Radiolab - Dispatches from 1918

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when COVID-19 has passed. So in this episode, we look back to the years after 1918, at the political, artistic, and viral aftermath of the flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people and left our world permanently transformed. This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, Tad Davis, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Latif Nasser, Sarah Qari, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, with production assistance from Tad Davis and Bethel Habte. Special thanks to the Radio Diaries podcast for letting us use an excerpt of their interview with Harry Mills. You can find the original episode here. For more on Egon Schiele’s life, check out the Leopold Museum’s biography, by Verena Gamper. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.  

Wait, you're listening. I'm listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From WNYC. Chad? Hey. Hey. How's it going?

Good. I'm Chad Abin-Rom. This is Radio Lab with dispatches six through 10 Pat Walters, senior editors, gonna start us off. Okay. Okay. So you and Molly had this idea to do an episode about the 1918 flu. And whenever I get into something historical,

I go to the newspaper archives. Okay. I just, I think they're so cool. You know, coronavirus is in the news everywhere. We've been talking about this on the show, and I thought, like, oh, what did this look like in 1918? But yeah, so I decided to just like go to the New York Times archive, start in October, which was like the peak of the second wave of the 1918 flu.

People are talking about how things are opening up again, and we might have a second spike of the coronavirus, and what people are afraid of is that what happened in 1918 will happen now, which is it was pretty bad when it emerged in the winter of 1918 in the beginning of the year. And then it kind of went away. And then everyone was like, Oh, it's gone. And went back to normal. And that fall, it spiked. And like most of the people who died in that flu died in this second fall. I didn't know that that's, I actually honestly didn't know that that's the trajectory it took.

It kind of freaks me out, I have to be honest. Anyhow, okay, sorry. So, yeah. So you go to the New York Times in the fall of 1918 and I remember struggling to find the flu. Hmm, it's all WW1. The front page of the paper on October 1, 1918 has huge, like, 20-point font headline across the whole page. Bulgaria quits the war. Turkey may follow.

War's fiercest fighting on Canberie front. I don't know what these things mean. I don't understand where we're one enough to know what any of this means, but it's just like all war. French advance on every front. Every day. British take many towns. All fall. Turkey also seeks peace. Austria seeks to quit war. Page two, page three. USS Tampa. Some small maps, there's profiles of officers and different units, what they were doing in the war, where they were killed. 692 casuals. You have entire articles which are just names of all the people killed. You keep going, page 5, 6, 7, pretty much all war stories. You know, as you get into the low teens, you get the flu stories. Just little briefs saying like, St. Louis closed its businesses,

or the health commissioner has decided not to close the schools, but even though everyone's saying you should close the schools, or like, the flu is in China now, and that's the whole story. It's just like, really? Flu in China is the story. Is that sentence? That's it. So this is how the coverage goes all fall

war stories war stories war stories and until my favorite example of this situation is December 20th 1918. It's another day another another typical day at the New York Times with no flu coverage on the front page. Pretty much no flu coverage until the last page. And there wedged in between a very fussy long story about like who owns some cable lines. It's like a half a page long story. I don't even understand what it was about. And an ad for shirt collars, which were a thing, then, is this 95-centon story with this headline. Six million died of influenza. Oh, f*** off. And the subhead is regarded as world's greatest plague since the Black Death. So this five sentence story stuck in the

last page of the paper says this, the Times as Medical Correspondent says that it seems reasonable to believe that throughout the world about six million persons have died from influenza and pneumonia during the last three months. It has been estimated that the war caused the death of 20 million people in four and a half years. Thus, the correspondent points out, influenza has proved itself five times deadlier than war, because in the same period at its epidemic rate, influenza would have killed 100 million. Never since the Black Death has such a plague swept over the world, he says, adding that the need of a new survey of public health measures has never been more forcefully illustrated. Oh my god. That's I just I just I it's just that's crazy. Yeah.

Well, it's just, that's crazy. Okay, so the 1918 flu is kind of famous for being forgotten. Wasn't widely taught in schools, you won't find it written about in a lot of novels and plays. But what I didn't realize is that it wasn't just forgotten after the fact, it was ignored in the moment as it was happening. And there are a lot of reasons for this.

I mean, you had censorship in certain countries. You had self-censorship in this country. Journalists feeling like maybe they had to keep morale up and stay focused on the war. Not to mention there wasn't much anyone felt that they could do about the flu. It was even kind of familiar. Came around every year. And that year there was just more of it. But on top of that, and this is what I find interesting, they didn't even know what it was. Like think about a couple months ago, March, coronavirus.

Immediately you began to see these illustrations in the paper of the spiky ball. My kids started drawing pictures of the spiky ball. We all had something we could visualize. Back then, they had no picture of the enemy. They didn't even know the flu is a virus. It was truly invisible. And yet this tiny, unseen, unspoken of force was reshaping human history in all kinds of surprising ways. This show began with a simple question, what happens afterward, after this? Molly Webster, who you'll hear from later in the program suggested, well, let's look back at what happened after that one.

And that's what we're going to do today, as we enter the summer of coronavirus and look forward to the fall. We have five stories of how the invisible hand of that flu has continued to guide and shape us for the last hundred years and has left the world a very different place. It was in 1911, Yes, men and women were dead. When they stopped, Where's the doctors call the flu? People died everywhere.

That we present through the air and the ground. Okay, so these dispatches are a full team of fair. We're gonna start things off while we started with Pat. We're gonna keep it going with reporters, Ted Davis and Matt Kielty. Yes, so Ted and I, we talked to... Remote, Ruby. A couple of historians. I don't hear. Can you hear. Yeah, so Ted and I, we talked to... Remote A, Ruby. A couple of historians.

