Very, Very, Very Dreadful by Albert Marrin

Author:Albert Marrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Published: 2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Children ready for school during the 1918 flu pandemic. Credit 61

AMERICA’S CHILDREN

Influenza robbed countless youngsters of normal childhoods. For them, attending school had been a regular part of life. The pandemic, however, forced local authorities to decide whether to keep public schools open; private schools decided this for themselves. Most officials played it safe, ordering district schools closed for a few days, weeks, or months. Yet three major cities—New York, Chicago, and New Haven, Connecticut—kept their public schools open throughout the pandemic. Their reasons for doing so were much the same; we will focus on New York because it had the nation’s largest number of pupils.41

The city’s schools served nearly one million children, of whom three out of four lived in crowded, run-down tenements. At first, health officials wanted to follow the rest of the country, closing schools until the crisis passed. However, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker (1873–1945), head of the Bureau of Child Hygiene, argued for keeping them open. She asked the health commissioner, Dr. Royal S. Copeland, a simple question: “If you have a system where you could examine one-fifth of the population of the city every morning, and control every person who showed any symptom of influenza, what would it be worth to you?” Startled by Baker’s question, Copeland replied, “Well, that would be almost priceless.” Like Baker, he decided “children are better off in school, under supervision, than playing about in the streets.” New York’s public schools stayed open.42

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