17 April 2020, 5:45 pm - In Which History Repeats Itself
If my Wednesday walk felt like a scene from The Road, today’s activities felt like a part of Dread Nation. As some part-time work, which thankfully I am still getting paid for, I run the social media channels for the local museum. Since no one is at the museum, I took a trip to spend the day in the archives and research three major things: Lyon County soldiers in the Civil War, small pox outbreaks, and diphtheria deaths. Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation is set in Kansas, post-Civil War, but instead of Kansas becoming known for Bleeding Kansas and anti-slavery, Kansas is overrun with zombies. Kansas has had its fair share of plagues, though none of them resulted in zombies (yet).
Lyon County had a fairly large turnout of volunteer soldiers in 1862 who fought in the Civil War until they were mustered out of in 1865. They came home to Kansas, most of them settled in Emporia, and started farming. However, an unseen danger soon came after the families in the area: small pox and diphtheria. I found numerous cases where smallpox was so widespread around the county that schools had to shut down and the smaller communities outside of Emporia were quarantined. Emporia itself would quarantine anyone sick and anyone exposed to the sick in order to contain the spread, or as we say today, flatten the curve. The entire town of Lang, Kansas was quarantined due to a large smallpox outbreak in the town vicinity. Similar to American War, the town at the heart of the smallpox outbreak was sectioned off and avoided like South Carolina (El Akkad 73). Luckily, the citizens in Lang made a full recovery and town was opened again.
Many other stories I unearthed revealed a pattern of history that is repeating itself today. One family tragically lost seven children in 72 hours due to diphtheria. Only one child survived, simply because she was the only one the doctor could inoculate in time. A school teacher in a one room school house accidentally infected her entire school with scarlet fever, thus causing the schools in the district to periodically close. One town denied ever having cases of smallpox, and instead said that the local paper, which ran out of Emporia, circulated the rumors in order to hurt their businesses. Later, it was found out there were at least three cases in that town. This felt so much like Dread Nation, at the Mayor’s dinner, where they denied having any zombies in Maryland, and suddenly a zombie was at the dinner table. It also is strikingly similar to today’s reports, where places are denying there are any sick (regardless if their department of health says they do) and are demanding the cities/counties/states reopen. So much of what we are experiencing is similar to the early days of Kansas, and I can draw some ties to Dread Nation if we consider the zombie outbreak to be, well, any viral outbreak (which it is).
On a different note, I will never get used to the blatant racism used in newspapers in the 1860s-1900s. By now I should expect it, but it always catches me off-guard. One article said that the Greek and Italian railroad workers “worked find but did not work as fast as our ‘white boys.’” So, not only did the paper discriminate against the black and latinx citizens, but also against white people who weren’t their particular brand of “white.” I will never not be appalled at the way immigrants were treated, especially by a town that was founded by free-staters.
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Works Cited:
Ireland, Justina. Dread Nation. Balzer + Bray, 2018.
El Akkad, Omar. American War. Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.