I don't hear. Can you hear? Yeah, I can hear them. Okay. John Barry. Professor of Tulane University. And Margaret. Oh, hi, good. Margaret McMillan.

Professor at University of Oxford. Yep. Yeah, okay, so if we jump in near the end of 1918, there's a ceasefire, World War One is coming to an end. I'm just wondering what's the general mood? Well, there was this sort of mixed feeling that on the one hand, in the allied countries, they'd won the war, and that at least was over, but it also left a tremendous amount of chaos. Large parts of Europe were in revolution, empires were collapsing, and probably nine million dead of the competence

and good to suppose how many more who died of starvation or disease. So there was a lot of grief, a lot of concern about where the world was going, but also I think there was a real longing for some sort of better world. And that new, better world was supposed to come in the form of a peace treaty.

So January 1919, all the Allied leaders come together in Paris. And who all were the Allies in World War I? The T1s were France, Great Britain, and then of course the United States. In gentle estate, when the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris. He entered almost as a conquering era.

Huge crowds turned out to see him, because for a lot of your pins, and not just your pins, a lot of people around the world, he represented a new hope. Because for the past year, Wilson had been giving these speeches about what the war meant to the United States. And in them, he called for things like peace without victory, that there were no losers in this war.

He called for the end of colonialism, imperialism, he called for the creation of this thing that it never existed before, that he was calling the League of Nations, where countries could just come together to talk through their differences rather than going to war over them. It was all of this that had people calling Wilson the God of Justice. But worth mentioning that Wilson, you were for him or against him, was a bit of an ass. And that if you disagreed with him, he would cut you.

And more importantly, he was also extremely racist. He's not my favorite president, you know, his person, which is a whole another story. But with a lot of historical accuracy and a little bit drama, to continue with this story. January 18, 1919. In the office of the French Foreign Ministry, 37 nations, 200 delegates packed into this big conference room.

To come up with this peace treaty that they would eventually send to the enemy, Germany. seven nations, 200 delegates packed into this big conference room. With lots of gold and mirrors. To come up with this peace treaty, that they would eventually send to the enemy, Germany. And at the further room at this long table, where are two main players? Woodrow Wilson. And right next to him, this short bald man with a big white mustache. The Prime Minister of France. George Clementso. He looks like Mr. Monopoly.

But Clementso was ferocious. Who's nickname was the tiger? And unlike Wilson, he was someone who, quote, had no real interest in humanity as a whole. His sole concern was for France. And this would be a bit of a problem, because Clementso, when it came to the enemy, Germany. I don't think there is any question.

You wanted him treated like an enemy. That we are here to decide the issue of German guilt and ultimately German reparations. Because as the French kept on saying we didn't start the war. Germany declared war on us. And the conduct of Germany is almost an example in human history. The damage done to France was enormous. The French had lost more men in the war than any other country. Everyone in France had someone who died, knew someone who died. There must be justice for the dead and wounded. Whole villages had been wiped out, towns destroyed.

And for those who have been orphaned and bereaved. He was saying someone should pay for this and it should be Germany. Because Germany is so fit to gratify her last footerini by resort to war. He essentially wanted to put the boot on Germany's neck. He didn't want Germany just to pay. He wanted payback for what Germany did. He wanted revenge. Problem was...

Wilson didn't. Wilson wanted to go easy on Germany. It was his whole piece without victory thing. So Wilson and Clemens, so they'd get together... Virtually every day. Privately'd be a nice little spread, tea and coffee and chocolate A-clas and things. And the two of them would go at it. How long must we repeat history? Wilson preaching peace and unity, the more we learn that brave men

won't work. And Clementso your history is a short one. Being just like look the Germans the Germans must pay. Need to be brought to their knees. The Germans are defeated, and they would argue back and forth. They must not be destroyed. And back and forth. The Germans have attacked us before. They'll do it again. And they'd argue about the League of Nations. We need to be just about German reparations. Justice is what Germany shall have. And these negotiations. Justice for the people started a trade. Who now stagger under the war that's which exceed 30 billion pounds.

And drag. They cannot. No one seems to be... Hey, that much. Ludging. And eventually things started to get diplomatically heated. John told us after one meeting, Wilson turned to an aide. And called the French, quote, damn noble.

In another meeting, You, sir. I'm so called Wilson. At one point, the British Prime Minister, who was always in these talks, he said, I feel as I'm sitting between Napoleon and I am not thinking only of Germany. I am thinking about the future of the world. Let me see if we're eagerly. In this one on January. We must make peace. February. March. Jerry's no peace.

Then eventually Wilson gets angry. So much so. I want the steam engines prepared. That he threatens it is leave to go back to the states. Several occasions. And Clem on so said rather unkindly. He's like a cookie keeps the trunk ready in the whole way. Because Wilson could never actually bring himself to go.

Late March Wilson told his wife, quote, Well, thank God I can still fight, and I'll win. A few days later he tells an aid. We've got to make peace on the principles laid down and accepted or not make it at all. That was April's second. And the next day after that, April 3rd. Pfft. Pfft.

Wilson gets sick. Pfft. Pfft. The quote is, uh, his doctor, Wilson, was seized with violent bits of coughing, which were so severe and frequent that it interfered with his breathing. Unquote. He had a fever.

His fever hit 103. His health starts deteriorating so fast that his doctor thought with his breathing. He had a fever. His fever hit 103. His health starts deteriorating so fast that his doctor thought he was poison. Because of intestinal symptoms. Does that just mean stomach pain? Yeah, and vomiting, diarrhea. Turns out all symptoms of influenza. Influenza.

