A Bit of a Crap Year

In the fall of 1918, World War I at last ground to a halt.  The meat grinder that was four years of intense trench warfare ceased its terrible movement and celebrations broke out around the world.  Though a late comer to the war, some 5 million American servicemen, of which 3 million served overseas, began to be discharged so that they could return home and restart their civilian lives.  Unfortunately, they brought back with them a little something called the Spanish Flu, a virulent as hell hitchhiker which quickly began spreading across the country, killing thousands.  As can be imagined, a lot of people weren’t all that down with dying, so many municipalities shuttered businesses, schools, and public spaces.  Mask wearing and social distancing became the norm, though not without resistance from some claiming such requirements infringed on civil liberties.  Despite these extreme measures, some 675,000 Americans perished.

During the war, the United States had enjoyed an economic boom, supplying the various nations doing their best to cave in each other’s skulls.  However, the end of the war, combined with measures to prevent the spread of the Spanish Flu, caused the economy to falter and stumble into a recession.  Thousands of returning soldiers, eager to get back into the work force, found either no jobs available or shitty working conditions for even shittier pay.  Less than pleased with this situation, many joined labor unions which organized mass strikes in support of each other throughout the country in the spring of 1919, many of which devolved into violent struggles between the unions, company goons and scabs, and police.  These often violent mass strikes, along with random bombings by small groups of anarchists, convinced many that the country was descending into a communist revolution.  Now this might sound ridiculous today, but one should probably remember that at the time full on communist revolutions were taking place in Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Finland, and Hungary, and most industrialized nations around the world were experiencing periods of communist inspired protests and riots.  The fact that many American labor leaders at the time were also openly communist, to the point of calling for a widespread and violent labor revolution, probably didn’t help things that much either.  As a result, a panic ensued which allowed various levels of government to launch campaigns against leftist groups and unions, including violent attacks against protesters and strikers and the unwarranted arrest, and even deportation, of many groups’ leaders.

Now prior to the war, big business in the U.S. relied heavily on the massive flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe to hold down labor costs and keep unions from gaining too much power.  However, the start of the war dried up the flow of immigrants and the country’s entry into the war removed some 5 million people from the labor pool.  Not really wanting to raise wages, many factories began hiring African-Americans, who prior to this period had mostly worked as share croppers in the South.  It was rather easy considering racist Jim Crow policies kept African-Americans on the bottom of the economic ladder.  Migrating to other parts of the country meant not only better wages, but also escaping restrictive laws and random lynchings, so it wasn’t that hard of a decision.  Unfortunately, returning white soldiers, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, weren’t all that happy to find their jobs taken by people willing to work for less, never mind all the stupid racist views that were the norm at the time.  This sentiment only intensified when strikes began and factory owners hired even more African-Americans to work as scabs.  This resentment eventually boiled over into a series of race riots across the country, with white mobs indiscriminately attacking African-American communities, burning businesses and lynching residents.  African-Americans, some who had served in the military during the war, not being all that keen with this turn of events, fought back.  In many cases, the National Guard had to be called in to regain control.  This was all of course blamed on communist agitators, you know, not because people dislike getting treated like shit.

Oh yeah, 1919 was also the year Prohibition began.  So you know, just in case things weren’t crazy enough, you couldn’t even buy a damn drink.  Anyways, just thought I might as well throw that in there.  Back to the main narrative.

The total shitfest that was 1919 basically continued on throughout 1920 and 1921, with the country falling deeper into an economic depression which of course spurred further labor unrest, overzealous responses to labor unrest, and race riots.  About the only bright point was the passage of the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote in 1920.  Peace was only largely restored by a new economic upswing which began in 1922.  This upswing significantly weakened the labor movement, which had already been hurt by many in the general public coming to view them as being arm in arm with the violent communist revolutionaries in Europe.  One of the last things they managed was to ally with racist nativist groups to convince Congress to pass laws severely restricting immigration.  The labor movement would not recover its former political power until the Great Depression.  As a result of immigration being curtailed, the migration of African-Americans out of the South continued for the next several decades.  Though they faced discrimination and often times violence, this movement helped establish an African-American middle class and a cultural renaissance known as the New Negro Movement, both of which helped contribute directly to the Civil Rights Movement of the next generation.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_race_riot_of_1919#/media/File:Omaha_courthouse_lynching.jpg

