Yes, those are Christmas decorations. Yes, it was November 1st. And yes, this is one of the signs of the apocalypse. It was Nostradamus who famously wrote:

Only Nostradamus saw the true horror

“And the great jolly man will stomp on the face of the turkey.

Red will flow like a river through the streets…with slight accents of green for decorational purposes.

And greedy men will glut themselves by pretending a holiday which makes them lots and lots of money is really about giving and not, you know, about making lots and lots of money.“1

2012 is, after all, just around the bend.

I mean, why not ignore the holiday about gratitude and thanksgiving  in order to bow down to the new national god of  “I want, I want, I want!!”? I mean, how can you expect me to concentrate on feeding the poor and spending time with my family when I can now buy a snuggie for my dog!

It’s not even Thanksgiving yet and a week ago a local radio station here started playing Christmas music 24/7. And they’re not even playing the good stuff like the Vienna  Boy’s Choir singing “Ave Maria.” I’m talking about crap like “Mary, Did You Know?”

(Perhaps it wasn’t fair of me to post the Kenny Rogers/Wynonna Judd version. But I wanted you to see the song in its full horror.)

I curse those wise men for bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. It was just a commercialization waiting to happen.  And with this economy retailers are getting more desperate  to get everyone to spend money they don’t have for stuff they don’t need.

And poor Thanksgiving’s getting the royal screw over.

But I guess if I should be mad at anyone it should be Franklin D. Roosevelt — you know, that guy that used to be president. And I’ll tell you why.

It's all this guy's fault.

In 1939 Thanksgiving fell on the 30th of November. The same had happened in 1933, and retailers realized that since no one did their Christmas shopping until after Thanksgiving, having the holiday later would mean less time for people to shop in their stores and make their cash registers ring.

And so some guy told another guy who told another guy who told the president. And in response Roosevelt made a proclamation that Thanksgiving would not longer be on the 30th, which was the last Thursday of the month, but the 23rd, the fourth Thursday. This would give people a week longer to buy stuff.2

Well, this didn’t go over too well with a majority of the nation. The mayor of Atlantic City dubbed it “Franskgiving” and other states just had it on the 30th anyway. Governor W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits Pappy” O’Daniel decreed that in Texas there would be two Thanksgivings.3 (Although this may have just been an excuse for him  to eat two Thanksgiving dinners in one week, since he was apparently very fond of biscuits).4

You might point out that by then the commercialization of Christmas was firmly in place. FDR didn’t do anything but help retailers get their heads above water after the Great Depression. Perhaps true, but Roosevelt also put a big ol’ government endorsement on the idea that Thanksgiving is not a day for showing gratitude, but a lesser holiday easily brushed aside. And that ideology has only become more prevalent, until  today Thanksgiving is nothing more than an arbitrary day which ushers in an already bloated Christmas season. It’s unfortunate to see a holiday which George Washington and Abraham Lincoln often used to invoke a spirit of gratitude to tie together the nation trampled under the  feet of rabid Black Friday crowds.5

Let us save 30% on all purchases over $100 or we will eat your brain!

And so in honor of Thanksgiving I’ve spent an entire post essentially talking about Christmas. I blame FDR for that, too. Don’t worry, everyone is doing it.

Footnotes:

1. Nostradamus didn’t actually say this….obviously.

2. I got all this historical info from Godfrey Hodgson, A Great & Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims & the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 180-181.

3. Best nickname ever!

4. Purely speculation.

5. Perhaps I should have cut some of my embittered complaining and actually included more about this, but I was in a soap-boxing mood. Washington and the other founding fathers periodically invoked the spirit of thanksgiving to rally the  foundling country behind them. And Lincoln proclaimed two national days of thanksgiving during the Civil War in an attempt to keep the nation strong during that trying time.

Though over 16 million Americans fought through it, and over 400,000 died in it, the WWII monument was the last to be erected in Washington square. Why is that? And with so much talk about what happened during the war, what was it like for those for those who fought upon their return? What do they think of the war?

I could go and pour over some dusty books, and post some links to other web sites. But why do that when  I can give you an answer straight from a primary source. I would hardly be a respectable historian otherwise.