By this point, April 1919, millions of people have already died of the flu. There had been these three big waves. And John told us this kind of remarkable thing is that as the flu had been rampaging, Wilson had never spoken of it. Not once. Not publicly. He was focused entirely on the war. That's all he cared about.

And here's Wilson in Paris trying to put an end to the Great War, trying in some ways. He thought to put an end maybe to just like war forever, while the third wave of the flu was moving through Paris. Now, whether Wilson contracted the flu, I think we'll never know. Margaret points out like we truly can't know. It could have been. I think it was more than a cold. I mean we'll never know. Margaret points out, like, we truly can't know. It could have been.

I think it was more than a polled. I mean, he really was very sick. But for John, who wrote a whole book about the 1918 flu, he's like, a lot of the classic symptoms were there. Diarrhea, nausea, fever, coughing, shortness of breath. And also this one peculiar symptom. Mental disorder. John said, for people who contracted the flu back then. It's extremely common to be disoriented.

To feel restless. To become delirious. And Wilson, Do you hear them? Definitely showed those symptoms. They're right outside the door. One of Wilson's closest aides. Said nothing we could say to disabuse his mind of the thought.

They hear me. Sir, who are you talking about? That the home was filled with French spies. The French. Also, around this time Wilson, take the chairs according to an aid acquired a peculiar notion. Move them.

He was personally responsible. Street lines. Before all the property and the furnace place, he was occupied. Put them in street lines. Something queer was happening in his mind. The British by minister referred to it as, quote, nervous and spiritual breakdown.

Climbing so when he got win. He is worse today. Said to someone, do you know his doctor? Can you get around him and bribe him? The same time Wilson's doctor is saying these are terrible days for the president. Wilson would be sick and in bed for about a week, but even after he recovered, one of his

aides said, quote, one thing was certain, he was never the same after this little spell of sickness. April 8th, he goes back to the peace conference. Back to negotiating with Clemen, so,'s a different man. He's weaker. Even one of his secret service aides notice Wilson lacked his old quickness of grass Entirely unquote, and this is the thing is that John said After Wilson got sick gave in on practically every point he seemed to just fold to Clements. Oh he went in with this idea to go light on Germany and

Came out with almost the opposite the final treaty called for everything Clements have wanted harsh reparations on Germany a huge reduction in its military loss of a bunch of territory Germany was pretty much a discharited as Germany's foreign minister put it quote they could have expressed the whole thing more simply in one clause Germany renounces its existence. Unquote. Now, Wilson did end up getting his League of Nations, but Germany in the end wasn't allowed to join it, which was pretty much a slap in the face.

But some people say because Wilson got this big thing that he wanted all along, that's why he was willing to give up on everything else. But I don't think so. What he did in KVN was so far into everything in his personality and everything in his history. I can't prove it was a disease, but I don't see another reasonable explanation. And after Wilson made the concessions, a whole group of his top but younger aides met and considered whether they should resign in protest. One of them wrote Wilson a blistering

letter of resignation. It came from a diplomat named William C. Bullitt. Quote, I am sorry that you did not fight our fight to the finish and that you had so little faith and the millions of men like myself and every nation who had faith in you. Our government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections, and dismemberments. A new century of war. June 28, 1919, the Germans would eventually sign what is known as the Treaty of Versailles. And what happens next is something that's debated by historians. There's some like Margaret who say, there was a real problem here and that was increasing the Germans felt they hadn't lost.

There was this growing sentiment amongst Germans that they could have won the war. It was just that like these liberal leaders surrendered too soon. And so if you feel you haven't lost, no treaty has been the same fair. But there are many historians who say that this treaty, the Treaty of Versailles, which was so harsh on Germany, pretty much forced them into a depression, humiliated the German people by blaming them for the war, that this treaty would sort of create this foundation for the rise of the Nazis.

And here, every other country has its own people, the citizens. And obviously everything that followed, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the deaths of upwards of 80 million people. And it's kind of made me think a lot about Paris 1919, how there was this moment where you had these two important men, Wilson and Clementso, who would be sitting at some table in Wilson's study, or that big, long table in the conference room, and argue about what

the world should become after the end of this first great war. And I keep, I sort of keep imagining that like in those rooms where Wilson and Clemens so are sitting, that there's this other chair there, this empty chair. You know, it's over by itself. No one's paying attention to it. And I just keep thinking how it was almost as if the virus itself kind of had a seat at the table. The story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story of the story a story about how the flu gave the arc of history in this one particular individual a little nudge all the way on the other side of the world. So, the place where it starts kind of is

it's May of 1918. I think it's like May 29, 1918. There's a ship that docks in the port city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai. It's carrying Indian troops home from World War I. I didn't know India fought in World War I. Yeah. Indian soldiers prepared to embark for service overseas. India was a British colony at the time, so about a million Indian soldiers were off fighting

the war for the British. Splendid soldiers, splendid fighters, they will give a good account of themselves wherever they may serve. Some of them were in France and Belgium. Also others like the ones getting off the ship were coming from Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq. Huh. Anyway, so this ship, it's only there for about 48 hours.

But in those 48 hours, in addition to those soldiers, the flu also disembarks. A few days later, this one police officer that had been stationed at the dock shows up at the hospital running a fever. Then six other police officers get sick. A few days later, it's a bunch of men working for a local shipping company. Then it's people working at the dockyard.

