A century ago during flu pandemic, newspapers used quips, poems to urge mask wearing
As orders imploring Americans to wear masks are rolled out to control the spread of the coronavirus, a look back to another time when mass face coverings were required offers some intriguing parallels.
During the influenza outbreak in 1918, officials in Georgia — as they have in places here recently amid the COVID-19 pandemic — urged locals to don protective masks.
In 1918, newspapers, including those in Macon and Columbus, trumpeted the mask-wearing campaign.
The Columbus paper, then known as the Enquirer-Sun, offered some of the most colorful encouragements.
Sprinkled about its editorial page the morning of Oct. 14, 1918, were pithy proddings that included: “For the sake of argument, suppose we admit that the flu mask does no good. ... Can you suggest any harm that it does?”
“Better to wear a flu mask a little while now,” read another, “than to wear a death mask all the time.”
Yet another declared: “If a flu mask looks funny go ahead and laugh. It won’t do any harm.”
That day’s editions of the Enquirer-Sun also included an article headlined “Flu Mask Offenders To Have Places Closed Or Face Police Court.”
The head of the city’s health board was asked by a reporter whether, as the write-up put it, the board “had the power to compel people to the wearing of masks.”
The official, identified only as Lt. Hoskins, said that it did indeed have such authority.
“We will either close such places of businesses” or summon offenders to court, “or both,” Hoskins said.
Most establishments were said to have “cooperated willingly” but that “those that did not better do so immediately.”
A week later, editors of Columbus’ afternoon paper, the Ledger, reminded readers a week into the mask mandate to keep doing so.
“While hundreds appeared in the streets today with faces covered in masks ... it was quite apparent that many had failed to comply with this simple request ... and this is regrettable,” the editorial said. “There may be some who have good reasons for not wearing the masks. These ought to keep away from public places.”
Macon mask mandate
Masks were required in Macon as well in an Oct. 21, 1918 order approved by Mayor Grover Glendenning Toole.
Midway through the month in Macon, the flu had sickened 600 people, 10 of whom died.
The Macon declaration, which lasted through Nov. 6, said masks must be worn “in theaters, picture shows, churches, Sunday schools, schools, classrooms of colleges and universities, fairs, carnivals and other (gathering) places.”
The masks were required to be worn “over the nose and mouth, consisting of not less than four layers of standard surgical gauze, or three layers of ordinary commercial cheese cloth.”
Children in Macon schools were also required to wear masks or be sent home.
The city health department said in a statement that “closing of the schools would be distinctly detrimental. School children while in school are under the surveillance of the health department nurses and of teachers. Children showing signs of sickness are sent home.”
A pro-mask poem that appeared in a column of aphorisms in the one of the Columbus papers a week or so earlier perhaps summed the mask-wearing mantra best:
It is, my friends quite up to you; To help kill this awful flu; To wear a mask — do anything; That to the town relief will bring.