Pandemic Leadership: Historical Lessons for the Next Time
(It Will Come)
NOTE: This previously unpublished document appears here for the first time because today it is of acute historical and public interest. Please read through to the end for a full understanding of its context.
Walter Montgomery
December 2020
For the sake of this great nation and its future generations, let us bequeath them an honest historical record of how America managed the pandemic that enveloped us during “the war to end all wars” and its aftermath. That record, history will surely judge, is one of horrific and unforgivable failure, defined by 675,000 fatalities in the United States, a number exceeding by more than twelve times the American dead from the combat in the war itself.
We must help our descendants learn from this generation’s misery and myopia. Most important is the failure at the apex of the nation’s leadership. In the face of crisis, a society relies on its leaders to set the tone and substance of action. Wise guidance from our government would not have prevented the virus that attacked us but would have limited the suffering and devastation it wrought. But wisdom did not emanate from the pinnacle of American leadership, as an accurate historical record of 1918–1919 must show:
— The President decided the national government should not take the lead in fighting the virus, instead leaving it to the states and a grotesque menagerie of local actions — or inaction.
— The President ignored, downplayed, and lied about the seriousness of the disease.
— In the face of widespread death and suffering from the virus, the President placed almost all his attention elsewhere, on issues more important to his political interests.
— In the states, numerous political leaders echoed the President in their irresponsible language and behavior.
— Millions of ordinary Americans accepted without doubt the disinformation, distortions and lies from the President and the leaders who emulated him.
— Encouraged by the President and the like-minded leaders, millions embraced wild conspiracy theories and bogus explanations of the virus.
— Also with the encouragement of the President and other leaders, millions loudly and often ominously opposed vital safety measures — masks, in particular.
— Respected public-health leaders thus became targets of denunciation, ridicule, hatred and physical threats.
— The pandemic became a venomous and chaotic political battle, initiated at the top of our government and cascading rapidly into the states. Never was there national political leadership that treated it as a public-health problem for Americans to solve together with organized and peaceful cooperation.
This obscene comedy of leadership reveals the obvious: America could have done much, much better. Death, suffering, and economic destruction did not have to control us with unbridled ferocity. Responsible and caring leadership would have made an enormous humanitarian difference.
Inevitably, other global health crises will come. For millennia the world has been complex, interconnected in ways that have transmitted deadly afflictions. Humans have intensified the scope and speed of such transmissions without rooting out the causes of the diseases. Barring some unlikely miracle, virulent dangers surely await our descendants if not us. Yet we, like other peoples, are not inclined to look closely or objectively at history or to draw wisdom from it. Easily, we succumb to blinding political and social pressures.
The President did not cause the pandemic, but he could have made it much less awful. We have been calling it the “Spanish flu”; perhaps it should be labeled the “Woodrow Wilson flu.” In any event, we can only hope that when the next pandemic strikes — maybe in 1930 or 1950 or, if we are really lucky, a hundred years from now — Americans will somehow take heed of the negative lessons in leadership those of us living here in the second decade of the 20th century will be leaving behind.
Anonymous
New York
January 1921
