Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic
2020-08-14 · Guest: Ron Jones (Historical Kinesiologist) · 50:18
Lessons from the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic
Charlie Deist (filling in for Bob Zadek) interviews historical kinesiologist Ron Jones about the lessons of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. They discuss the differences in lockdown duration, the importance of physical education, and how the “seen versus the unseen” costs of modern technology and sedentary lifestyles may be more damaging than the pandemic itself.
Topics: 1918 Pandemic, Public Health, Lockdown Policy, Physical Education, Kinesiology, Technology and Health, Frédéric Bastiat, Essential Liberty
Speakers:
- Charlie Deist: Host (filling in for Bob Zadek)
- Ron Jones: Physical Educator and Historical Kinesiologist
Introduction to the 1918 Pandemic [00:00]
Charlie Deist: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. My name is Charlie Deist, filling in for Bob this Sunday from the warm, muggy, and even a little thunderous Bay Area. Well, where are we now? By my count, it’s about 153 days since “15 days to stop the spread.” There are many questions, and I came across an interesting set of articles written about the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, where the public officials warned of the immune-suppressing effects of any kind of long-term disruption.
And it turns out that there’s a whole treasure trove of lessons and data from this period that have been almost completely ignored. The exception to this is found in my guest today. Ron Jones is a classical physical educator and a historical kinesiologist. What is a historical kinesiologist, you ask? Well, it’s someone who studies physical culture and movement. He’s an expert on health and fitness, but he’s also a historian who’s been unearthing these gems from the archival records in his daily Facebook Live broadcasts. You can find Ron Jones often podcasting at theleanberets.com. He has an incredible library of resources there.
And in his Facebook Live broadcasts, I noticed he wasn’t just pontificating his own opinion, his own narrative about COVID. He was really trying to understand what had happened in 1918 and whether we’re in a comparable situation today and how our response today has differed from how they reacted back then. So there’s this question in a lot of people’s minds—certainly on my mind—which is: where are we going? Do our leaders have a sense of where we’re going? Do the politicians in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. have a plan or a vision, or are they just kind of making it up as they go along? And I can think of no one better to help me wade through this murky water than Ron Jones. Ron, welcome to the show this morning.
Ron Jones: Well, thanks so much. And it indeed might be some murky water as the storm approaches the California coast today, Charlie. Thanks so much for having me on. I want to thank Bob. I know he’s not here today, but I really appreciate it. And I love the intro music. Thank you.
Charlie Deist: Quite murky indeed. And I look outside and I can see a faint glow of the sun, but otherwise there’s a thick cloud cover. And I’m hoping that it’s a rising and not a setting sun, as Benjamin Franklin said at the end of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention. We can always wonder, you know, when the prospect of coming out on the other end is there, we get a sense of hope. We get a sense that we’re going to be all right. But I think for a lot of people in the country, they’re looking at the news, they’re seeing that the media is reporting with just as much sensationalism as ever, and yet it doesn’t seem like it necessarily warrants that.
Historical Data and Public Health Sources [02:59]
Charlie Deist: Based on your reading of history, first of all, tell us, what are some of the sources that you’re using in studying the 1918 pandemic?
Ron Jones: Well, I’m actually using the largest digital database in the world for the 1918-1919 pandemic influenza in the United States. And this is a combination effort of University of Michigan, Centers for Disease Control, the Robert Wood Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—I mean, these are some pretty heavy hitters in public health, and they have been for a long time. And what’s nice about the data that I’m talking about today, Charlie, is it was published long before the current administration or the previous administration, for the most part. So it’s been out there for a while. One of the sources that I used was from a very large conference in 2006 on the pandemic history. And again, that’s quite a few years ago. So we’ve had the information out there, and I’m just puzzled, as I’ve talked to you before the show, why we weren’t exposed to this in January. Why weren’t the politicians discussing what needed to be done historically to give us a guide or a rudder to steer the ship into safe harbors, as it’s been cited historically in certain social situations?
Charlie Deist: So it’s important that these studies and the archival research was put out before the previous two administrations, because partisanship has clearly led people to put on their blinders when looking at this. And I don’t claim to be entirely immune to any sort of partisan influence or narrative-seeking, but we want as historians to be wary of that and to approach the data with clear eyes. How do you as a historian start to parse data, any large data set like this, and what are the key findings that have come out for you?
