Jim Bradshaw: Morgan City and the flu pandemic of 1918

I got my flu shot early in the fall. I got the flu last week.
Medical folks say that the shot will make your case milder even if you get the flu bug. There may be something to that; I had only one day of the “just take me out in the woods and shoot me” intensity. But if what I had was the mild version, I don’t want to see the other.
The scientists also say, as I have just had cause to notice, the vaccines do not actually inoculate you against the flu; they “help your body prepare to fight it.” Well, my body was unprepared, and so were the bodies of a handful of friends and neighbors who came down with it.
There still appears to be a good bit of guesswork in deciding which flu strain to inoculate against each year, but it must be said that the vaccines have worked to head off terrible epidemics such as the one in 1918, when a strain of “Spanish flu” infected 500 million people worldwide — about one-third of the planet’s population at the time. More than a quarter of the people living in the United States got sick, and 675,000 died.
More U.S. soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu epidemic than died in battle during all of World War I.
The epidemic probably got to Louisiana through the port of New Orleans and may have spread into south Louisiana through the port at Morgan City.
The histories are hazy about the exact timing and numbers, but most date the Louisiana outbreak here from the first week of September 1918, when the ship Harold Walker steamed into New Orleans. Fifteen passengers were sick and three had died when the ship docked.
Five crew members were sick when an oil tanker reached the city two days later. The ship’s radio operator died while at sea. Later that week, a United Fruit Company cargo ship brought still more sick crewmen to the city. New Orleans newspapers reported the city’s first influenza death on Sept. 29.
By the end of October, 14,000 people in New Orleans had suffered through a bout with the flu and more than 800 had died — and other towns were feeling its effects. Newspapers began to print pleas for anyone trained in nursing to contact the Red Cross and volunteer to help care for the sick.
Early in October medical officials in Morgan City issued an order “prohibiting the holding of public gatherings of any kind … until further notice, due to prevalence of Spanish influenza.” Other parishes and communities soon followed suit.
Health officer Dr. C.D. de Gravelles wasn’t sure whether he had authority to order Morgan City’s churches to close their doors, “so [he] put the matter up to them in the form of a request,” according to a newspaper story. The churches complied quickly enough, but there seems to have been some trouble in closing the back doors to the town’s saloons.
De Gravelles reported 39 cases in Morgan City (which then had a population of about 5,500) and 30 in Berwick (about 1,500 population) under his personal care. The numbers were comparable in communities across south Louisiana.
The virus had apparently spread inland by Oct. 16, when the St. Landry Clarion reported, “There is no let-up in the spread on the ‘flu.’ On the contrary, the malady has spread so rapidly that it said to be epidemic in every state of the union and the number of victims is becoming alarming.”
On Oct. 19, newspapers in Morgan City, Franklin, St. Martinville, and elsewhere used big chunks of their front pages to print in its entirety a U.S. Public Health Service bulletin that basically told people to stay away from other people.
That seemed to be the only thing that worked. On Nov. 2 the Clarion was able to report, “The influenza epidemic throughout Louisiana and the other states is reported as waning, so much so that the health authorities feel extremely gratified at the present outlook, and the general public is looking forward to a full resumption of every-day activities. Schools, churches, places of amusement, etc., will reopen very shortly and the handicap people have been laboring under during the prevalence of the malady will soon be forgotten.”
It’s hard to find exactly the number of people who died in Louisiana during that epidemic. Records were poorly kept and many of the flu deaths were attributed to pneumonia. But historian Ann McLaurin did a pretty careful study (“The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in Shreveport,” North Louisiana Historical Association Journal, Winter 1982) and estimates that there were about 174,000 cases of the flu reported in the state between Sept. 28 and Nov. 5, 1918, with 3,114 deaths.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.