Covid-19 is causing a severe recession after an economic boom built upon a foundation left shaky by the Great Recession. Similarly, did the influenza pandemic of WW1 lay the groundwork for the Great Depression after the even-shakier Roarin’ 20s boom? What’s next now? And what can we learn?

Was the “Spanish flu,” a disease pandemic whose awful memory was shoved aside by the Roaring 20s, a so-called Invisible Hand? A negative, indeed a “dead” invisible hand of capitalism at that? What lessons are relevant for us today as the new coronavirus recession arrives so soon after the Great Recession? If history does tend to repeat itself, then it helps to remember what’s often forgotten.

Recent research into the origins of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 points to this zoonotic disease as likely originating in the American Midwest. Probably on pig farms in the USA. Not likely from bats and birds in China. Now these scientists are unable to be completely certain, especially since viruses were unable to be observed until the 1930s. Dimitrii Ivanovsky deduced viruses caused tobacco mosaic disease in plants as early as 1892, but they remained invisible. Richard Shope isolated swine influenza viruses from sick pigs in 1931, and others in humans two years later. These scientists collaborated and quickly realized viruses move between different species as zoonotic pathogens. They soon recognized they had discovered the actual causes of influenza including the deadly Spanish flu pandemic. To help get a sense of the challenges these researchers faced with such microscopic pathogens, not to mention the endless debates over whether or not viruses are alive or nonliving, the electron microscope became commercially available only in 1938.

Studies also show this misnamed Spanish flu (Spanish media broadcasted it to the world as Spain, neutral in the First World War, and was, unlike the combatants, unconcerned about military priorities) may have smoldered around the American Midwest and Great Plains as early as 1916 or even 1915 before exploding around the planet. Other researchers point to origins in Vietnam (then a French colony), China (then riven by intermittent internal wars since its 1911 revolution), or France (bogged down in trench warfare in WW1). There isn’t any consensus.

As this influenza burst forth along commercial, travel, and military routes, the pandemic swept Earth in at least three major waves with the second being the most lethal. First noted in January 1918, this influenza pandemic continued thru 1919 until the very end of 1920. Disputes between scientists center more on whether or not the 1918 influenza virus originated first in birds then to pigs then humans or first in pigs to humans, or even first in birds to humans and then to pigs.

All this may seem silly except today with this novel coronavirus we humans still don’t know. China and the Americans accuse the other of creating Covid-19 in labs and spreading fake news about the other giving rise in turn to all manner of conspiracy theories. Birds, bats, snakes, swine, and pangolins are among the animals associated with possible origins. Such chaos in a globalized species still divided by a chaotic mix of both opposing and intermixing combination of nation-states, stateless-nations, religions, ethnic groups, cultures, political and economic ideologies, financial disparity, and corporations leads to unnecessary conflict and confusion. There’s been an increase in military movements and fears of war in different parts of the world, altho as the virus spreads further fighting and even street crime has slowed down considerably.

But did the Spanish flu help cause the Great Depression?

Consider this premise:

The First World War, its equally bloody concurrent and subsequent thicket of revolutions and civil wars, and the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic combined to create such a legacy of grief, shock, and horror people sought to put the destruction behind them, indeed to forget them, and let the good times play whenever and wherever possible. This psychological shift led to financial speculation so reckless and fantastical as to fuel the Roaring Twenties. This built up financial bubbles so fragile that when the tightening money supply contracted with unexpected speed and severity global capitalism collapsed into the Great Depression.

The so-called “Roaring’ 20s” was famous for the wealth and prosperity of the times as well as an explosion in art, music, film, fashion, and other expressions of culture. Yet this masked over national and global instabilities. As alluded to above, the violence of global war did not end with the Armistice of 1918. Ferocious civil wars raged big and small from Ireland to Mexico to Russian to India to China and even inside the United States with the race wars. Military interventions were common between many countries despite the new League of Nations. Some of these conflicts, internal as well as international, continued all the way thru the 1920s and 30s to merge into the Second World War. Within the United States there was the short, severe postwar Depression of 1920-1921. The economic rebound was dubbed the Roaring Twenties in North America and Europe. There were two brief, mild recessions in the mid-1920s, but the rest of the decade roared on.

The Great Depression began as economic slumps in the spring and summer of 1929 triggered an initially recession. The stock market was a global roller coaster March thru August, leading to a cascading collapse of the stock market in September. This recession snowballed towards the Great Crash of October 1929. The stock market crashes occurred 28 October, continued thru 13 November, and eventually, after a few false Bull starts, continued to collapse until Wall Street reached its lowest nadir on 8 July 1932. Furthermore, as the Roarin’ 20s intoxicated many the cities of the world with delusions of wealth, much of rural North America was gripped in a relentless depression. This was known as the Great Farm Depression or the Great Agricultural Depression. It began in 1920, continued thru the entire decade, merged with the great droughts known as the Dust Bowl in 1930s, and continued all the way into the 1930s. The spread of the Second World War (1931-1939-1941-1945) eventually led to the end of the Great Depression.

