The deadliest disease event in human history carries the name of the one country that had nothing to do with it. The 1918 influenza pandemic infected roughly a third of the people alive and killed somewhere between 17 and 50 million of them, possibly more — more than the war that was still being fought around it. The world filed it under a single word, Spanish, and almost everything that word implies is false. Spain did not start it, did not suffer worst, and did not want the name. To see how a libel that durable gets attached to a country, it helps to put the charge on trial — and to start with the evidence for where the thing actually came from.
The case for everywhere but Spain
The conventional starting gun is a Kansas infirmary. On the morning of March 4, 1918, a company cook named Albert Gitchell reported sick at Camp Funston, a hastily built Army cantonment on the Kansas plains where tens of thousands of men were being drilled before shipping to France. He had a sore throat, a fever, and a headache. By noon more than a hundred soldiers had lined up behind him with the same complaints. Within a few days, 522 men at the camp were sick.
Gitchell was not really the first case. He was the first one written down. Two hundred miles west, in rural Haskell County, a country doctor named Loring Miner had been watching an unusually violent influenza tear through his patients since January, and had been alarmed enough to warn the U.S. Public Health Service’s journal, Public Health Reports. Young, healthy farmhands were dying of it. Men from Haskell had reported for training at Camp Funston. The trail is circumstantial, but the timeline runs the right direction.
What is not in dispute is what Funston did with the virus. The camp held more than fifty thousand men at any moment, packed into barracks and bound for the Western Front. The epidemic burned through it — more than 1,100 were sickened, with dozens of deaths — and then the survivors did exactly what they had been trained to do. They boarded trains, and then troopships, and carried the virus into the trenches of Europe by mid-April. From the crowded military camps and the ports it moved into the general population of a planet at war.
Kansas is only one of the candidates. One theory points to a British staging camp at Étaples in France, where a lethal respiratory illness had appeared as early as 1916. Another traces it to China, brought west by laborers recruited to dig and haul behind Allied lines. No one has proven where it began. But of every origin ever seriously proposed, Spain has never been one of them.
Why the verdict came out backward
If Spain was nowhere near the start of it, the question is how its name got onto the indictment. The answer is not in the epidemiology. It is in who was allowed to print the news.
By the spring of 1918, the major combatant nations had spent four years perfecting the machinery of wartime censorship. Anything that might dent morale at home, or signal weakness to the enemy, was suppressed as a matter of policy. A disease ripping through army camps and munitions cities was precisely the kind of news that did not get printed. French, British, German, and American papers stayed largely silent as their soldiers and civilians fell ill by the thousands.
Spain was not at war. It had no front, no censor’s office sitting on the wires, no reason to pretend its citizens were well. So when the flu swept through Madrid, Spanish newspapers reported it plainly — the case counts, the closed theaters, and, most conspicuously, the news in late May that King Alfonso XIII himself had fallen ill. El Sol carried the story of the stricken monarch on May 28. He recovered. The headline went around the world.
To readers in Paris and London and New York, scanning the only uncensored coverage available, the conclusion was obvious and entirely backward. The terrible new flu was apparently raging in Spain, and seemed to be coming from there. The name attached itself and would not come off. It was a libel produced not by Spain saying too much, but by everyone else saying nothing.
The defendant’s own names for it
The Spanish were furious, and they were not quiet about it. A government official protested that the epidemic “was not born in Spain, and this should be recorded as a historic vindication.” It was not. The name stuck precisely because the people insisting on it were the ones who had been honest.
So Spain reached for names of its own. One was the “French flu” — gripe francesa — aimed across the Pyrenees at the country’s old rival, on the unprovable but satisfying theory that the sickness had come over the border. The other was stranger and more revealing. Spaniards took to calling it the “Naples Soldier,” the Soldado de Nápoles.
The name was a joke, and a good one. Soldado de Nápoles was a song from La canción del olvido, “The Song of Forgetting,” a zarzuela — a Spanish light opera — that had finally reached Madrid’s stages that very season; it opened at the Teatro de la Zarzuela on March 1, 1918, three days before Albert Gitchell reported sick at the Kansas infirmary. The tune was everywhere, impossible to get out of your head. One of the show’s writers, Federico Romero, is said to have boasted that his song was as catchy as the flu. Madrid took him at his word and named the flu after the song.
Everyone was passing the blame
Spain was not unusual in wanting to pin the disease on someone else — only unusual in losing the argument. Every country played the same game. To British soldiers in Flanders it was “Flanders flu”; the Germans facing them called it Flandern-Fieber. In Senegal it was the Brazilian flu, in Brazil the German flu, in Poland the Bolshevik disease. The French papers, before they settled on the convenient “Spanish” label, had first reached for “American flu” — which, of all the names the world tried on, may have been the closest to right.
The flu that bears Spain’s name was honest about it, and got blamed for the honesty. The countries that lied got to pick the story, and more than a century later, the lie is the one still in every textbook.