Ron Jones: Well, I want to keep an open mind. And I just, you know, I started thinking about this in the spring. Like, what actually happened? Of course, I’d seen a documentary here or there, you know, somebody had mentioned that the Spanish flu, if you will, in 1918 was quite deadly. But by this summer, when we’re talking about going into basically a shutdown situation the rest of the year with our schools, I was compelled to do deeper research. And I went into this really not knowing a lot. And I just wanted to know what happened. And so I’m here to report the facts about what happened. And we can pontificate about, you know, how to dissect that and how to interpret that. But what I’m learning—and I’m learning something every day—is that the numbers in 1918 were astronomically higher for the most part. And it’s just not adding up to what we’re seeing today. And I think that is something that people need to understand.
Comparing San Francisco and Detroit in 1918 [05:50]
Charlie Deist: Let’s get specific and talk about a couple of different cities. And since I’m based in San Francisco and since most of our listeners are clustered on the West Coast, I thought we could look at some of the cities here on the Western seaboard. Let’s start with San Francisco. What have we learned about how San Francisco handled the pandemic back then? And set the frame—where are we? At the close of World War I, this is 1918, somewhere around when were the first cases showing up and how did people react when they started to see people coming down with what sounds like a pretty bad disease?
Ron Jones: Yeah, the geopolitical context was we’re at the end of World War I, which ended on November 11th, 1918, Armistice Day. And most of the cases in the United States started showing up in August into early September, sometimes early October. But San Francisco had their first case on September 23rd. And then I’m going to record or talk about a peak period. This is the peak epidemic period, the danger zone, you know, the critical period when there was a lot of lockdowns and restrictions. And in San Francisco, that went from the end of September, which is September 23rd, through about February 1st. And there were 45—almost 45,000 people infected. There were over 3,000 deaths in San Francisco. And they had an excess death rate of 673 per 100,000, making it one of the worst cities in the United States for the 1918-1919 influenza.
Charlie Deist: Okay. And then how does this stack up to—let’s just take one other data point or a couple of other data points, maybe even departing from our West Coast home here. What was the worst-case scenario? How did San Francisco fare relative to the worst case in the United States?
Ron Jones: Let’s see. I believe that was in Detroit. And they actually tied that into air quality. There were reports about because they were such an industrial city that some of that related to the poor air quality at the time. So let me pull this report out here. Detroit is…
Charlie Deist: We’ve had New York as probably the worst example in the United States, New York and New Jersey. And now as the numbers are starting to materialize for the Sunbelt states, I think that we’re seeing something like a third the number of the fatalities that they had—certainly less than half than what you had in New York and New Jersey. Of course, it remains to be seen how it’ll all play out. But there is this sense that geography matters and that there can be local conditions.
The Patriotic Masking Campaign [08:42]
Ron Jones: Yeah, there was some about that. But basically, you know, it was interesting as all the cities were a little bit different in their strategy. And if we go to San Francisco in particular, the area that you’re from, they had a strategy that involved a lot of emphasis on the masking. And so, and then sometimes depending on the city, their strategy changed because the first strategies weren’t working. Or in some cases, they didn’t want to put people under lockdown again. They just felt like that wasn’t the right strategy. It was too hard on the population. And therefore they went into something like quarantining or masking for people that were actually infected rather than make a general lockdown or restrictions for the whole community. And San Francisco was one of those places that had a heavy emphasis on the mask. In fact, at the time it was considered patriotic to wear the mask. So there was this whole patriotic campaign in San Francisco for masking.
Charlie Deist: And who knows how the mask technology has evolved since then, or if we’re doing some kind of security theater with the cloth masks. It’s been a question in my mind, but regardless, I want to put aside those empirical questions because I find that those often lead into these debates with no end. Each side kind of cherry-picks its preferred studies, and there are all these things that we just don’t know.
Fear, War, and Immune Suppression [10:55]
Charlie Deist: But one of the things that I heard in one of your broadcasts on Facebook Live was certain public health officials talking about potentially immune-suppressing effects of anything that would disrupt life for long periods of time, whether it’s lockdowns, masks, going outside and constantly seeing everyone dressed up in their masks. What’s your read on how public health officials approached things differently or viewed things through this more sort of holistic, even at times referring to spiritual consequences? Do you think that we’ve lost something there, or was this just a bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo?
