The Economist under-reported the pandemic. Many victims were counted among the dead of the first world war
Apr 18th 2020
IN A REMARKABLE coincidence of history, this spring marks the 100th anniversary of the final serious outbreak of the Spanish flu, the world’s last big pandemic caused by a respiratory-based virus. It was the third-deadliest pandemic of the past millennium. Only the Black Death of the 14th century and the spread of smallpox to the Americas in the 16th century exceeded its death toll. From its appearance at the start of 1918 to its disappearance sometime in 1920 some 500m people—a quarter of the world’s population—caught the disease. Up to 50m died, more than were killed in combat in the two world wars combined. Yet despite the staggering toll, the crisis was poorly covered by many newspapers—including this one—and is often missing from history books.
One reason is the timing of its appearance, during the first world war. There were four major outbreaks of Spanish flu in Europe and America. Two, including the most lethal, occurred before the armistice in November 1918; a third started and ended before a peace treaty was signed at Versailles in June 1919. A fourth outbreak hit some parts of the world in early 1920, but was in most places much less deadly.
Scientists disagree on where the virus first appeared. A crowded British army camp in France, a farm in Kansas and a bird-migration route in China are all plausible suggestions. However, in order to maintain morale, wartime censors refused newspapers permission to report on the disease and its severity. In order to keep war production for the army as high as possible, few preventative measures were taken. But newspapers in Spain, which was neutral in the war, were allowed to cover the disease there freely. Their articles were republished around the world. And so the disease unfairly gained an almost certainly inaccurate nickname: “Spanish flu”.
The Economist appears to have obeyed the wartime censors and avoided discussion of the disease in its leaders or editorials until after the armistice. The newspaper and its then editor, Francis Hirst, had strongly opposed the war on pacifist grounds until 1916. But then he was forced to resign by the newspaper’s owners, the daughters of The Economist’s founder, James Wilson, including Eliza Bagehot and Emilie Barrington. They replaced him with the decidedly pro-war Hartley Withers, who seems to have chosen not to explicitly break the censors’ instructions.
Yet the disease was mentioned in parts of the paper not subject to censorship, such as commentaries on the money market and the stock exchange. These lay bare the damage the pandemic did to business. After the first outbreak hit, The Economist reported on July 6th 1918 that a credit crunch had hit the money market. There was “no really cheap money” available to British lenders or firms, because of the “disorganisation of business in various parts of the country, owing to the influenza from Spain”. Meanwhile, a report on the stock exchange in the same issue casually noted that “complaints of lack of business in all the Mining markets are as common as influenza”.
Throughout the summer we continued to blame the disease for a tight money market, as employee illnesses and absences brought financial markets to a halt. “Depletion of staffs owing to influenza is said to make the banks slow in discovering how much credit they have to dispose of.” The minutes of company meetings published in the paper also spelled out the damage influenza did to production, particularly to gold mining in South Africa (an important industry in a world where many countries still linked the value of their currencies to gold). The first (and smallest) outbreak in Britain, in 1918, lasting just over a month, caused absences equivalent to an average of four days for every munition worker, the reports indicated.
After the armistice in November 1918 more discussion of the disease began to appear. The crisis played a role in changing The Economist’s editorial line on government intervention. In the 19th century, the newspaper had become known as an advocate of laissez-faire ideas. Its first editor had set the tone by opposing central-government intervention in a wide range of areas, from tariffs to education and public sewers. In its first leader to mention the Spanish flu after the first world war, The Economist deviated from this approach, calling for more involvement to improve public health and more co-ordination from central government. The change of editor undoubtedly helped the shift from classical liberalism towards a more interventionist sort, but the Spanish flu certainly focused the journalists’ minds. “War must be waged…by State and employer alike”, thundered The Economist in a leader in December 1918, calling for “decent conditions of work, fair pay and good housing” as well as “education” as the methods that should be used to prevent the spread of disease.
Such a position was prompted by the real damage done to firms by the failure of many governments to take preventative action against the Spanish flu, such as the lockdowns widely used against co-19. Robert Barro of Harvard University, for instance, has recently estimated that the Spanish flu reduced real GDP per person in each country it affected by an average of 6.0%. The damage done to belligerent states by the war, 8.4% on average, was not much greater.
Even so, until co-19 rekindled interest in the history of pandemics, the Spanish flu had been widely forgotten in public memory and was even ignored in some history books. That process was helped by both press censorship and the decision by governments to bury the human toll of the disease in the collective memory of the first world war. British war memorials often state that the “Great War” lasted from “1914 to 1919” because they also included the names of troops who died of Spanish flu after the armistice. The great war against Germany and its allies may have ended in November 1918; the war against germs had not.
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