Living History During a Time of Pandemic
By Jason S. Lantzer, Ph.D.
In the initial days of the Covid-19 pandemic, like most people I was left scrambling. Sure, there was the distraction of Tiger King, and while I wasn’t thrilled with the notion of being on lockdown, driving all over to find toilet paper, or missing out on seeing my students, some professional plans, nor trying to balance working from home while also making sure my children took to e-learning, it wasn’t all bad. Life slowed down, we had more family time, and despite the stress and fear, we were managing to get by.
As March gave way to April, I watched as some people turned to religious leaders, others to scientists and medical professionals, and still others to politicians—all seeking guidance about the “why” of the pandemic and the “what” they should do next. I listened and watched more than one press conference by school boards and politicians (at the local, state, and national level)—parroted by news media—that what we were facing was “unprecedented” and that we were in uncharted waters.”
Those words and phrases grated on my historian’s ears. We had survived pandemics before—and not just in the distant pass. I had barely started my teaching career when we were faced with H1N1 (the swine flu), which had led to a race to get a vaccine---literally, I drove my then toddlers to a CVS that had some children’s doses and even quarantines of those who (like one of my students) contracted it. And I knew, from some of my own work that we’d faced something similar nearly a century ago: The Great Influenza.
If we were searching for context, I reasoned, how we had dealt with the influenza outbreak that ravaged the globe from about 1917-1921, gave it to us. Here was a pandemic that seemingly appeared out of nowhere (spurred on by soldiers going to training camps and then being shipped off to fight the Great War—all while living in close quarters), had caused mask wearing (and opposition to doing so), lockdowns and closures (including of churches and schools), and had strained public health resources. My favorite historical fact was that in my home state of Indiana, confectionary shops were considered essential businesses during the pandemic—recognizing not only the American sweet tooth and importance of small businesses, but also that comfort food was seen as essential!
For a time, the Great Influenza example was my historical frame of reference. True, it wasn’t a perfect fit to our times, but it was similar enough to disprove the “unprecedented” talk that I continued to hear on the news. It also gave me an outlet to do some research and revisit some of my earlier work. Just a few months before the pandemic hit, I had completed a manuscript dealt with the Great War. As such, I reread John Barry’s The Great Influenza. I had first read Barry earlier in my career, while working on a project that dealt with the eugenics movement—in large part because, as a colleague pointed out, he does a great job describing the then new public health establishment, many of whose members were also advocates of eugenics. The Great Influenza became my “go to” recommendation for grappling with Covid-19.
However, there was an element missing from thinking about the 1918 flu and our current situation. The public health aspects were similar enough, but as the Covid-19 pandemic marched into the summer I realized there was something missing. The flu came in waves. Covid seemed to never leave us. Influenza, even in 1918, was common (and common place—throughout the twentieth century, about every decade after would see an influenza pandemic hit the United States, often with death tolls above 100,000 people). Covid was (as its full name implied) “novel”—it was new and seemed to strike people without warning, with widely different outcomes. It was that fear that anxiety, that was missing in what I was reading about the Great Influenza, when comparing it to our own time.
A colleague suggested that I read David Oshinsky’s Polio: An American Story. I knew of the book but had never picked up a copy. But I also knew something about polio, because my grandfather had survived it.
About three years before this picture was taken, my grandfather, Paul Rose, was stricken with polio. Prior to the late 1940s, polio had been considered a childhood disease and a debilitating one at that, for not only did it have the potential to kill children, but even survivors were often left physically wrecked, sometimes even paralyzed. But the disease, which struck fear into communities and parents alike, also appeared to be random. Medical professionals were not entirely sure how it spread or why outbreaks happened when or where they did. Most effort was put into rehabilitation and mitigation. Americans knew the disease not just personally, but also because President Franklin Roosevelt had suffered from it (hiding the extent of his paralysis) and had openly supported research efforts. It was not until after World War II that the great vaccine race took place. And by then, it did so with a sense of urgency. Polio cases were growing, and the reach of the disease was expanding. Increasingly healthy teenagers and twenty-year-olds were also contracting it.
Such was the case for my grandfather. He was a barely in his teens, a farm boy from rural Estill County, Kentucky when he contracted it. He was physically fit and known for his ability to tame horses. He was the one of four living children to Fred and Myrtle Rose. And now he was paralyzed, and bedridden. He was seen by a doctor, but for how long (or even if) he was hospitalized or if he had to spend time in an iron lung remains unclear. What matters though is the conversation my great grandfather had with him at some point after the diagnosis.
The Rose farmhouse was two stories, the four children (two boys and two girls) shared the two bedrooms upstairs. I imagine my great grandfather carrying my grandfather up the staircase. My great grandparents had lost a child to illness (my mother was eventually named for her), and the man I one day knew as Papa Fred was determined not to lose another. He sat on the edge of my grandfather’s bed, after days spent working on the farm, and massaged my grandfather’s legs. As he did so, he looked directly into my grandfather’s eyes and repeated, “my boy will walk again.” Whether it was prayer, plea, or a demand, it became a mantra and went on for days and then weeks. He rigged up an apparatus of wood and rope, that helped my grandfather build up strength and steady himself to stand. And slowly but surely, the strength in his legs returned.
My grandfather survived polio. He went on to live a good life, marrying, moving to Indiana, working in a factory (where he stood and walked all day—five or six days a week), raised a family, farmed, and eventually moved back to the family farm in Kentucky where he and my grandmother still live today. But his story made real to me what Oshinksy wrote about. It was a fact I had known, but not the details. I was lucky enough to know my great grandparents. I know that my Granny Myrtle likely prayed for, worried over, and cooked whatever my grandfather wanted. And in my mind, I can hear the mantra of my Papa Fred “my boy will walk again.” A statement of hope mixed with fear.
And it was that sense of fear, of anxiety, that had been missing in my own analysis of Covid-19. The pandemic isn’t just clinical and surely shouldn’t be political. It is a reminder that we cannot control everything, indeed that our mortality is real, and is fragile, that life and the way we live in the United States is a privileged one (even if it is far from perfect)—and that it can be taken away seemingly at random. But framing our current times with the stories of the Great Influenza and polio should also remind us that there is hope for a better tomorrow. Or, to paraphrase my great grandfather, that we will walk again.
