Mar 15, 2020 - How KC's response to 1918 flu pandemic caused needless death ... So-called Spanish influenza had been ravaging the city since late September. ... President Donald Trump and the governors of Kansas and Missouri soon declared ... Missouri meat processing plant employees sue over work conditions ...
Feb 19, 2018 - One of the deadliest flu outbreaks in history began in KS and quickly ... least 20 million people worldwide had died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. ... It's not known whether it started in the pigs or chickens or birds flying overhead. ... It was nicknamed the Spanish Flu, the Spanish Lady and the Blue Death.
Feb 26, 2020 - Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri ... it's worth remembering that the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic may have started in Kansas.
There are lots of hypothesis on where the 1918 influenza pandemic got its start. One idea put forth and published by the National Institutes of Health and other authors suggests that the virus originated in Kansas and spread from there. BY CHRIS OCHSNER
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There are lots of hypothesis on where the 1918 influenza pandemic got its start. One idea put forth and published by the National Institutes of Health and other authors suggests that the virus originated in Kansas and spread from there.BY CHRIS OCHSNER
Note: The Kansas City Star and McClatchy News Sites have lifted the paywall on our websites for this developing story, ensuring this critical information is available for all readers. Please consider a digital subscription to continue supporting vital reporting like this.
The news walloped Kansas City like a Jack Dempsey uppercut:
“A DRASTIC BAN IS ON,” shouted the bold headline of The Kansas City Star, on Oct. 17, 1918.
So-called Spanish influenza had been ravaging the city since late September. Hundreds in town were sick and dying of “the purple death.”
Over the next 27 weeks, the flu would kill an estimated 2,300 people in Kansas City, giving it a mortality rate greater than New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and even St. Louis, a city with more than 2.5 times Kansas City’s population at the time.
The reason — standing perhaps as a cautionary tale in the face of the spread of the global coronavirus pandemic — is that Kansas City failed in spectacular fashion to responsibly deal with the contagion when it had the chance, experts say now.
On Thursday, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, backed by the health department, made his first move by declaring a citywide state of emergency, canceling all events with more than 1,000 people and halting non-essential travel for city employees. President Donald Trump and the governors of Kansas and Missouri soon declared emergencies as well. Across the country, it is now recommended that people gather in groups no larger than 10 people.
“Protecting all of our residents remains our top priority,” Lucas said of the COVID-19 outbreak, “which means that how we interact over the weeks and months ahead will need to change dramatically.”
That did not happen soon enough in 1918.
Instead, as historians documented, Kansas City — unlike its rival St. Louis, which quickly shut down businesses and quarantined the city — adopted a keep-businesses-open approach amid political squabbling that would have fatal effects.
But, in the end, the town of some 250,000 people would emerge from the epidemic with a death rate of 718 people per 100,000 population — the 17th worst among 50 large American cities. The actual worst, Pittsburgh, would log a rate of 1,240 per 100,000. But Cleveland would have a rate of 590, New York at 582, St. Louis at 536 with Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit even lower.
“The lesson I took away from it,” Berry told The Star last week, “is that money does not buy your health.”
Camp Funston at Fort Riley, Kansas, was one of the first places in the United States to be hit by widespread cases of the 1918 influenza virus that would become a worldwide pandemic. Soldiers sent from Fort Riley to fight in World War I may have carried the virus to Europe. AP
THE KANSAS FLU?
In many ways, the epidemic was already on its way to doing its worst in Kansas City by the time city leaders acted together to beat it back in late 1918. Globally, the flu killed at least 50 million people, more than double the number that died during the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages.
“Effective at once, to remain in effect indefinitely,” The Star’s story continued. Then came the list of closings:
All theaters and motion picture shows.
All schools.
All churches.
Public gatherings of 20 or more persons, including dances, parties, weddings, funerals.
Crowding in stores was forbidden, restricted to no more than 25 persons. Music or amusements in hotels, bars and restaurants: forbidden.
Streetcars could carry no more than 20 standing passengers. All elevators and streetcars would be sterilized daily; telephone booths would be sterilized twice a day; streets would be deluged in water.
A small army of “quarantine officers” were to be dispatched to face what was then — as it remains today — the deadliest period in Kansas City history. More lives would be lost from the flu in Kansas City than deaths of Kansas Citians fighting in all of World War I.
While the measures seem extensive, they had been poorly coordinated.
“Our public response was delayed and dysfunctional,” said David McKinsey, a Kansas City infectious disease physician and lead author with his brother, physician Joel McKinsey, and Maithe Enriquez, of a 2018 Missouri Medicine paper on the flu in Kansas City.
