The Cellars of Mercy

The response would not arrive in time for the week that followed. On the morning of October 7, 1918, the supervisor of the Visiting Nurse Society of Philadelphia stood in the basement of Engine House No. 16 on Pine Street, watching a laundry kettle steam on a coal stove. She had brought her own carbolic soap. The municipal supply had run out three days before, and the requisition forms she had filed with the Bureau of Health sat unanswered on some clerk’s desk, if they had reached a desk at all. She boiled linens that nurses had stripped from the dead and dying in the rooms above, where the firehouse served as an emergency relief station. The soap was hers. The kettle was borrowed. The coal came from a merchant on Twelfth Street who had not yet refused credit to the Society.

The official apparatus had stopped answering its own telephones. The Bureau of Health’s telephone exchange, designed for six operators, was down to two; callers received only busy signals or silence.

This was not the plan. The plan, such as it existed, was written in the Board of Health minutes of October 3, when Director Wilmer Krusen had finally ordered the closure of theaters, schools, and churches. The plan assumed that hospitals would absorb the sick, that the Bureau of Health would coordinate relief, that the city’s institutions would function as designed. What the plan did not account for was velocity. Between October 4 and October 6, the deaths recorded in Philadelphia jumped from 130 to 289 to 428. The municipal hospital on Pine Street had filled by October 5. By October 6, patients lay on cots in corridors, in supply rooms, in the basement where the supervisor now worked. The plan had no provision for what happened when the plan itself became impossible, when the city needed not just beds but drivers, orderlies, and gravediggers.

The Society’s nurses made their rounds in automobiles lent by private citizens. They carried morphine tablets in pocket tins, borrowed from physicians whose own supplies dwindled. They left clean linens where they could, and when they could not, they did not. The Society’s annual report for 1918, compiled months later, would note that 257 nurses made 25, 000 visits during October alone. The number was precise. The experience was not. What the report could not capture was the arithmetic of improvisation: one nurse, twelve patients, no running water in a converted warehouse on Callowhill Street; a supervisor driving her own Ford to deliver oxygen cylinders that the city had promised and failed to send; the moment when a nurse realized that the fever chart she had kept for three days belonged to a patient who had died in the night and no one had recorded it.

The firehouses were Krusen’s idea, or became his idea when the hospitals failed. On October 5, he had ordered the conversion of twenty engine houses into emergency infirmaries. The order was sensible, even necessary. What the order did not specify was who would staff them, supply them, or remove the dead from them. The Bureau of Health had 34 inspectors for a city of 1.7 million; by October 8, Krusen would report that 17 of them were ill. The municipal ambulance service, never large, had lost drivers to the same fever they transported. The gap between Krusen’s signature and the kettle on Pine Street was measured not in malice but in mass: too many sick, too few well, too little time to build what had never been built.

Into this gap stepped the institutions that had not been designed for epidemic response but possessed what the city lacked: manpower, organization, and a structure of command that did not require municipal appropriation.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia kept a daily tally. It survives in the administrative files of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, handwritten on lined paper that records dates, names, and assignments with the clarity of a military quartermaster. On October 5, the Rector received a request from the Bureau of Health. The request was not formal. The telephone call came from an official who did not give his name, or whose name the secretary did not record. The city needed drivers. It needed orderlies. It needed men who could lift bodies without collapsing, who could work in rooms where the dying outnumbered the living. The Rector did not consult the Board of Health. He consulted his own ledger of seminarians.

St. Charles Borromeo stood on Lancaster Avenue in Overbrook, a Gothic complex of stone buildings that housed 240 students training for the priesthood. They ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-six. They came from Philadelphia parishes, from coal towns in Schuylkill County, from immigrant families in Kensington and Southwark. On October 6, the Rector summoned the prefect of discipline and read the Bureau’s request aloud. The prefect’s notes, preserved in the seminary archive, record no debate. The students were not asked. They were assigned.

The first detachment left on the morning of October 7, the same morning the supervisor boiled her linens. There were twelve of them, driven to the city morgue at Thirteenth and Wood Streets in a truck borrowed from a parish in Germantown. Their assignment was specific: assist in the identification and removal of bodies that had overwhelmed the morgue’s capacity. The morgue had been built to handle twenty corpses. It currently held seventy-three. The refrigeration had failed. The attendants had fled or fallen ill. The seminarians were given rubber aprons, cotton masks, and instructions that the prefect had received from a health inspector who himself had never worked in a morgue.

