32:38):
except walking outside when the weather permitted, and then as
as it got a lot snowier and colder here in Massachusetts,
the weather was not permitting nearly as often, and I
was like, I feel bad never moving. I need to
address this. Yes, I am very thankful that we have
had a treadmill in our house for a long time,
(32:58):
because it's been really the um. You know what else
is handy? Yeah? Listener mail? You got some? I do?
I do? I have listener mail? Okay, this is This
is a reference to an episode from quite some time ago,
but it's honestly one of my favorite episodes and I
love it every time we get an email like this.
This is from Jennifer Um. Jennifer has um the subject
(33:19):
line of this email Thanks to you, I found out
my mom was a smuggler. Nice uh, And so the
email begins, No, seriously, dear Holly and Tracy, longtime listener,
never a writer of fan mail, but this has been
long overdue. I wanted to thank you for your episode
back in TWI Butter versus Margarine. I grew up in Wisconsin,
but had never learned about the banning of Margarine. Perhaps
(33:42):
some folks were still nursing grudges with a smiley emog
But what was truly the delight of the episode was
the conversation that led to with my mom, now eight four.
I asked her if she remembered the Marjarine band, Oh yes,
and what she thought of it. She was quiet for
a moment and then mentioned that she used to drive
(34:02):
ladies from Church down to Illinois in her car, and
they used to fill up the trunk with their OLEO
purchases and then drive back north. My mother was a smuggler,
and I'd never have known it if it weren't for you,
So thank you. I've attached a picture of her. You'd
never guessed this high school princess was going to turn rebel,
would you. Also? I've been working on my family genealogy
(34:23):
and my great grandfather, Mom's grandpa was a dairy farmer,
which I knew. What I didn't know is that he
helped lead what I am personally calling the Great Swiss
Cheese Rebellion of nineteen thirty six. It turns out the
Feds were demanding Swiss cheese be made with a certain
percentage of butterfat, and the farmers were saying that percentage
was terrible, and they demanded it be changed to the
(34:45):
percent they thought made a more delicious Swiss cheese. They
withheld their milk until demands were met. I'm pleased to
report they won, and that their specific Swiss cheese butterfat
percentage is now codified in US law Title on Section
one three three point one nine five of the FDA's
Regulations on Food for Human Consumption. Apparently I come from
(35:08):
a line of daring dairy ne'er do wells, and I'm
so happy to know this. Thank you again and again
for these shows. They are fun to listen to you
and they have sparked some great family conversations. Cheers, ladies,
keep up the great work. Thank you so much, Jennifer
for this for this email. I love both of these
stories so much. I love the whole weirdness about the
(35:29):
fight between Butter and Margarine, and I love the Olio
smuggling and I love the rebellion over how much butter
fat is in the Swiss cheese listen always more, Always more. Um.
Last night, my spouse was cooking our dinner and I
saw him put an entire third of a stick of
butter and the carrots. I think that sounds about right.
(35:52):
It was amazing. The carrots were fantastic, so um, and
I just felt like everyone needed to know about our
better anyway. Uh, if you'd like to write to us
about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at
I heart radio dot com. And we're also all over
social media ad Missed in History, which is where you'll
find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can
(36:14):
subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app
and Apple podcasts and anywhere else you get your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(36:35):
listen to your favorite shows
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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