Not the War We Expected
The Impact of the 1918–1920 Flu Epidemic on One Family
The Spanish Flu
With the rise of the coronavirus pandemic, many people are asking what we can learn from pandemics in the past. This has created interest in the largest pandemic in modern history, the influenza pandemic of 1918–1920. As a family historian, I can share how the impact this global event had on one family in one small place, Ord, Nebraska.
In 1918, the First World War was intensifying. After declaring war in April 1917, the United States had instituted a draft and by early 1918 was sending men “over there,” to fight in Europe. Meanwhile, an influenza epidemic, which would come to be known as the “Spanish Flu,” was just starting to get a foothold. It would spread across the world, from the tropics to the Arctic, from Europe to Asia to America. By the time the Spanish Flu disappeared, it had killed at least 17 million people (Spreeuwenberg, 2566), and possibly many more:
“… the real pandemic mortality rate may fall in the range of 50 to 100 million…. [T]he scale of mortality undoubtedly makes it one of the largest outbreaks of disease in recorded history, particularly as those deaths occurred in a very short time, from early 1918 through to, in some cases, 1920.”
— Johnson and Mueller, 115
The population of the world at the time was approximately 1.86 billion people (UN Secretariat). This means that the pandemic in 1918–1920 killed between 1–5% of all the people then alive. A similar death rate with today’s population would kill 76 to 380 million people. It’s fair to say that due to advances in medicine, even if the coronavirus were to be as deadly, it would not kill as many people as the Spanish flu did, but that does not mean the coronavirus is not serious.
Origins of the “Spanish” Flu
It’s unclear where the virus originated. Due to the limitations gathering data in 1918, scientists have not been able to determine the origin of the virus. One thing epidemiologists agree on is that it certainly did not start in Spain. Much of the world was at war and military censorship stopped reporting of the flu. Spain was not at war, and when the pandemic reached them, they reported on it and it ended up being associated with them.
One prominent theory — supported by early medical evidence of cases of a new and deadly flu — is that it started at Fort Riley, Kansas, and spread from there with US troop movements.
Whatever the source, the disease spread quickly. Unlike most other influenzas, it killed people in the prime of life (20–50 years old) while sparing many older and younger people. In some cities, such as St. Louis, preparedness and lock-downs minimized the impact.
In October of that year, [Dr. Max] Starkloff [the city’s health commissioner] shut the city [of St. Louis] down. He issued an order closing movie theaters, pool halls, schools, churches, bars, conventions and any large gatherings. Washington University canceled a football game and later suspended classes. (Messenger)
In other cities, such as Philadelphia, reckless disregard for the risk of the virus led to many deaths.
700 would die in one day in Philadelphia. (Crosby, 53).
Family History
When I began doing family history research, one of the first stories my mother told me was about the death in 1919 of her grandmother — Alice Margaret (Gregg) Johnson — and then, three days later, of her aunt — Bethene Blanche (Johnson) Harris. This happened nine years before my mother was born, but it was a defining event in the family and the effects of the losses would linger for decades.
When Blanche died, she left an invalid husband, Ralph, and a two-year-old son, Ralph Jr.
Ralph Sr. had been kicked in the head by a horse some time after Ralph Jr. was born. Because it was felt that Ralph Sr. could not raise Ralph Jr., my mom’s cousin Ralph Jr. was raised by John E. Young and Louellen (Johnson) Young, who picked him up at the dual funeral of his mother and grandmother.
My mother’s stories were correct, but — as with many family stories — incomplete. Through further research, I found another cousin who died of the Spanish flu at the age of 8 and another cousin who died while in the medical corps of the US Army at Fort Riley, Kansas, probably of the pandemic at its source.
… the most likely site of origin was Haskell County, Kansas, an isolated and sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of the state, in January 1918.
— John M. Barrie, “The site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications”
Robert Dudley Atkins (1893–1918)
Robert Dudley Atkins was born 27 August 1893 in Genoa, Nance County, Nebraska, the son of John William and Lora Elizabeth (Gregg) Atkins. He was a younger brother to Virgil Ruby Atkins and John William Atkins Jr, and an older brother to the fraternal twins Allen Bryan Atkins and Alice Hazel Atkins. The family grew and prospered on a farm in rural Nance County.
On 5 June 1917, as the war was spinning up for Americans, Robert Atkins registered for the draft. He listed his occupation as “druggist apprentice.” It is unclear whether he was drafted or enlisted. What is clear is that very soon he was in the Army as a Private working in the medical department.
Six and a half months after registering for the draft, he died at Fort Riley, Kansas, on 16 January 1918. He was brought home to be buried in Valley View Cemetery, Genoa, Nance County, Nebraska.
Charlotte M. Gregg (1910–1918)
Charlotte M. Gregg was Robert Dudley Atkins’s first cousin. She was the middle of five children of William Blakeway Gregg and his wife Emma Carolina (Larson) Gregg, and was born 20 Mar 1910 on the family farm near Ord, Valley County, Nebraska. When she got ill and died of the Spanish influenza of 30 Dec 1918, her younger brother Russell Boyd Gregg (1918–2009) was not yet three months old.