The disease starts to spread through the city of Bombay and from there, throughout India. Now, meanwhile, just north of Bombay in the state of Goodroth, there's a man that's taking the train from city to city giving speeches. He's a lawyer, activist, big proponent of nonviolent resistance, and his name is Mohandas Gandhi. Ah! This is him speaking much later, but just help you imagine. And the thing is, like, in these speeches,

he's actually recruiting people to fight in World War I for the British. Really? It's very surprising, right? I mean, Gandhi definitely had some blind spots. He even made some racist comments about black people when he was in South Africa. And when it came to India, he had this idea that if Indians fight for the British, then they will in return get more autonomy. To quote from some of these speeches that he gave,

India has altogether lost the capacity to fight. It has not a particle of the courage it should have. We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn the use of arms. So for him, it was the show of strength, but also kind of like a bargaining chip. I see. So he thought if Indians prove their strength, the British would reward them. Yeah, something like that.

So through that summer, the flu is spreading through India. Gandhi is running around giving speeches. And then all of a sudden, on August 17th, he writes a letter where he says, I'm on my back. Is that what he literally said? I'm on my back. Yeah.

That's like the letter equivalent of a text message, like, sick, can't talk. Exactly. What else does he say? He says, dear Mr. Henderson, I'm on my back. I'm passing through the severest illness of my life, and I was incapable of sending you a letter earlier. And so he got the flu?

Well, it's kind of unclear, like, one person I spoke to argued that it could have been the flu. Other people said it probably wasn't. We honestly can't know for sure. According to Gandhi's own account, he got food poisoning from something that he ate and came down with a case of dysentery. But the thing is, it was really bad. The appetite had all gone. I had all along thought that I had an iron frame, but I found that my body had now become a lump of clay. I have almost a crawl to reach the laboratory,

and I have such gripping pain that I feel like screaming. I wanted to scream all the time, but controlled the urge with great effort. I long to die and be free from it all. It went on for about five months, like approximately from August of 1918 to somewhere around January of the next year, which lines up exactly with the time of that terrible second wave of the flu in India.

And so at the exact time that Gandhi was on his back, so was India, like it was utter devastation. And the colonial government was basically doing nothing. The sanitary commissioner of the state of Punjab writes, the hospitals were choked so that it was impossible to remove the dead quickly enough to make room for the dying. The streets and lanes of cities were littered with dead and dying people. The postal and telegraph services were completely disorganized. The train service continued, but at all the principal stations dead and dying were being removed from the trains. The

burning cot, which is a cremation site, in burial ground, were literally swamped with corpses, whilst an even greater number awaited removal. Nearly every household was lamenting a death and everywhere terror and confusion reigned. Wow. You know, in the US we had about half a million people that died from the flu. In India, it was somewhere between 10 and 20 million people, just in those few months. Oh my god. Which is more than the number of soldiers that died in World War I globally.

Like we talk about the forgotten flu, but the part that was most forgotten was what happened in India. Wow, yeah. And Gandhi is on his back through that whole period. Yeah, he finds out that his son and daughter in law have come down with the Spanish flu as well. His daughter-in-law actually ended up dying from it. Wow.

I actually started reading through some of his letters from this time. And they're fascinating because you see him go from writing these long-screens about politics and war recruiting to like real soul-searching. For instance, around October or so about two months into his illness, he's so sick that he starts to think that he might die. Dear hoodie love, I have a feeling that I'm now going. I have very little time left.

The body is becoming weaker and weaker. You start to see him contemplating in his own life. The inheritance of character, which I'm leaving to you, is invaluable in my view. I wish you to cherish it. Follow the path of religion. And more I contemplate this illness, the more deeply I realize what love of man to man must be and therefore love of God He's like reflecting on God and nature is God and God is love and nature and God be had this philosophy about illness where

Mysterious is the way karma works itself out any illness that you experience often. It's something that you've brought on to yourself We reap as we sow we we get what we deserve. In this illness, I can see my own fault at every step. Because he thought that way about illness, when he actually got sick, he started to reflect what have I done to bring this on. And if you read his letters, it seems like part of that was realizing that recruiting for the war effort was misguided. One need not assume that heroism is to be acquired only by fighting in a war. One can do so even while keeping out of it.

War is one powerful means among many others, but if it is a powerful means, it is also an evil one. That the way to have strength is not to fight for the British. In a war of all things, we can cultivate manliness in a blameless way. It was to fight against them through nonviolent means. What ends up happening is he emerges from his illness. As he moves across the dusty roads of India, the frail little man marshals his feet. And begins speaking to crowds again.

The war is over, he's done recruiting, and he says now that it is not wrong to defy laws that are unfaithful. We have to resist. By this time, the British have passed a law allowing them to arrest people without really any reason. And the people of India, meanwhile, have been through all of this death and suffering and seen that the colonial government was powerless to help them or just didn't care to.

So this time, the crowds are much bigger. They're ready for Gandhi's message. To which the British respond by cracking down even further. Massacring hundreds of people in a city called Amritzer, and in the wake of that Gandhi writes, it seems I shall have to fight the greatest battle of my life. From a handful of demonstrators, the marchers become a crowd. And then an army, unstoppable, Gandhi's name becomes their battle cry. It's a long time before Indians actually get their independence, I think 28 years to be exact.

But this moment, when the Spanish flu sweeps India and both India and Gandhi emerge from this time of extreme hardship, I think you can say that this is the moment where independence really starts to take shape. Coming up, dangerous bodies, ether ghosts, pig reservoirs, and whale flu. It's right after the break. Science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. I'm Chad Abumarad, this is Radio Lab. The idea for this set of dispatches is simple. As we head into the summer of corona and into the uncertainty of the next few months, we thought it was a good time to sort of look forward by looking back to the aftermath of the 1918 flu.

And to chart the many ways that the silent invisible hand of that flu virus has shaped human history. This next one comes from producer Latif Nasir. All right, I'm ready. Take me on a journey Latif back in time. And you're going back in time and you're going across the globe. Nice. To Vienna.

