The 1918 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide—including some 675,000 Americans—in just 15 months. But Woodrow Wilson’s White House largely ignored the global health crisis, focusing instead on the Great War enveloping Europe and offering “no leadership or guidance of any kind,” as historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, recently told Time’s Melissa August.
“Wilson wanted the focus to remain on the war effort,” Barry explained. “Anything negative was viewed as hurting morale.”
In private, the president acknowledged the threat posed by the virus, which struck a number of people in his inner circle, including his personal secretary, his oldest daughter and multiple Secret Service members. Even the White House sheep came down with the flu, reports Michael S. Rosenwald for the Washington Post.
Wilson himself contracted the disease shortly after arriving in Paris in April 1919 for peace talks aimed at determining the direction of a post-World War I Europe. As White House doctor Cary T. Grayson wrote in a letter to a friend, the diagnosis arrived at a decidedly inopportune moment: “The president was suddenly taken violently sick with the influenza at a time when the whole of civilization seemed to be in the balance.”
Grayson and the rest of Wilson’s staff downplayed the president’s illness, telling reporters that overwork and Paris’ “chilly and rainy weather” had sparked a cold and fever. On April 5, the Associated Press reported that Wilson was “not stricken with influenza.”
Behind the scenes, the president was suffering the full force of the virus’ effects. Unable to sit up in bed, he experienced coughing fits, gastrointestinal symptoms and a 103-degree fever.
Then, says biographer A. Scott Berg, the “generally predictable” Wilson started blurting out “unexpected orders”—on two separate occasions, he “created a scene over pieces of furniture that had suddenly disappeared,” despite the fact that nothing had been moved—and exhibiting other signs of severe disorientation. At one point, the president became convinced that he was surrounded by French spies.
“[W]e could but surmise that something queer was happening in his mind,” Chief Usher Irwin Hoover later recalled. “One thing was certain: [H]e was never the same after this little spell of sickness.”