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The History of Epidemics in New England

The history of epidemics in New England teaches us that they arrive with terrifying swiftness. They also don’t get less lethal with time, no matter the improvements in medicine, science or public health.

For example, more people died from the flu pandemic in 1918 than from the Black Death in a hundred during the Middle Ages.

Epidemics, it seems, have always come to New England from across the sea. Europeans fishing the Grand Banks brought plague and smallpox to the native population in the 16^th century. Three centuries later, sailors home from World War I brought the Spanish influenza to Boston and then to the rest of the United States.

And then as now, children and the elderly were usually the ones who died during epidemics of smallpox, flu, measles, cholera and diphtheria.

History of Epidemics: Indians

In the history of epidemics, perhaps no people suffered more than the indigenous people of New England.

The first recorded epidemics in New England killed many Indians more than a century before the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

Illustration: Indians lament death by disease. In the history of epidemics, the indigenous population suffered greatly.

In what is now Canada and Maine, contact with Europeans began at least in 1504 with the first documented French vessel on the Grand Banks. By 1519, more than 300 European ships made round trips to Newfoundland in the summer. All came to fish.

The European visitors brought with them diseases to which the Indians had no immunity, including smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, cholera and bubonic plague.

In 1586, a typhus epidemic devastated Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indians, among the first to make contact with Europeans.

In 1616, a terrible plaque swept the Massachusetts coast – perhaps smallpox, perhaps yellow fever, perhaps bubonic plague. It killed as many as 90 percent of the Massachusetts people and devastated the Pennacooks in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It also felled the Agawam in Ipswich and the Naumkeag in Salem. And it cleared nearly all the Wampanoag along the coast from Plymouth to Boston.

Then a smallpox epidemic in 1633 killed many more Massachusetts and Narragansetts in Rhode Island.

And after the Pequot War, smallpox, diphtheria, flu and measles killed two-thirds of the Pequot-Mohegans in Connecticut.

Measles

On Oct. 18, 1713, Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote in his diary that he feared a measles epidemic: “The Measles coming into the Town, it is likely to be a Time of Sickness.”

How right he was. Measles killed five of the 11 people in his household. His son Increase brought the measles home. Then his wife Elizabeth and two newborn twins died from it. So did his two-year-old daughter and a maid.

Cotton Mather

His grief was almost unbearable. “My poor family is now left without any infant in it, or any under seven years of age,” he wrote. “The dying of a child is like the tearing off of a limb,” he later preached.

By the 20^th century, however, people stopped viewing measles as a life-threatening disease, though it killed 20 percent of children under two who got it.

A measles epidemic in 1904 swept through Connecticut. C.A. Lindsley, secretary of the state Board of Health complained that towns weren’t enforcing quarantines, at that time the only way to stop the disease from spreading.

Between 1900 and 1910, measles killed an average of 774 people a year in the United States. But the mortality rate declined slowly, and then in 1963 came the development of the measles vaccine.

There still is no cure.

A quarantine sign

Smallpox

Judge Samuel Sewall went to five funerals in Boston in one day during the horrific smallpox epidemic of 1721. Called ‘the speckled monster, it had no cure. The only recourse was to flee from it.

Samuel Sewall

That year Boston had about 10,600 people, but 900 fled the disease, about 6,000 came down with it and 844 died from it. In the history of epidemics, the 1721 smallpox scourge ranked as the worst.

From 1620 to 1720, New England experienced 12 smallpox epidemics, along with some sporadic cases. During that time smallpox caused one in 10 deaths in Massachusetts—more than war, Indian raids or other illnesses.

In 1706, Cotton Mather’s congregation bought him a gift – a slave named Onesimus. Mather kept a close eye on him, thinking he had a tendency to steal. But he acknowledged that Onesimus was a pretty intelligent fellow. In 1716, Onesimus told Mather how he could prevent smallpox: by rubbing pus from an infected person into an open wound. That caused a mild, but more survivable, case of smallpox.

When the horrific smallpox epidemic of 1721 sickened half of Boston, Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston inoculated 242 people. Of those, six, or one in 40, died. For the rest of the population, smallpox killed one in seven people who had the disease.

It was the first place anyone was inoculated this side of the Atlantic. An English doctor developed a vaccine in 1796. Massachusetts later became the first state to pass a compulsory vaccine law. And by 1932 Massachusetts achieved comparative immunity to the disease, reporting fewer incidences of smallpox per capita than any other state in the Union.

In 1979, public health officials declared smallpox eradicated.

The Throat Distemper of 1735

In 1735, a young child in Kingston, N.H., came down with a cold and all of New England would get sick. The throat distemper of 1735 to 1740 was one of the greatest epidemics ever to terrify New England.

What modern physicians recognize as diphtheria first showed up in in the spring of 1735. The symptoms started out looking like a cold that produced a very sore throat. But they then escalated to lost appetite and fever. The bacteria then attacked the throat, nose and lungs – poisoning the tissue and killing it off. The coating of dead tissue eventually interfered with breathing and killed the sufferer.