Ron Jones: Well, actually, there were specific references in some cities with the health leaders or community leaders that it did affect—they were talking about fear. The fear response as relating to what this does to the immune system. And even in the 2006 pandemic workshop hosted by the CDC and the Health and Human Services Department for the United States, they talked about the emphasis of clear communication, truthful communication, and not feeding into the fear factor. And so we were really addressing these issues in 2006, but also in 1918. And this is why some of the entertainment stayed open. They actually left certain avenues of entertainment open in some cities, not all, because of the concern over a lack of a place to vent and to blow off steam and to, you know, let go of the stress of not just the pandemic, but also the First World War. So this is another thing in terms of geopolitical context: what did the First World War do to the immune systems of the global population? It was an awful, awful thing to witness. It was just—there were so many people that died. And there was a disillusionment with technology. We used technology to just kill more people. So we were coming out of the Industrial Revolution where just, you know, the machine era, right? We were holding up the machine as the Holy Grail, and look what it did. And so that, I think, does have an effect on how people feel and how their physiology functions. And that was specifically addressed in some of the cities during the 1918-1919 pandemic.
Fatality Rates and Demographic Shifts [13:30]
Charlie Deist: Just to get a sense of perspective, we’ve seen numbers for COVID in the United States—I think we’ve approached something like 180,000 total fatalities, which is, you know, nothing to scoff at. It’s a sizable number. But to put it in perspective of, say, number per 100,000 in the population, how does that compare to the numbers that we were seeing in the major cities during the 1918 flu pandemic?
Ron Jones: Well, if we look at the three Pacific Northwest cities, we’ve got—we’ll start with Los Angeles where I’m at. The death rate was 494 per 100,000. Okay. So the death rate this summer in Los Angeles, I think it was 39 per 100,000. So that gives you a comparison, right? In San Francisco, as we mentioned earlier, it was 673 per 100,000. And Seattle, Washington, it was 414 per 100,000. And I believe the last time I checked in the United States, it was 49 per 100,000. Now, something interesting to note, Charlie, is that basically I can say this, I think, with a good deal of confidence: that the numbers in 1918-1919 were underreported. I think it was actually a lot worse because a lot of the mandated reporting wasn’t put into place until after they were into the thick of the epidemic. They were into that peak period before they implemented that. It wasn’t set up in place at the time. And so also the death rate was so astronomically high, people were just frantically trying to deal with just the carcasses. Just from a carnage standpoint, the processing of the dead bodies. Our medical community was very stressed because 25% of our doctors and nurses were part of the military effort. So we already had a shortage of doctors and nurses. In fact, this is the golden era of the Red Cross. They were just astronomically important for providing nurses and helping people get into nurse training. And in fact, some of the nursing education, like in Chicago in particular, that came out of the 1918 flu continues today. So if you’re into nursing history, there’s a whole thing we could do on that. But anyway, it was just—there were so many people dying. I mean, it’s been reported in the research that I’m reading that sometimes people were in the house dead for six to eight days. There was no place to put the body. The police would come by and ask people to bring the bodies out. There were special trains made to transport bodies. I haven’t seen that in Los Angeles yet. That’s just my personal report. So…
Lockdown Duration: Weeks vs. Months [16:50]
Charlie Deist: So it’s maybe a factor of 10 in terms of the overall fatality. The age differential in terms of who COVID tends to target is also something that seems like a major difference between the present and the 1918 pandemic, where it seems to disproportionately affect old people and really leave the young relatively unscathed. You’ll hear a story every once in a while about some young person, usually with comorbidities, but I read a statistic last night that it’s in the vicinity of one in a million young people or people under the age of—I don’t remember the exact age, but for children. And if we’re talking about how COVID is affecting us going forward and the decisions and the risk calculus, we always have a trade-off to make. Whenever we put kids in school or get together in cities, we’re choosing to take some degree of risk in order to reap the benefits of coming together. And that’s really, I guess, what a culture or what a society is, is that decision to reap some of the benefits in exchange for the costs. And I would say that COVID is revealing some cracks in the old institutions where maybe we might not go back to the way things have always been. We might make some adjustments. We might start to reopen schools that have better ventilation systems or put more emphasis on an outdoor curriculum even. But if we’re talking about this question of a proportionate response, how long were the lockdowns back then? And were people getting back to life quicker than what we’re seeing now, despite a death count that is by most estimates 10 times lower than what it was in 1918?
