How the 1918 Pandemic Frayed Social Bonds
The influenza pandemic did long-lasting damage to relationships in some American communities. Could the mistrust have been prevented?
When officials in Seattle announced a citywide lockdown, 15-year-old Violet Harris was overjoyed that she no longer had to go to school. “Good idea? I’ll say it is!” she wrote , excerpted at length in . “The only cloud in my sky is that the [School] Board will add the missed days on to the end of the term.” But as the reality of quarantine set in, Harris grew bored. Unable to leave home, she whiled away the hours by sewing a dress to wear to school when it reopened and experimenting with new recipes from the local paper, producing a particularly dreadful batch of fudge, half of which she ended up throwing out. It seems that the full weight of the crisis dawned on her only when she received the startling news that her best friend, Rena,