Travel patterns in New England made it relatively simple for epidemiologists to track the spread of the throat distemper. Ernest Caulfield described its path in his The A History of the Terrible Epidemic, Vulgarly Called the Throat DistemperDistemper of 1735-1740.

It spread from Kingston to Kittery, Maine, and Hampton Falls, N.H. From Kittery it spread north to Maine and from Hampton Falls south to Massachusetts

Gradually the disease progressed into Connecticut and sporadically to Western Massachusetts.

Across New England some 5,000 people died of diphtheria between 1735 and 1740. More than 75 percent were children. Overall, it killed 22 of every 1,000 people. In New Hampshire, where it struck first and worst, 75 out of every 1,000 people died of it.

Influenza

In the history of epidemics, it’s hard to know just how many times flu sickened New England. People called it different things: ‘uncommon colds,’ ‘very deep colds,’ ‘pleuritic fever’ or ‘malignant pleurisy.’

As Caulfield writes in his essay, The Pursuit of Pestilence, accounts of disease and epidemics in colonial New England amount to ‘a confusing array of dates.’

There was a severe outbreak of flu in 1647. Another influenza pandemic began in 1697, raced through the Americas and ended in 1698. We know about other flu epidemics in the 17th and 18^th centuries, but we don’t know much.

Victims of the 1918 flu epidemic. In the history of epidemics, this one was probably the worst.

Spanish Flu

We know a lot, however, about the 1917-1918 flu pandemic. It killed as many as 100 million people and struck young adults hardest. It could have killed as many as 10 percent of all young adults in the world.

Nicknamed the ‘Spanish flu,’ it came to New England with a couple of sailors on Boston’s Commonwealth Pier on Aug. 27, 1918. The next day, eight more people had it. On the third day, 58.

The close quarters and massive troop movement of World War I quickened the spread of the disease and helped it mutate. The Boston area was especially susceptible because of the soldiers and sailors moving through the city.

“To see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves,” wrote one U.S. Army doctor at Fort Devens, a hellhole of death.

The flu came to Connecticut through New London. It spread to Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island.

The death toll from the flu in Massachusetts was said to be 45,000. An estimated 8,500 died in Connecticut, 1,772 in Vermont, 2,300 in Rhode Island, 5,000 in Maine and 3,000 in New Hampshire. Those numbers may be low, however.

Doctors could do nothing to contain the disease. They desperately searched for a vaccine and treatments, but failed. They could just hope, and keep people away from each other.

On Oct. 2, Boston canceled its Liberty Bond parades and sporting events, closed churches, shut down school and put the stock market on half-day.

The flu epidemic finally ended in the summer of 1919 when people either died from it or developed an immunity. “The virus burned through available fuel,” wrote John Barry in The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. “Then it quickly faded away.”

Barry also argues the virus mutated into a less lethal strain.

This story last updated in 2022.

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The Civilian Conservation Corps, a Young Man’s Adventure

During the depths of the Great Depression, a 17-year-old boy from Warren, R.I., enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

He did it to help support his family, but his time in the Civilian Conservation Corps turned into the adventure of a lifetime.

The CCC started when President Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Emergency Conservation Act on March 31, 1933. His goal: to generate jobs for young men suffering from an almost 25 percent unemployment rate.

The Warren boy at first was too young to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. You had to be 18 to enlist. But in October 1935, the government lowered the age requirement to 17, and he signed up. The teenager met all the other requirements. He was unemployed, unmarried, physically fit and his family was on relief — like tens of millions of other American families.

He earned $30 per month {about $570 today), but he had to send $25 home. That beat the $21 per month that regular U. S. Army soldiers made at the time. The money the CCC boys sent home supported an estimated 12 to 15 million family members.

The Civilian Conservation Corps 141st Company. Leo Caisse is in the middle row, second from right.

Go West, Young Men

The Warren boy was sent to Fort Adams in Newport for physical conditioning and evaluation, just as all other enrollees in the nation did at their local Army depot. At the end of their two weeks of training and evaluation, he received his final physical and inoculations. For some of the boys it was the first time they saw a doctor.

The Civilian Conservation Corps assigned the Warren boy to the 141^st company posted at Burlingame in Charlestown, R.I. He was issued a blue denim work suit and a renovated Army olive drab uniform with CCC patches. (Roosevelt thought the uniforms looked shoddy and in 1938 ordered the Navy to design a spruce-green uniform.)Then he took the CCC oath.

civilian-conservation-corps-burlingame-beach-house

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this beach pavilion at Burlingame State Park.

His company, like several others, was transferred out West, which had more forest work and fewer unemployed young men than in the East. He had to get his parents’ permission because of his age.

He took a train cross country from Fort Adams to a campsite at Triangle Lake near the Town of Junction City, Ore. There they became the 2108 Company of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In Oregon, the teenager and his company built fire guard service stations, fire lookout towers, trails and shelters. They fought forest fires when needed, a hallmark of the CCC wherever they were.

Cowboys and Mountain Lions

The young man earned a truck driving license issued by the Department of the Interior. He learned to operate a bulldozer, tractor and a jackhammer. He also learned welding, a skill he would later use in helping to build the USS Massachusetts at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass.

