Editor’s Note: This story was filed to the Associated Press in 2018 for the 100 year anniversary of the Spanish Flu.
HUNTINGTON, West Virginia (AP) – The aftermath of World War I still dominated the headlines in the United States 100 years ago, but reveling in the glory of American dominance a world away belied the unprecedented suffering at home.
Huntington’s two daily newspapers in 1918 – The Herald-Dispatch and the Huntington Advertiser – played the same formula mimicked across the country; the front pages screamed with the final days of the German “hun” in bold-faced type.
But the clear and present danger for the American public – the reason for all the dirt moving at Spring Hill Cemetery that autumn – was Spanish influenza, and the Tri-State’s portion of the world’s worst global pandemic since the Black Plague.
From January 1918 through 1920, an estimated 500 million people were infected with the disease worldwide. It reached every corner of the globe, decimating even the most isolated settlements in the Pacific and in the Arctic.
It’s estimated the virus contributed to the deaths of between 50 million and 100 million worldwide, representing between 3 percent and 5 percent of the world’s population.
In the United States, the flu may have struck as many as 30 percent of the nation’s population, killing more than 500,000 people. It is the second deadliest event in American history, behind only the Civil War, and alone dropped the nation’s life expectancy by 12 years.
“Spanish” flu is a misnomer, and the strain is theorized to have actually developed in Kansas. Because newspapers on both sides of World War I censored most early news of the outbreak for the sake of public morale, Spain, which remained neutral, freely reported on influenza, giving the impression it had originated there.
America’s troop mobilization in World War I spread the disease across the country and eventually into Europe once deployed. Stateside military encampments, with their crowded and often unsanitary quarters, became hotbeds of disease.
The first cases were thought to have developed among soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, around March 1918. Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, suffered an astonishing 1,777 deaths due to influenza that year – the bodies of soldiers grimly “stacked like cordwood” outside the morgue. In Maryland, Camp Meade reported 77 deaths in just one 24-hour period, including 19 soldiers from West Virginia.