Russell told me when I met him that the loss of his sister was a constant point of discussion in his family when he grew up. Russell Gregg became an agronomist with the Agency for International Development, traveling the world helping impoverished people produce more viable crops to feed their families. I cannot help but imagine that his desire to help others developed out of the loss his family experienced in the Spanish flu.
Alice Margaret (Gregg) Johnson (1870–1919)
Alice Margaret Gregg was one of the members of the older generation. Unlike her nephew, Robert Dudley Atkins (aged 25), and her niece, Charlotte M. Gregg (aged 8), Alice was a parent.
Alice Johnson was born 29 April 1870 in West Nodaway, Nodaway, Adams County, Iowa, to Robert Washington Gregg, a veteran of the 25th Iowa volunteers during the Civil War, and Helen Edwina Arnold. Between 1883 and 1885, the Greggs moved from Iowa to Nebraska. She would have been thirteen to fifteen years old. She was the second eldest. Her sister Lora Elizabeth Gregg had been born in 1868, and so would have been fifteen to seventeen years old. The younger siblings included William Blakeway Gregg (born 1872), Archie G. Gregg (born 1875), Esther Emily Gregg (born 1879), and Blanche Cora Gregg (born 1883).
According to family lore, Robert Washington Gregg was called “Gypsy Gregg” because he kept moving. By 1888, he had moved the family to a homestead near Alliance, Box Butte County, Nebraska. In addition to farming, he ran the Post Office at the eponymous Gregg, Box Butte County, Nebraska from 1890–1893.
Alice married Nels Johnson on 26 September 1888 at her father’s homestead in Alliance, Box Butte County, Nebraska. Alice was 18; her husband Nels was 24. Nels lived in Nance County, where Alice had grown up. He was a Swedish immigrant, having come to America in 1868 at the age of four with his parents and three older siblings.
He bought a [160 acre] farm a mile west of his father’s place, farming there some years. He sold it and moved to Ord, Nebraska, in December, 1901, where he bought a farm of five hundred ten acres four miles north of Ord, in Valley County. — Schlichtemeier, 13
They ran one farm, sold it, and bought another, three times larger. And they raised their family. They had three children: Bethene Blanche Johnson was born in 1892, Helen Kjerstine Johnson in 1894, and, finally, Wallace Gregg Johnson in 1903. The family prospered, and Alice Johnson was active in local women’s groups, including the P. E. O. Sisterhood and the Laurel Kensington Club.
In the last months of her life, Alice was dealing with a number of health issues in the family. She had been ill. Then, her son-in-law Ralph was injured on the farm. While he was recuperating, many of the members of the family became ill with the flu.
Then, Alice herself became ill with the Spanish flu and died.
Bethene Blanche (Johnson) Harris (1892–1919)
Bethene Blanche Johnson was the eldest of the children of Nels and Alice Johnson. After graduating from Ord High School in 1912, she received a teacher’s certificate and taught second grade. She married Frederick Ralph Harris — who went by Ralph — on 28 September 1913, and they moved to Lincoln. Ralph was a cashier and later a book keeper. At the time of his registration for the draft, the family was living at 2758 Franklin St., Lincoln. On 3 March 1917, they had a boy, Frederick Ralph Harris Jr.
In early 1919, Ralph and Bethene moved their young family to Bethene’s father’s farm near Ord. They took over running the farm and Bethene’s parents moved into the town of Ord to enjoy a less strenuous life.
But it was not to be:
It was but a few months ago that Mrs. Johnson had a terrible sickness and Ralph Harris got kicked [by a horse and had brain surgery] and for weeks his life was almost despaired of and he has barely recovered his normal health. Mr. [Nels] Johnson has been far from well since having the flu a few weeks ago and both Mr. Harris and the son Wallace Johnson have been critically ill in recent days. — “Mother and Daughter Die,” Ord Quiz
When her mother fell ill, Bethene attended to her. Bethene herself then became ill. Helen Johnson, Bethene’s sister, and my grandmother was sent for. She had been teaching in Blue Hill, Nebraska. She dropped everything and came down to nurse her mother and sister.
Alice died on 29 March 1919; her daughter Bethene died on 1 April 1919. The minister had been told to come to conduct a funeral. Between his being notified and his arriving there was another death. Mother and daughter were buried in the Ord Cemetery on 2 April 1919. Ralph Harris was barely well enough to attend the funeral of his wife and mother-in-law. Ralph Jr. was picked up at the funeral and taken to his new home with the Youngs. He grew up as Fred Young, and became a professor of English language and literature.
Family Overview
Robert Washington Gregg and his wife Helen Edwina (Arnold) Gregg had six children, from Lora Elizabeth the eldest (born 1868) to Blanche Cora the youngest (born 1883). All of their children — with the exception of Archie — had children. Twenty-two grandchildren in all.
