Also, 1918 wasn’t a political exercise.
i found this to be somewhat interesting
In addition, the pandemic exploded in the midst of war frenzy and heightened nationalistic hatreds. In the United States the great influx of immigrant workers, who had fled Europe immediately before and during the war, and the upsurge of racial and class tension added further to the socio-economic toxic mix. In 1917 one of the worst race riots in U.S. history erupted in East St. Louis and lasted to 1919.44 In February that year, a general strike was called in Seattle, and in the autumn the famous Boston police strike sparked class hatred and collective violence, with Harvard athletes and Brahmin businessmen forming the ranks of strike breakers.45 In 1921 whites destroyed an entire black town adjacent to Tulsa (Greenwood), burning nearly 4,000 houses and killing as many as 400 blacks, women and children included – a horrific event of U.S. history that until recently remained hidden from official histories.46 From 1918 to 1920 terrorist bombings, cries against Bolsheviks, and a hysterical red scare spread across America. Yet, this general milieu of hate failed to influence influenza. Despite its rapid contagion, high mortalities and unusual lethalities, this pandemic, as Alfred Crosby has shown for San Francisco and Philadelphia, brought communities together. With public services in Philadelphia near collapse and unburied bodies of flu victims left in heaps, elite volunteers entered the city’s ghettoes and opened kitchens to feed the poor; cab drivers mobilized 2,000 cars to serve as hospital ambulances; organizations cut across accustomed denominational boundaries, with Catholic nuns working in Jewish hospitals;and ‘people of all kinds poured into Emergency Aid Headquarters’to volunteer as nurses, ‘thrusting themselves into the presence of lethal disease’.47 This self-sacrificing volunteerism materialized, moreover, in the absence of institutional structures and despite deep schisms then splintering this and other wartime societies at home.
