Category Archives: News

“Coughs and sneezes spread diseases as dangerous as poison gas shells.” This saying printed in newspapers of the time may have been as catchy as the disease it was warning against: the Spanish influenza.

The disease claimed more lives than bullets and shells during World War I, which was drawing to a close in the fall of 1918. An estimated 18 million people died in the Great War, according to the National Archives. The influenza epidemic killed an estimated 50 million to100 million people worldwide during a two-year period. One-fifth of the world’s population contracted the deadly virus.

According to the website Stanford.edu, the first wave of influenza appeared in the spring of 1918 at Fort Riley, Kan., where new recruits were trained before being sent to Europe to fight in the Great War. As soldiers fanned out to fight the Great War, the virus made its way around the globe. The disease became known as the Spanish influenza because the Spanish news media was the first to widely report the epidemic. The disease was also called grippe, the three-day fever and other names.

The war brought the virus back into the United States in the fall of 1918 for the second wave of the epidemic. It first arrived in Boston in September 1918 through the port, according to Stanford.edu. According to the National Archives, this time the disease was far more severe than it had been in the spring.

By September 1918, newspapers reported that the epidemic of Spanish influenza was sweeping Army and Navy camps in the United States. South Dakota residents were certainly not immune from the effects of the deadly disease as Spanish flu spread across the nation.

Delo Townsend was a young high school math teacher and principal at Langford in 1918. In an interview that appeared in the Sept. 9, 1976, Fort Pierre Times, she said, “Sometime in October, many people started getting sick with this pneumonia type illness – cough, aching bones and high temperatures. Schools had to close. When it got really bad, my school board decided to turn our high school into a hospital.” There were funerals every day, she said. Some took place outside to keep down the spread of the disease.

“Often hardly anybody dared attend the funerals,” Townsend said. According to an article in the Spring 1987 issue of “South Dakota History,” records of McKennan Hospital (now Avera McKennan Hospital) in Sioux Falls reported 173 cases of Spanish influenza in 1918-1919.

“The high death rate severely taxed mortuary facilities in Sioux Falls … Many local doctors were still in military service due to World War I and were unable to return home to minister to the sick. Entire families often fell ill, and the greatest number of stricken people stayed home, with the strongest helping the weakest through the crisis. Still, the hospital became so crowded that beds were set up in corridors and all other areas where space was available,” stated the article by Susan C. Peterson. Newspaper articles listed symptoms of the disease. They included high fever, headache, general soreness, sore throat, cough and inflamed mucous membranes. While the young and elderly are usually hit hardest by such diseases, those ages 20-40 were the hardest hit by the Spanish influenza.

Across South Dakota and the nation, public gatherings were forbidden. Schools, colleges, theaters, churches, pool halls and other public gathering places closed. Advice in the Oct. 23, 1918, Daily Huronite about how to avoid the Spanish influenza included keeping in good condition; getting as much fresh air as possible; avoiding people with colds; not staying in stores longer than necessary; breathing through a clean handkerchief when around people with colds or when in a crowd; and keeping off the main streets in order to avoid contact with people.

An anti-spitting ordinance was enforced in Rapid City to help stop the spread of the disease. People were arrested or fined for spitting on city sidewalks. By the end of 1918, 1,847 people in South Dakota had died of Spanish influenza, according to the South Dakota Department of Vital Statistics. The four counties with the most influenza deaths were Lawrence with 145, Brown with 118, Beadle with 98 and Minnehaha with 95. Some people with Spanish flu died from pneumonia. The total number of deaths from influenza and pneumonia in 1918 was 2,391.

In 1919, there were 700 deaths from influenza in South Dakota. The flu epidemic came to an end by the summer of 1919. An estimated 675,000 Americans had died during the epidemic.

This moment in South Dakota history is provided by the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation, the nonprofit fundraising partner of the South Dakota State Historical Society at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre. Find us on the web at www.sdhsf.org. Contact us at info@sdhsf.org to submit a story idea.

In the United States, Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance is observed on September 11 of each year in memory of the 2,996 people killed in the 2001 September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, DC. Of the 2,996 lost that day, 343 were firefighters and 72 were law enforcement officers.

The U.S. Flag is flown at half-staff until sunset on all U.S. government buildings and establishments throughout the world. Individual American homes are also encouraged to display their American flag.

