The “Forgotten” 1918 Influenza Epidemic and Press Portrayal of Public Anxiety

Abstract

This study explores media portrayal of collective “American anxiety” by examining magazine coverage of a domestic crisis that should have made Americans anxious, the 1918 influenza epidemic, to seek references to anxiety, and to try to understand why this scourge, which killed more people than did World War I, has been lost to public memory. The coverage suggests that the nature of epidemic itself offers clues to why it has been virtually “forgotten.” It had no beginning or end, no definable enemies, no amplified heroes who fit an early twentieth-century male definition of the concept, and no institutionalized commemoration.