1918 Spanish flu sickened thousands on Coast. ‘Every day they were hauling caskets.’
“The Three-Foot Rule” advised today to avoid airborne viruses was called “The Four-Foot Rule” when the 1918 Spanish Influenza infected about one-third of the world’s population, including thousands on the Mississippi Coast. An estimated 2-3% of those infected died.
“All persons engaged in conversation are requested not to stand within four feet of each other,” proclaimed a public service announcement published on The Daily Herald’s front page Oct. 7, 1918.
The Mississippi State Department of Health ordered the coastal district’s director to shut down public schools, although college campuses were ordered to self-quarantine. The latter included St. Stanislaus in Bay St. Louis, where about 200 got infected.
Also closed were any public places, any indoor or outdoor meetings, even wartime Liberty Bond parades, along with “all moving picture shows, churches, soda fountains and pool rooms.” When the district health officer asked all serving the public to wear masks, the Coast quickly learned there was none available for mass distribution.
The closings and cancellations were ordered “until further notice,” which stretched into six weeks during the worst months of October and November 1918.
When the worldwide spread of the new coronavirus, or COVID-19, began dominating news, Americans began recalling family stories of the 1918 flu. The catastrophic pandemic claimed more than double the 20 million civilian and military lives lost in World War I, which the U.S. entered April 1917.
Most American flu deaths occurred the next year in October and November, but the pandemic continued into 1920. America’s most deadly month ever was October 1918 when 200,000 flu victims died, taxing health workers and funeral homes staffs often sick themselves.
The first officially recorded Spanish flu death anywhere in the world was at a Kansas military training camp in early March 1918. It was an unrecognized hint that the war and its soldiers would spur a worldwide pandemic.
Estimates run as high as 50 million pandemic deaths worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States. An estimated 6,219 Mississippian died in 1918, followed in 1919 by another 3,013.
Evidence of the pandemic on the Coast is found in older cemeteries by the unusually high number of 1918 and early 1919 headstone dates.
For example, one family plot at the Old Biloxi Cemetery holds at least four flu victims of the Stanovich family. The late Harriett Stanovich often told later generations about Coast deaths in what she called “The Great Flu.”
Unlike previous flu, this one also claimed healthier young folks. It showed no class distinctions, although poorer communities weren’t as likely to recover from complications. Antibiotics didn’t exist. Overdoses of medications such as aspirin sometimes killed the already sick.
A century later, records from that era are insufficient to report how many actually became infected.
Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties had a combined population of about 80,000, and thousands of those who became infected survived. But hundreds likely died, a fact suggested by numerous newspaper obituaries and articles that help fill in gaps from existing health records.
Rural areas apparently fared better. The neighboring piney woods counties of George and Stone, each with 7,500, are credited with the lowest death rates in the state.
Mississippi’s population today is three million. At the pandemic outbreak it was 1.8 million, and Mississippi’s combined flu deaths for 1918 and 1919 was likely 9,200. The 6,219 statistic most often cited reflects only the first year’s deaths.
About one-third of the world’s population — or an estimated 500 million people — contracted the flu in several waves that peaked in autumn 1918 but continued into 1920. Conflicting estimates of deaths vary from 17 million to 50 million, some as high as 100 million.
A century later, those death figures get updated and debated as research improves. For example, scientists now know the Spanish flu was an H1N1 virus, different yet in the same family as the virus that caused a 2009 pandemic.
The story of the 1918 pandemic is as difficult to nail down with statistics and correct facts as is the continually updating story of the COVID-19 virus that began last December in China.
Many researchers believe it is too early to make reliable comparisons of the two worldwide virus outbreaks because much is still unknown about COVID-19.
This 21st Century virus shines a vintage spotlight on what is mislabeled the “Spanish” flu. It didn’t start in Spain but was credited to Spain because its news agencies were not censored so they first reported the virus. Other countries, including England, France and America, used wartime censorship excuses to quell virus news.
A much bigger factor for the flu spread was the world at war. Soldiers and sailors carried the virus into battlefields, then back to their home countries after World War I ended. An estimated 17 million WWI deaths pale next to the number of flu deaths.
As often happened countrywide, Mississippi’s first cases were in September 1918 at military bases, with Payne Field in West Point leading the way. The Coast did not yet have its large Seabee and Air Force bases, but in Gulfport the Herald reported the beachfront Naval Training Center had between 500 to 600 sick sailors. The National Guard training base, Camp Shelby, was also on lock-down.
Because records were spotty, later lost or are still buried in archives, the best source of what the Coast was like during the pandemic is old newspapers. Computers and the Internet did not yet exist. In fact, the state health department kept in touch with its Coast director by telegraph.
For exhausted doctors, health workers, agencies like the Red Cross and community volunteers who risked their own lives to save others, record keeping obviously was not a high priority. Even newspaper staffs fell sick en masse, including those at the Herald.
From 1918 Herald microfilm we learn that in just one October day, 9,842 new Mississippi cases were reported. On other days, newly reported statewide cases could total 6,000.
October on the Coast reflected the state. Fifty new cases were reported in just one day in just one Coast city — Gulfport, population 8,000. Not all of them died, of course, but one young Hancock County witness, Tommie Dukes, Sr., who later became a National Negro League player, remembered:
“...every day they were hauling caskets from Bay St. Louis to the Kiln. You’d see them trucks coming there with caskets.”
As WWI became the story carried forward to the next generation, memories of the Spanish flu pandemic lessened and rarely made history books. Ironically, the first 21st Century pandemic, SARS in 2003, renewed scientific and historic interest in the 1918 virus. The final chapter of this “Mother of All Pandemics” has yet to be written.
Note from the Chronicler: Weaving together reliable facts for this article is no easy task because so many past reports are conflicting or incomplete. I first researched the Spanish flu in 2006 when I had the newsroom health beat. Today’s information comes from an assortment of sources, among them Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization, Mississippi Encyclopedia, Biloxi History & Genealogy Library, Hancock County Historical Society, Sun Herald microfilm, The History Channel, foot-noted entries in Wikipedia, as well as my earlier research.
Kat Bergeron, a veteran feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at BergeronKat@gmail.com or at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923.