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After learning that black patients suffering from the 1918 influenza were being treated in the segregated basement of an emergency hospital, banker and civic leader Maggie L. Walker successfully lobbied Gov. Westmoreland Davis to convert the Baker School for the care of black patients. This facility was staffed by black doctors and nurses, such as these women photographed a few years after the flu pandemic in front of St. Luke Hall, headquarters of the Independent Order of St. Luke, the fraternal organization Walker led. (Photo courtesy Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site)
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Stuart Circle Hospital, opened in 1913, treated Richmond residents who contracted the flu of 1918. The top floor featured a roof garden, thought to be useful in healing patients by providing ready access to fresh air and sunlight. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
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Richmond native Adair Archer, a 24-year-old soldier, was stationed at Camp Lee in Petersburg before a transfer to Camp Grant in Illinois, where he quickly died from the flu during the 1918-20 pandemic. (Image by Chris Salvador courtesy Field Studio)
Lance Warren and Hannah Ayers, spouses and award-winning production partners of Richmond's Field Studio, watched as COVID-19 thrust the nation into uncertainty and peril last month. As documentarians and makers of the PBS series “The Future of America’s Past," they knew there was something they could do.
“Hannah and I wanted to be useful,” explains Warren. “We were struck by how pandemic news is endless, but historical reflection is limited.”
Their interest led them to the Great Influenza of a century ago and the affliction in Richmond. The term “unprecedented” is often invoked when referring to the present pandemic, but it needs a qualifier. We’ve been through something similar, but that experience is now past most living memory. And in a city adorned by plaques, statues and monuments to generals and politicians, the mute testimony to the massive death of the 1918-20 Great Influenza is mostly found on headstones in cemeteries.
“We wanted to make an extension of our show dealing specifically with the 1918 epidemic,” Ayers says. “It isn’t taught very widely, it isn’t publicly memorialized.” Though the deaths from the Great Influenza, estimated at 50 to 100 million, were perhaps 10 times greater than the concurrent First World War, that cataclysm’s violence largely eclipsed memory of the widespread disease.
Warren points out that the influenza and COVID-19 pandemics are quite different, and a century’s worth of medical knowledge and technology separates efforts to stem the illness. “What we wanted to present was the human response — how reactions then and now are similar, and how they differ. It's worth considering: What worked? And what could have been done better?”
To gain perspective and to localize the issue, the team interviewed University of Richmond professor Elizabeth Outka, whose book “Viral Modernism” and co-curating of the Valentine’s 2019 “Pandemic” exhibition gave her unusual insight; Ajena Rogers, supervisory ranger at the Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, who brought light to the activist Walker’s push to improve treatment of African American victims; and Errol Somay, director of the Library of Virginia's Virginia Newspaper Project, who brought the event to life through print.
“We also found archival footage from 1918 taken by the Ford Motor Company,” Ayers notes. The automobile manufacturer set out to demonstrate the resiliency of its product and, like a proto-Google truck, shot film during travels.
One of the key personalities in their story is the city’s beleaguered public health director, Roy Flanagan, who is pressured by politicians and business owners to reopen Richmond after roughly two months of lockdown.
“We stay away from any direct comparison,” Warren says. “But comparing 1918 with today, you see troubling symmetries — disparities along lines of race and income, and a rush to reopen by localities facing economic strain.”
The story is one of contrasts, of neighbors giving to each other, but also politicians and business owners failing their fellow citizens.
Volunteers of 1918 risked their own health to staff emergency hospitals and soup kitchens. “In that we can find some hope,” Ayers says. “The challenge was then to do more than they thought possible — and they did, and we see that happening today.”
“The Future of America’s Past" began streaming its second season as the pandemic unfolded in the U.S. The program, which airs nationally as well, can be seen on Sunday, May 17, at 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. on VPM PBS stations. The seven-minute segment on the epidemic will be posted on the show's website on Friday, May 8, and available on demand.
