“It’s the flu…..Just the flu”: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in Recent History and how it Changed U.S. Society

Instructor: Tammy Belden
January 22, 24 and 26. 1-3 p.m.

Given our recent history with a global pandemic, it might be useful to explore how the United States responded to perhaps the deadliest pandemic in modern history. What lessons were learned? The “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918 swept through the globe and killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide in less than two years. In the U.S., the public health and medical communities were ill equipped to deal with such a crisis. The country was at war, and the war was the government’s first priority. Young men were amassed into crowded military camps and moved throughout the country with little heed paid to increasingly desperate pleas from public health officials. The news was repressed in order to maintain war morale and to ward off panic. Contemporary attitudes toward poverty, class, and race were baked into the responses to the pandemic. Young, healthy adults were the population most affected, unlike most diseases which primarily struck children and the elderly. When the pandemic was over, U.S. society had changed in deep and lasting ways.

Tammy Belden received her bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and went to graduate school in cultural anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. She worked at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC for thirty years and, since retiring, has lectured as well as guided tours of the DC area speaking on a variety of topics in American History. Through her combined interests in cultural anthropology and history, she has delved deeply into how such crises affect American society in deep and lasting ways.