Read any conventional history of the 20th century and you will find one big event missing.
The 1918 “Spanish Flu” epidemic ended the First World War, and was an enormous trauma that continued well into the next decade.
But we aren’t told that story. We’re told that America won the war in great battles across northwest France. We’re told that Prohibition and the Roaring 20s were a reaction to the fighting.
The flu barely rates a mention. Yet it defined the era that followed it.
The flu went into a memory hole because it took out the young and the fit, leaving survivors wondering why they should bother. It was the flu that caused a the great “turning inward” of American politics, for both political parties, which went on for a decade.
It’s clear now that COVID had the same effect as the 1918 flu and is getting the same treatment. The world shut down for a year and people died in agony, alone. The moment we rebooted, people tried to memory hole the experience. The vital, necessary, human cooperation needed to stop the spread, the isolation and the vaccines, were all dropped into that memory hole and buried with the dead.
COVID remains a trauma that is too terrible to recall, and those who want to remember the fight, or continue it, are treated as anathema.
Just like with the flu.
The Big Mistake
The same turning inward that brought us Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and the public rise of the KKK has brought us the return of Donald Trump and neo-Nazis on the public stage. It seems the key mistake Democrats made in the last election was trying to remind Americans of the trauma we had just gone through.
Again, the same thing happened in 1920.
There are many events from that period that are being repeated right now. Take, for example, the Palmer Raids, which led to American citizens like Emma Goldman being deported to Russia, in defiance of the Constitution and the courts. We’re so ignorant of our history we forget that A. Mitchell Palmer, the man behind the raids, was originally a progressive.
After the flu the whole idea of progressivism, of political unity in the name of the little guy, was eclipsed by hypocritical money-grubbing nihilism. In public we pretended Prohibition was working and minorities were happy. In private we went to speakeasies and lynched black people. Art celebrated the hypocrisy, in novels like The Great Gatsby, in the journalism of H.L. Mencken. And in poems like The Hollow Men .
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.”
Think of the flu the next time you read it, think of COVID, then read the poem again.
It wasn’t courage that ended the war. The flu ended the war. We couldn’t stand that then. We can’t stand that now. The idea that something we can’t even see might end us, at any moment, has driven America crazy, just as it did before.
The Future
We know what happened a century ago. The party continued until it ended, in October 1929. The bonfire of Republican economic vanities, the forgetfulness, the willful hypocrisy, the tariffs, went on and on until it crashed down all around us.
That’s the most likely scenario for our kids’ future, too.
Except for this.
Except for the fact that America can’t be isolated today as it was then. Republicans are trying to isolate us, behind our oceans, just as they did back then. But we’re not as dominant in the world now as we were then. The world is too interconnected. It can reorganize without us, around us, and drive us down if we choose to go there.
These global trends can hasten the end of the party, the collapse of the economy, and while that may seem horrible to contemplate, the idea that we might go on for a decade as we’re going now is even more horrible.