Hugh Phillips fought in WWII as a gunner on a B-29 (pictured right). He flew as part of the first incendiary raid of Tokyo, and came back to America for what was supposed to be a short leave while the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sometimes war histories focus so much on the decisions of politicians or generals, or the massive movements of war workers and soldiers that they forget to tell the experiences of the individual men and women who fought and served. So I’ve posted a few short clips of an interview I conducted with Hugh a few weeks ago.

You want to know what history’s like in its purest form? This man, sitting in his living room, remembering his experiences related to the Second World War, is perhaps as pure as history gets.

Clip #1: Hugh’s thoughts on returning home, how America remembers veterans, and the WWII monument:

“You know when we first came home there was a kind of almost hero worship for us”

Clip #2: On why he is grateful the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima:

“And because the atomic bombs were dropped the war ended”

Clip #3: A funny experience he had right after he got back, when he mistook the booming sounds of fireworks for something completely different:

“And those things went  boom boom down on the ground and boom boom in the air”

Go to this link for a three minute clip of Hugh I did for the East Valley Tribune. He’s the fourth down in the middle.

I had a great idea today a la  Archimedes’ bath-time revelation. (That probably didn’t happen. But can anything really beat a naked, dripping wet Greek guy running down the streets of Syracuse shouting “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”? But I digress). Here was my thought: why just limit myself to blogging about historical events?  Why not do for history what Romenesko has done for journalism: scour the web looking for interesting news articles about history or that have a great historical perspective, and then post links to them. You know, really cement the idea that history is not the past, it’s just an extension of the present.  If my journalism classes have taught me anything it’s that linking to other people’s interesting content makes you much more popular than writing a bunch of your own crap (Yes, Jeff Jarvis, you have brainwashed me, too.)

So I googled my little heart out, and twenty minute later the best I had come up with were stories on a book about the history of the New York Shakespeare Company and 10 failed doomsday prophecies. Not one to give up easily, I kept searching. This is when I stumbled upon this dandy little site: HNN (History News Network). It turns out this site does what I was going to do, but a billion (read: A BILLION) times better. Curse them and their acronym-titled, professional-looking, ridiculously-well-researched website! It’s run by a professional historian/journalist and his army of unpaid minions interns, who search the internet far and wide for all the cool and relevant history-related articles and topics and blogs and anything else you can think of.  So here I am on my little wordpress blog suddenly feeling a lot like Alfred Russell Wallace. But the good news is I’ve found a fantastic new website and resource, and you have, too. Check it out — I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Few think about what “trick or treat” actually implies, focusing on the treat part of the equation. It’s really saying “Give me some candy or I’ll burn your house down.” Or something like that. Because Halloween pranking is almost as old as the holiday itself. And the decline in pranking–the forgotten “trick” in the “trick or treat”–is a relatively modern development.

Halloween, the day when the veil between our life and the afterlife is supposed to be at its most transparent, and when spirits and devils and witches roam the streets unchecked, has long been a day when bored or mischievous children took revenge on their elders. It was a day when any act could be blamed on an evil spirit, and a general atmosphere of danger and fear pervaded. Pranking was at first very popular in rural areas, where Halloween became a favorite day for rowdy teens to soap windows, hitch cows to wagons instead of horses, tie front doors shut, throw dirt or flour on porches, and my personal favorite by a mile: disassemble wagons and carriages and then reassemble them on top of a barn (you just don’t see proper pranks like that anymore).

But after the turn of the twentieth century, pranking moved from the country to the cities along with the rest of the idustrializing nation, getting more destructive along the way. This is what you would think of as general hooliganism: smashing windows, egging, lighting fires.

But pranking reached its heyday during the “Black Halloween” of 1933. Along with the general rowdiness normally seen in major cities on the holiday, boys and young teens broke out into riots, barricaded and flooded streets, overturned cars, torched buildings, and even sawed down telephone poles (my, these boys are creative!).

It was during this decade that people, hoping to deter mobs of ragamuffin teens from destroying their property, really started taking advantage of a traditional but not very widespread practice of trick-or-treating. They ushered the pranksters inside their homes, hoping filling their faces with enough candy and sweets would make them too happy or distracted to cause any trouble. Well it worked. Instead of lurking in the shadows with a BB gun, kids knocked on people’s doors, threatening a nasty trick if they got no yummy treat.