In a family of six siblings, and twenty-two cousins— a total of twenty-eight people — there were four deaths. That’s a mortality rate of 14%. If you’re considering mortality rates as a percentage of infected people, it’s higher as not all of the siblings and cousins got sick with the flu.
Additionally, there is another cousin Minnie Ballard, who was born in 1907 and appears in the 1910 census, but not the 1920 census. She likely died between census day in 1910 (15 April 1910) and census day in 1920 (1 January 1920). If she died in the last eight and a half months of 1919, she might have been caught up in what some think was a final wave of the Spanish Flu, which extended into early 1920. If Minnie was also a victim of the flu, the mortality rate in the family would have been nearly 18%. While the coronavirus is not likely to have this large an impact on families, we already are hearing similar stories, such as the story of the Fusco family, seven members of whom were sickened, and four died (Tully).
Below is a chart of the family with the six children of Robert Washington Gregg and Helen Edwina (Arnold) Gregg and the dates of death of the four family members who died of the Spanish flu on black circles. In the case of Minnie Ballard, more information would be needed to confirm her date and cause of death, but I believe she may also have been a victim of the flu. I have placed the range of dates of her possible death on a gray background.
COVID-19
In 2020, we have vastly more medical and epidemiological knowledge than we did in at the time of the Spanish Flu. In 1918, we were just coming into the modern era of medicine with a relatively robust understanding of infection. But we did not have microscopes advanced enough to see a virus, and we did not understand the genetics behind viruses and the details of their biochemical interaction with human cells. Today, we can even track the evolution of viral RNA.
We are much better equipped to deal with a virus of this nature now than we were a hundred years ago. Add to this the likelihood that the coronavirus is not as deadly as the Spanish influenza virus. Data is still being analyzed, but many researchers believe Covid-19 has a death rate of 1.0–2.0% of people infected, which would make it 10–20 times more deadly that the seasonal flu, but still much less deadly than the 3.4–10% lethality of the Spanish flu.
A key thing that remains a variable is the human element. Our will and follow-through will determine the story that our children and grandchildren tell about us. We need to focus on:
- social distancing
- separating the sick from the exposed, and the exposed and sick from the well
- providing medical personnel with the personal protective equipment, tests, and equipment they need, and finally
- staying well by bolstering our immune systems with healthy food, exercise, and sleep.
If we take the recommended steps, we have a good chance of vastly lowering the impact of this disease and getting back to rebuilding our lives and economies. If we are lucky, we will learn compassion and understand the fragility of the systems we have created, and improve them to limit the impact of the next outbreak.
Sources
- Peter Spreeuwenberg, Madelon Kroneman, John Paget, “Reassessing the Global Mortality Burden of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 187, Issue 12, December 2018, pp. 2561–2567, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwy191.
- Niall P. A. S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 76, №1 (Spring 2002), pp. 105–115.
- United Nations Secretariat. “The World at 6 Billion.” (New York: Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1999); online at a personal site hosted by Denver University, https://mysite.du.edu/~rkuhn/ints4465/world-at-six-billion.pdf : accessed 22 March 2020.
- Tony Messenger. “Messenger: Lessons on how to deal with a pandemic were forged in St. Louis in 1918,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis: 13 March 2020) online at https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/messenger-lessons-on-how-to-deal-with-a-pandemic-were/article_1947cae8-f169-5d86-8e90-2f6793be4d5a.html : accessed 23 March 2020.
- Alfred W. Crosby. America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- John M. Barry. “The site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications.” Journal of Translational Medicine 2:3 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1186/1479-5876-2-3 : accessed 20 March 2020.
- “Charlotte Gregg,” The Ord Quiz, (Ord, Nebraska, 2 January 1919), p. 1; cited on FindAGrave memorial page for Charlotte Gregg (20 Mar 1910–30 Dec 1918), Find A Grave Memorial 154916678.
- Lena Johnson Schlichtemeier. History of Swan Johnson Family of Nance County, Nebraska. (Privately printed: 1936; transcription online : https://www.genealogymedia.com/transcriptions/swan-johnson-family/).
- “Mother and Daughter Die,” The Ord Quiz, Vol. 38:1 (Ord, Nebraska: 3 April 1919); Ord Quiz Archive, Ord Township Library, http://ordlibrary.org/ordquiz/1919/1919%2004.pdf : accessed 24 March 2020.
- Tracey Tully, “Coronavirus Ravages 7 Members of a Single Family, Killing 4,” New York Times (New York: 18 March 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/nyregion/new-jersey-family-coronavirus.html.
Other Resources
- John M. Barry. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. (New York: Viking, 2004).
- Gina Kolata. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
- Laura Spinney. Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. (New York: Public Affairs, 2017).
- Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/.
- Ancestry.com. https://www.ancestry.com/ : Nebraska marriage records; WW I Draft Registration Cards; United States Population Census.