The Elmocalypse

Some twenty million years ago, when humans were just splitting away as their own type of ape, long before they even considered becoming the jackasses we are today, a new type of tree appeared in central Asia.  The elm was a tall and stately deciduous tree, tough and resistant to most of what the world could throw at it.  As a result, over the next many millennia, this bad ass of trees spread across central and eastern Asia, Europe, eastern North America, and even parts of the Indian sub-continent.  Larger and taller than most other trees, with a distinctive shape, the elm quickly became sacred to many groups of people, often getting tied into myths surrounding death and the underworld.  As humans progressed, they found more uses for elms beyond burning them to stay warm, such as bows to shoot arrows, chariots and wagons, boats, and even many of the first sewer pipes since it resisted rotting no longer how long it was wet.

When European explorers began to spread out around the world, though they found many new and fascinating things, they also found many things similar to home.  One of the more prominent of these were elm trees, though with some subtle differences, giants bursting with familiarity.  Where these Europeans didn’t find elms, they planted them, giving themselves a taste of the old world.  As people began to move from the countryside into cities, they brought their elm trees with them.  Resistant to adverse climatic conditions and pollution, they quickly became the go to ornamental in cities and towns to the point that the majority of trees in parks and lining streets throughout Europe, North America, and Australia were elms.  Avenues and boulevards arched by rows of towering elms became an archetype of the new urban world.  That is, until Dutch Elm Disease hit the scene.

The first appearance of Dutch Elm Disease was in 1910 in the Netherlands, hence the name.  Tree lovers, the science kind not the weird kind, began to notice leaves and branches dying on an increasing number of trees.  At first it was only a few trees here and there, but by the time World War I came to a close it was being seen across the region, with many blaming the strange symptoms on poison gas used in the trenches.  As can be surmised from the last sentence, at first people had no clue what was causing the problem, but eventually around 1921 some Dutch scientists figured out that the trees were being attacked by some kind of fungus that was being spread by bark beetles.  I’m sure you’re very excited to learn all the details, so go read about them on your own.  Anyways, over time the fungus spread rapidly, reaching the UK in 1927 and North America in 1928, carried over via imported lumber.  Tree lovers, again the science type, began warning that if something wasn’t done, then millions of elm trees could die.  However, before this could take place, the fungus mysteriously began to disappear, falling victim to various viruses.  So ended, the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease.

Wait, no, that’s not right.  I mean yeah, the part about Dutch Elm Disease becoming less common in the 1940’s is true, but not the part about it disappearing.  No sirree, it just went into hiding, in Canada of course, where it secretly gave itself a makeover before springing back out into the world.  In the mid-1960’s, it suddenly reappeared on the scene in much a more virulent form.  Again hitching rides via lumber imports, it spread rapidly across its old stomping grounds, only this time taking no prisoners.  Over the next forty years, millions of elms in Europe and North America died.  Entire sub-species were completely wiped out.  In North America, of the 77 million elm trees believed to be alive in 1930, less than 25 percent were still alive in 1990. Most of the UK and Europe became almost completely devoid of elms over the same period.

People of course didn’t just sit back and watch their elms die without a fight.  Massive, at times national, campaigns began to save the elms.  These early attempts mostly involved spraying gallons of insecticides over the trees, but this had little affect given the bark beetles that spread the fungus were small and the trees were very large.  Next, prevention programs were initiated, where dead or dying branches were quickly cut away to try and save the rest of the tree.  Many states and provinces also passed laws regarding when elm trees could be pruned and outlawing the use and sale of elm firewood.  Fungicides have also become more popular, but with mixed results.  Thanks to these efforts, the spread of the disease was at least slowed, but not stopped.  Over the decades, millions of dollars have been spent on the problem.

Today, Dutch Elm Disease remains a threat to what few native elm trees still remain.  Thanks to efforts by researchers, it is now understood that it first spread from Asia, where many of the local varieties have immunity.  The disease was spread via the importation of lumber for making high end furniture.  As a result of this research, many of these resistant varieties are now being interbred with European and American varieties to create new varieties that are being planted to replace what has been lost.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Main_Street_Elms,_Stockbridge,_Mass_(NYPL_b12647398-75756).tiff

Wash Your Damn Hands

In the year 1846, a young Hungarian man named Ignaz Semmelweis, who we will just call Iggy because I’ll be damned if I type out Ignaz Semmelweis more than I have to, was appointed to a prestigious position at the best hospital in Vienna, overseeing the maternity wards.  Now at the time, the hospital had two maternity wards, one which trained doctors and one which trained midwives, which were mostly utilized by underprivileged women and prostitutes who could not afford to have doctors visit their homes.  Such maternity wards were common across Europe at the time, often funded by churches to help combat uncomfortably high levels of infanticide of illegitimate children.  The system worked rather well, with the women getting much better levels of medical care and free childcare, and the doctors and midwives getting live subjects to practice on, which was all well and good since otherwise all they had to train with was cadavers.