Then after WWII ended, and with it the rationing of sugar, candy companies realized that if people were going to start handing out treats on Halloween, it might as well be ones mass produced and packaged. The commercialization of Halloween had begun, and the era of widespread pranking came to a close.

Pranking still continues on Halloween today, but not nearly to the degree it had before the 1950s. So if you’re thinking about turning off your lights this Halloween and saving yourself five dollars on a bag of candy: beware. You may just end up with a wagon on your roof.

**You may notice the the lack of footnotes. Well, since I’m a very busy girl trying to get a master’s degree and raise a small child, I think you’ll forgive me for their absence this time. Just know that I drew heavily, AND I MEAN HEAVILY, from these two books:

David J  Skall, Death Makes a Holiday: The Cultural History of Halloween, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2002).

Lisa Morton, The Halloween Encyclopedia, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2001).

Slightly terrifying, don’t you agree?  But don’t grab for the gauze masks and lock yourself up in the bunker just yet. Because Paul Lewis was born in the late 1800s. And the year is 1918.

H1N1? Swine flu? It would seem you’re off by about 90 years, you’re thinking.

Nope. 1918: The year of the great influenza pandemic that killed as many as 100 million worldwide. That was 5% of the entire population. Of the whole world. That would be the same as 350 million people dying in one fell swoop today.2 The swine flu of today ain’t got nothing on this.

It’s the virus that killed so many people so quickly that rotting bodies piled up in morgues, and in streets, and in houses. Gravediggers couldn’t be paid to touch them or bury them. People were buried in mass graves. Cities would send people down the streets with a wagon calling for people to bring out their dead. Seriously.3

So, never heard of this pandemic? A few years ago I would have bet that you hadn’t. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, this little craze we like to call the “the swine flu” has pushed this pandemic again into the forefront. But I would guess that if you have heard of it, you’ve probably not thought very much about it. But don’t worry too much about that. Even those at the time didn’t seem to think much of it, either. Apparently people dying in battle was more memorable than people dying on a hospital bed. 4

But as we know, forgetting history is as dangerous as haranguing Aaron Burr at the city tavern. But thankfully, the fine author Aldous Huxley will help us down the right track (he’s the guy over to the right looking stern and important). He said, “The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.” Oh, so pertinent. Thank you Aldous.

The fact is that there will never be a pandemic like the one in 1918-1919 again. And yet there could be. WILL be, depending on which historian/scientist you talk to. But this one will be slightly different, and not just because of modern science and technology. We have the benefit of history–history made during that pandemic in 1918–to guide us.

So here it is — interesting a pertinent tidbits about the 1918 pandemic:

1) The 1918 strain is the same strain as today’s dreaded “swine flu.” Well, today’s is more like the all gnarly and mutated version of itself. Kind of like Venom. Or Britney Spears after 2002 (although I hear she’s having a comeback).

2)  People in their 20s and 30s had astoundingly higher death rates than those over the age of 65. This is the complete opposite of the norm and quite frankly, common sense. This is something that made the 1918 pandemic so terrifying — young, healthy, people dropped dead in 24 hours, while 75-year-olds battled the virus for weeks and lived to breathe another day, albeit with a little bit more difficulty.

3) A  milder wave hit first, followed by two much more deadly waves. Again, this is the opposite of what should happen and flies in the face of our friend reason. Normally our efficient little bodies work up a resistance to viruses, and it takes a little while for them to build up their arsenal again. But with the 1918 pandemic, each wave came back with a bang, sometimes within 6 months of each other, the third being the deadliest of all.

4) People in 1918 knew about hygiene. They knew that to avoid getting sick you should wash your hands, keep the space around you clean, wear a gauze mask, and keep your contact with other people down to a minimum. This virus didn’t care.

5) People who died in the pandemic usually didn’t die from the flu, but from infection resulting from it that brought on severe bacterial pneumonia. Ya know, the kind that makes your lungs froth and harden and fill with blood. Yeah, that kind.

