Rest in Peace

JOANNE: When the flu took hold, it was so devastating it could overcome whole cities and their civic structures. In Philadelphia, the flu’s progress was aided by a massive gathering on the 28th of September 1918. Americans across the country were gathering in support of the liberty loan drive. They were encouraged to buy bonds to support the war effort. And many cities held patriotic celebrations. Historian James Higgins says the largest one was in Philadelphia.

JAMES HIGGINS: There was a mock bombing raid. Anti aircraft guns were hidden throughout the city with dud anti aircraft shells that they’ fire off. It is a huge celebration. And the parade marches 23 blocks from north Philadelphia to South Philadelphia. And that day there are singalongs numbering in their hundreds throughout the city. People are packed cheek by jowl on the trolleys and the sidewalks to get to the parade. And then of course, people are standing there for hours watching the parade go by.

JOANNE: There had been scattered cases of influenza in Philly, which had been brought to the city by sailors from the naval base in Boston. But the liberty loan celebration exposed almost the entire population of the city to the virus, and almost all at once.

JAMES HIGGINS: And that night, I like to suggest that the half of the city that went to the parade went home to the half of the city that didn’t go to the parade.

Within one week of the parade, Philadelphia officially logs 1,100 deaths.

JOANNE: Many doctors and nurses had been called away to war and the city’s hospitals were quickly overwhelmed. Funeral homes ran out of coffins. And grave diggers who had to dig everything by hand couldn’t keep up with the number of bodies. The morgue for the city of Philadelphia only had room for 36.

JAMES HIGGINS: We have a couple of photographs from inside that morgue. And there are bodies with towels and sheets and a bit of cloth over the faces strewn on the floor. They’re on embalming tables. We know from written records that they are stacked on desks and they’re piled in corners. And the atmosphere inside the city morgue becomes so cloying that the back doors are thrown open and the liquid that’s running out of people moves across the floor and onto the sidewalk. And little boys had to be shooed away by adults because they’re gawking through the doors at all the bodies inside.

JOANNE: Even more horrifying, as the morgues filled up, deceased family members were left around the home, stretched out on couches, set up in chairs, and put under tables. Panic spread throughout the city, along with the smell.

JAMES HIGGINS: People are walking down the street, and they can tell which house has a body laying in it by the smell alone. And so it is a terrifying sort of realization that you are walking down a street in metropolitan Philadelphia and you’re passing a home where you know there’s a body laying. And when you walk through some of the most densely packed of the neighborhoods, people’s senses are assaulted by it. And this adds to such a great deal of the fear that people already feel, as everyone around them gets sick and as you wait for your own symptoms to develop.

JOANNE: This was a city in crisis. Its systems couldn’t cope with the sheer number of the dead. When it was clear that the city was unable to keep up, they turned to the largest charitable organization in Philadelphia, the Roman Catholic Church. On October 14, young men from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary removed more than 400 bodies from the city morgue.

JAMES HIGGINS: And this must have been like untangling the bodies at Dachau and other concentration camps that American and British soldiers liberated at the end of World War II. Some people are stacked like cordwood and others are thrown into heaps. And they’ve been there for days.

JOANNE: Those bodies along with others from homes around Philadelphia were buried in Potter’s Field.

JAMES HIGGINS: Where the poor, the indigent, and the unknown are buried by the city of Philadelphia.

JOANNE: Many of Philadelphia’s immigrants who died from the flu, Irish, Italian, Polish, were Catholic and had been left on the grounds of Holy Cross Cemetery.

JAMES HIGGINS: The seminarians who go there, and there are dozens, report that there are bodies lying all over the cemetery grounds. They’ve been pushed into sheds and horse sheds. They’ve been pushed into the office. They’re laying on the grounds of the cemetery itself amongst tombstones. Bodies are brought in coal carts, children’s wagons. One of the seminarians recalls a pitiful scene of an Italian father with his 1-year-old or 2-year-old baby has been put in a pasta box. Another father brings one of his children and they are in a citrus fruit bag, a burlap sack because even if he could afford a coffin, there are no coffins to be found in the city of Philadelphia anywhere by the second week of October.

JOANNE: The seminarians spent the first day digging individual graves until 10:00 at night, but the numbers of bodies were so great that it became clear that this wouldn’t be sustainable.

JAMES HIGGINS: And so the decision is made to begin excavating large communal graves, trench graves. These are not holes where you toss bodies. That’s not what they do.

JOANNE: They dig 60 foot long trenches 10 feet deep where dozens of boxes would lay on top of each other. They meticulously record the location of every body in case family members wanted to exhume it later for burial in an individual plot.

JAMES HIGGINS: An eyewitness recalls in the evening when the the sun is down that she hears Latin being spoken.

MALE SPEAKER: [SPEAKING LATIN]

JAMES HIGGINS: And she comes around some tombstones and finds a number of seminarians in one of these mass graves. And they are reciting the De Profundis from the Old Testament. And it goes in part from, the depths oh lord I cry out to you. It’s a lamentation psalm. And they are saying the prayers over the dead, blessing them with holy water, and stacking the coffins two high.

JOANNE: Higgins says that there is evidence that up to 3,400 people were buried by the Philadelphia seminarians in just about three weeks time. The trench graves at Holy Cross Cemetery are still there today. And Potter’s Field has been turned into a parking lot. And that’s a fitting image because most Americans have forgotten about the Spanish flu and know nothing about the way it could ravage whole American cities. But James Higgins is not surprised.

JAMES HIGGINS: It’s not exceptional, I don’t think, for the public to forget about epidemics. I wager if you ask most Americans, even most Philadelphians, tell me a little something about the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 that killed 10% or 15% of the entire city of Philadelphia, most won’t be able to tell you anything about it. What I find more exceptional is that the historical community, the professional historians, the scholars, the professors, the writers, the researchers, they too have forgotten it. They have somehow missed, they have somehow overlooked and ignored an event that kills more Americans than the Civil War in just a couple of months time.

BRIAN: James Higgins is a historian at The University of Houston Victoria. He id the author of A Brief History of Pennsylvania Medicine.