The exact source of the Spanish flu is unclear, but some have come to believe that it should have been called the Kansas flu. It’s thought to have taken root in early March 1918 among World War I soldiers at Camp Funston, part of Fort Riley in Geary and Riley counties.
Careful readers then, looking back, might have sensed something different out there. On April 3, The Star ran a small item with an odd headline: “Rain Ends Queer Epidemic.”
Hundreds of schoolchildren in Mexico, Missouri, near Columbia, had been flattened for days by a mysterious bug. Doctors suspected it was some form of flu, but speculated that recent rains had “ended the epidemic.”
In the surrounding weeks, several thousand soldiers at Camp Funston would also be treated for a flu that killed 38 men.
Soon tens of thousands of soldiers trained in Kansas were off to the battlefields of France, Belgium and Italy.
“Six to eight months later,” said John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” “it exploded simultaneously on three continents: Europe, Africa and the United States.”
Then, as now, Kansas Citians had known the flu was precariously close to home.
On Sept. 24, a muted headline in The Kansas City Times ran tucked below war news regarding the enemy Huns of Germany: “Influenza Coming West.”
Few understood its fury.
A headline in The Star proclaimed the bans put in place by city leaders to ward off the spread of the deadly 1918 influenza epidemic. File THE KANSAS CITY STAR
WRENCHING DEATHS
“This influenza was violent. … This influenza killed,” Barry wrote.
No mere cold, the flu caused a swift and wrenching death, with a killing rate 25 times higher than milder forms.
In hours, healthy individuals could go from having what seemed like a cough to developing pneumonia that engorged the lungs with fluid, then blood.
Violent hacking contorted bodies as victims struggled to breathe. With lungs filled to uselessness, oxygen disappeared and victims quickly turned blue, the “purple death.” First the mahogany patches rose near the cheekbones and ears; then they spread across the face. People turned so dark near death, reported one Army physician in the day’s vernacular, “it became hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white.”
Headline after headline warned that the illness was drawing close to Kansas City.
Sept. 26, a.m.: “Influenza in 26 States.”
Sept. 26, p.m.: “Grip Spreads in Army, At Camps 5,000 New Cases Were Reported Yesterday.”
Sept. 27, p.m.: “Grip Doubles Death Rate.”
Then the flu hit town, often afflicting healthy people — between 15 and 35 — first and hardest. The youngest and oldest came later.
The first cases, the McKinseys note, were reported in the last week of September at the Sweeney Automobile and Tractor School, a private building at 24th Street and Baltimore Avenue, that had been converted for military use.
“Within a week 800 fell ill,” the McKinsey paper notes.
On Sunday, Sept. 29, The Star reported that a woman with “what is believed to be the first case” of the Spanish flu outside the Army had been admitted to General Hospital. She was Mary Riley, an employee of the Hotel Muehlebach. Others note the first civilian cases might have come days earlier from Fred Harvey’s restaurant at Union Station.
A drawing published in The Star in late November 1918 made commentary on the return of the influenza epidemic that had almost been eradicated weeks before. File THE KANSAS CITY STAR
FIGHTING PENDERGAST
Within a week, Kansas City Mayor James Cowgill and health authorities issued an order to close all schools, theaters and churches until the epidemic subsided.
But conflict soon erupted between factions allied to two influential Democratic political bosses: Tom Pendergast and Joseph B. Shannon. Pendergast had yet to rise to full power.
“The problem was that Tom Pendergast and Joe Shannon were dividing up the city 50-50,” Berry said. “What that did was make institutions unworkable.”
Health officials were among them. Two sides made their stances.
On one side were physicians A. J. Gannon, director of the health department’s infectious disease department, and his ally E. H. Bullock, the Kansas City health director and superintendent at General Hospital. They both supported a prolonged quarantine.
On the other side were Mayor Cowgill and W.T. Motley, a non-physician who was president of General Hospital and the health department. Siding with business merchants — including Pendergast, who controlled many saloons — they were for lifting the quarantine.
“It was business interests. They didn’t want to shut down the city,” Berry said.
So they didn’t. On Oct. 14, an initial ban was lifted. One disapproving Army medical officer from Camp Funston warned, “the responsibility for 400,000 lives” in Kansas City lies in the balance.
Another officer, Capt. A.A. Hobbs, responded curtly when assured that a ban could always be reinstated. “A dead man cannot accept apologies,” Hobbs said.
