A Confederate Judge, New Orleans, and Politicizing a Pandemic

Buried somewhere in the Greenwood Cemetery in Ruston, Lincoln Parish, Louisiana is a victim of the Spanish Flu—my great-great grand uncle Judge Newton McKay Smith.

After losing an arm for the Confederacy during the American Civil War in the 1860s, Smith found himself no longer suited for farm work. So, in the words of my aunt, “He studied law and became a judge”.

Smith continued to practice though the turn of the century and up until the Great War came to an end in 1918. Like many veterans and Southern Americans at the time, he was probably a major supporter of America’s involvement in the conflict and likely joined in the many war fundraisers and parades that took place in the busy port of New Orleans.

With the public eye fixed on the war, few took notice of a mysterious disease which swept across Europe and killed more soldiers than the conflict itself. And on September 16, 1918, a New Orleans newspaper published an article titled “No Danger of Spanish Influenza Epidemic Here”.

That same day, however, the Harold Walker oil tanker landed in the mouth of the Mississippi River after travelling from Boston to Mexico. According to journalist Drew Broch, “Among those on board, more than a dozen people — including the ship’s physician — were ill with what was suspected to be the flu. Two others had died on the first leg of the trip and were buried in Tampico [Mexico], and a third… expired on his way back home”.

This ship is likely what introduced the virus to Louisiana. Soon, ‘social distancing’ measures like isolating the sick and the forbidding public gatherings were introduced. But 78 days later, these measures were reversed even though New Orleans had recorded a higher rate of virus deaths than all U.S. cities except for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

This decision to lift social distancing measures came just around the announcement of the armistice in Europe on the ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’. Celebrations erupted in the streets of New Orleans and elsewhere and would have been celebrated greatly by veterans and public servants like my great-great-grand uncle.

It is possible that Smith contracted the virus through these types of celebration or through some other sort of exposure to the public. It’s hard for me to imagine what would have been going through the mind of the then 81 year old judge as he was found himself confined to a hospital bed the following year.

I don’t know very much about my relative or his beliefs, but as a former confederate and public figure in Louisiana at the time, there is probably a good chance that he, like many others, racialized the virus and blamed the Germans, Spanish, or other European immigrants for the spread of the virus which would kill him. While blame was attached to Germany as the war’s aggressors and losers, it was also associated with Spain as the country’s lack of censorship in media had allowed the world to believe that the virus was worse there than anywhere else (not to mention that the Spanish king Alfonso XIII famously suffered from it).

This ‘blame game’ comes into direct conflict with the theories of contemporary historians like Alfred W. Crosby who argued that the virus originated in Kansas and Claude Hannon who believed it originated as a less deadly variant in China. Other popular theories also maintain that it originated in P.OW. camps in France or food markets in Austria.

Like how today’s Corona Virus has been labeled a ‘Chinese Virus’, the ‘Spanish Flu’ became a highly politicized weapon of blame in which governments could (metaphorically) wash their hands from and halt or rollback public health measures. This politicization has been witnessed countless more times in the modern era as the Marburg virus was attributed to Uganda, Ebola to Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dengue to the Philippines and Thailand, SARS to China, and HIV to the homosexual community.

How we choose to label these infectious diseases is important and certainly intertwined with their mitigation and public image. Let us take a lesson from the city of New Orleans and the global history of infectious disease by practicing a healthy lifestyles and remaining in quarantine as long as appropriate.