That was a long, long time! Bear with me, please.

The Great Recession is said to have begun in late 2007, but one can say it began as global real estate bubbles began to burst in 2005-2006 and again in 2007. The Great Recession was said to have ended in the United States until 2009 and in a number of other countries as late as 2013 and 2015. These are the claims of pundits, however, who couldn’t figure what’s going on as the economy recovered to boom in some industries while many other regions remained economically devastated with staggering levels of unemployment and homelessness even in cities with revived economies. The resulting social disruption and political turmoil was enormous with a turn toward authoritarian regimes of all stripes as was the case during and after the Great Recession. Some of this led to the Arab Spring beginning in December 2010 spreading across the Middle East in 2011. Inspired, the Wisconsin Insurrection of February-August 2011 in the United States, morphed into the Occupy Wall Street protests of September 2011. These Occupy revolts spread around the planet, even to Antarctica, and known as Occupy Earth and eventually the Occupy Movement. It petered out and fragmented in 2012, but not before influencing and giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, the Ferguson and related riots, the Standing Rock revolt, the UK Riots of 2011, and numerous other protests. The Great Recession left a crumbled foundation.

The economy recovery following the Great Recession proved as hollow and as illusory as the Roaring 20s did after World War I and its influenza pandemic. Today’s world moves faster than it did a hundred years ago. Transportation and communications technologies combined with greater globalization of economies, media, and culture accelerate this sense of interconnectivity even as political relationships between nations fray. People during the Roaring Twenties sought to put the cataclysms of war, revolution, and disease behind them and enjoy “the Good Life.”

Yet for so many people there were no Roaring Twenties for them. They turned far to the Left or far to the Right to seek recourse for perceived injustices. The once solid and stable foundation of the world had been wrecked by world war and its interlocking revolutions and civil wars then hollowed out by the Spanish flu. Agriculture, as food is the foundation of everything from social connection to sharing wealth, never recovered. It’s no wonder the vaunted prosperity of the 1920s, riddled with the ghosts of influenza, collapsed so quickly into a great global depression and further socio-political violence.

The vaunted “invisible hand” of capitalism in which otherwise “bad” people’s pursuit of their own self-interest leads to the improvement of all around them with an increase in prosperity and the betterment of civilization is verbose nonsense. Indeed, we see such invisible hands operating as negatives like “hidden hands” in the corruption of society and the development of a gilded prosperity covering over virulent disease and chaotic tendencies toward greed, tyranny, and war at odds with liberty, equality, peace, health, and community.

We are on the brink now. This pandemic is a Disease X threat as this new mysterious zoonotic virus is so highly contagious, stays infectious for an unusual amount of time, and endures so much longer on surfaces than otherwise expected. While not as lethal as a hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola and with a death count currently lower than either cardiovascular disease or cancer, Covid-19 nevertheless is cutting a wide swath thru our population. Covid-19 is a pandemic we are unprepared for as a species altho experts have been urging us to prepare for Disease X for years.

Other more severe existential threats loom, too. Global climate disruption and change. Renewed threats of nuclear warfare. Economic and financial collapse. Power grids destroyed by massive solar flares and EMPS. Larger numbers of asteroids and comets than once imagined coming close to Earth and the Moon. The list goes on further, and solutions to our overlapping wicked problems are clouded by opinions and strife. We are long overdue as a species to build both a democratic world government and a democratic global economy rooted in local interconnectivity. We don’t need to keep ourselves down any further. This pandemic will end sooner or later, and so will this recession however severe. This is not the Zombie Apocalypse.  

 

William Dudley Bass
Sunday 5 April 2020
Saturday 11 April 2020
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Sol

 

SOURCES:

Andrewes, Christopher. Richard Edwin Shope, 1901-1966, A Biographical Memoir, National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C., 1979. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/shope-richard.pdf.

Daszak, Peter. “We Knew Disease X Was Coming. It’s Here Now.” Opinion, The New York Times, New York, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/coronavirus-pandemics.html.

Kessler, Robert. “Disease X: The Next Pandemic,” EcoHealth Alliance, New York, 2018, 2020. https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/2018/03/disease-x.

Palucka, Tim. “Overview of Electron Microscopy,” History of Recent Science & Technology, The Dibner Institute, CA, 2001, 2002. https://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/materials/public/ElectronMicroscope/EM_HistOverview.htm.

Racaniello, Vincent & others. Virology Blog: about viruses and viral disease, 2008. https://www.virology.ws/2008/12/23/discovery-of-viruses/.

Staff. “Influenza 1918 | Image Gallery: Medical Investigation of Influenza,” PBS, 1996-2020. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/inlfluenza-photo-gallery/.

 

Copyright © 2020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. The only exception here is the black and white historical fotograf from the First World War per PBS. Thank you.