“ …Like A Cyclone” BY L.R. SMITH
“You have seen Bell Buckle in rush times but you have never seen things happen so fast as they did here for a few days last week.” So wrote “Son Will” Webb to alumnus Phillips Copeland on October 29, 1918, as The Webb School began its recovery from the great Spanish influenza pandemic. (Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a two-part series about Webb’s response under the leadership of Son Will to the Spanish influenza pandemic. The second installment will be published in the Fall-Winter 2020-2021 Webb Magazine.)
Spring-Summer 2020
The Webb School is no stranger to epidemic disease. Since the 1870’s, the School had dealt with smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, and influenza. Twice in Culleoka, the School had been emptied overnight by threats of smallpox and cholera. Epidemics were a fact of life in the third quarter of the 19th Century, but by 1914, advances in medical science and public health services, the so-called “Biological Revolution”, had made it possible for Americans to begin to believe that epidemic disease was on the verge of being consigned to the ash heap of history. That confidence was as unfounded then as it is today.
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Sawney’s eldest son Will Webb Jr. was the de facto head of school with G.W. Follin, Sr. as his assistant. His aging father W. R. Webb retained overall authority. The three weeks from October 18 until November 8, 1918 severely tested Son Will’s capabilities, but he would emerge from the crucible a proven leader, ready to lead the School into the 20th Century. The influenza pandemic of 1918, aka the “Spanish flu’, the “Spanish Lady” or, as Son Will referred to it, “the trouble”, had its origin
possibly as early as 1916 and appeared in its fully developed and very deadly form in the Spring of 1918. Its point of origin is in dispute, but the first case in the United States appeared in March at the vast army training cantonment at Camp Funston, Kansas. The United States was just hitting its stride in its massive effort to create from scratch a four-million-man army which was intended to be the decisive weapon of Allied victory over the Central Powers in the last year of the blood-soaked First World War. Millions of young men, volunteers and draftees, poured into training camps like Camp Funston and, in due course, were shuttled to east coast ports to be packed like sardines into troopships bound for France. Between them, the terrifically overcrowded training camps and troopships were perfect incubators for disease. From Camp Funston, the influenza spread throughout other cantonments in the Midwest and South, then to the east coast ports of embarkation, then to Europe, where it infected all of the warring powers on the Western Front. It then returned to America in a second wave during the Fall of 1918, though in a vastly more virulent form where, by the end of November, it had killed over 300,000 people, civilians and military. It then disappeared, only to return in a third wave in the Spring of