The Atlanta Lawyer June/July 2020 Vol. 19, No. 1 | Page 14

2020 1918 Pandemic and the Law What it was Like to be a Lawyer During the Spanish Flu Pandemic. MICHAEL JABLONSKI Law Office of Michael Jablonski [email protected] 1918 should have been an exciting year for lawyers in Atlanta. Asa Griggs Candler, the soft drink tycoon, announced that he would not run for re-election when his term as mayor ended in 1919. James L. Key won election when his chief opponent, Edward H. Inman, withdrew from the runoff. Key, a lawyer, would serve four non-consecutive terms as mayor. Inman and his wife would build the Swan House. Carl Vinson, a graduate of Mercer Law School, defeated fiery Tom Watson in a hotly contested election. Gov. Hugh Dorsey, who had been practicing law in Atlanta since 1879, was elected to a second two-year term. Former Atlanta lawyer Woodrow Wilson, re-elected in 1916 with a promise to keep the country out of the World War, instead entered the war in 1917. Atlanta developed into a major military training center. The Atlanta Constitution proclaimed, “In every social entertainment the note of war relief ” as functions raised money for the Red Cross. The Fourth Liberty Loan Drive raised more than $14 million, or more than $207 million in 2020, in Atlanta. John Heisman coached the Georgia Tech Golden Tornado football team to a 6-1 season scoring more than 100 points against teams from Clemson, NC State, and the Georgia Eleventh Cavalry. All these events were eclipsed by an influenza that swept through Atlanta and the world. Between 1918 and 1919 the virus infected one-third of the world’s population, killing 50 million people. 675,000 died in the United States. Even President Wilson, in Paris to negotiate the end of the war, missed several sessions of the council of four when he came down with flu. Now known to be caused by the H1N1 avian virus, the first illnesses appeared in military personnel at Camp Funston, Kansas during the spring of 1918. The public was not warned out of fear that talking about the illness would harm the war effort. The fear eventually was bolstered by statute. Pres. Wilson had pushed the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress making it illegal to publish information detrimental to the war effort. (Both the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act were repealed in 1921.) Reports about the flu when it broke out were censored. Many public health officials pushed a positive message so as not to run afoul of the law: “This is ordinary influenza by another name,” or “There is no reason for alarm.” The belief that the illness arose first in Spain developed because Spain was the first country that could publicly acknowledge the spread of disease since it did not participate in the World War. Consequently, the United States Public Health Service advised the public that it need not be afraid, as the disease was “nothing but an aggravated form of the old-fashioned grip.” Public health officials in Atlanta followed that example even as they reported numbers evidencing a horrid contagion. “But influenza should not be given the blame for every cold that is contracted,” the secretary of the city’s board of health said in November. (He blamed 14 June/July 2020