In Oregon, he served a maximum of four six-month enlistments, all that the CCC allowed and was honorably discharged on June 23, 1936.

Leo Caisse

He returned to Warren, but after a little more than a year he re-enlisted in 1937. This time was assigned to the 2130^th company in Casper, Wyo.

In Wyoming, his Civilian Conservation Corps company built bridges, roads and a dike, according to National Archives records. He fought fires, of course, and some members of his company fought coal fires. While in Wyoming, he also learned another skill: how to evade a mountain lion in the wild.

Later in the 1950s he told stories to his son about how he knew real cowboys and Indians out West. That was really intriguing because it was the heyday of cowboy shows on TV and Cowboy Town in Plainville, Mass. His name was Leo Caisse. He was my father and he passed away when I was very young.

It has been a revelation researching his adventures and it has given me a sense of pride that he and so many others benefitted from this program, which began the green movement.

Roosevelt’s Tree Army

Roosevelt’s Tree Army developed many public parks that still stand today as a living legacy to their work.

Less obvious today was the improved health and well-being of the boys who joined.

Enlistees were so undernourished due to the Depression that they gained an average of 12 pounds each. When issued their uniforms, it was the first time most of them got new shoes.

Many camps had two movies a week with state-of-the-art equipment, chaplain services, lending libraries, organized sports and vocational education. President Roosevelt mandated that all enrollees learn to read and write in the service if they hadn’t achieved literacy yet.

The Civilian Conservation Corps offered 603 different courses nationwide. They often had camp newspapers, wrote poetry, composed songs and put on plays, as well as engaged in organized sports with other camps and local teams.

A Civilian Conservation Corps pillow

The men celebrated holidays in camp, including Mother’s Day. In one instance, they invited their mothers to camp for a dinner and the boys put on a skit for them. In another, the commanding officer collected 25 cents from each man to send home a special pillow to their mothers.

The Army ran the CCC, but the state or national park service would select the projects. Since fascism was on the rise overseas, the Army was careful not to drill the Tree Army. Nor did it allow saluting or weapons training.

Still, many Civilian Conservation Corpsmen who joined the Army were automatically inducted as corporals or sergeants, depending on their leadership experience in the Corps.

Following are summaries of the Civilian Conservation Corps in each New England state.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island had eight camps, but they did not all operate continuously or simultaneously. Fort Adams served as their state headquarters.

In the very beginning at least two Rhode Island companies were sent to other states: one to Rangeley, Maine and another company (about 200 men) to Vermont. Later they went to Oregon and Wyoming.

Rhode Island eventually enrolled 15,900 men out of 2.5 million men who served nationally.

civilian-conservation corps-goddard-state park

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this structure and many fireplaces at Goddard State Park in Rhode Island.

Massachusetts

Over 100,000 men served in the Massachusetts Civilian Conservation Corps, which brought together two wasted resources: young men and the land.

When the CCC began, Massachusetts had accumulated 100,000 acres, mostly inaccessible to the public. When the Emergency Conservation Act passed, Chief Forester Harold Cook immediately prepared applications for seven camps. He would eventually have 31 camps.

The first enrollees arrived at Fort Devens for medical exams and some basic training and testing to acclimate them to a military routine.

They built roads and trails, overlooks, picnic shelters and log cabins. And they engaged in timber improvement, pest control and forest fire fighting. In the end they planted 12 million trees and improved 170,000 acres of state land. The Massachusetts enrollees collectively sent an estimated $20 million home to their families.

Friends of the Upton State Forest are restoring a former CCC administration building and cottage. At least one former member – and probably many others — was so desperate for work he forged his birth certificate and joined at age 15. He learned construction skills that served him the rest of his working life.

They built the access road to the top of Mount Greylock as well as the Thunderbolt Trail. The CCC created the Savoy State Park, too, and the Elliot Tower in Milton’s Blue Hills Reservation. It still stands today and offers a panoramic view from Boston Harbor to Mount Wachusett. The Blue Hills reception center has a small CCC exhibit that includes memorabilia.

New Hampshire

Bear Brook State Park is one of the few surviving CCC camps that now serve as museums.

Over 37,000 young men served in the CCC in New Hampshire. They built state parks such as Moore Brook and Bear Brook, and ski facilities such as Waterville Valley, Cannon Mountain and the Wildcat Trail at Pinkham Notch. They also fought forest fires, planted trees and built dams, bridges, roads, camp grounds and hiking and bridle trails.

At the Bear Brook exhibit stands a statue of a shirtless Corpsman with an ax. Identical statues stand at the Freetown State Forest, a former camp, and at the Maine State Library in Augusta.

civilian-conservation-corps-acadia-shelter

The Civilian Conservation Corps built many park shelters, like this one at Arcadia State Park in Rhode Island.

Connecticut

Connecticut had a total of 17 camps, and over 30,000 men served in the CCC. Some hadn’t enlisted, but were LEMs – locally enlisted men, such as carpenters and stone masons. Along with their traditional work, the CCC also built nine lookout towers, constructed 123 bridges and developed over 1000 acres of public camping and picnic grounds.

As in all other camps, the Connecticut CCC couldn’t build roads. They did, however, build many truck roads for fighting forest fires.

