This post is written by Ryan Reft of the Library’s Manuscript Division.
“Even if there was war,” Susanna Turner of Philadelphia remembered of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, “the war was removed from us you know … on the other side … This malignancy, it was right at our very doors.”
Yet, as the virus spread across the United States in 1918 and 1919, mobilization for World War I dominated federal concerns. Org