In today’s paper, subscribers can read a portion of actual coverage from the Greenfield Recorder in October 1918 of the influenza epidemic that infected about a quarter of the world’s population between January 1918 and December 1920. The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, according to Wikipedia.
Make no mistake — the so-called Spanish Flu took a heavy toll in Franklin County. But the look of the coverage was starkly different then versus now.
In 1918, the Greenfield Recorder was a 12-page weekly publication. But there was a lot of news within those 12 pages. For one thing, the size of the broadsheets was much larger than today’s paper and the fonts, or type faces, used were much smaller, so you could pack a lot of news into one paper.
Also, newspaper design has come a long way in a hundred years. The visual cues that today’s readers take for granted — i.e., size of headlines, placement on the page, size of photos — were nonexistent a hundred years ago. Speaking of photos, there were almost no photos on the pages of the Greenfield Recorder in 1918.
The first local reporting of the flu epidemic came Oct. 2, 1918. As you can see in the photograph of an actual front page, the headline, “TAKES HEAVY TOLL” is the same size as other story headlines at the top of the front, like “PAY DEERFIELD TAX” and “LIBERTY LOAN LAGS.” Whereas today, the size of the headline is a clue to the importance of the story. Similarly, the size of the subhead, “More than 800 cases now” is the same size as the subhead, “Boston and Maine Railroad has biggest bill” and “County towns need to show more pep.” Readers had to decide for themselves what story was more or less important.
The following week, Oct. 9, 2018, brought news that the epidemic “takes heavy toll” and the week “has seen heavy death lists.”
Surprisingly, there were no obituary pages back then. Instead, deaths were included in news of individual towns. This was a time when correspondents reported on the news and social life of their towns, including deaths and funerals. For example, here is a partial listing under Erving (Oct. 9, 2018): “Word was received here last Friday p.m. by Joseph H. Sargent of the death of his youngest son, Wayne, from influenza at Camp Upton. The young man was taken for limited service and had been in camp but a few months. He was a native of Erving, where most of his life had been spent.” And this, under Shelburne: “David Fiske, two years old, the youngest son of Chester Fiske, died suddenly Sunday night. His mother and three brothers are also very ill with influenza.” To get a sense of the number of cases of sickness and deaths from the Spanish flu, one would have had to read the minutiae of news reported by all the local correspondents in all the towns. And it was considerable.
Things that are the same then and now include the closure of schools, theaters and church services; all assemblages of people were forbidden and lodges and societies could not hold meetings. The public library was closed and there was an extreme shortage of physicians and nurses, with the fear that hospitals would soon be crowded to capacity. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that much of today’s reporting was ripped from yesterday’s headlines.
What you didn’t see then that you do see now is news of federal government responses to help victims and their families, their towns and states.
One conclusion that could be drawn from comparing news coverage then and now is that the flu pandemic was equally important as upcoming tax deadlines and liberty loans supporting the world war that the nation had recently joined. Another way of saying the same thing is that the flu pandemic was no more important than upcoming tax deadlines and liberty loan drives, the weather and other news of the day. The attitude then was: Life was tough, suck it up.