When a dam broke above Hartford in 1936, it devastated the area. The CCC lent a hand by clearing out 2,950 buildings and 800 other structures.

A CCC Museum in Stafford Springs, Conn., once the administration building for Camp Conner, contains photos, displays, information and artifacts.

Maine

CCC statue in Augusta

Fort Williams in Portland Harbor administered and trained Civilian Conservation Corpsmen for both Maine and New Hampshire. At its height, Maine had 16,686 men, 1,612 supervisors and 1,136 out-of-state enrollees in 19 camps. Additionally, Rhode Island sent 144 to the Rangeley area. The camps closed by 1942, but in their heyday the CCC’s emphasis evolved from emergency relief to job training. The Maine and New Hampshire Tree Army sent home an estimated $4 million.

Their assigned work came from the Maine Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and the National Park Service. It included, much like all the other CCC work roads, trails, recreation areas, erecting buildings, and pest control.

George Dorr, superintendent of Acadia National Park, saw his chance to improve the park in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He asked Roosevelt for a camp at Acadia. Eventually some 3,000 poor boys, mostly from Maine, came to three CCC camps in Acadia. They opened new trails and improved old ones, planted thousands of trees, made fire roads, fought fires, built footbridges and constructed two campgrounds, Blackwoods and Seawall. They built Ocean Drive, which loops around the park with stunning views of the coast and opened hiking trails to Echo Lake, Long Pond and Beech Cliff.

There is a memorial dedicated to the CCC and their work in Maine in Augusta.

Vermont

Vermont was originally allocated four camps but got 30, more than any other state of its size. The reason? The highly motivated State Forester Perry Merrill, a man with great foresight who saw the potential for CCC work.

Some 40,000 men served in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Vermont. However, only about 11,000 came from Vermont. The other companies transferred from other states such as Rhode Island because Merrill found so much work for them to do.

A massive flood in 1927 had devastated much of the state, and the Vermont CCC boys gained recognition for their flood control activities and dam building. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the 2,000-foot Waterbury Dam along with the Wrightsville and East Barre dams.

They also built many ski slopes, including the Stowe Ski Resort and the Mount Mansfield State Park. They also built 105 miles of truck roads for forest fire fighting and 10 lookout towers.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He has also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College. Leo passed away in 2020, and we miss him very much. This story updated in 2022.

Photos, except for the Civilian Conservation Corps pillow and statue, courtesy Leo Caisse. CCC statue by By DrStew82 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59856211. This story was updated in 2021.

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The 1965 Drought, New England’s Worst Ever

It will probably be several centuries before the Northeast United States again suffers anything like the 1965 drought. It was the driest year of a 10-year dry spell that devastated farms and sent municipal leaders into a panic over the drinking supply.

There were actually two droughts: The agricultural drought, and the water-supply drought. Farmers tried to save their crops and fed their livestock in barns, while suburbanites were told not to wash their cars or take long showers.

There was a high pollen count, high fire danger and high prices for produce. Wells dried up. Rivers, ponds and reservoirs became stinking mud holes. The air was so dry foggy mornings disappeared along the coast.

According to climatologist W.C. Palmer, the 1965 drought was “such a rare event that we should ordinarily expect it to occur in this region only about once in a couple of centuries.”

The 1965 Drought

The 1965 drought actually occurred during 1961-69, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It began in 1960 in western Massachusetts, where precipitation was below average. Then in 1962 eastern Massachusetts dried up. The rest of the Northeast got little rain or snow.

From 1962 to 1966, 34 out of 46 months had below-average precipitation. The summer of 1964 was very dry. Overdrawn reservoirs weren’t replenished.

Then 1965 was the driest year on record since the late 19th century. The 1965 drought was most severe in northeastern Pennsylvania and southeastern New York. That year, Connecticut got only 29.45 inches of precipitation, far below the average of 46.15 inches. Maine was drier than in 1947, when fires destroyed nine communities and a quarter-million parched acres.

By July, communities were declaring water emergencies. Towns banned water use outside, but police and water departments were besieged by people calling to report neighbors who watered their lawns or washed their cars.

Sahara

Golf courses dug wells and dredged ponds. Fairways burnt up as watering was restricted to greens and tees. Brae Burn in Newton, Mass., “may as well be on the Sahara,” reported the Boston Globe. Brae Burn dug 20 test holes to find water. All were dry.

Part of the reservoir in Cambridge, Mass., oozed muck. In Norfolk, Mass., the 20-acre Kingsbury Pond was a stinking sea of mud. Commuters from the western suburbs in Boston rolled up their windows in summer to avoid smelling the stench of the Charles River. Usually water was discharged into the river to dampen the smell of the raw sewage that flowed into it. Not during the drought.

Herring couldn’t swim from the sea to fresh water to spawn. The Town of Pembroke, Mass., banned herring fishing and helped the fish upstream by carrying them in barrels. By fall, millions of herring spawned in fresh water couldn’t make it back to the sea in the dried-up streams. Trapped in ponds, the seagulls feasted on them.