The tally for October 7 records their work in the flat prose of administrative necessity: twelve students assigned to morgue detail from seven in the morning until six in the evening. What the tally does not record is what they saw, what they smelled, what they carried. For that, the archive offers only indirect evidence: a letter written on October 9 by a seminarian to his brother in Pittsburgh, saved by the family and donated to the seminary in 1962. The writer was nineteen, in his second year of theology. His handwriting slopes with haste, as if written in stolen minutes.

He described work he had not known priests were asked to perform. The bodies arrived in wagons, and the seminarians moved them to rooms where cold storage was supposed to operate. The cold did not work. A priest accompanying them spoke of corporal works of mercy. The letter writer observed that he had not known mercy looked like this, and that he would not describe it further: the reader would not believe him, and he would not sleep.

The letter continued with practical detail that betrays its author’s effort to maintain ordinary perception: the wagon driver who brought sandwiches from a deli on Race Street, the rubber boots that split at the seams, the priest who came to offer absolution to the unidentified dead and wept without making noise.

Then the prose breaks. There were not enough names. They were numbering the dead now. The writer had inscribed 34 on a card that morning without knowing whose face it belonged to.

He returned to St. Charles Borromeo on the evening of October 7. The tally records him present at evening prayer. The letter records that he did not sleep, that he walked the seminary grounds until three in the morning, that he could not distinguish the smell of the morgue from the smell of his own hands despite scrubbing them with lye. The archive does not record whether he was sent back on October 8. The tally simply continues: fifteen students assigned to hospital transport at Pennsylvania Hospital, six in the morning until eight in the evening.

The Archdiocese’s mobilization expanded by increments that the daily tally captures with bureaucratic patience. On October 8, twenty seminarians drove ambulances improvised from private automobiles commandeered by the police. On October 9, eighteen worked as orderlies at St. Agnes Hospital, where the nursing staff had been reduced by half. On October 10, the assignment changed. The Bureau of Health telephoned again. The city cemeteries could not receive the dead at the rate the dead accumulated. The seminarians were needed for burial detail.

Holy Sepulchre Cemetery occupied 110 acres in Cheltenham Township, north of the city limits. It had opened in 1868 to serve Philadelphia’s Catholic population, a landscape of modest headstones and marble angels, of priests buried beneath Latin inscriptions and infants beneath carved lambs. On October 10, 1918, it became a construction site. The seminarians arrived with picks and shovels requisitioned from a parish building project in Manayunk. They were joined by prisoners from the county jail, loaned under a temporary agreement between the sheriff and the Bureau of Health. The agreement survives in a single sheet among the Board of Health papers, unsigned, dated October 9, noting fifty prisoners for burial detail at Holy Sepulchre with terms to be arranged.

The trench graves were dug in the northeast corner of the cemetery, in a field that had been reserved for future expansion. The dimensions were specified by the cemetery superintendent: eight feet wide, sixty feet long, depth sufficient to prevent disturbance. The seminarians worked in shifts of four hours, the limit their supervisors set before exhaustion made the work dangerous. The prisoners worked without limit. The tally records their numbers but not their names, not their crimes, not whether they volunteered or were commanded. The distinction between seminarian and prisoner, between volunteer and conscript, blurred in the practical necessity of moving earth faster than bodies arrived.

On October 11, the first trench received its dead. The Bureau of Health had suspended its usual requirements for death certificates, burial permits, individual coffins. The dead came in canvas shrouds, in pine boxes meant for shipping, in blankets when boxes ran out. The seminarians lowered them with ropes, arranged them in rows, covered them with lime and soil. The superintendent’s daily report, preserved in the cemetery’s own archive, notes that Trench Number One held forty-two interments on October 11, and that Trench Number Two had been commenced according to instruction.

The number would grow. By October 15, Holy Sepulchre would hold 262 bodies in mass graves, with additional trenches opened at Mount Moriah and Arlington Cemeteries. The seminarians would work through the third week of October, until the death rate fell and individual burial became possible again. Their cassocks, according to the later letter, were stained with clay and lime that no washing could remove. The Archdiocese purchased new ones. The old ones were burned.

The volunteer network extended beyond the seminarians, though their records are the most complete. The Visiting Nurse Society’s 1918 annual report names 89 volunteers who assisted with clerical work, linen preparation, and transportation. The report does not name the women who appeared at firehouses without appointment, who identified themselves as neighbors or relatives of the sick, who stayed until they fell ill or until someone ordered them to leave. The Bureau of Health’s own records mention auxiliary assistance without specification, a phrase that covers both organized volunteers and the improvised labor of whoever remained standing.