Ron Jones: Yeah, let me address your first comments. I mean, if we’re waiting for a no-infections at schools, we might as well keep the school shut down for at least another year. That’s based on what I’m reading, right? So, you know, that’s something to think about carefully. They did not wait for a no-infection period. They shut down—the average length of a shutdown or severe restrictions was from about two and a half weeks to six weeks. Now, the two and a half weeks would have been more on the military camp side because of the close quarters of the soldiers. And that actually heavily factored into the infection problem in the United States because of the military camps around so many of our big cities and the civilian contractors coming in and out to provide services and the soldiers on furlough coming into the cities. And so that was a whole other part of this. But in Los Angeles, their shutdown, their peak period basically went from September 22nd to February 6th. Their school closures were from October 11th to December 2nd. Then they had a second surge, so they closed the schools again on December 10th. And then they started opening the schools on January 6th and they opened the final school on February 6th. So San Francisco, they shut down on September 23rd and basically they were open by February 1st. Their schools shut down in San Francisco from October 18th to November 25th. And Seattle, Washington, their peak period was from October 5th to December 31st. And their schools shut down from October 6th to November 14th. So that gives you an idea. It was weeks, if not days, but not four, five, six months, 12 months.
The Crisis of Physical Education [20:45]
Charlie Deist: Right. So we’re talking in terms of weeks, not months. Or when it is months, it’s just a couple of months and it’s not the spring, summer, and fall semester. It’s interesting because we’re now just getting into the back-to-school season and California has shut down all of its schools. I don’t know if they’ve put a number on the reopening or when they’ll start to reconsider that. But if you set this example of no new infections, clearly this is an impossibly high bar that’s going to require a complete reordering of society, and one that hasn’t really been thought out all that well, that’s maybe more born of necessity. The interesting thing here—and this is a question for you as an educator as well, someone who has really studied the physical education systems of the past and implemented them with hundreds of students at a time—I wonder, because schools have been closed and the concern is that putting them in these stuffy classrooms is going to not just lead to the kids getting infected, but also to the teachers getting infected. Do you think that there could be room for maybe a more limited reopening of just PE programs? I read the other day that some schools are going to be implementing potentially remote learning centers—or I’m sorry, the schools will effectively be turned into this kind of Orwellian pod system where you come in and you log on to the computer. There might be a few administrators to make sure that kids aren’t acting out, but they’ll be connecting to their teachers at home via Zoom. And I guess the question is, could you at least have one aspect of the school day, the PE programs that have been very much kind of on the chopping block or considered the most expendable, could you reopen in a more limited capacity? Or has there been any talk about distinguishing between staying indoors and being outside where it’s fresh air and sunlight as disinfectants?
Ron Jones: You know, there was a history of outdoor education in the previous generations, and some of that came out of the 1918 influenza pandemic. So it’s—there’s been talk about it. I haven’t seen any school districts with any kind of definite concrete plan. But ironically, PE is like one of the first things to go. I’m definitely not hearing about a school opening up just to provide PE, although one could argue that would be one of the most important things to do right now. You know, in the 1920s, coming out of the Industrial Revolution, there were some amazing warnings by the thought leaders of the day about our addiction to the machine. And if you squint your eyes a little bit when you read these, it’s almost like they were written in the last five years. It’s absolutely stunning. And we did not listen to the warnings. And we’re heading for the proverbial crevasse here where we’re going to dive off and maybe not be seen again, because you can’t lock people down in a machine all day long inside and expect it to go well. I understand there’s a temporary solution that needs to be implemented here. But if we’re holding up technology as the answer, that’s a real dangerous place in history because oftentimes it ends up being something that backfires on us eventually. So—and we already have reports of students literally not being able to get up at all for three and a half hours straight because the classes are stacked so close they can’t even go to the bathroom. Well, from a kinesiology standpoint and postural standpoint, that’s devastating. You lock our kids down for a year like this and they’re going to move completely differently. And they were moving poorly before this ever started. So we’re going to see higher levels of obesity. We’re going to see more joint problems. We’re going to see more back pain. And without quality physical education, basically they’re not going to know what to do to take care of themselves. I think it’s potentially devastating what’s happening. And I don’t think people are thinking through the real psychological and physical effects of children being locked in a machine all day. It’s concerning. As a physical education teacher and a health education teacher and a historian, I’m very concerned about it.