Pastures, hayfields and cornfields were burned out by the 1965 drought. Dairy farms in Fairfield County, Conn., lost most of their pasture grass, and wells went dry for a third of them.

The honey crop in Vermont was smaller than usual. So was the blueberry crop in Maine. Shade trees, such as the Norway and sugar maple, were damaged. Along Rte. 2 between Concord and Cambridge, Mass., Red Pine needles turned brown.

Emergency

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a study to find out what the federal government could do to help New England. Cities and towns got loans of pumps and pipes to access the deepest arts of reservoirs. Some Massachusetts towns borrowed vintage World War II pipes from Fort Devens and Romulus Air Force Base to reach water beyond normal sources. It didn’t work. The pipe was too expensive to transport.

President Johnson

Rockport, Mass., got approval to use water from a quarry, so long as it was treated twice with chlorine. Also in Massachusetts, Randolph, Holbrook and Braintree banded together to get water from a gravel pit. Fitchburg hired a rainmaker.

The next month, 11 Massachusetts counties were declared drought disaster areas. More than a hundred Massachusetts towns restricted water. Hanover considered a moratorium on building permits. Sandy Pond beach was closed in Ayer after hundreds of dead fish floated to the surface, deprived of oxygen.

Scattered Relief

By September, some parts of New England got rain. In western Massachusetts, rain changed brown pastures to green and grass and alfalfa returning to some farms. Cranberry growers were skating by. Some reservoirs filled to capacity.

The 1965 drought eased in Northern New England except for coastal Maine. In Grand Isle County, Vermont, too much rain left standing water in fields.

Then temperatures dropped.

The water problem worsened in November because the cold locked precipitation above ground. In southeastern Massachusetts, a cold snap destroyed a quarter of the cranberry crop. Cranberry growers didn’t have enough water to flood their bogs and prevent the berries from freezing.

Test wells throughout New England reached record lows and nearly a dozen towns along the coast had to draw down their emergency supplies. On Nov. 1, 1965, the Quabbin Reservoir fell to 59 percent of capacity, a drop of 17 percent in 12 months.

Car washes, service stations and ski areas couldn’t get water.

The 1965 Drought Continues

Quabbin Reservoir after the 1965 drought

By April 1966, the rainfall shortage increased to nearly 37 inches since the drought started in 1963, reported the Boston Globe. That almost equaled a year’s supply of rain.

People thought the drought ended with heavy rain in July and persistent fog along the coast. A dry August ended that hope.

A Boston College scientist suggested detonating dynamite, creating tiny earthquakes, could end the 1965 drought. The disturbed soils would the presence of water and suggest areas for drilling, he said.

By October 1966, farmers said the drought had ended. But the water-supply drought had not. There wasn’t enough water in wells, water tables and reservoirs.

A wet spring in 1967 ended the drought. Above normal rain and snow from February to May filled the reservoirs. On April 25, 1967, Malcolm E. Graf, Massachusetts Water Resources Commissioner, stated the four-year drought, worst in New England history, was over.

Photo: Quabbin Reservoir By Solarapex at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11535183. Cracked mud By Rosser1954 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90076337. This story about the 1965 drought was updated in 2022.

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The Top Secret Reeducation Camp in RI During World War II

Some of Germany’s finest writers and artists churned out an anti-Nazi newspaper at a secret reeducation camp in Narragansett, R.I., during World War II.

Guards in front of Fort Kearny

They produced the newspaper for tens of thousands of German POWs held at prison camps throughout the United States. It ran from February 1945 to April 1946.

Their American captors selected the intellectual POWs to publish the newspaper, Der Ruf, because they hated Nazism.

After they returned to Germany, the POWs formed a world-famous literary circle, Group 47. It then dominated German literature for decades. Group 47 nourished young writers such as Nobel Prize winners Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass.

US POW Camps

During World War II, the United States incarcerated 425,000 prisoners of war in 700 camps inside its borders. Most were German, and many of them weren’t Nazis.

New England had more than a dozen prison camps. In Massachusetts, prisoners were held in Boston when they arrived. Wounded POWs went to hospitals and anti-Nazis went to Fort Devens. Others went to Camp McKay, Westover Field, Camp Edwards on Cape Cod and Camp Andrews and Fort Strong in Boston Harbor.

The prisoners went to Bradley Field and Fort Kearney in Connecticut. In Maine, they went to Camp Houlton, Hobbstown, Princeton and Seboomook in Maine. They were held in a camp in Stark, N.H.

German POWs who opposed Nazism could find life miserable in the camps. Hard-core Hitler followers beat them up, even murdered them.

Secret Reeducation Camp

Franz Wischnewski and Curt Vinz

The War Department sent the most brutal, dedicated Nazis to a maximum security prison in Oklahoma. And then the Department’s Special Projects Division set up three secret reeducation camps in Rhode Island – at Forts Kearny, Getty and Wetherill. Their aim: to prepare German POWs to rebuild their country as a democracy. They also wanted to persuade them to break from Nazi beliefs.

The War Department chose anti-Nazi prisoners to create “intellectual diversions” for German POWs. They then called the project the “Idea Factory” or just the “Factory.”

