Pandemics of 1968 and 2020: Surviving the Virus of American Politics

The H3N2 virus pandemic of 1968, known as the Hong Kong flu, killed about 100,000 people in the United States, and more than a million worldwide, during one of the most tumultuous years in modern history. This was a flu that seemed to seek out people 65 and older. But over half the French workforce came down with it. Hospitals everywhere were overflowing. It ran its course but still exists today, appearing seasonally with far less damaging results.

Hong Kong flu links that chaotic time 52 years ago with our present political chaos and the COVID-19 pandemic that has now killed over 78,000 Americas in the first 18 weeks of the year. There was a feeling of apocalypse in 1968. Many people thought we were living through the end of civilization as we know it. Some say the same thing about 2020.

I wonder how people 50 years from now will describe the 20^th year of the 21^st century. What events will be remembered?

In 1968, we had no trouble predicting a description: anarchy in the streets, a cruel war, assassinations, urban riots, civil rights and student protests, the feminist revolution, the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring. It was simple. It was a year no one could quite believe.

American soldiers were being slaughtered by the Viet Cong and were slaughtering soldiers and civilians in return. The Tet Offensive, the battle of Khe Sanh, the Battle of Saigon, the My Lai Massacre and many other horrific moments in that war appeared on American TV every night. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, but the Vietnam War and the bombing of Hanoi drove him out of office. The spiritual ballast of American decency, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. Civil rights riots broke out in over 100 American cities. Bobby Kennedy, running for President, was assassinated after a campaign speech in Los Angeles. Anti-war protests raged across American campuses, including Columbia University where protesters stormed buildings and took them over. Protesters entered Selective Service offices around the country, burning draft records with napalm.

In Paris, over a million students waged protracted demonstrations for seven weeks that shut the city down and came close to plunging the French economy into a severe depression. In Mexico City, the military killed hundreds of students in the Tlatelolco Massacre. Warsaw Pact forces led by the Soviet Union sent tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring independence movement.

The Republican National Convention in Miami nominated Richard Nixon for president with commotion. The Democratic Convention in Chicago nominated Hubert Humphrey amid ferocious protests that were met with what some called a “police riot.” Chicago seemed to many of us that August what newscaster Walter Cronkite called it: a “police state.” The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland began when police used force in Derry to disperse civil rights protesters. Terrorists were hijacking airplanes, most notoriously Pan Am Flight 281 to Havana.

To many Americans, the world seemed to be teetering over the abyss. Politically, anti-war activists protesting the war in Vietnam took to saying that there was no difference between Nixon and Humphrey, to the horror of other Americans who saw one as a monster and the other as a tragic figure tangled in circumstance. As President Johnson learned via the CIA, candidate Nixon secretly told Vietnam President Thieu to stay out of the Paris peace talks so that Nixon could have more leverage over Humphrey. Johnson called it “treason.” But he couldn’t reveal his CIA sources, so it remained for documentarian Ken Burns decades later to tell in a film of that act of perfidy in a war that caused countless more deaths on both sides.

Cities ablaze, police gone crazy around the country, political murders, antiwar and civil rights upheavals — still, the nation did not fall into oblivion, even though it came close with Watergate down the road, nor did the world, even when it seemed that way to the Soviet Block when its union tore itself apart in 1989.

What will be remembered about 2020 so far? We’re all too close to tell, of course. But there are the obvious things. The COVID pandemic and unprecedented public health responses requiring social distancing, sheltering at home, economic lockdown, the wearing of face masks by most people, other than the President and Vice President, will be at the top of the list it seems.

Armed white supremacists, anti-Semites and extremist libertarian protests of business lockdowns in various states including Michigan, along with President Trump’s Twitter rages and oral Clorox prescriptions, seem likely too. The rise of Democratic governors embracing public health mandates and as many as 15 Republican governors foot dragging or balking altogether will probably be a mere addendum, though it seems desperately important now.

Most of the nation voluntarily self-isolating peacefully at home could also be overshadowed by violence if it breaks out in the future. A global stock market crash and a recession/depression settling in around the world, with gas prices bottoming out, will certainly be remembered as the COVID crash of 2020. Unemployment reaching near 35 million in the United States will be, too. Europe becoming a COVID crisis zone, with Italy and Spain completely locked down, won’t be forgotten, either.

Increasing tensions between China and the United States with COVID at the center will probably bleed into what promises to be a never-ending competition for the tag of “most powerful country.” A fierce argument about “reopening” the country prematurely — with Republicans and their president arguing that in a trade-off between economic disaster and public health disaster, the economy trumps health, tough luck for the old and infirm — will never be forgotten by the families of those who were “sacrificed.”

Witnessing a President fall apart on national television day after day during COVID news conferences where his egoism, malice and off-the-wall “solutions” to the pandemic are like watching a man go mad, won’t go away either. Seeing years of accumulated environmental regulations tossed out the window like so much litter will reverberate for generations. A nuclear MAD (mutually assured destruction) dance between the US and North Korea will fade as “just another close call.” Russians continuing to influence American elections are already largely off the radar. The Impeachment of the President and his acquittal in the Senate will remain a historic headline. But climate change brush fires and heat waves in Australia that killed over 500 million animals will get lost in the heat, smoke and coastal floodings ahead.

Comparisons are odious. And I’m not making one here. All years have their bad moments, some more than others. And the sense of doomsday foreboding comes with the territory of humanity. It does seem clear, though, that in the short run the world is unaccountably resilient. We survived 1968 to our astonishment. It truly seemed at the time like madness incarnate had taken over world history. It’s beginning to seem that way again. Our coronavirus death toll could well soar over the months ahead, we could dump into a deep economic depression that might take years to recover from. And grief and political fury could still engulf the country.

How deep does our political chaos have to dive to cause Americans to take to the streets again? How long can America’s poor and marginalized, who are bearing the brunt of COVID, stand it before they riot, demanding equal health care under law?

Whatever comfort there is in seeing 2020 in the light of 1968 is cold comfort indeed. Our worlds are different, our reactions are different, our habits of mind are different and we can only pray that history doesn’t repeat itself with violence and counterviolence ripping society apart. Fifty-two years later, we are still caught in roughly the same ideological strangle hold; the political pendulum has swung back and forth many times and appears to be ready to swing another way again. Pandemics will never cease. The world is still teetering on the brink of nuclear holocaust. Climate change, so obvious to so many of us, is still being argued to death by Copernicans and flat earthers. But do I think we are going to come completely apart anytime soon? Do I think an American Fuhrer is about to grab power? I don’t.

Did the Soviets think their empire would come crashing around them? I don’t believe they did.

I know one thing. I’m notoriously, even comically, wrong in my predictions. But like a lot of us who are still around, we’ve been in the saddle a long, long time. And the trail ahead, while largely unpredictable, doesn’t seem all that different.

That was the same argument, though, that we had with our elders, and we thought then that they were just smug crackpot know-it-alls and so we turned from them and clung ever tighter to the cactus of our fears.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Photo from the Library of Congress. A soldier standing guard on the corner of 7th & N Street NW in Washington D.C. with the ruins of buildings that were destroyed during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.)