Unlike President Donald Trump’s frequent pronouncements about COVID-19, President Woodrow Wilson never once spoke publicly about the 1918 Spanish flu or the battle to defeat it. He focused exclusively on a different war, the Great War, afraid that acknowledging the pandemic would lower morale. U.S. soldiers sustained 116,00 casualties in the First World War, but 675,000 Americans died of the Spanish flu. Read more about the deadly Spanish flu pandemic a century ago in On the Shore (1917-1925), a tale of conflict between generations in a Lower East Side immigrant family (see NOVELS).