Okay. In the early 1900s. Okay. I mean, it's the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it's really, it's like one of the cultural capitals of the world. ItHungarian Empire, but it's really, it's like one of the cultural capitals of the world. It has this great classical legacy, like Mozart and Beethoven and Hofburg Palace

and that kind of thing. But at this moment in the early 1900s, it's just like bursting into modernity. At there's one point in 1913, where within about two miles in Central Vienna, you could find Stalin, Trotsky, Freud, and Hitler. Like they would have been going to the same coffee shop. That's crazy.

Is that true? Yeah. Oh my God. So anyway, so Vienna was this place in time where it's like, wow, this has sort of disproportionate mark on the 20th century, right? And I want to tell you about a guy who was at that place at that time named Egon Shilla. Egon Shilla, okay. So 1907 at the time he was a teenager. He wanted to be an artist studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but he found his teacher so stifling that he drops out.

And he decides to seek out his idol, one of the best known artists in all of Vienna, Gustav Klimt. Oh, he had the famous painting that there was like a woman that people put up on their dorm room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like she's like in gold leaf, it's called the kiss. Yes, that's Klimt.

So you have this like teenage art school dropout approaching his artistic hero, who's 30 years a senior, and supposedly kind of the way the story goes, Sheila shows him some of his sketches. He asks him whether he has any talent. And Clint says much too much. This sort of monumental moment.

And within a few years, Sheila skyrocket to success. And in exhibitions, you'll find their work alongside each other. Well, kidding. Now, just to give you a sense of what this guy, Sheila, what his work is like, like this guy's not a bowl of fruit guy,

he loves drawing portraits, and including and especially nude, like he draws men, women, male couples, female couples, himself masturbating, women masturbating. A lot of people at the time considered him a pornographer, he even gets arrested and thrown in jail at one point, and then they just let him out of jail a few weeks later. And you can see why people found some of his work unsettling.

Like he would be drawing his sister, like very detailed moods of his sister, detailed moods of like underage girls, you know, sickly people. There's a drawing he does like of the scrotum of a newborn baby boy. Like it's weird. it's really weird. And one of the Sheila experts I talked to,

Verina Gomper, she was like, to Sheila, painting bodies was a way of investigating the deepest questions about life. And just looking at them myself, like you can see, like he just wanted to see people. Yeah. And the way people actually were not the way they were supposed to look, just the way they really actually looked. So a few years later, 1915, he marries Edith Harms three days after the wedding. He has to report for active duty in the Austrian military.

Couple of years later, he gets reassigned back to Vienna. And soon after he finds out that his mentor, Gustav Klimt, is in the hospital. Klimt had a stroke. And while he's in the hospital recuperating, he contracts pneumonia. So Sheila goes to, basically goes to see his mentor on his deathbed, but he's too late.

So instead, he goes to the morgue and sits next to Clint's body and starts to sketch him. Like almost like a death mask, you know, like he's making a death mask or something like that. Like trying to freeze him or something or hold him or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So Climp dies and sort of his shield is reeling from the death of his mentor. He's actually professionally doing better than ever. The whole Vienna art scene sees him as this rock star. He buys a new, like big studio, and he talks about how he was gonna convert his old studio into this kind of new revolutionary kind of like art school.

It wasn't just gonna be a kind of a traditional art school, the way that he had gone to. He hoped that there would be a kind of a traditional art school, the way that he had gone to. He hoped that there would be these kind of cohorts of artists behind him, that he could help train the way he wished he had been trained. And besides that, his wife Edith, she becomes pregnant. But then comes the fall, when the big second wave of the flu pandemic hits. And according to the Sheila Biographer, Jane Collier, there's this family story that

Edith, who was by this point six months pregnant, she decides to go out and get some groceries. She goes downtown and comes back with the flu. No. So Sheila just attends to her over the next couple of days and just has to watch as she's struggling to breathe and as she and also obviously they're on more in child just kinda start to fade away. Oh.

And the night before she dies, she asks for a pen and paper and writes this kind of barely legible note with super loopy handwriting, which says something like, I love you and I love you endlessly, Edith. And Sheila, he's sort of sitting next to her and just like he did with Clamp, he just sketches her.

So he makes this really gut-wrenchingly sad portrait of Edith. You see her in the bed. Sheila biographer, Jane Collier. Her head is propped up on pillows. Her eyes are half closing, but trying to stay open. You see her pervading away. So she died that night. So she lived through the night she died in the morning, and then it's that same day that Sheila first starts to shiver. Oh wow. So for the next three days,

he lays in bed with a high fever, and he dies the same day as her funeral. Whoa. Yeah, he was 28, she was 25. Wow, so that's horrible. Like this guy who's about to just explode, suddenly has these three deaths in rapid succession. Wow, what do you make of that? One of the ideas that the biographer, Jane Collier, brought up was this term that Gertrude Steincoin called the Lost Generation.

And when we hear that phrase, usually you think of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway, the the the nihilism of young people who lived through the 19 teens, but there's another way to read it. The lost generation were people who were literally lost. They weren't there anymore. They were gone. And you know,, Sheila is one of the, kind of the crystallizations of that. Like he's one of the clearest examples of that. Someone who was brilliant, someone who's prolific, like he had this sort of spark that was snuffed out.

So that made me wonder, like what would it have been like if they had survived? Like, how would modern art, how would the modern world be different? And so I, it's funny I like I asked these two different scholars. And they had kind of the same answer, which was sort of striking. They were like, Sheila was into drawing people, right? He was into drawing bodies. He was into drawing these human figures. But after the war, modern art in Europe moves away from figural work, like human figures,

and then towards abstraction. And it was only relatively recently that Shiloh's work became invogue again. Wow, that's kind of, that gives me chills just thinking about that. It's like for somebody who so passionately took in the human form to then in the wake of the pandemic and the war, it's just too painful to take in the human forms anymore.

