July 2012, Volume 40, Number 3 73

Fanning, Patricia J.Influenza and Inequality: OneTown’s Tragic Response to the GreatEpidemic of 1918Amherst, MA: University of MassachusettsPress167 pp., $22.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-812-9Publication Date: September 2010

Patricia J. Fanning’s Influenza and In-equality analyzes the social meaningsof epidemic disease, specifically the im-pact of the influenza epidemic of 1918on Norwood, Massachusetts. This eth-nically diverse industrial community ofapproximately 12,000 was an every-town. Since the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, elites had been creating factoriesthat offered attractive labor opportuni-ties to men and women of the mid-dle and working classes. Successivewaves of migration yielded a hierar-chy of power among the multiplicityof residents that, in turn, shaped Nor-wood’s social geography. Norwood’snewest foreign-born residents, for in-stance, found themselves limited to liv-ing in the areas of town with the worstinfrastructure. There, they also foundthemselves under police surveillance.Progressive reformers from the elite andmiddle classes in Norwood, as in largercities, attempted to address what theyviewed as threats to the civic order.They adopted a new system of govern-ment (a “town manager”) to battle polit-ical corruption (41). They also providedpublic access to health care. In 1918,the town was being rallied to war, la-bor leaders were being scrutinized forBolshevik tendencies, and influenza ar-rived in the fall. The town’s typicalitymatters because it is in its typicality thatFanning finds a refreshing point of viewfrom which to study the epidemic.

The 1918 influenza epidemic slew atleast twenty-five million people aroundthe world, including at least half a mil-lion people in the United States. Mosthistorical research has been focusedon how the epidemic was forgotten inpublic memory. John Barry found an-swers for this in the federal govern-ment’s obscuration of information as itmobilized for war (9). Alfred Crosbyfound answers in the anonymity of thevictims (94). Fanning’s work compli-cates these two arguments by examin-

ing how public memory was obscuredat the local level. In the process of tran-scribing names from death certificatesto published city lists of the dead tothe final engraving of cemetery stones,Norwood’s city officials scrambled thenames of the dead until they were unrec-ognizable. Fanning, furthermore, con-tends that the question of forgetting ismore a problem of historiography thanof memory. The history of this terribleevent was retained in the private recol-lections of Norwood’s immigrant fam-ilies. Influenza and Inequality cautionsus not to mistake silence for forgetful-ness.

Trained as a sociologist and as a his-torian, Fanning uses newspapers, per-sonal letters, government reports, in-stitutional records, and oral historiesto understand the social factors thatshaped Norwood’s response to disease.Although influenza killed poor and richalike, Fanning shows how the experi-ence of influenza was not universal. Im-migrants suffered disproportionately inthe first, and most virulent, wave of in-fluenza that struck Norwood. The mor-tality statistics showed that 66.7 per-cent of those who died were foreign-born adults, 22.2 percent were U.S.-born adults, and 11.1 percent were chil-dren of immigrants. As Fanning ex-plains, this variance is “not a surprisingconclusion,” but it is “a view rarely ex-amined in depth in existing studies ofthe 1918 epidemic” (11).

Influenza and Inequality deftly illus-trates how the prejudices of civic lead-ers shaped the distribution of healthcare. Their response was based on theiralready existing understanding of thesocial geography of Norwood. Just asthe city’s officials did not trust the poor-est members of Norwood in other ca-pacities, these officials did not trustthe city’s poor to follow treatment or-ders to prevent the spread of the dis-ease. When the first wave of the epi-demic hit in September, city officialssubjected Norwood’s foreign-born res-idents to house-to-house inspections.When they found a suspected case, civicleaders demanded that the patient beremoved from her or his home to thecity’s health facility for treatment. Thetown’s purportedly progressive systemof government had cut immigrants outof the political process, limiting theirinfluence on any of these policy de-cisions. As a result, in the midst ofthe crisis, the actions of city officialscompounded problems. Residents hidfrom authorities and from medical care.

Rather than reading these actions asfear, city officials viewed them as proofof intransigence. The result, Fanningargues, is that the epidemic served asa tipping point in transforming anti-immigrant sentiment into legislative ac-tion. Instructors will find the engag-ingly written Influenza and Inequalityuseful for undergraduate classes in thehistory of the United States in the Pro-gressive Era, urban studies, immigra-tion, and medical humanities.

JENNIFER KOSLOWFlorida State University

Copyright © 2012 Taylor & Francis

Pappademos, MelinaBlack Political Activism and theCuban RepublicChapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress323 pp, $39.95, ISBN 978-0807834909Publication Date: August 2011

In Black Political Activism and theEarly Cuban Republic, author MelinaPappademos sets out to contribute “amore satisfying account of twentieth-century black activism and identities, aswell as racial politics generally” (10).Pappademos, who earned her PhD fromNew York University under the super-vision of Dr. Ada Ferrer—the author ofone of the seminal works on the historyof black Cubans, Insurgent Cuba: Race,Nation and Revolution, 1868–1898(University of North Carolina Press,1999)—joins recent scholarly dia-logues about defining black Cubans aspolitical actors in a historiography that,she argues, has largely confined itsattention to people of African descentto the realms of slavery and culture.Although historiography on Cubans ofcolor does deal substantially with thehistory of slavery and emancipation,another trend has emphasized the polit-ical. Pappademos relies on the “criticaland important work” (9) of scholars ofthe Afro-Cuban struggle for equalitysuch as Aline Helg and Alejandro dela Fuente. She classifies their worksas studies of race relations—not ofrace—that use the nationalist frameto talk about the struggles of blackCubans. She differentiates her workfrom previous scholarship by “de-centering nationalism as the principalframe for understanding racial politicsand black activism and by excavat-ing the multiple social and political