The 1918 global flu pandemic, coming in the wake of WWI, was a travesty. So many people were shaken by it, and by their responses (sometimes more selfish than they would have thought of themselves), as well as their survivors' guilt, that first-hand accounts of the flu largely disappeared.
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| Seattle, Washington; 39th Infantry preparing for deployment to France |
Daily Mail: 10 Major Changes Resulting from the 1918 Flu Pandemic
I was really surprised this event was given so much credit for countering "eugenics." Eugenics was the study of how to arrange human reproduction to increase the passing down of "desirable" inherited characteristics. That meant so-called less-desirable people were forcibly sterilized (including in the U.S.) There were attempts to promote abortion more heavily among the poor. The 1918 pandemic helped people realize that the conditions of poverty, not personal "defects", allowed diseases to spread more rapidly among the poor.
Francis Galton, an Englishman, was largely responsible for first developing this line of thinking. In the U.S., Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, came to believe in eugenics. (It's not true, however, that she did it for racially motivated reasons.) In "The Eugenic Vale of Birth Control Propaganda" (1921), she wrote that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." Eugenics was finally dealt its death blow after the Nazi's abhorrent use of it.
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