The Americans carefully screened the German prisoners to make sure they hated Nazism and wanted to rebuild Germany into a free democratic society. Most had joined the army involuntarily, and some had spent time in Nazi concentration camps.

Fort Kearny

On Feb. 27, 1945, 85 German writers, artists and professors were moved to Fort Kearny, situated on 20 acres in Saunderstown above the West Passage of Narragansett Bay. The fort served the purpose of coastal defense, but the naval threat disappeared. The army took its heavy guns elsewhere. The fort had barracks for the prisoners, a kitchen and administrative buildings.

The prisoners didn’t have such a bad life in the secret reeducation camp. In the morning, a recording of Duke Ellington’s Lady Be Good woke them up. They had to wear clothes printed with “PW,” but sometimes they could wear khakis. They also had a measure of freedom. Sometimes they could take the ferry to Newport for supplies. One local resident remembers seeing prisoners in their “PW” clothes strolling along Boston Neck Road, presumably on their way to Twin Willows, a bar still in operation.

The News Staff

They worked on their main task, publishing the German-language newspaper. Prisoners who worked on Der Ruf and later joined Group 47 included:

Hans Werner Richter, a novelist who eventually earned worldwide fame for his role in starting the Group 47.
Dr. Gustav R. Hocke, Der Ruf’s first editor in chief. He was a prize-winning novelist and newspaper correspondent who had been forced to serve as a civilian interpreter for the German Army. The Allies captured him in Sicily in September 1944.
Alfred Andersch, a writer who became a leading literary and radio figure in postwar Germany. After serving time in Dachau, he was forced into the army, deserted, and was captured. After the war, he continued to work on Der Ruf in occupied Germany.
Curt Vinz, production editor.
Franz Wischnewski, an artist and graphic designer.

The newspaper was first distributed to German prisoners in March. They were given small amounts of money and had to buy the paper for a nickel. That way, reasoned the Factory, it wouldn’t seem like American propaganda.

Der Ruf

A November 1945 edition of Der Ruf

Ardent Nazis called it “Jewish propaganda.” They burned the newspapers and threatened prisoners who bought them. At some camps, prisoners greeted Der Ruf with enthusiasm, and the news staff received hundreds of letters praising their work.

Stories included recommendations on the best American writers (Steinbeck and Hemingway). The newspapers carried accounts of the horrors of German concentration camps. They also had war reporting along with descriptions of the strengths of America’s political system. And they ran a history of free German labor unions. and included quotations from American authors like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder.

Until April 1 of that year, the Factory produced 26 editions of Der Ruf. The army then shut down Fort Kearny and returned the POWs home.

One POW author wrote that the secret reeducation camps were “probably unique in human history.” He wrote that “Voluntarily, German prisoners of war have undertaken to start a work of positive aid to their own fellows here in captivity.”

.They did it, he wrote, “as men who believe in the future of their home country, a country that must become a part of a peaceful world.”

Der Ruf in Germany

Wischnewski, Vinz and Andersch then continued to publish Der Ruf in Germany. Its circulation reached 100,000 until the Americans shut it down because it opposed the occupation of Germany.

The Der Ruf alumni then formed Group 47. Richter said its members were determined to prevent forever a repetition of what had happened. “They wanted to lay the foundation of a new democratic Germany,” he said. They also wanted “a better future and a new literature, conscious of the responsibility in regard to politics and the development of society as a whole.”

After Fort Kearny closed as a secret reeducation camp, Rhode Island State College acquired its buildings. They now belong to the Narragansett campus of the University of Rhode Island.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images courtesy of Edward Davison Papers, Yale University Library, except for photo of Der Ruf, which comes from the Office of the Provost Marshal General, RG 389, National Archives). With thanks to the Small State, Big History blog, The Top Secret World War II Prisoner-of-War Camp at Fort Kearny in Narragansett.

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The 1918 Flu Epidemic Kills Thousands in New England

As World War I raged in Europe, New Englanders died at home from a foe more deadly than bullets: the 1918 flu epidemic.

Victims of the 1918 flu epidemic

The granddaddy of infectious disease epidemics, it killed 50 million people. Some estimates sago as high as 00 million people. Unusually, it struck healthy young adults hardest. It could have killed as many as 10 percent of all young adults in the world.

More people died from the 1918 flu epidemic in a year than from the Black Death in a century. It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS killed in 24 years. In fact, no other disease in history killed as many people.

The 1918 Flu Epidemic Comes to Boston

On Aug. 27, 1918, several sailors on Commonwealth Pier in Boston were reported to have the disease. The next day, eight cases were reported. On the third day, the toll rose to 58 cases.

The sailors were sent to Chelsea Naval Hospital, from which the disease spread to Boston and the rest of Massachusetts.

On September 8, the 1918 flu epidemic traveled 40 miles to Fort Devens, which held 50,000 soldiers. Fifteen days later, there were 10,500 cases of the flu reported at Devens — as many as at the other 24 army camps combined.

Most who caught the flu suffered the usual symptoms–cough, fever and aches. But as many as 20 percent had it worse, with chills, fever, vomiting, delilrium and blood spurting from the eyes, ears and nose.