The Seen and the Unseen Costs of Lockdown [25:15]
Charlie Deist: This speaks to one of the recurring themes of this show. Bob will often refer to Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French political theorist and economist who wrote about the seen versus the unseen. And it became this analogy of the parable of the broken window, where people think that, “Oh, well, if a miscreant kid throws a rock through the window, then that will boost economic activity because you have the glazier that needs to come and replace the window and it starts this circular flow of spending through the economy.” But it neglects that the shopkeeper has less money in his pocket to spend on other more productive things. And we see the same fallacy with COVID reporting every day, where the seen costs—the visible costs of people dying and getting sick—are on the front page every day. And we are starting to see a little bit more awareness of the unseen, but you’re pointing out that some of these postural issues, the effects of keeping people indoors for months and months on end from a baseline of already very sedentary lifestyles, can have devastating effects. And this is the unseen. This is where our policymakers need to kind of turn their attention in making the trade-offs. And there’s been a deference to essentially unelected health officials in many cases who are not necessarily looking at the big picture because their whole career has been about identifying infectious diseases. So for them, this is like the astronomer who has a solar eclipse in their home country. It’s sort of an opportunity to put all of their knowledge into practice. I’m speaking with Ron Jones, the host of The Lean Berets podcast and a physical educator and historical kinesiologist who’s been digging through this treasure trove of information about the 1918 flu pandemic trying to draw out some lessons. You can find Ron’s work at theleanberets.com.
[Omitted commercial break for Bob Zadek’s book Essential Liberty]
Charlie Deist: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show. Charlie Deist here, filling in for Bob this Sunday. Bob will be back next Sunday with another regular edition of the show of ideas, not attitude. And you just heard the ad there for The Bubble. Bob also has a new book out on this very topic of some of the trade-offs that we’re facing with COVID-19 and the questions for policymakers as well as just you and I. What can our response be? How can we prioritize our essential liberty over some of these things that may be having longer-term consequences like shutting down schools or remaining on indefinite lockdown? The book is called Essential Liberty: Finding Freedom in a Post-COVID World, and it features interviews that Bob has done with a variety of thinkers from economists to public policy makers on this very question of: what is a proportional response? And if we follow the words of Governor Cuomo or some of the policymakers who have suggested that if our actions save even one life, then they’ll be worthwhile, we end up in a very different kind of world than if we sit back and try to rationally assess what the appropriate balance is.
Fitness Standards: 1930 vs. Today [29:00]
Charlie Deist: So Ron, on this question of balance and proportion, you’ve been talking about how during World War I there was a sense that technology had somehow spun out of control and that it was not being used necessarily as a tool for progress and bettering our lives, but that it had been used for the wholesale destruction and slaughter of millions of men during World War I. So do you think there’s any kind of parallel to—obviously we’re not coming out of a hot war like that. What do you think could have predisposed us today to be maybe a little bit immune compromised and more vulnerable to something like COVID? This is sort of a chance for you to speculate, or if you’d like to go in a different direction, I’m all ears.
Ron Jones: Technology! I mean, if you look at the amount of sitting and just doing nothing but twirling your thumbs, I mean, that just doesn’t build the immune system, period. I mean, you know, as a credentialed PE teacher, the condition of our children today is absolutely horrendous. If you take the 1930 standards—testing standards for physical fitness—and you take the athletic child today and you run them through the same battery of tests, they come out testing around the 30th percentile compared to the 1930s. That’s how out of shape they are. So if your little son or daughter came in in the 30th percentile of math, would this be acceptable? What about for reading? What about for science? And yet these are the athletic kids. This was brought out to me by one of my mentors who was a physical therapist for 40 years. And I put my son—he’s an athletic basketball kid—and I put him through the vertical leap, and guess what? He tested at the 30th percentile, and he was like one of the most athletic kids growing up in this basketball program. So, you know, if you start looking around, a lot of our problems are from technology. Ironically, technology is oftentimes invented to solve a problem of previous technology. So it’s not the panacea—I mean, it’s not the end-all solution. And this is the historical researcher in me issuing a warning shot over the bow for everyone that is rushing to technology as the savior for education today. It might solve a temporary problem that we can’t get the kids into schools physically right now, but it’s creating a lot of other issues. And I’m not just talking about the mechanical postural issues. I’m talking about the psychological issues. And this is something that I want to mention: there was a great concern over the public’s emotional state in 1918 after just four or five weeks of lockdowns. And there was a lot of talk about that. People were literally losing their minds after like four, five, six weeks of these restrictions and shutdowns and quarantines. And I’m looking at this like, oh my gosh, they’re talking about four, five, six weeks. We’re talking four, five, six months going into a year now. No wonder people are losing it. So this is something else to pay attention to, and you and I have talked about this: what are the psychological impacts of what’s happening? They’re going to be deep. They’re going to be really deep. And in some ways, it’ll take decades to get through this, if we get through it.