6) All of those things I just said would also apply to a pandemic in 2009 –  milder wave first, younger people more vulnerable, horrid pneumonia — the works.5

If you go to the CDC website, you’ll see that they are taking the swine flu very seriously. In fact, its been declared a pandemic. And yet there is always someone willing to tell you that the CDC and the media are just fear-mongers. Or that big Pharma is coming in the night to steal your money in exchange for overpriced flu shots. Or both. Take for example, two graphs from the comedy website graphjam which I think capture the sentiment of these types of people :

So okay, they’re sorta funny. But the first graph would look a lot different if you put the 1918 pandemic death toll in.  And the second graph might ring more true if call upon “common sense,” as the grapher does. But as we’ve seen, our buddy H1N1 doesn’t always listen to common sense. (As a side note, am I the only one who finds the second graph humorously ironic? I hope not.)

One of the reasons people can make these graphs because they have a special visual impairment which prevents them from seeing outside the borders of their own wonderfully modern and developed country. America and other developed parts of the world happen to be places where clean living conditions are the norm and vaccines are readily available. The lowly remainder of the planet are not always so lucky.

I won’t pretend like Big Pharma doesn’t have its greasy little hands in places it shouldn’t. Or that none of the reports of the pandemic have been exaggerated. And I agree that instilling fear isn’t the way to avoid another pandemic, and can cause more harm than good. But downplaying the the virus can be just as dangerous. During the 1918 pandemic, to keep morale high because of the war, newspapers didn’t report much on the virus, and the government was eerily silent — few warnings, misinformation, no guidance. This produced confusion, fear and terror in people, who saw people dropping like flies around them, and ultimately led to  more deaths.6

I’m not posting all of this because I think there’s imminent danger of another deadly pandemic coming this year. I think the likelihood is pretty small. But when one reads of the history of this virus, its hard to believe that day will never come, and might not be just around the corner. Mostly, though, I get annoyed at people who think they can truly understand anything without understanding the history  behind it.

This is why Paul Lewis doesn’t annoy me. Remember, the scientist/naval officer/doctor?  He studied the disease he saw in the sailors, and eventually, along with others, realized it was influenza. After  years of  attempting to find the origin of that deadly disease, he and a colleague believed they could link it with flu seen in swine. He died before he found that link, after contracting yellow fever while studying it. But eventually, building upon his work, scientists decoded the virus, and dubbed it H1N1, making it possible to develop a vaccine. Lewis diligently worked for ten years to unlock the mysteries of this and other disease before he died, studying and pouring over information of the 1918 pandemic. He understood that the key to preventing another pandemic in the future would come from unraveling the mysteries of the past.7

As I’ve tried to make very clear, this virus can be deadly, but more than that, creative and elusive. It’s wisdom, not common sense, that should dictate our reaction to it. I would call on the old adage, “better safe than sorry,” or in this case, “better a few extra gauze masks and vaccines than an uncontrolled, worldwide pandemic.” You get the idea. And so I applaud the CDC and certain media outlets and members of the scientific community for taking their history seriously, and trying to alleviate any threat this deadly disease carries in its grimy little hands. Gold stars for the lot of them.

*****

Detailed and accurate notes:

1.This lovely little anecdote came from John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (New York: Penguin Books: 2005), 1-2. By the way, I got a little giddy typing this footnote. Oh Turabian, how I’ve missed you.

2. See Barry, The Great Influenza, 396-8. The exact death toll for the pandemic is outrageously enigmatic and likely to never be known for sure. But both Barry and others, including scientists and historians,  agree that the death toll could very well have been that high, and was very likely to have been above 50 million. Please also see Barry, “Chasing the Elusive 1918 Virus: Preparing for the Future by Examining the Past” in The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready?, ed. Stacey L Knobler, et al., ((Washington, D.C:  The National Academies Press, 2005), 58-59.

3. Barry, The Great Influenza, 326-7. Yes, I quoted this partly so I could put in the clip from Monty Python. I see no problem with this.

4. At least that’s what Alfred Crosby says in his aptly titled America’s Forgotten Pandemic,: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd edition, (New York: Cambridge University Press), 311-325. And yes, the sentence I put was a glaringly simplified explanation. But this post’s length is reaching critical mass as it is.

5. See Crosby and Barry — these aren’t necessarily disputed facts so I don’t think page numbers are needed. Plus, I’m lazy.

6.Barry, The Great Influenza 333-42.