The military camp became a hellhole of death. Soldiers clutching blankets lined up outside the hospital in the rain while cots overflowed into hallways and onto porches. Doctors had to step over piles of corpses to watch an autopsy.

100 Deaths A Day

A doctor wrote a letter to a friend describing the horrors of the 1918 flu epidemic at Fort Devens, where they had to stack up bodies like cordwood in the morgue.

Tending a patient at Fort Devens.

“These men start with what appears to be an attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate…

“It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day, and still keeping it up. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a new mixed infection here, but what I don’t know.

“My total time is taken up hunting rales, (crackling sounds from the lungs) rales dry or moist, sibilant or crepitant or any other of the hundred things that one may find in the chest, they all mean but one thing here — pneumonia — and that means in about all cases death.”

All they could do to prevent it was to cancel all gatherings of soldiers.

Ayer

The impact of the 1918 flu epidemic spread beyond the military camp to the nearby town. The doctor wrote,

…the little town of Ayer is a sight. It takes special trains to carry away the dead. For several days there were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce, we used to go down to the morgue (which is just back of my ward) and look at the boys laid out in long rows. It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle.

By late September, the flu epidemic struck 50,000 residents of Massachusetts and spread beyond the commonwealth. So many young men got sick the Army canceled a draft call though it badly needed them for the war effort.

By October 1, Massachusetts alone had 75,000 cases of the flu. The next day, the city canceled its Liberty Bond parades and sporting events, closed churches, canceled school and put the stock market on half-day. By Oct. 7, t least 1,023 people died from the 1918 flu epidemic in Boston alone.

Doctors could do nothing to contain the disease. They desperately searched for a vaccine and treatments, but failed. They could do nothing but wait and hope.

The flu epidemic began to subside in mid-October. Later estimates put the number of Massachusetts flu deaths at 45,000 from Sept. 1, 1918 to Jan. 16, 1919, but public health officials now consider those numbers low.

Connecticut

Doctors and nurses at Fort Devens.

On September 11, the first case of flu in Connecticut was reported in New London. Within a week it spread throughout the state. In Hartford, four Yale students walked into the hospital. They felt ill on the train to New Haven and decided to get off. Twenty-four hours later, all four had died.

Doctors turned the Hartford Golf Club into an emergency hospital. Within five weeks, there were 325 reported deaths in Hartford; 294 in Waterbury, 209 in; New Haven and 69 in Bridgeport had 69 deaths. Still, the flu epidemic didn’t hit Connecticut as hard as Massachusetts. The commissioner of health urged all nurses and doctors to resist requests for help from Massachusetts.

Public health recommendations from the 1918 Illustrated Current News, New Haven.

Elsewhere in New England

After Massachusetts and Connecticut, the flu epidemic hit Vermont hardest. Public health officials reported 6,000 cases during the last week in September. The largest outbreaks occurred in Middlebury, St. Johnsbury, Lydonville, St. Albans, Montpelier, Barre, Randolph and Northfield.

In Portland, Maine, hospitals overflowed with flu patients. A Maine doctor asked the surgeon general to quarantine ships in Portland Harbor because he feared Canadian soldiers returning from the war would inundate the city’s hospitals.

The disease affected rural New Hampshire less than the rest of New England, but still killed many. At the epidemic’s peak, a public health worker in Berlin wrote,

It is hardly possible for me to describe the conditions in this community. I am the only experienced public health worker here with the exception of the staff. Saturday, I cared for forty patients, from four to nine sick in one family.

One of the first flu deaths reported in Rhode Island was of John Stanley Hardman, a hospital apprentice in the Naval Reserve. He died 36 hours after contracting the disease while nursing two flu patients in late September. His fiancee sat by his side as he died; they had intended to marry on Oct. 1.

Rhode Island public health officials opened emergency hospitals in Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Warwick and Westerly.

The flu epidemic finally ended suddenly in the summer of 1919. People had either died from it or developed an immunity. The flu strain had also mutated into a less lethal disease.

This story about the flu epidemic was updated in 2022.

Image: Postcard of Camp Devens PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14506829.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also like to read about the great throat distemper epidemic of 1735 here.

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The Boston Herald Rumor Clinic of World War II

When malignant rumors threatened to undermine civilian morale during World War II, the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic tried to put them to rest. The pioneering effort spread to dozens of other cities before the U.S. government consigned it to a slow death.

Rumors were a big problem during World War II, more so than in World War I. Then, they were directed against the enemy and usually involved atrocities committed by soldiers. But the most common World War II rumors involved the U.S. war effort. For example, Indian soldiers at Fort Devens were raping women. Or no U.S. Navy vessels survived Pearl Harbor.

One rumor had a woman’s head exploding after she permed her hair and went to work in a shell factory. According to another, unmarried, pregnant WAACs were sent home from North Africa. Some people spread the canard that canned crabmeat packed in Japan contained glass or poison.

Through its listening network of ‘morale wardens,’ the Rumor Clinic tracked down rumors. They spread in taverns and on factory floors, in schools and at parties, on wharves and in stores. Each Sunday, the Boston Herald published a rumor and refuted it. Often, the refutation included analysis of the motivation that started the rumor.