And so we have to look away, you know? Yeah. That's kind of what I hear in that story. Yeah, and it does feel like between the war and the pandemic, like that whole generation must have seen the human body in such like in its most, like seen it in the frialest way in the most visceral way, like it's like,

oh, I don't wanna see that anymore. Well, don't you have, I mean, I remember you saying something like this. I mean, I, bodies look dangerous now. I saw this picture. It was one of those like, it was a conda-nass publication that I guess had been done right before the pandemic. And it had on the cover,

these two millennials embracing and kissing each other. And I remember seeing this photo and just recoiling. The idea of two human bodies touching. I was like, oh, no, get away from each other. Like there's some way in which the human body, like the, it's radioactive now. It's weird, because there's a way in which, I don't know, it's like at this moment,

our bodies are simultaneously, they seem so dangerous and like weapons. But then also like our bodies seem so vulnerable, like the idea that like someone's, you know, knee on a neck, like couldn't be that devastating, you know? Like it just, like you feel, I don't know, it's like at this moment

there's these two conflicting things. It's like bodies is so vulnerable and bodies are so dangerous. Hmm. Producer, lots of nozzles. Next up, Rachel Qsick. Okay. I am at your service. All right.

Ready to be inspired and amazed. Well, I don't know how much I'm going to inspire you, because I think you know a lot of what I'm about to say, because you are a radio man. But I appreciate you faking enthusiasm for the next 30 minutes. I'm really. No.

I'm not going to fake it. It's sort of like, oh my god, my, sorry, my child. Just scared the f*** out of me. So good. So good. Oh, but anyhow. OK, so where would you like to launch in? Let's start in the fall of 1919. The war is over, the flu is winding down,

and we're in Pittsburgh with this guy. Frank Conrad, who had been a ham operator before the war, and once the war ends in his garage, he, you know, sets up his, or resets up his amateur station. So that's Susan Douglas, radio historian. And I am a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. And back then, radio broadcasts were really just more code, just a bunch of beeps, boops, but Frank was about to change that. He worked for Westinghouse, which was an electrical manufacturing company. So he thus had access to vacuum tubes that were used for transmission.

And all you need to know about vacuum tubes is that they were the secret bit of technology that let radio go from This to this thing that's full of life But also in that moment in history in the wake of the flu Weirdly made us confront death absolutely. So on October 17th 1919 Frank is in his garage with these fancy vacuum tubes. And then he picks up a microphone, pushed up to a, you know, a phone to graph. And music floated out of Frank's little garage

into the air. There's no recording of this broadcast. All we know is that Frank talked a little, played some music, and about 35 miles away, all the way across Pittsburgh. Those sounds reached the ears of a little boy named Harry Mills. I remember the 10 or 11 o'clock at night and all the once this voice appears. And I remember letting out a yoke or a shout of some sort, my dad who had just gotten out of the bass, come in wrapped in a toutus, be sure I was alright. Somebody hadn't happened to me and I said, Dad, look, I'm hearing this full of talking.

And we shared the headphones, only had one pair of headphones. And he allowed us, I was right. That what a moment, that must have been. Can you, right? Like, suddenly, like, imagine that that like, that's never happened before. You didn't realize that the radio could even do that. Yeah. And then it's a voice like fills your bedroom.

I think that's just the coolest thing ever. It's super cool. And other people thought it was pretty cool too. One of the Pittsburgh newspapers began reporting on this and once word literally got out. That it was this guy broadcasting of voice and music from his gay Raj and Pittsburgh as soon all of these places. America

needs a tidal wave of the old time religion. Legislations. Labor unions wanted to do what Frank did in his garage. Colleges in universities, newspapers, the Boy Scouts, everybody wanted to in on this. Wow! Saul Adore, they could wish for a white man in the past.

Saul Adore, he was crazy. Get a little like a son. And at this moment, the radio you'd have in your home is really just a bunch of coils and wires. And a crystal, there was this little wire and it was called a cat whisker. And you would basically move it around the crystal until you got something. And in came the world. People have been asking me for the last two days.

Why put a ventriloquist on the air? The answer is, why not? And we depreciated if anyone hearing this nonsense, why do you take with us? As you'd move the whisker around to that crystal, you were not just hearing voice and music. You were hearing cowls. You were hearing screeches. You were hearing static. All of this kind of atmospheric noise that was really creepy and really weird, you know. You heard all of these sounds that lived between the voices, between the everyday human world, and something that stretched beyond it. And let's remember the context by the end of World War I, between 10 and 20 million people

had been killed. And then another 50 million or so were killed. By the flu, pretty much everybody knew somebody who had died, a friend or a family member or a loved one, and they were desperate for some kind of way of coping. And so when people heard these mysterious voices on the radio, a lot of them wondered, is somebody trying to reach me, are they okay on the other side? Is there another side? Can I communicate with the undead? Susan says this was a real moment where spiritualism took off. Reggie boards were flying off the shelves. People did go to sayances.

People thought maybe my brother or mother or cousin or whoever else I lost was out there floating around in this space called the ether, which is also where people believe the radio waves lived. And so explorations of the ether, you know, via radio, might be the way in which we could connect with the dead. It's so interesting, like, I don't think I ever would have come across these stories in any other moment in time, like in my own heart and head, and felt like any sort of sympathy for the people who wanted to believe in the spiritualists, like who would go to say ounces and buy weegee boards, but like the moment

we're living in right now where I'm speaking to you from my closet, and I haven't seen anyone besides my roommate in weeks, and And the other day I was like, because I'm in an apartment with one other person. And I had just been talking to my roommate for so long. And I was like, all right, I gotta get out of this, but there's no excuse to get out of here. And then I was just like, oh yeah, I got a phone call with my sibling, I gotta go.

