But as horrific as the disease [Spanish flu] itself was, public officials and the media helped create that terror—not only by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure. A specialty among public relations consultants has evolved in recent decades called “risk communication.” I don’t care much for the term. For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it’s that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.
― John Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
American author and historian John Barry has written books on the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and the development of the modern form of the concepts of separation of church and state, as well as individual liberty. Today, perhaps more than ever, he’s been interviewed by many news organizations and journals as a historical authority on flu pandemics. Having recently read his book, The Great Influenza, I was struck with the dominant theme of his work: tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We shouldn’t distort, pervert, or manage it, Barry argues, for this only creates fear and distrust. It did in 1918, and it will again today and tomorrow.
President Woodrow Wilson was convicted that the country must prepare for and support the war. To this end, Barry writes that Wilson created the Committee for Public Information. This agency’s work was to control all information the American public received. Just one year earlier, Wilson had pushed the Sedition Act through Congress, which made it a crime to say or publish anything that would negatively influence America’s war efforts. Barry cites the architect of the Committee for Public Information who stated:
Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms. The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.
The truth–or manipulation of the truth–lies at the heart of Barry’s convictions, as well as Wilson’s and those government officials who’d been designated as information czars wholly in charge of everything that American citizens should know and believe. And at this time when a flu pandemic was sweeping the nation, when many described bodies being piled up as cords of wood, when the country’s best scientists were feverishly working to identify the cause of and develop a potential treatment for this influenza, when military bases were decimated with death, when some towns, like Gunnison, Colorado, set up armed perimeters around their counties to keep the contagion out, and when death was a likely visitor to most families–at this time, the Committee for Public Information was pumping out pro-war advertisements and news articles, encouraging citizens to buy war bonds, employing a host of Four Minute Men to make rousing patriotic speeches in city gatherings and movie theaters, and prosecuting those who dared do or say anything “unpatriotic” .
On the subject of the flu pandemic, they were either silent or responded with patronizing assurance that this was just the ordinary grippe and citizens should take normal precautions: wash your hands, don’t spit in public, keep your feet warm, stay rested. They chose not to report the truth of the pandemic’s strength and its cataclysmic consequences. Perhaps they weren’t nearly as inspired by this truth as other truths that they believed were necessary to sustaining our war efforts. Or perhaps they believed this truth was one that they could conveniently shelve as WWI raged on in Europe. Regardless of their reasons, the truth about the pandemic was either downplayed or not reported at all.
Until the truth could no longer be denied. This grim reaper kept knocking and knocking through horrific stories of pain and death the likes of which most had never experienced. Real people with real stories–and photographs of the unimaginable consequences of pandemic. By then, tragically, the influenza had not only taken the country but the world. When Spanish King Alfonso XIII was stricken, the Spanish press covered the pandemic which was now ravaging Europe. Ironically, a virus which hadn’t originated in Spain earned the name Spanish flu only because the uncensored Spanish press were the first to write about it openly.
As I read through Barry’s book, I kept thinking about his central message to tell the truth. But the more I read, the more I was plagued with these questions: What is the truth? How do we know it’s the truth? Why does one individual’s truth differ from another’s? For years, I taught a high school unit on worldviews. I wanted my students to investigate the concept of worldview, to understand how worldviews differ, and ultimately, to determine their own worldview based on what they’d learned. As we began our unit, we used James W. Sire’s definition of worldview from his book The Universe Next Door:
a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic make-up of the world.
We studied the “big questions” whose answers help determine one’s worldview: What is real? What is good? What is right? What is true? What does it mean to be human? What happens to humans at death? How do we know anything? What is the meaning of human history?
Our discussions regarding truth were often the most interesting and contentious. In short, we disagreed about what constitutes truth. Countless students offered statements like this: Well, you have your truth, and I have mine. Others countered with arguments like this: Something is either true or it’s not. There can’t be one truth for you and one truth for me. At the heart of these debates was the issue of whether or not truth was relative or absolute, whether or not truth could/should be determined individually and by circumstance OR whether it should be universal and immutable, for everyone for all time. It goes without saying that we never reached consensus on this issue. We did, however, identify major differences in how we defined and used the concept of truth.
Just yesterday, my daughter and I were discussing recent news reports on the Covid19 pandemic and asking these same types of questions: How do we determine the truth about this disease and its implications for us–as a world, a nation, a state, a community? What data, what evidence is true? What interpretations of this data/evidence are true? Who is speaking the truth? Why does one source’s truth appear to differ radically from another’s?
Unlike the government’s deliberate suppression of information regarding the Spanish flu pandemic, our government officials–as well as medical, scientific, economic, and public health experts–are providing us with ongoing information, an ocean of information that relentlessly crashes against the shores of our consciousness. We have a lot of information at our finger tips, at the touch of a button, the flip of a switch. And I think it’s safe to say that this information is filtered through each source’s worldview. That is, we all see the world and our place in it from the lens of our particular worldviews. Because these worldviews differ–some subtly and some drastically–we should expect that arriving at the truth will be challenging, at best. We should expect that we’ll have to read, listen, and view widely and from a variety of sources. We should expect that we will have to critically weigh all that we learn if we are to determine what we think best defines the truth.
Some may argue that, in an ideal world, we would all share the same worldview; hence, we would all define and arrive at truth in the same way. But we don’t. And we won’t. This is, perhaps, the truest thing I can write today. We can bash those whose worldviews (and truths) differ from ours, or we can learn from them. We can ignore sources that we’ve generally deemed untrustworthy, or we can regard them with cautious skepticism, entertaining the possibility that they may provide us with kernels of truth. We can quickly fix labels of good guys and bad guys, or we can withhold judgment until–and unless–a preponderance of evidence justifies such labeling. In the end, the pursuit of truth will be, as it has always been, a laborious and ongoing individual endeavor.
Certainly, Barry’s admonition about telling the truth is one that we shouldn’t take lightly–not during a pandemic or ever. Who and what determines the truth, however, will continue to challenge us. As it should, for these questions will always be the crucial questions. And the answers to these questions will continue to shape our lives and our world, as they have decidedly shaped the past.