The American Red Cross established emergency headquarters at 1420 Locust Street on October 6. Its reports, compiled weekly for the national office, track a mobilization that paralleled and occasionally overlapped with the Archdiocese’s. By October 8, the Philadelphia chapter had enrolled 400 volunteer nurses, many of them retired or students from training schools that had suspended classes. By October 10, it had distributed 15, 000 gauze masks, most of them made by volunteers from patterns supplied by the Army Medical Department. The masks were not tested for effectiveness. They were better than nothing, which was the standard against which all improvisation was measured.

The Red Cross also coordinated what the official reports call home relief: food packages, nursing visits, and burial assistance for families without resources. A case file from October 9, selected for inclusion in the chapter’s monthly summary, records a family of six on Wharton Street, all infected, the father dead, the mother delirious, three children under ten in the care of the eldest daughter, who was twelve. The Red Cross volunteer who filed the report, a Mrs. Blackwell of West Philadelphia, noted that she had arranged for the father’s removal by seminary students, Catholic, and had left coffee and bread with the daughter. The child was competent but frightened, she wrote. She planned to revisit on October 10 if able.

Mrs. Blackwell did not revisit on October 10. The chapter’s internal record shows her assigned to emergency duty at Pennsylvania Hospital, where the nursing shortage had become critical. What happened to the daughter and her siblings is not recorded. The case file was closed on October 17 with the notation that the family had dispersed, address unknown.

This was the pattern of the volunteer network: intervention without follow-through, relief that arrived and departed, human connections made and then severed by the same pressure that created them. The seminarians who dug trenches were rotated back to theology classes when their numbers threatened to fall below the threshold for ordination. The nurses who borrowed automobiles returned them when owners reclaimed them for their own emergencies. The firehouses that served as infirmaries were cleared and disinfected by October 25, their equipment restored, their temporary patients buried or recovered or transferred to permanent institutions. The network had been built for surge, not for duration.

Krusen observed this improvisation without directing it. The Board of Health minutes for October 7, 8, and 9 record his attention to theater licenses, to the enforcement of closure orders, to a dispute with the Pennsylvania Railroad over quarantine of train crews. They do not record his attention to the Visiting Nurse Society, to St. Charles Borromeo, to the prisoners digging at Holy Sepulchre. This was not negligence in the ordinary sense. It was the consequence of a system designed for regulatory control finding itself required to manage biological chaos. Krusen could close a theater. He could not manufacture a nurse. He could issue a permit for burial. He could not dig a grave.

The Bureau of Health’s own staff reflected this mismatch. On October 8, Krusen reported to the mayor that 17 of 34 health inspectors were ill. On October 9, the clerk who recorded mortality returns failed to appear; his replacement, a stenographer from the Department of Public Works, made errors in tabulation that would require correction weeks later. On October 10, the Bureau’s telephone exchange operated with two operators instead of six; callers received busy signals or no response. The official apparatus was consuming its own capacity.

Against this, the volunteer network offered what institutions could not: numbers, flexibility, and a willingness to work without compensation or protection. The seminarians received no hazard pay. The Visiting Nurse Society nurses who worked in firehouses received the same salary as those in ordinary cases, which was modest, and the same risk, which was not. The prisoners at Holy Sepulchre received sentence reduction, according to the sheriff’s later report, though the terms to be arranged were never formally documented. What motivated individual participants varied and, in most cases, left no record. The seminarian’s letter offers corporal works of mercy, a theological category that translated physical labor into spiritual merit. Mrs. Blackwell’s case file offers no motivation at all, only action.

The practical result was survival for some, and for others, a more dignified death than the city could provide. The firehouse infirmaries recorded mortality rates that exceeded the municipal hospital’s, but offered care where no care had existed. The trench graves at Holy Sepulchre denied individual memorialization but prevented the open piles of corpses that had accumulated in other cities. The volunteer network was not sufficient. It was simply what remained when sufficiency proved impossible.

On October 9, the same day the seminarian wrote his brother, the Bureau of Health issued a statement to the newspapers. The statement announced that all available resources had been mobilized, that citizens’ committees were assisting in relief, that the situation was improving daily. The statement did not mention the seminarians. It did not mention the prisoners. It did not mention that the mortality returns for October 8, which Krusen had not yet reviewed, would show 528 deaths, the highest single-day total yet recorded. The statement was not a lie in the technical sense. It was a description of a city that existed in press releases rather than in basements.