Psychological Impacts and Rapid Policy Action [33:30]
Charlie Deist: When you mention technology often being created to solve another problem that technology had previously created, it made me think of how we see the same thing oftentimes in the world of government policy, where you end up with a whole patchwork of laws and regulations that are intended to remedy a failure of previous regulation. And when we’re talking about the school system and the failure of the school system to sort of adapt to this scenario and the urge to just patch it over with a sort of technological solution, I’m wondering if you see any silver linings coming from outside of the system, maybe outside the public school system, either in terms of the direct response to COVID-19 or just remedying this problem of physical inactivity in general. Because as I think a lot of generals have pointed out, you know, the obesity and sedentary lifestyle diseases—this is an epidemic that threatens us just as much as something like the national debt. Where are the silver linings, maybe in or out of the public school system, but maybe with a particular focus on what’s happening outside of public schools?
Ron Jones: Well, I think we have an opportunity in the chaos to deal with the root cause solutions of our poor health in general, right? Beyond COVID-19. We’ve got a morbidly obese population to a large extent, if not severely overweight. And beyond just the poundage on a person’s skeleton, we’ve got extremely poor movement skills, which go into cognitive skills. This has been tied in historically all the way back to ancient Greece. It’s very, very important to move in a skillful way. This is the importance of teaching classical physical education instead of just having little Johnny or, you know, the kids like aimlessly walk around the track. That’s not physical education. I’ve lost count of how many parents, Charlie, have written me and said, “All my kid does is walk around the track,” or they just get a ball thrown out and they don’t ever get any kind of instruction technically. Now, I’ve been criticized for that, but it’s extremely important to have a mastery of skills, especially with your body, with your hands, with your feet, you know, how you move through the world physically has a lot to do with your cognitive development. And this has been talked about for generations. So there’s an opportunity to focus on the basics again, because we’re sacrificing a whole generation of children. They’re not prepared to deal with what we’re dealing with today. Just because they can use their phone and do Snapchat doesn’t qualify as being prepared to navigate something like this. So I think the opportunity is to get to the root causes. We have serious health issues in this country, and that’s tied into education. On the education side, I think the charter schools have a potential here because they’re jumping out of the standard way of doing it. I think they are absolutely behind the curve on health and PE, though. That is something I’m going to leverage criticism at them directly. They’re not going to make it if they don’t get on board with PE and health, period. End of story. And that’s the same for traditional schools. There’s just too much history. And if people want to learn more about that, they should watch my documentary film I made with filmmaker Doug Orchard. It’s called The Motivation Factor. You can find that at motivationmovie.com. It’s the history of PE and why it’s so important and how it factors into developing the best learners in school.
Charlie Deist: I was going to mention that you were an executive producer and the historian on this film, The Motivation Factor, which features a school in Carmichael, California, La Sierra High School, which for a couple of—was it a couple of decades had this PE program, or was it less than that?
Ron Jones: ‘56. They opened the school in ‘56 and the school closed down due to boundary issues in 1983. So for a while, yeah, over 20 years, they were the gold standard for PE in America for high schools. And in fact, their PE program was better than college PE programs.
