Where was Captain Bill?

Did Spanish Flu containment regulations keep Captain Bill from home?

Cleveland newspapers first published that the Spanish Flu had arrived to the United States on September 12, 1918; the first Ohio case was diagnosed at the end of the same month.  As Chuck Hallinan previously reported, Cleveland’s city's health commissioner, Dr. Rockwood, responded suggesting that Cleveland would be spared the full force of the epidemic.  Unfortunately, his hopeful but unfounded guidance came just as the number of cases exploded. His reluctance to order immediate quarantines or bans on public gatherings may have been justified – people generally do not respond to rules that radically change lifestyles with just the possibility of being harmed.  Rather than coercion, the good doctor chose to rely on voluntarism and cooperation to contain the influenza recommending that public and group leaders take suitable precautions.

However, the body count quickly mounted.  On Friday, October 11th, Dr. Rockwood declared the Spanish Flu an epidemic.  On that day, a number of nurses at St. Luke's hospital had fallen ill from the disease after marching in the Liberty Loan parade on Sunday Sept. 30.  He declared schools, dance halls, theaters, movies, churches, and "other public meeting places, (excepting the “Liberty Loan” meetings places – we had a war to fund) be closed starting Tuesday, October 15th.

Interestingly, the bans were similar to today’s Covid-19 bans, with at least one exception: a ban on the common practice of spitting.  “Police Chief Frank Smith stated that ‘[i]n the view of the present situation, every member of the police department must understand that it is just as important to arrest and prosecute people who spit on streets, sidewalks and street cars, as it is to apprehend burglars and thieves’” (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 6, 1918).  

Source: Free Library of Philadelphia

Source: Free Library of Philadelphia

Dr. Rockwood sympathetically (but lacking a statistical basis to do so) declared the epidemic over on Armistice Day (November 11, 1918).  The logic seems to have been: If the Great War is over then let’s call this germ war over too.  The likely rationale would be Dr. Rockwood’s realization that the public was going to enthusiastically celebrate the end of the war and ignore the bans in place anyways. The Germans may have surrendered but, as we know, the germs did not.