7. ibid. (by the way, ibid. = giddiness alert) Might I add that a lot of the same information I’ve attributed to Barry is contained in other works on the pandemic. Barry just has a really good index, so its easy to find citations for info I’ve read in my research. See bibliography immediately below for all the books I looked at.

Bibliography:

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

Crosby, Alfred W. America’s Forgotten Pandemic,: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press)

Duncan, Kristy. Hunting the 1918 Flu: One Scientist’s Search for a Killer Virus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Knobler, Stacy L. et al., ed. The Threat of Pandemic Influenza: Are We Ready? Washington, D.C:  The National Academies Press, 2005.

Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

“So, do you know anything about Ivan the Terrible?”

“Yeah. I took a course on Russian history up to the Revolution.”

“Do you know why they called him that?”

Did I ever. It’s actually a myth that “terrible” was supposed to stand for “bad” or “evil.” It actually meant that he was one formidable dude. A better translation: Ivan the Awesome. And that’s awesome.

Poised to tell her of this awesomeness, a thought came to my mind: would she believe me? It all sounded like something I made up.

I had to think, and quick. Better ease her in, set the stage. Then drop the golden egg.

“Oh, it actually doesn’t mean he was bad. It actually means he was great. In fact–”

“Yeah, did you know that it actually meant ‘Ivan the Awesome.’”

Shock. Amazement.

“Uh…yeah…actually I–”

“Because I was watching this movie, you know Night at the Museum 2, it was so funny….anyway, the guy on there who was playing Ivan said ‘No, I’m not Ivan the Terrible, it’s a mistranslation. I’m Ivan the Awesome.’ Isn’t that interesting?”

Nods of reluctant acquiescence.

“Well, you should really see that movie. Lots of interesting history in there. See ya!”

How dare she? How dare she gain knowledge from a Hollywood movie that I had  gained by sitting through tedious hours of lectures mostly describing how crappy life was as a Russian peasant.  She had stolen an anecdote right out from under me. No, the screenwriting team of Garant and Lennon had. In a Ben Stiller movie. Shudder.

You see, historians love knowing little details about history that no one else does. Also, that no one else cares about. Knowing the minutest of minutiae makes them feel like they mean something to the world. And putting these obscure details down into books only other historians would want to read makes them feel like they mean even more something to the world.

But here’s the great thing, the fact that keeps historians from wallowing in insignificance down in the depths of the archives:  the minutiae matter. Take for example Ivan IV of Russia. Called Ivan the Terrible in America, he was known in Russia as Ivan Grozny, and Grozny is best translated as “awesome” or perhaps even better, “formidable.” He was a devout Russian Orthodox who made Russia a powerful empire in the 16th century. He also reportedly murdered his son and had a sadistic streak  brought on by mental illness.

History lesson over. Well, almost. The point is that the mistranslation of his name into English  echoes the ambiguity of this first Tsar of Russia, who helped  both to build and destroy the country he ruled. And the final verdict on whether he was more awesome or more terrible is still up for debate in the historical world. This ambiguity is mostly lost on those who only get the brief textbook treatment of Ivan the Terrible.  And as any historian will tell you, history is not what actually happened, but what people think happened. The name “Ivan the Terrible” brings up images of general rape, pillage, and murder. And so that is how he is remembered.

It is amazing how one simple step – the change from “awesome” to “terrible” – can change how a person is remembered in history. That’s the broader significance behind the detail — that what people are called and how people refer to each other matters. And so when people ignore ambiguity, as they often do, and label a person as a “tsar” instead of a “adviser”, or call others  “mobs” instead of “protesters”, it’s important. It helps dictate the connotations associated with those people, and  more importantly, contributes to how they will be remembered.

Okay, history lesson officially over. But don’t worry, I’ve got more of these little gems tucked away in a safe place. And that is mainly the point of this blog — to share fun little historical facts that I come across. But more than that, to post historical details that relate to and enlighten current events. I want to show that history isn’t boring, it isn’t just about dates, and it’s relevant. Even the little oddities and  blips and eccentricities.

But don’t put your head on your desk and snooze away the next 50 minutes until lunch break. As famed historian David McCullough said, “No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” I will try my hardest to make this something you want to read. If you are already nodding off then all hope is lost. But if not, take this as a warning: I may or may not succeed. Read at your own risk.