Recovery and the Roaring Twenties [38:00]
Charlie Deist: And yet we didn’t see it replicated on a larger scale. Usually in the free market, you have—when something is successful, when a product or an idea is successful, you have people run out and start to copy it. But in this case, it has almost been lost down the memory hole if it weren’t for this documentary. And coming back to your experience researching the 1918 flu pandemic, there was one finding in there that I found particularly interesting, which was that many cities had extended hours at the playground or opened up parks for extended hours on the theory that the safest place for kids was still outdoors. We’ve had a guest on the show frequently, Lenore Skenazy, who is the author of the book Free-Range Kids. And she talks about how we’ve started to adopt this mindset of hyper-risk awareness with respect to our child-rearing that leads us to keep kids indoors. And if we think that being on the phone or the computer is the safest thing, we’re neglecting a much greater danger at our own peril. What else—tell that story of how in 1918 they were emphasizing getting outside more compared to the approach today, and what changed in our mentality since then?
Ron Jones: Well, it was also the area of tuberculosis. So there was an emphasis—at least in the PE side of education—there was a lot of emphasis on hygiene. And under that umbrella of hygiene was fresh air and ventilation. So they were talking about fresh air in schools a hundred years ago. And it’s kind of interesting now that people are talking about how we need better ventilation. I’ve got books sitting right next to me in my office right now that were saying the same thing, you know, a hundred-plus years ago. So that’s nothing new. The parks were very developed at the time in a lot of cities and they were, you know, a place of social engineering because they weren’t just places to flop around. They actually had libraries and they had physical education teachers on the parks. They taught the kids how to play. There was free play involved, but it wasn’t just unstructured free play. There was a lot of technical instruction as well. So a lot of community networking there. Different races of people came together, different religions of people. It was—the whole park recreation is a fascinating area of history to go into. But they did end up closing a lot of those places, too. Now, early on with San Francisco, I’ve got a photograph that was published on the database website showing the people in San Francisco at a park. They’re just packed into this park with all their kids. I don’t have the specific date for that, but I know initially they were telling people to go outside and get fresh air. So that’s extremely important, absolutely. But you know, today, if you’re on a Zoom meeting with your teachers for, you know, six hours a day, by the time you’re done with that, you might not even be able to get off the couch. I don’t know.
Charlie Deist: There’s another finding, which was that some of the cities that locked down experienced a larger spike after that. And obviously it can be hard to tease out cause and effect, if whether the lockdown was prompted by an initial spike in cases that was already baked in. But do you have any sense of whether lockdowns on the whole, as this blunt instrument, are actually or were actually effective?
Ron Jones: Well, there’s still a lot of debate over what worked and what didn’t. Even today, people are—and these are the experts, you know, that study epidemiology and the science of pandemics and the history of pandemics. They’re still debating about the efficacy of masks and social distancing. In fact, the 2006 conference that I referenced, there were comments in there by the panel experts about they weren’t quite sure about the distancing was that effective. So I think one thing I can pull out of all this is it’s not one strategy or the other or a couple. If it’s going to work, you have to do all of them at the same time and very, very quickly. And this is one of the things that I got out of reading all this documentation, Charlie, is that the leaders of 1918 in America were able to come together and quickly come to decisions and take action on them within a 24-hour period. I mean, I’ve got citation after citation of the first meeting of the commission or the leaders of the community, and literally within 24 hours they were implementing the decisions on the action end of public health policy. I just am fascinated with that because they had telephones in that area and they would show things in the movie theaters or make announcements, but there were no cell phones and no internet, you know. So it was a vastly different world in terms of communication. And they took action. And there was some arguing, and there was some protesting, and there were people that didn’t agree with the mask, and there was a lot of this going back and forth just like today. But in 24, maybe sometimes 48 hours, they had these things in place. In fact, Seattle, when they shut Seattle down, it happened so fast, it was cited people went out in the city at night and they were wandering around like, you know, cattle with no place to feed. I mean, it just—they were stunned. The city was closed. They didn’t even know what happened. So they put things into place quickly. And that I didn’t see in America when we started this. We had some things going into place, but I mean, they—we’re talking about shutting down the whole city. In fact, Utah shut the whole state down. They shut the whole state down, including church services. Now, if you know anything about Utah, that’s the home of the Mormons. So in fact, a lot of cities did shut the churches down. And so that controversy is nothing new. It was happening then. There was a lot of pushback then as well, especially when they left the saloons open. But as I found out, the saloons were providing cheap meals to industrial laborers that were in a tenement housing kind of a situation, so they needed a place to eat at night, not just drink.