And then I walked into my room and just to play it off. Like I actually had a phone call. I just like began speaking as if I was speaking to my siblings and like responding to these imaginary things that they would say. Like I imagine my sister would be talking about her baby and then my other sister would be talking about this dinner she made and I would respond and imagine and I must have sounded crazy and I do sound crazy but it felt so good until like, do that.

It was like, playing house or like make, make believe, but it felt so real, and I just, I don't think I ever would have done it before this moment, but I just have this sense of empathy for those people. And I'm just as crazy as they are, I guess. Yeah. Produced for Rachel Kusik. Okay. Rounding things out. Molly Webster.

So, so far we've done a lot of stories about human history and human experience. But my 1918 thing was what happened to the virus. Yeah. Because I mean, at the time, we couldn't see it, we didn't have the technology to see it. We didn't even know it was a virus, so we didn't know that much about viruses. It really was an unseen force. But, that all changed in 1997, thanks in a big way to a guy named Johan Holtin. Johan Holtin.

Yeah, he is like a legend as a science adventurer. And so basically the story goes is like, Johan got very interested in trying to see if they could get a sample of the 1918 flu and learn about it. So we went to Brevig Mission, Alaska, which is very, very cold place where bodies would be preserved. And there was a known flu outbreak there, late in the pandemic that killed most of the village. And so he dug down into the Permafross, where there was essentially this mass grave, went into bodies, took out portions of the lungs, then sent those samples to a lab in Washington, DC. Run by this guy. Hello, Jeff Tomberger. Hey, Jeff, it's Molly Webster. How are you?

Good. How are you? Dr. Jeffrey Talbin Berger. I'm a senior investigator at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Anyways, back in 1997, Jeff took those samples into the lab, and he was able to kind of really see the virus itself. So if you sequence all the genes of the 1918 virus, which as you did, we did in my lab, in the 1990s, in what he saw, so to speak,

was all of this genetic material called RNA. Influenza is an RNA virus, but the RNA that makes up the genome of the influenza virus is not just on one string, one continuous strand of RNA. It's on eight separate little pieces called segments. Really? According to Jeff, you can think of those segments as genes, so there are eight different genes all doing different things. And once you have that exact sequence, it now you can do very careful genealogy. By comparing those genes to other genes and other

flus from 1918 all the way up to today, you can just follow it and you can look at how things change over time. You can put together a very thorough life history of this virus. Yeah, it's a crazy story. The first thing to know is that when the pandemic peedered out, like around 1920 or so, the virus itself did not. No, the pandemic virus never went away. It just started circulating annually, causing influenza. And as more and more people became immune to it, it basically became like the normal flu.

Spread person to person. Through 1921 and 22. Changing a little bit every single year. Enough so it wouldn't die out because of immunity, but we're still talking about the same baseline flu that infected and killed everyone in 1918, running around dominant virus, traveling all over the world. Throughout the 20s and beyond. Through the 1920s, the 1950s, and then we get to 1957. Somehow in 1957, a dual infection occurred between the human virus that derived from 1918 and an unknown bird virus.

Wait, there's a meaning of two viruses right at the doorstep to a cell? Yeah. Yes. And because they were both flu viruses, they both had those eight gene segments, which means they could... Mix and match those genes and create a new virus. It's like a plug-and-play or something. Yeah, think of Lego blocks. You know, you can put them together in different ways, as long as you have a complete set. So these two viruses end up swapping their genes,

and the 1918 virus ends up with three new genes. Now, two of those genes make very important proteins. The two major proteins that are sticking out on the surface of the virus, like the little spikes that stick out from membrane around the virus. Those two proteins are abbreviated H and N, so the 1918 virus was H1N1, and when it bumped into this other virus, it got a new H and a new N.

When that happened, what you had was a new virus that had all the core machinery that had already been adapted to humans of the 1918 virus, but it now had proteins on the surface that nobody had immunity to, and so it could cause a new pandemic. After almost 40 years of, you know, being the regular old flu and making people sick, but like not that sick, in 1957, all of a sudden there was a new version of this virus. H2N2 virus. And thanks to that new HN, it killed over a million people worldwide and over 100,000 in the U.S.

It's like a serial killer that went and changed its clothes or something. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, the core of the virus was still derived from 1918. And then the crazy thing is that just 11 years later in 1968, that 1957 virus interacted in some way somehow with another bird virus. Did the gene-swapping thing again got itself a new age? And that became age three. Well, it's true from 1957's day the same. With the N2 from 1957 stayed the same.

With the backbone of, yes, go ahead, sorry. It's five genes from the 1918 virus, two genes from the 1968 virus and one gene from the 1967 virus. And then in 1977, the H1N1 virus, all eight genes from the 1918 virus that stopped circulating in 1957, came back into human circulates 20 years later. Yes. Wow.

And that H1N1 virus co-circulated with the H3N2 virus so that we had two different strains competing with each other for annual flu season. And then that circulated until they were replaced by a new pandemic that had a really complicated and mixed up origin and relation to 1918. Okay, so to understand this next part, you have to know that most flu's come from birds and they go into us, but they can go into other animals too.

