History and forgetting: What will we remember of 2020?

History is what we choose to remember. I wonder: What will we as a nation chose to remember about the Pandemic of 2020? It looms so large in the present that it seems impossible we could ever forget it. Three hundred thousand dead and counting, ERs overwhelmed, bodies warehoused in freezer facilities, local economies in shreds, people struggling just to hold on.

Yet I wonder.

The devastating flu pandemic of 1918-1920 killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, including my grandmother, Mary Gibney Beyer. Percentage-wise, that’s the equivalent of nearly two million today. Panic and dread screamed from the headlines. Many of the same battles we fight today played out 100 years ago. Arguments over school closings, limits on public gatherings, and unpopular mask mandates. In San Francisco, thousands joined the Anti-Masking League and a Board of Health officer shot and severely wounded James Wisser outside a downtown drugstore after he refused to put on a mask.

Yet in most history books, that epidemic is a mere blip between the Great War and the Roaring ’20s.

Once that pandemic ended, people were eager to move on. The 1918 pandemic killed ten times the number of Americans that died in World War One. Its death toll was close to that of the Civil War. But no monuments memorialize the dead, no statues honor heroic doctors or nurses. The memory faded.

As a boy, I heard tales of the Great Depression and the Great War but rarely — if ever — of the Great Pandemic. Before COVID-19 reared its head, hard-learned lessons from 1918-1920 — like the efficacy of mask wearing and the virulence of the second wave — all but vanished from the public memory.

What about this time? Will we remember skyrocketing death tolls, makeshift hospitals, the raging spread of the virus, the science denial, the anger at public officials and each other? Rather than recalling the way hostility and suspicion divided us, will history instead invent some myth of pulling together for the common good to help us feel proud of our national character? Or will we just choose to forget?

I also wonder what we will remember and forget on a personal level. If you lost friends, or worried daily about vulnerable love ones, you’ll probably be a long time holding on to that. As for the rest of us, will we recall the longing to see the curve of a face, to hug a friend, to chat up a stranger at a bar? What about washing the groceries, or scrubbing our hands till they were chapped and raw? The way you have to tug on your ear to get the elastic bands of the mask to fit? (Maybe that’s just me.) The thousand pangs and pricks that make our physical and emotional lives painfully different from anything we’ve ever experienced?

Here’s my guess: Unless this pandemic is followed by a string of others just as terrible, we will barely remember it in a decade or two.

In fact, some benighted individuals seem to be trying to forget it even as it happens by minimizing the whole thing. That, too, has a historical parallel. The 1918 influenza pandemic actually started in army encampments in 1917, but military censors during WWI suppressed the news, thus enabling its spread. Even in our news coverage, the Coronavirus pandemic has often been squeezed out of the headlines by dramatic stories relating to Black Lives Matter, violent street protests and the convulsions surrounding the presidential election.

Forgetting is understandable. Blocking horrific details of a catastrophe is a component of healing. But the tragedy is that on a national level, forgetting weakens our power to face the next crisis that threatens to divide and conquer us.

As individuals, remembering might make us more empathetic to suffering and more grateful for the simple pleasures of living life unencumbered by the dark cloud of a killer virus.

History is what we choose to remember. Let’s choose to remember all of it.

Rick Beyer is an author, documentary filmmaker and producer, and co-host (with Chris Anderson) of the History Happy Hour livecast on the Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours Facebook and YouTube page. One of his books is The Greatest Stories Never Told. He lives in Chicago.