Dr. Melissa Kean served as the Centennial Historian at Rice University where she has worked in the University Archives at the Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library for over twenty years.
Spencer: Given that Rice is now dealing with a major crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, could you please contextualize how U.S. entry into World War I monumentally affected Rice and can you explain how Rice responded to the situation in its early history?
Dr. Melissa Kean: The thing about World War I at Rice is that we had just barely gotten started. There were still no grown trees on campus. The war had the potential to essentially kill the institution because so many of our students and our faculty left to go fight in the war. It was a crisis. One of the things that kept us going is that because we weren’t charging tuition at the time, that didn’t mean we lost all our revenues just because the size of the student body went down. We also received revenue from the military because of our willingness to support the war effort after we turned the campus into an arm of the U.S military. This was obviously very problematic, but we were in survival mode as an institution. It was effectively one of the biggest events, if not the biggest event, of Rice’s first 25 years as an institution.
Spencer: You wrote a blog post in 2018 on the Rice History Corner Blog about how there is only one first-hand account in the Rice archives about the 1918 influenza epidemic at Rice. In the first hand account, the student talks about how one of the dormitories was converted into a field hospital. Why do you think so little was recorded on the matter? Was it because people at the time didn’t realize how historically significant the Spanish Flu of 1918 would become or do you think there were other reasons involved?
Dr. Melissa Kean: In the first hand account, we see that all the doctors and the nurses in the field hospital at Rice were military nurses and doctors because the entire campus was under military regulation as there was a war going on. As the Spanish Flu was tearing through Houston, we were in the middle of a world war and that had to take precedence over everything else and we didn’t shut down. The Thresher shut down completely and there are no publications for the entire fall semester of 1918 so that is one of the reasons why we don’t know much about what was happening on campus at the time. If you ever look at the Rice Campanile editions from 1917 or 1918, all the students were wearing military garb. It was essentially a military camp. One additional thing about the Spanish Flu epidemic is that there isn’t much written down in the Rice archives because there was no vaccine for many things that we routinely vaccinate for today. People just didn’t have the same expectation of personal safety that we have today. In Houston, there was still living memory of horrible yellow fever epidemics in the late 19th century. We didn’t have antibiotics then and we didn’t have mosquito control like we have today. All kinds of diseases would routinely blaze through a city. And Houston’s humid climate was favorable for mosquito-borne diseases to develop and there was not an expectation that everyone at the time was entitled to good health. It was a very different mindset about the risk of being alive.