—Friday, November 13th
During the dark days and nights of the pandemic I occasionally rummage in the archive of the Daily Sun in search of a sense of how Cornell coped with the Spanish Flu a century ago. Such then-and-now comparisons fascinate not least for the exotic look of a vintage broadsheet even when leafed through in digital form: the front-page cartoon crowning the seven-column layout; the creativity and craft of the advertisements that open windows onto the vibrancy of Ithaca’s urban life with its cafeterias, smoke shops, haberdasheries, and many theaters (both live and movies). At every turn one encounters juxtapositions and synchronicities, international wire stories jostling with campus announcements, as in the issue of April 16, 1919—Eastertide—and the call for Cheerleader try-outs placed just below the headline about peace terms being presented to the Germans at Versailles. The ominous subhead runs: “Paris Believes the Central Powers Will to Balk at Hard Conditions.” To the left of the cartoon making light of the looming introduction of Prohibition, we read of a Bolshevik defeat, corruption in state government Albany, and a strike on the docks of New York. Just below the illustration of a drunken Noah watching his bottles of booze toddle towards the Ark, comes an announcement of University Organist James T. Quarles’s pre-Easter potpourri program that ranges from Chopin’s Marche funèbre to the Good Friday Spell from Wagner’s Parsifal on which the recitalist is joined by his wife Gertrude, a contralto. Gone are the days when an organ concert, even in Easter Week, makes it onto the front page of any newspaper.
On page three another cartoon calls for funds to bring the troops back from Europe by depicting the Doughboys forced to swim home across the Atlantic. Almost comically moored alongside the cartoon is another watery column about changes to the order of the rowers in the Cornell varsity eight. On page five we read that the number of “English” deaths has surpassed births, nearly 100,000 having fallen victim to the flu. Just below this report comes news that the Cornell Mandolin Club has given up plans to re-form because its long-time director is still France. These and other collisions bring home the mortal truth that Spanish Flu was spread and worsened by war.
From University Historian Morris Bishop’s classic History of Cornell published in 1962 one learns that that in October 1918 the university began quartering soldiers on campus. With them came the flu. There were 900 cases at Cornell, some 1,300 in Ithaca. Thirty-seven students died, and about the same number in the town. In 2020 by contrast, the first Covid death in Tompkins County, home to Cornell, was reported a month ago. In the autumn of 1918 many doctors were overseas, so local resident and students were called on to help the stricken.
In World War I, Cornell’s fraternities were converted to dormitories for soldiers, with as many as seventy-five cots in each house. There were no campus clubs, no publications, no athletics. Tompkins County had voted to go dry already in October of 1918, more than a year before the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect. The cessation of student activities and the popularity of the movies, as Bishop wryly noted, “operated to keep the students away from beer’s redolence.”
During Covid there has been more than a little beer pong played. Today there’s a cluster of new cases at Cornell caused by party-hopping students. Rather than facing quarantine in fine style in the Statler as has been the case in the present crisis, one could have been sent off to the trenches instead, not for contracting the disease but for being alive.