Charlie Deist: So if there’s a lesson in all this, it might be that there may be a role, especially early on, if you can coordinate. And this makes me think of one of the interviews contained in the new book, Essential Liberty, which you can get—you can get the first three chapters for free at bobzadek.com if you sign up for the mailing list. That includes this interview with Alex Tabarrok, who’s an economist and blogger at Marginal Revolution, who made the point that, you know, as classical liberals or libertarians, we—there is this bias against government action. But that doesn’t mean that we want government out of the picture altogether. And there are certain things that we would expect from a functioning government. And even that was not always there in the response to the current pandemic. So we’ve—it seems like we’ve lost a degree of accountability. And in particular, when you think about all of the conflicting mask mandates, there is a sense that government did not act as effectively as it could have. In a different vein, there’s a question of how can people just pursue their normal lives within the framework that we already have. And you’ve seen more people going out to the parks. At the same time, you’ve seen a response by city officials, including the mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, who tweeted out a picture of people enjoying themselves at the waterfront of Lake Michigan and saying, “Come on, people, don’t you understand that we’re in a pandemic?” kind of neglecting the ability of people to, one, calibrate their own risk and have an understanding of what the risks of infection are at this point. Most people have done some research on their own or they’re getting it blasted to them by the news networks, perhaps getting a sense that things are even riskier than they actually are, and still going out and maybe maintaining social distancing or wearing a mask if they feel like they need some extra degree of protection. But I feel like we’ve lost this sense of being able to collectively assess the risks and make decisions on our own. How would you summarize the lessons from the 1918 pandemic as you’re reading through these archival materials as they apply today?
Ron Jones: Well, based on what you just said, I think we need to think beyond COVID. What’s the overall effect on our immune system of everything that’s happening? And so I would argue that staying inside and not going outside is going to make things a lot worse. Okay. So we can go outside, we can distance, go into certain particular locations, but I just want to put that out there. I think we need to think not just about COVID, but about everything else that’s going on on the psycho-emotional side of this, because it does have an impact on the immune system. But I mean, looking at all the reporting—all the reports that I’ve been through—I think what most impressed me was the ability for the leaders to come together and make very quick decisions, even though they were very unpopular with some people in the community. They were able to do that with limited technology and oftentimes in 24 hours or less. They also all had a different strategy. It depends on the region and the culture of the people as well. Some people let people come out of restrictions and didn’t put them into a second round of shutdowns just because they didn’t think emotionally the people could handle it. So there were a lot of different strategies involved. So to have one blanket strategy for every region of the country, that’s something to think about. Is that the right way to go? And also, just in general, it blasted through the population. It was called a hit-and-run disease. It was two to six weeks and people were putting their lives back together. And it didn’t have an economic impact on the country in terms of a severe recession or a depression. I mean, from what I’ve read is that, you know, there were obviously people were losing money and there was an impact there with people that had died and a parent had died and they were the breadwinner and there were orphans—there was all kinds of orphan issues. But it didn’t have this devastating impact. In fact, we went into this amazing period of growth, as we know, for 10 years until the Great Depression. So those are some thoughts that come to my mind.
Charlie Deist: That’s a nice and optimistic note there to end on. We’re coming to the end of our hour. I’ve been speaking with Ron Jones of theleanberets.com. He is a classical physical educator and historical kinesiologist who’s been doing some fascinating Facebook Live broadcasts about the history of the 1918 pandemic. If you’re out there and you’re maybe a charter school entrepreneur or you’re in the space of the public schools and have an influence over policy and education, consider reaching out to Ron, who’s just a wealth of information on how you could start to reintroduce some of these vital activities into the school day and cut up some of that technological monotony that is going to have really troubling long-term consequences. So Ron, I want to thank you for taking the hour with us this morning. How else can people follow your work or get in touch with you in the last 30 seconds that we have here?
Ron Jones: Oh, I think they need to watch the movie. Watch our documentary film. That’s the best thing that I can advise you to do. Because in that, you’re going to get the importance of what we’ve been talking about here today in terms of building the best immunity with children, building resiliency, not just physical strength, but also mental stability. Mental stability was highlighted in classical PE programs. It wasn’t just how many push-ups you can do.
Charlie Deist: Thanks again, Ron, for spending the hour with us this morning. Bob will be back next Sunday. So long for now.