Horses or dogs, whales and seals and camels and bats that have flutes, that whales. They probably all have a whale. Influents of viruses are in the reason that that matters is it turns out at way back at the beginning of our story. The 1918 virus, most likely, went from humans to pigs in 1918. And then the virus adapted to pigs and made a pig-specific lineage of the 1918 virus that became swine and fluenza. Oh my god. And so the human strain of 1918 goes off,

and it goes through the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and the onwards and onwards. Well, the pig strain is doing the same thing. It's going through the Piggy 1920s and then the Piggy 1930s and the Piggy 1940s, and it's doing little changes along the way, and at some point, they give it back to us. In a complex set of swapping genes between human viruses,

pig viruses, and bird viruses, a new virus was created that has some of the genes from the 1918 virus, but some are derived from its human descendants, two of them are derived from its swine flu descendents, and then a couple of the genes from bird virus and that led to a new H1N1 virus in 2009. This is so wild. I know, but Pig detour side, I think the thing that was crazy about what Jeff told me is that the virus, the one that had the backbone of 1918, the one in 1968.

The 1968 H3N2 virus became the dominant form of influenza and is still the dominant form of influenza today. Really? More than 50 years later. Does that mean that like the flu I might have gotten this past winter is built on the backbone of the 1918 strain? It absolutely is. And here's the thing I think that's important to think about.

If our data are correct, that a single transmission event from a bird virus to humans, say just before 1918, that led to the emergence of this new pandemic virus. Not only the tens of millions of people who died in the pandemic itself estimated at least between 50 and maybe even 100 million people, but that the tens of millions of people who have died of influenza in the last 102 years are all directly related to a single event in which a bird virus adapted to humans. Sometime before 1918, and no one really knows when, like a human, you know, touch some bird poop and scratch their nose or ate an infected chicken or like hugged a turkey or something. And this virus went from that bird, snuck into that human, and from there it went from

human to human to human to human to human to human to human every day of every year for the last 102 years. So the 1918 virus is ultimately responsible to all the slew deaths that have occurred in 100 years, which is stunning to think about. Wow, so the pandemic never finished. Anyway, right. It does also make you wonder, I mean, like here we are with the coronavirus six months in.

Like are we at the start of some crazy 102 year journey with this virus? Hello. Hi. Hi. Hi, oh. So we actually called up the best person we think of to answer that question. Okay, Dr. Fauci, such an honor to talk to you.

Sure. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who probably at this point doesn't need an introduction, but when we got him online, we told him what we had learned about the 1918 virus, formed several times into smaller pandemics, stretching all the way into this. And then we just asked them,

do you see that sort of legacy stretching forward for COVID-19? Like in 100 years, are we gonna look back on it the way we look back on 1918 now? You know, yeah, you know, it is conceivable, but unpredictable and not inevitable.

So COVID-19 is a brand new virus. It doesn't have the reassortment capabilities that the flu has. It doesn't have gene segments that would allow for what we call easy reassortment. The first thing you told us is that the coronavirus doesn't have those eight segments that the flu viruses have. So it can't do that same swapping of parts. All those genetic shenanigans, as it were. But on the other hand, the coronavirus.

It certainly has the capability of mutate, so it could change. So I guess the question people are asking, is it conceivable that with this particular coronavirus, that we're gonna see versions of this as the years go by. You can never predict with certainty, but what I think we'll see over years is that we will either control it very well with a vaccine,

which I do hope is the most likely option, or it will go through a couple of cycles of seasons, and then we'll take its place at a low level threat, something that's present that can be dealt with, that it doesn't impact us in a way that it's impacted now. Gotcha, gotcha. I guess that's comforting to hear. I mean, for the best case scenario being that we see

a couple of cycles of this and then a vaccine kind of tempers it and gently guides it into something of a low level. Right. Yeah, something of a seasonal variety. What's the worst case scenario that keeps you up at night? Well, I have to tell you, the worst case scenario that keeps me up at night, I'm living through right now, a brand new virus that jumps species, infects humans, and has the combined capability of spreading

extremely rapidly from human to human, at the same time as it has a relatively high degree of morbidity and mortality. And that's exactly what we're in right now. Literally the perfect storm of the pandemic, which is the reason why, unlike other pandemics of different years with the exception of 1918, which is the reason why, unlike other pandemics of different years with the exception of 1918, which has some significant similarities, we have an epidemic that has essentially gripped the planet. So this is indeed an unprecedented situation. We've not been here before, certainly no one in our generations. because of a conversation you and I were having about, what would it be like to emerge from this COVID-19 era? So, okay, let's look back.

Let's look back at 1918 and see what happened in the years after that. And in doing that, we found all of these tendrils, artistic, technological, social, things that reached out, not just past 1918, but all the way to now. And it just makes me feel like the way in which we think about the rulers of our histories. I just not the rulers. It's like somehow we are not the masters of our destiny in the way that we think. It is interesting because it's like the things that catch our eye are not always the things

that define us. Yeah, that's a better way to put it. Yeah. It was in 1911, yes, men and women were dead. When they stole, with the doctors, call a fool. People died everywhere, they went free, Wow! That went pretty fast through the air and the growth of the rich sure was saying it was in 1990! Okay very special thanks for these dispatches to Verena Gumpur, Rushmohingandi, Siddharth Chandra, David Arnold, Laura Spinney, Simon Jutras who played the role of George Clementso,

our own David Gable who played the role of Woodrow Wilson. Dan Fink for casting, and also the National Film Board of Canada for use of the film based on the book by Margaret McMillan Paris 1919. McMillan Paris 1919. Okay. I'm Chad Abumrod. Thank you for listening. Please stay safe, everybody. This is Tim Scamal from New Maryland and New Brunswick, Canada.

Radio Lab is created by Chad with BoomRat, with Robert Crowich. They're produced by Sorn Wheeler. Dylan Keaf is our director of sound design. Susie Lettchenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Qsick, David Gebel, Bethel

Habtie, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Sarah Curry, Erie Ann Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliai, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbach, Melissa O'Donnell, Tad Davis, and Russell Gregg. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. you