“Those selfish interests that have been besieging the municipal authorities in order that they may continue to make money, will now find that their selfishness will cost them far more dearly than if they had actively and willingly co-operated in protecting the public health,” a Kansas City Journal editorial railed against those who lifted the quarantine.
Just as Gannon and Bullock feared, infections and deaths immediately rose when the ban was lifted. Three days later, the “drastic” ban splashed on the front of The Star would go into effect, although only for a month.
On Nov. 11, 1918, more than 100,000 people lined the streets of Kansas City to celebrate the end of World War I with an impromptu parade and other gatherings. At the time, the flu epidemic that had killed nearly 1,000 people in Kansas City by then was thought to be under control. Flu cases soon surged. File THE KANSAS CITY STAR
ARMISTICE AND EPIDEMIC
Few local chronicles exist detailing daily life at that time. News stories recount nursing shortages and hospitals flooded with the sick and dying.
A 50th anniversary piece on the epidemic appeared in the Missouri Historical Review in 1968. The author detailed stories of nuns and priests waiting at hospitals and greeting ambulances to give last rites to individuals who had died before reaching the doors.
The main preventive of the day was isolation. Health authorities suggested clean diets, fresh air and bed rest. Doctors gave aspirin for pain and fever; oxygen by mask was used to quell the blue cyanosis; epinephrine was given for the pneumonia.
One man, a nonsmoker, began smoking cigarettes in the belief that it would protect his lungs. Another hung skunk oil around his neck. A woman ate mounds of “protective” yeast.
Barry, the author, said the experience in Kansas City would have been similar to experiences in other cities.
“You’re seeing panic in the streets, quite literally,” he said. “Understand, that the vast majority of people who got sick had a terrible few days and, a week later, they were fine.
“But you didn’t know when you got sick and you had your first cough if you were going to be dead in 72 hours or you were going to be fine. That was part of the terror.
“You’ve got the Red Cross reporting that people are starving to death, not because there is not enough food, but because people are too terrified to bring them food. It became every person for himself and herself, and society began to disintegrate.”
On Oct. 21, a story in The Kansas City Times described Gannon, the physician, wading into the homes of deathly ill people in McClure Flats. In the rat-infested neighborhood of shanty homes where Hallmark Cards’ headquarters now sits, he found a tamale vendor preparing food near a filth-infested backyard piled high with garbage and swarming with flies.
“Sure, I make them here every afternoon, and I always sell them out, too,” the man is quoted as saying.
“And thus goes the infection,” Gannon replied.
The Kansas City Journal described children playing on a garbage heap near a dying influenza patient. “On this garbage pile was poured the slop from the sick room,” the newspaper reported.
The first gauze masks, five layers thick, were seen in the city that night. Soon, few people were on the streets without them.
Profiteering and hucksterism mounted. Pharmacists sold “cures” and “preventives” at inflated prices.
As it became apparent that the war would soon end, and America would celebrate, pressure mounted to find good news in the epidemic and to lift Kansas City’s bans and quarantines.
By October’s end — with the death toll at 1,000, less than half of what it would ultimately be — stories declared the epidemic at a standstill.
Bans were eased. On Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918, more than 100,000 Kansas Citians flooded the streets, although many of them were likely sick.
In the euphoria over peace, stories about the flu all but disappeared. Until it erupted again. By Dec. 4, the Kansas City health department was estimating an average of 107 cases and 17 deaths each day.
The Star and The Kansas City Times began running daily tables of mounting deaths.
Then, as Christmas approached, the cases dwindled. Some 25 persons were still dying each day.
On Monday, Dec. 22, both The Times and The Star reported that despite 53 new flu cases and 28 deaths, the flu was under control. It would actually linger, ebbing and rising, over months.
Within days, bans were lifted. Masks came off. Front page headlines that had talked of death now gave way to this headline on Dec. 23.
“Expect a White Christmas.”
A story from The Star described the filthy conditions some people were living in while the 1918 influenza epidemic swept the city. File THE KANSAS CITY STAR
A version of this story, also written by Eric Adler, appeared in The Star in 2005 in relation to the outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu. Quotes from author John Barry appeared in that piece.
Red Cross nurses practiced carrying a stretcher in St. Louis to aid those hit by the 1918 influenza pandemic. St. Louis city leaders quickly shut down businesses to lessen the impacts of the flu and fared much better than Kansas City, which had a keep-businesses-open approach. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Eric Adler has won numerous national, regional and local awards for his reporting that often tells the extraordinary tales of ordinary people. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in NY, he also teaches journalism ethics at the University of Kansas.
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