Matthew Daley is professor of History “with a particular emphasis on the Gilded Age to Great Depression (1865-1941) in the fields of urban, Michigan, Great Lakes, industrial/historical archaeology, and public history.”[i]  This emphasis has led him and his students to dive deep into the Grand Rapids response to the 1918 influenza pandemic.

In Matthew’s research and teaching he seeks to go far beyond the fact that the pandemic happened.  He wants his students to experience the primary sources which are varied and multiple.  For example, in a local history course, Matthew devotes what he describes as “a chunk of the class to it”.  Students explore the City Archives and Research Center on Washington Street SE and the Grand Rapids History & Special Collections department (111 Library Street NE).  In places such as these the students dig into what we know, what kinds of records are kept, and “get their hands dirty doing original research.”

Matthew explains, “I want them to see what has been written by scholars, but also what is kept locally.  They sometimes ask me, ‘What’s the answer?’ and I say, “You tell me based on evidence. I know some answers, but not your answers.’ That opens up the exploration and is particularly fruitful.”

As an urban historian, Matthew is interested in this experience for himself, too.  Sometimes his interest in public policy takes him into areas such as Detroit sewers, garbage collection, the Herman Kiefer Hospital (1911-2013, a massive complex in Detroit built up for WWI) and projects like these that arose from the progressive era about 1890-1920.  This era of civic improvement and reform saw many political changes as well as a more urbanized society.  

“They tried to improve public health, tackling issues such as TB right up until the 1950s,” Matthew notes. “I joke that I wrote my dissertation on infrastructure and city politics and ran into the Great Depression.  My dissertation advisor said, ‘you study things that are never going to happen again’.”  Matthew pauses.  “Suddenly they are relevant again.”

“I was reminded when watching a documentary on Netflix that pointed out that when things go well you don’t ask questions.  It’s the fiascos that trigger a wave of investigation and challenge our notions.  Historians might seem to focus on glum topics, but when the building stands up, nobody asks why.”

“Of course, the topics we pick are shaped by our interests.  It is also helpful when entities left a lot of records.  Pipes and water quality might seem boring, but when the head of the water commission’s brother-in-law makes pipes that burst two years later...well, then you are curious about how the process worked.  In Detroit the explosive growth meant building the piping in months not years.  Two years later they had to be replaced because they were too small.  The engineer in me wants to know why things work and the historian wants to see the messy things that people do.”

When Matthew arrived in Grand Rapids in 2004 and was teaching local history, he wanted a project for his students.  He wondered what was available about the 1918 pandemic.  He lived near the Villa Maria Cemetery (a section of Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery) and saw a series of graves of the religious and penitents who died in 1918 over a short period.  That got him thinking about how to get his students hands figuratively and sometimes literally dirty as they saw the impact of the pandemic locally.

“Some have published their work,” Matthew states proudly.  “Some of the work was based on newspapers--two major papers plus neighborhood papers with almost the immediacy of blogs.  They also looked at official records at the city health department.  They learned about the city health officer Dr. Clyde Slemons (1873-1954), about smaller hospitals, the city sanitarium (which treated endemic and airborne TB), funeral home records at the city library.  Each element gave the students a different piece of the puzzle.  

Students found that Grand Rapids fared better than Philadelphia or Baltimore but that the reasons were murky.  “Why was less written about smaller cities?“ students wondered.  Matthew hinted that the item you are looking for may not be where you think it will be.

Matthew has worked as an archivist and knows how important they are for knowledge of their collections, but researchers also need to search for sources that may not seem immediately relevant.

And yet working in a large archive using city records and newspaper on microfilm you only have so much time.  Materials may be scattered. You may want to go through oral histories, little newspapers, and other records.  For instance, business records from 1918 turned out to be useful.  

“Now I have former students working at the library, and I actually teach the local history class there.  Teams of students look for information.  They journal about it.  They have goals.  Looking in unexpected places, buried in the back, they find interesting things.  Students come to question whether the official numbers are true.  After all, Clyde Slemons questioned the official numbers, too.”

Matthew described some of the measures taken in the hope of stopping the pandemic’s spread.   “The bluest blue laws saw churches closed while stores were open anyway.  They didn’t want to close the schools, thinking the children were safer there.”  Efforts at further closings were resisted. 

These policies were coming into practice during a time when Grand Rapids had a new governing structure with a part-time mayor, a city commissioner, and a hired city manager (Fred Locke, 1874-1945, a furniture salesman).  The city housed the sick in hospitals which were then smaller but with names we know well today:  Blodgett, Butterworth, St. Mary’s.  Eventually the TB sanitarium, houses, and boarding houses became ad hoc makeshift facilities for the afflicted.

The population was cajoled into mask-wearing with slogans such as “Obey the laws and wear the gauze.”

Meanwhile, WWI continued.  Industry in Grand Rapids was making some military parts such as wooden plane propellers being produced at furniture factories. Artillery shells were made in Wyoming.  Some workers were made sick by their contact with the materials which wasn’t picked up by local papers and was downplayed by some.  Slemons didn’t want to create a panic.

Matthew’s students start to pick up on these omissions and learn to be less credulous.  They come to understand that they must ask why a source is convincing and confront their own built-in assumptions.

“When we look at the funeral home and cemetery death indices we start to raise questions such as ‘how did people navigate their loss?’  We saw terms for the deaths such as ‘pneumonia” and had real database challenges making a proper count.  It isn’t clear like a game of Clue with a clean answer.  But it is true that it was not as bad here as it was in Philadelphia.”

“Now we have déjà vu all over again,” Matthew observes.  “The governor then never shut down the industries, it was just voluntary.  Is that a contributor?  Here the pandemic peaked in November 1918 with the highest death rate and then tapered off toward the end of the year.  There were three waves in 1919ꟷ in late spring, fall, and the winter of 1919-1920.  It kept coming back.”

“In Detroit, John and Horace Dodge died within a month of each other.  Henry Ford got sick but survived.”

“The students ask why people didn’t panic.  I explain that they lived with a host of unexplained maladies.  It was part of living life before antibiotics.  My grandfather said, ‘Death just came to the door.’”

He also explains that as a place in the midst of a transition from horses that there remained epizootic transmission.  Horses that drink from various troughs. Slemons was trying to rid the city of manure and arrange cartage to take dead horses from the streets.

The students were affected by their work.  “One student said, ‘I could touch the grief.’  It is not just a number to them.  One student stood on the site of the accidental death of a child he had learned about in his studies.  And one day as some of my class walked between Eberhard Center and the library with me, a student said, ‘History really is all about people.’”  Matthew can see that their work has humanized 1918, not to sentimentalize it but to understand it in terms of public policy.

“The 1918 project is not just about who dies, at which hospital, where they lived, the addresses that were quarantined, but instead an adventure to see how big the topic could become.  “I wanted it not to be just one narrow thing, but instead for them to have ownership of where they wanted to take it.  Demographics of disease and statistics were just coming into vogue then so there was a great deal of trolling through reports, but the silences are interesting, too.”

Matthew hopes that this project and another examining the building of the Grand Rapids freeways on which his students are working now will eventually become a digital, multi-generational project available online.

   

[i] History Department website profile