Writing this Editors’ Note in another COVID winter feels like being trapped in a cruel pandemic Groundhog Day: since 2020, some details may have changed but the global crisis goes on. In October 2020, we convened scholars to consider how we study and teach the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in the age of COVID-19. Now, in April 2022, as our own pandemic drags on, Christopher McKnight Nichols has drawn together another diverse panel of scholars to consider the many aftermaths of the 1918–1919 pandemic in public policy, inequality, religion, and in collective and deeply personal experiences of loss. Grounded in Progressive Era history, their conversation also helps us to ponder our own future.
In addition to the roundtable, this issue’s articles further remind us of how the many varieties of progressivism shaped the influenza pandemic and its aftermath. Erik Setzekorn examines the heated early 1918 congressional investigations into the high levels of mortality in the army’s hurriedly assembled training camps. Well before influenza coursed through the troops, diseases such as measles killed thousands of young men, thanks to poor management and administrative incompetence. Progressive politicians split over the proper response. Angered by reports of bodies stacked outside morgues, politicians like Senator George Chamberlain called for immediate and sweeping reforms. Others brushed aside such concerns, citing wartime exigencies. In the following months, influenza decimated the camps.
Progressive thought shaped the post-pandemic world of the 1920s too. Julia Haager, winner of the 2019 SHGAPE Graduate Student Essay Prize, shows how a wide range of Progressive Era reformers’ racial nativism shaped early public-school sex education programs. Though we rarely put together the Committee of Fourteen, the Child Study Association of New York City, the United Neighborhood Houses, and the American Social Hygiene Association, their programs all helped create the first widespread sex education programs in America. Like the roundtable, Hagger’s work highlights the range of progressive thought and its many long afterlives in the 1920s. We conclude the issue, as always, with book reviews.
