President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday December 3, 2020 said he plans to ask the nation to wear masks for his first 100 days in office. He also said he’ll issue a standing order mandating masks in certain places. “Just 100 days to mask. Not forever — 100 days,” Mr. Biden said. “I think we’ll see a significant reduction if that occurs with vaccinations and masking, to drive down the numbers considerably.”
In researching my great grandfather Augustus Arthur Thorspecken, I found that he registered for the WWI draft in June of 1917. I then found a newspaper clipping that showed that he was on leave from Camp Funston in January of 1918. Camp Funston in Kansas was the place where the first cases of Spanish flu first appeared and within a few weeks 1100 were sick. Since army training was 6 weeks in length, Augustus was likely at ground zero for the start of the Spanish Flu before he was shipped over to France. Because of the war, the flu spread to 24 of 36 U.S. army bases and then to Europe. The tight quarters of the camps were a perfect incubator to ignite the spread of the disease that resulted in an estimated 50 million deaths worldwide with about 675,000 deaths in the United States. My grandfather survived the pandemic and the war only to die of pneumonia 25 years later at the start of WWII.
Because there was a war going on, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic downplayed the spread of the virus. They did not want to appear weak. The first wave of the virus was like a tsunami that initially pulls water away from the shore, only to return in a towering, second wave. As the influenza spread across America, public health officials, determined to keep morale up, began to lie. U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue said, “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed.” As the disease accelerated newspapers assured readers that influenza posed no danger.
People knew that this was no common flu. The numbers were too staggering. There were not enough coffins for the dead. Mass graves had to be dug. They could not trust what politicians said. Society began to disintegrate. In 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people could only look after themselves. The most important lesson from 1918 is that politicians need to to tell the truth. This is a lesson that was not learned by the 2020 POTUS who lost. Joe Biden wants to start working to mitigate the damage already done with the simple request to wear a mask. Patriots who care about fellow Americans will pitch in.