Commentators in The Atlantic and elsewhere have speculated why so many Americans are either being stupid or being jerks when it comes to coronavirus. Hoarding toilet paper is only the beginning of it. Reckless people risk not only their own health; they may also be asymptomatic carriers who pass the virus on to more vulnerable people. What explains this tendency of some people to embrace such careless behavior in the midst of a public health crisis?

As coronavirus fatalities multiply these days—as COVID-19 leaves our bodies sick and makes our spirits sick at heart—I find myself asking how similar the mood today is to that of the West during the 1889-1890 flu pandemic.

One of the world’s worst plagues occurred in 1889-1890. The so-called Russian flu is of particular interest to historians for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was the first pandemic for which we have extensive public records in both eastern and western hemispheres.

For another, it spread with alarming speed, faster than any previous pandemic. Newly laid railroad tracks insured that the pest would travel the rails that now connected far-flung places. At the terminus of the tracks, steam ships took on passengers who carried the flu from Eurasian ports to the Americas. In all, this virulent bug killed one million people across the globe.

A third thing that made the 1889-1890 Russian flu a novel experience in world history was that news of the pandemic spread fast due to the unprecedented profusion of telegraph lines, newspapers, and magazines.

That led to a fourth factor that made the virus an unusual social experience. As casualties mounted, as morbid details of painful deaths accumulated, a new mood gripped the West. The adjective that was coined to capture the mood was fin-de-siecle, French for “end of the century.” Fin-de-siecle held two contradictory thoughts in a dynamic polarity. One pole was people’s amazement at the unprecedented material progress made by modern science, technology, and medicine. The other pole was people’s feeling of world-weariness accompanied by the loss of energy, abandonment of purpose, perception of decadence, and foreboding of apocalypse. Most people in prosperous countries tended to focus on the former, on the nineteenth century’s material gains. Rebellious youth and the rising new class of avant-garde artists and intellectuals tended to seize on the latter, with an air of fashionable despair.

As coronavirus fatalities multiply these days—as COVID-19 leaves our bodies sick and makes our spirits sick at heart—I find myself asking how similar the mood today is to that of the fin-de-siecle West during the 1889-1890 flu pandemic. On the one hand, most middle-class Americans have high expectations that science will prevail and beat back this novel strain of virus. On the other hand, there are reports of throngs of people who have recklessly crowded bars just before stay-in-place executive orders were to take effect. Multitudes are deliberately ignoring the practice of social distancing to revel in beach blanket bacchanals. Most notorious of all were the sandbar parties off Miami Beach to celebrate the spring equinox. How fin-de-siecle.

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