Sometimes the Herald blamed rumors on Axis propaganda. Germany had effectively waged psychological warfare to spread panic and demoralization among civilians before invading Poland and France.

“…[T]he Axis has been clever enough, via short-wave broadcasts and moral saboteurs, to exploit existing lines of discontent,” reported Life magazine in its Oct. 12, 1942 edition. “Thus the people of the U.S. are led to a sort of psychological suicide by serving to circulate dangerous lies about U.S. Jews, U.S. Negroes, U.S. allies, U.S. leaders.”

Boston Herald Rumor Clinic

The first Boston Herald Rumor Clinic column in early 1943 spiked a rumor supplied by the government. By the next week, readers were sending in rumors. By the third week, the Clinic received more rumors than it could handle.

The column included the rumor in italics followed by the word FACT. It then refuted the rumor in boldface, often explaining the psychological reason for the rumor’s popularity. The columns were posted on factory bulletin boards, included in department store pay envelopes and sent with clean wash to laundry customers.

One for the Rumor Clinic

Here’s one: A man walked into a Boston saloon and offered to buy a round. He said he was celebrating because his son was sent to Australia and had been promoted to corporal. The stranger beside him replied, “No cause to celebrate, my friend. Hundreds of soldiers who went out there are right back here in Boston now — insane. Bad food, terrible living conditions. Why, I’m told there’s not even room for all of them in the hospitals.” The bartender overheard the conversation, wrote it down and sent it to the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic.

Mistreatment of American soldiers was a common theme. So were waste of rationed items, government corruption, the imminence of defeat or victory and the value of war bonds. Rumors exacerbated fears about military weakness. They also worsened racial tensions and undermined cooperation for programs like food rationing.

Homegrown Rumors

Rumors didn’t always result from German propaganda. People distrusted the U.S. government, partly because they opposed the war. But they also had reason to question what the government told them. The Roosevelt administration, for example, kept from the public the extent of the losses at Pearl Harbor. Rumors flew that the West Coast had no defenses because the Japanese had destroyed the entire Pacific fleet and most military aircraft. The rumors spread so widely that President Roosevelt finally described the actual damage in a fireside chat – 10 weeks after the attack.

Sometimes rumors started casually. A man who commented that Boston’s chimneys could hide anti-aircraft led to the rumor that the roofs were bristling with guns.

Resentment of the women who stepped in to take a man’s job inspired lurid tales that plagued the WAACs – the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. A rumor flew that male doctors lined up naked WAACs for inspection at training centers. According to another, the training centers handed out contraceptives to the WAACs. Some spread the rumor that 90 percent of WAACs were prostitutes.

It turned out American GIs started those rumors.

Morale Wardens

The Boston Herald Rumor Clinic had three parts: First, the Boston Herald itself. Second, the Division of Propaganda Research, set up within the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety. The Division of Propaganda Research supervised the third part: a listening network of 300 ‘morale wardens’ — bartenders, waitresses, union representatives and insurance salesmen.

Robert Knapp, a student of Harvard psychology professor Gordon Allport, ran the Division of Propaganda Research.

Among the morale wardens was Frances Sweeney, who believed the enemy was exploiting traditional Irish hatred of the British. Life magazine described how the ’fighting Irish girl’ tracked down a rumor:

An African-American editor at the Boston Herald, William Harrison, told her he had heard a rumor that Indian soldiers at Fort Devens were killing and raping white people. He heard it from a friend who heard it from an artist, Lawrence Kupferman. Sweeney talked to Kupferman in his studio, where he told her he heard it from another artist, Giglio Dante. Dante told her he heard it in a North End bar from Tom McGowan, a business agent for the seaman’s union. Sweeney tracked him down at the union offices in what Life called the ‘tough Italian district.’ McGowan told her the rumor started after a Fort Devens soldier complained that Indians didn’t have a sense of humor.

Sweeney took the rumor to the anti-Fascist editor of La Costrocorreste, an Italian language newspaper, who printed a refutation in a column similar to the Herald’s Rumor Clinic.

Rise and Fall of the Rumor Clinic

Readers Digest and American Mercury also printed stories about the Rumor Clinic. Soon Allport and Knapp were helping to set them up around the country, in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, Long Island, Syracuse, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Chicago, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Montreal, Oregon, and Washington.

The Roosevelt administration was not pleased. It had established the Office of War Information (OWI) to control all information about the war, and had started its own Rumor Control project. It never got off the ground because government bureaucrats wanted centralized control. They didn’t like the idea of ivory tower academics freely handling government information.

The OWI went to war with the local Rumor Clinics. It established stringent criteria for getting federal funding and tried to bury them in red tape. The OWI condemned the rumor clinics in a 1943 New York Times story, claiming the attempts to spike rumors actually spread them. The Rumor Clinics went into a decline and were gone by war’s end.

How effective was the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic? It’s hard to say. The OWI claimed it helped spread rumors rather than spike them. Gordon Allport published a study arguing his approach was more effective.

Whatever the case, it is quite certain that no woman’s head blew up in a shell factory after she had a perm.

This story was updated in 2021.

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