Should ‘Spanish flu’ have been known as ‘American flu’?

There’s an ongoing debate in the media as to whether or not president Trump is being ‘racist’ by repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as a ‘Chinese’ virus. ‘It’s not racist at all,’ Trump insisted at one press conference. ‘It comes from China, that’s why.’

This is at least objectively true – unlike the case with Spanish Flu, which didn’t come from Spain at all. In fact the 1918 pandemic – which killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people around the world – most likely originated in the flat, treeless cattle country of Haskell County, Kansas, west of Dodge City. But it was never known as American Flu. Why?

The strange reason, I learn from John M Barry’s The Great Influenza – The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic In History, was that the USA in 1918 operated a censorship system almost as oppressive as China’s today. Not even the First Amendment seems to have offered much protection from the administration of president Woodrow Wilson, who ran America as a virtual police state, memorably characterised in one of Jonah Goldberg’s books as ‘Liberal Fascism’.