All Saints’ Day 1918: War, Sickness, and Chrysanthemums

Fourth in a five-part series of All Saints' Day celebrations in New Orleans history.

from the Morgan City Daily Review, October 16, 1918. Library of Congress Chronicling America.

                New Orleans, along with the rest of the United States, was at war.  The drafts of 1917 and 1918 would send a total of 71,000 officers and enlisted men from Louisiana to Europe to fight in World War I.  On the home front, military installations were built, war bonds were purchased, and the economy boomed to meet new agricultural and industrial demands.  In May 1918, Berlin Street in New Orleans was re-named General Pershing as a patriotic gesture.[1]

Above: Cartoon from Le Meschacébé (Lucy, LA), October 19, 1918. Library of Congress. Right: The Carpenter tomb, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, resting place of Grayson Hewitt Brown.

Although many of the dark realities of trench warfare in Europe had yet to touch New Orleaneans, some families had already felt the pain of loss.  Grayson Hewitt Brown, only nineteen years old, was stationed at Camp Beauregard near Pineville.  A volunteer to the 141st Field Artillery, Brown assisted health care workers during an outbreak of spinal meningitis by carrying a stricken comrade out of the camp.  Days later he died of the same disease.  His parents buried him in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 along the main aisle with the epitaph, “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.[2]”

But the Great War was only one of two world-wide battles in 1918.  The great influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 swept across the globe in three waves, the most pronounced of which had only begun to wane by November.  Indeed, many of the young men drafted to the military in this year died of influenza before even reaching the trenches.  Such was the case for Henry Philip Walter Rathke, not even 26 years old, who died in naval service in New York prior to deploying.  He was also buried in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1; he left a widow and a young daughter.[3]

from the Bossier Banner, October 17, 1918. Library of Congress.

Influenza reached the United States via ports like Boston, Massachusetts, and reached New Orleans by late September.  With losses of personnel to the war effort, public health officials struggled to contain the epidemic.  In Louisiana, calls for nurses plastered newspapers beside advertisements for war bonds.  Field hospitals were established and, notably, state and national legislative bodies banned the gathering of crowds of people for the entire month of October.  This included meetings of fraternal societies, theatres, and church services.[4]

​Through the week leading up to All Saints’ Day, the forced closure of churches led officials statewide to fret about whether services for the holiday would be offered.  

from flu.gov.

Only days before Friday, November 1, did the news break that services would be permitted.  Even so, many churches held services outside instead.  Attendance to graves in the cemeteries was noted as scarce, likely a reaction to the still-threatening epidemic.

​And yet amidst the tragedies of war and illness, one more shadow fell upon those brave enough to visit the cemeteries on All Saints’ Day.  Chrysanthemums, traditional flowers for mourning and decorating graves, suffered a blight of their own in 1918.  

Supply of the flowers had been thinned already by families mourning those died of influenza.  By late October, chrysanthemums were advertised at $6 to $9 – $100 to $150 in present-day dollars – and sold at twice the price of roses.[5]  The chrysanthemum blight was front page news, and florists noted that customers were purchasing red roses and dahlias, as opposed to the usual “dead white.”
 
In the next year, a third and final wave of influenza would cross the United States, as Louisiana’s enlisted men returned home from war.  In 1921, a bronze flagpole was erected in Audubon Park to commemorate New Orleans Great War veterans.  Yet the commemoration of those lost to war and influenza took place also in the decoration of graves on All Saints’ Days in years to come.

"The floral world will not be outdone by human beings, it would appear, and is plunged in the midst of one of the most widespread outbreaks of disease in history of local greenhouses... following out the example of human beings as closely as possible," from the Times-Picayune, Oct. 27, 1918. Image Dodd, Mead and Company - New International Encyclopedia (1923), Wikimedia Commons.

[1] The Weekly Iberian, May 11, 1918, 4.
​[2] “Grayson H. Brown Dies at Beauregard,” Times-Picayune, January 19, 1918, p. 11; “Armory Fund Gets Soldier’s Earnings,” Times-Picayune, August 24, 1918.
[3] http://www.rainedin.net/silbern/i11310.htm
[4] Natchitoches Enterprise, October 31, 1918, 3; Times Picayune, November 1, 1918, 10; St. Martinsville Weekly Messenger, October 26, 1918, 2.​
​[5] Advertisement of Frank J. Reyes, florist, 525 Canal Street, Times-Picayune, October 20, 1918, 2; “Blight Attacks Chrysanthemum Crop of the City,” Times-Picayune, October 27, 1918, 1.