The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

by John M. Barry

What the government didn’t do, vigilantes did. There were the twelve hundred IWW members locked in boxcars in Arizona and left on a siding in the desert. There was IWW member Frank Little, tied to a car and dragged through streets in Butte, Montana, until his kneecaps were scraped off, then hung by the neck from a railroad trestle. There was Robert Prager, born in Germany but who had tried to enlist in the navy, attacked by a crowd outside St. Louis, beaten, stripped, bound in an American flag, and lynched because he uttered a positive word about his country of origin. And, after that mob’s leaders were acquitted, there was the juror’s shout, “I guess nobody can say we aren’t loyal now!” Meanwhile, a Washington Post editorial commented, “In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”