Anyways, being a curious fellow, soon after taking his position, Iggy noticed a rather strange phenomenon regarding his patients.  The maternity ward training doctors and the one training midwives admitted patients on alternating days, and women would literally fall on their knees begging to be allowed into the midwife ward if they showed up on the wrong day.  Some would even give birth out on the street to avoid the doctor run ward.  While many of his contemporaries wrote such behaviors off as poor people just being stupid superstitious little shits, Iggy avoided making assumptions and instead started checking the numbers.  What he discovered was that the doctor’s ward had more than double the rate of deaths due to puerperal fever, a charming condition where within ten days of giving birth women developed unexplainable fevers and died.  In fact, 10% of the women who came into the doctor’s ward died soon after giving birth.

Now at the time, puerperal fever was not some new condition, in fact it had been noted in medical texts for the past 2,000 years.  Furthermore, doctors at the time did understand that it was more common in urban areas than rural ones, though this was mostly chalked up to cities being rather filthy places devoid of fresh air.  However, Iggy could see no reason why two different wards in the same hospital should have such alarmingly different rates.  Not being one to just sit on his ass, he began working to eliminate differences between the two wards; taking into account everything from temperature to overcrowding to even religious practices, but could find no reason for the disparate death rate.  Luckily, in 1847, Iggy had a breakthrough when his mentor was accidentally stabbed by a scalpel during a post mortem.  His mentor soon after died with symptoms perfectly matching those of puerperal fever.  It was then that the answer hit Iggy like a shit ton of bricks, the difference between the doctors and midwives was that the doctors spent half their days with the arms shoved in cadavers.

Now it’s probably worth mentioning at this point that though people were aware of germs at the time, they’d seen them in microscopes, but it still wasn’t understood that they had any connection with disease.  They were mostly seen as harmless tiny animals, like extremely miniature chickens or something.  So though Iggy didn’t make the connection to these tiny animals, he at least understood that some kind of particle was getting from the cadavers to the women giving birth, and that the doctors were the carriers.  To combat this, he began experimenting with cleaning his hands, testing various diluted caustic chemicals to see if they literally removed the cadaver stink from his fingers.  He then made hand washing a requirement for doctors before seeing patients, and lo and behold, the puerperal deaths dropped by 90 percent.

Now to be fair, Iggy certainly wasn’t the first person to come up with this idea.  A surgeon in the British navy was the first to bring up the idea of doctors spreading disease in 1795, and a British and American doctor had both figured out and began promoting the cleaning of hands in 1842 and 1843 respectively.  However, Iggy was the first to really show the connection in data.  He also quickly became the loudest proponent of widely adopting the practice.  Unfortunately, it did not go well.  Doctors, most of whom saw themselves as upper crust gentleman, were insulted by the very idea that they were somehow filthy and spreading disease to their patients.  They challenged Iggy on his hypothesis, to which he responded by writing heated letters declaring anyone who didn’t follow his advice was an unethical murderer.  Surprisingly, this did little to convince his critics, and growing increasingly unpopular, he eventually lost his prestigious position and was forced to find work at a small hospital out in the sticks.

Over the next twenty years Iggy became increasingly depressed.  Once described as a jovial man, he became a boor who wanted to talk about nothing but his theories and how his critics were idiots.  Attempts to publish his further research was only met with ridicule.  Eventually he became a drunk who spent most of his time in the company of prostitutes.  Increasingly violent and suffering from dementia, his family had him committed to an asylum, where he died in 1865 from an infection contracted after a severe beating by several guards.  He was 47 years old.  The following year, Louis Pasteur published his findings connecting germs to disease.  In the next several years it became common for doctors to wash their hands, eventually leading to large scale campaigns to improve hygiene amongst the general public at the turn of the 20th century.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ignaz_Semmelweis_1860.jpg