Additionally, a moment of silence is observed to correspond with the attacks, beginning at 8:46 AM Eastern Daylight Time. That is the time the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 AM. American Airlines Flight 77 flew into the Pentagon at 9:37 AM. A fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 AM after the passengers attempted to subdue the hijackers. Flight 93’s target was believed to have been either the US Capitol building or the White House.

Sponsored by the Winner VFW Auxiliary. Information obtained from Wikipedia

By Sherry DeBoer, Executive Director, S.D. Humanities Council

It is hard to imagine losing the editorial checks and balances that protect our First Amendment rights, our freedom of information.

These rights have been championed throughout history by traditional media outlets, some of whom stood against dictatorial attempts to censor public information. And while the First Amendment is not currently under direct attack, it is indirectly threatened by the potential extinction of traditional media, as digitization continues to divide both our attention spans and our already partisan nation. We must re-establish positive relationships with traditional media.

Bolstered by a grant from the Carnegie Mellon Institution, the South Dakota Humanities Council and the South Dakota Newspaper Association will host a series of “Democracy and the Informed Citizen” public forums this year focused on reinforcing public value for our media.

We must fight for our media the way our media has historically fought for us, such as when the Washington Post battled the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

At the time, Post Editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katherine Graham worried about litigation and backlash from President Richard Nixon and the value of their recently offered public shares. But they ultimately reported the ugly truth of the Vietnam War.

The Post decided the public’s right to know what the government was hiding outweighed tangible risks to the paper’s existence. As revenue losses threaten traditional media, we must secure our news ecosystem and its ability to audaciously reveal such wrongdoings. “Democracy and the Informed Citizen” examines the state of news in 2018 and considers ways to move forward as an informed, cohesive democracy.

Traditional media faces an onslaught of new challenges in this frenzied smartphone era: a President who announces his own news via Twitter, accusations of “fake news,” competition from online outlets restrained by neither accountability nor industry standards.

Gaining credibility is no longer as easy as printing a newspaper or broadcasting a signal. Ironically, traditional media outlets are chastised as much as or more than their uncredentialed digital counterparts, some of which earn money by spreading intentional lies. As digital advertising revenue lines the pockets of online publications, newspapers, television and radio stations have no choice but to chase the same online clicks. Meanwhile, truth and accountability trail behind.

By asking “What’s True, What’s False, and What’s Important?” our forums lead us to perhaps the most salient question: how do we know which sources to trust?

During our kickoff event at the University of South Dakota in April, we asked Washington Post editor Martin Baron, a 14-time Pulitzer winner.

The veteran editor’s advice? Think critically.

“If… they’re trying to reinforce your point of view, you should be highly suspicious of those news sources, because …. their purpose is just to tell you that you’re right all the time.”

We’re promoting infoliteracy, a relatively new skill necessitated by our complex digital media era. An infoliterate citizen distinguishes real news from fake news by recognizing and dismissing biased sources.

In 1971, The Post faced factual disputes, as newspapers have since the invention of the printing press, but not the extra layer of mistrust created by “fake news,” which forces readers to sort stories fabricated by agenda-seekers and liars from those written by real reporters.

Graham’s courageous decision to publish led to a Supreme Court decision that the McNamara Report – and its stunning revelation that the government promoted a war it knew was unwinnable – was public property. It also boosted the paper’s reputation.

Democracy depends on us to support news reporting capable of challenging the institutions we depend upon and trust.

We must discern our sources of information.

Ruling in favor of The Post and the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote: “In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry—in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government.”

We hope the 2018 initiative will encourage citizens to value media institutions that are willing to stake their names and reputations on their reporting, and to be part of the “informed and critical public opinion” that makes our democracy special.

Partnership Bringing Democracy Initiative Programming, Forums

As part of a special partnership created to promote the initiative, SDHC and the South Dakota Newspaper Association will host a series of public forums focusing on public trust and the media. The South Dakota forums will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, current and former journalists, journalism professors and others.

In conjunction with this democracy-themed programming, groups around the state will read and discuss the 2018 One Book South Dakota, “Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism” by Thomas E. Patterson.

SDHC will also host journalism and social media experts at the South Dakota Festival of Books in September led by Patterson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Timothy Egan and Jacqui Banaszynski, as well as digital storytelling expert Andy Boyle of Axios and Emmy-winning ABC News correspondent Linsey Davis, who files reports for World News, Good Morning America, 20/20 and Nightline.

We urge you to find and attend an event in your area, and to please support your local newspapers.