Racial unrest, disease, depression: 1919 versus 2020

A global pandemic has begun to ease off, leaving many thousands dead and the economy in tatters — and civil unrest with racist underpinnings breaks out across the country.

It was 1919. They called it the “red summer.”

The parallels between the summer of 1919 and the summer of 2020 are, according to Connecticut State Historian Walt Woodward, “One of the situations where there is a real resonance between the past and the present.”

The current coronavirus pandemic has been often compared to the influenza outbreak of 1918 and 1919, though there are some important distinctions. The death toll from the so-called Spanish Flu, for example, far outpaces the likely track of COVID-19.

Likewise, there are some important distinctions but also many parallels between the post-pandemic “race riots” (as they were called) of 1919 and the current ongoing protests against police brutality.

There had been a series of white-led raids of Black communities — including a month of fighting in Connecticut — when, in late July of 1919, a Black teenager was stoned to death while swimming in an area of Lake Michigan designated whiteonly, as The New York Times reported back then.

Police refused to charge the attackers, and the violent clashes lasted for two weeks.

Between Jan. 1, 1919, and October of the same year, The Times tracked “38 race riots and clashes in cities and other communities in various parts of the country.”

The flu pandemic, the so-called “red summer” race riots of 1919 and World War I are integrally connected, as historian and author Kenneth C. Davis said.

“I think absolutely the Spanish Flu had something to do with the red summer,” said Davis, author of “More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War.” “I don't want to overstate that it was the pandemic, but I don't think you can disassociate or disconnect anything about the period from 1918 to 1919, 1920, from the flu and the war, because they're completely interconnected.”

Soldiers return with disease

The Spanish Flu spread so easily, Davis said, because the priority had been on winning the war. Soldiers contracted the flu, and brought it back to military bases back home.

“In 1918 scientists and doctors were ignored. Sometimes the advice they were giving to politicians was ignored at great peril to the public health,” he said. “In 1917, 1918, the priority was winning the war. And that meant, keep pushing soldiers into the training camps, even though they were the breeding grounds for the disease. Keep pushing those soldiers onto the troop ships to go overseas. Even though the doctors said you have to slow this down.”

That’s why the first cases of Spanish Flu in Connecticut were identified in New London.

“New London in 1918 was a major hub of military activity,” said Woodward. “There were a tremendous number of military personnel on duty in New London.”

The first case in Connecticut of Spanish Flu was identified at the Naval base in New London in September 1918. By the end of the month there were hundreds of identified cases and, from there, the virus spread west through the state.

“It certainly was the epicenter in the way that New York City or Rockland County was at the beginning of the coronavirus,” Woodward said, noting that New London was also “one of the early places where these riots broke out.”

Between September and December of 1918, Connecticut lost 8,488 people to influenza, state records show — 56 percent of them between ages 20 and 39 — a number equal to 23,000 today as a percent of the state’s population.

The nation lost one-half of 1 percent of its people to the flu in 1918-20, equal to 1.65 million people as a share of today’s population.

The virus had started to abate in May 1919 when clashes between Black and white sailors spilled onto the streets of New London.