The supervisor of the Visiting Nurse Society read the statement in the evening edition of the Public Ledger, while waiting for a delivery of linens that would not arrive until morning. She made a notation in her personal diary, preserved with her papers at the University of Pennsylvania: Krusen says improving. We have no soap. The entry is dated October 9, 1918. The next entry is October 12, noting simply that a senior nurse had fallen ill, then nothing until October 18. That nurse, with fourteen years’ service, died on October 14. The supervisor attended her burial at Holy Sepulchre, in a private grave purchased by the Society, not in the trenches where the seminarians worked. The distinction mattered to someone. The record does not say who.

The Archdiocese’s tally for October 11 shows 23 seminarians assigned to Holy Sepulchre, 15 to hospital transport, 8 to miscellaneous duties that included delivering food packages and assisting at the morgue. The total, 46, represented nearly 20 percent of the seminary’s enrollment. The Rector wrote to the Archbishop on October 12, requesting guidance on how long this employment of students might continue without prejudice to their formation. The Archbishop’s reply, dated October 13, directed that spiritual exercises be maintained even in the midst of corporal works, and that no student be detained from his studies beyond the present emergency. The emergency, at that point, showed no sign of present tense.

The reply also authorized the Rector to request additional assistance from other religious communities if the need persisted. The need persisted. On October 14, the Brothers of the Holy Cross from West Philadelphia sent six members to assist at Holy Sepulchre. On October 15, six Sisters of Mercy from Merion joined the nursing staff at St. Agnes Hospital. The Archdiocese’s network was expanding into a parallel infrastructure, staffed by vows rather than salaries, accountable to hierarchy rather than civil service. It was not more efficient than the municipal system. It was simply more available, more willing to absorb losses that would have paralyzed government departments.

The prisoners at Holy Sepulchre worked without such spiritual framing. The sheriff’s report of October 20, compiled after the emergency had passed, noted that 34 of the original 50 had completed their assigned duty, that 12 had been returned to jail for illness or insubordination, and that 4 had escaped. The escapees were not pursued. Their names were recorded, their sentences noted as remaining to be served, their whereabouts listed as unknown. The practical arithmetic of emergency had replaced the ordinary procedures of justice.

By October 12, the volunteer network had become the primary mechanism of response. This was not announced. It was not voted. It emerged from the accumulation of individual decisions: the supervisor’s choice to boil her own linens, the Rector’s choice to assign his students, the sheriff’s choice to lend his prisoners, the Red Cross’s choice to enroll untrained volunteers. Each decision was local, immediate, irreversible. Together they constituted a system that no one had designed and no one directed.

The cost of this system was borne unevenly. The seminarians who dug trenches at Holy Sepulchre suffered no fatalities, according to the seminary’s records, though three were hospitalized with influenza in late October and one developed tuberculosis that would kill him in 1921. The Visiting Nurse Society lost six nurses to the epidemic, their names recorded on a memorial plaque installed in 1919. The prisoners who escaped were not counted as losses. The families who received assistance and then lost contact with their helpers were not surveyed for outcome.

What survived was the method itself: the recognition that when official capacity failed, unofficial capacity could be mobilized through existing networks of affiliation and obligation. This was not a discovery. It was a reversion to older patterns of relief, to the parish and the neighborhood and the voluntary association, that industrial cities had attempted to supersede with professional services. The epidemic forced a temporary restoration, not by choice but by necessity.

On the evening of October 12, the seminarian wrote his second letter to Pittsburgh. The seminary had granted a brief leave for those who had worked continuously since October 7; he had spent the day sleeping and walking the grounds. They told him he had done enough, he wrote. He did not know what enough meant. The trenches were full and they were digging more. The Rector said they had shown that the priesthood could serve in any need. He thought they had shown that any need would take what they could give, and ask for more.

He did not send the letter. It was found among his papers after his death in 1967, with a notation in his own later hand: Not sent. What was there to say? The seminary’s tally for October 13 shows him assigned to hospital transport, then to Holy Sepulchre on October 14 and 15. He was ordained in 1922. He served as a parish priest in Delaware County until his retirement. He never wrote about the epidemic again.

The image of his cassock, stained with the clay of Holy Sepulchre, preserved in a photograph among the seminary archives, shows what the official records cannot: the physical imprint of work that institutions had failed to organize, performed by hands that received no instruction from the Board of Health. The unanswered requisition on Krusen’s desk, the kettle on the stove, the numbered card that could not be attached to a name—these objects trace a system that functioned without authorization, that persisted until exhaustion stopped it, that left no precedent for the next emergency. The volunteer network had saved what it could. It had also measured, in its own strain, the full distance between what the city promised and what its people could deliver.

The network had saved what it could. It had also measured, in its own strain, the full distance between what the city promised and what its people could deliver. It left no precedent, only a set of tallies and stained cassocks, awaiting the next week when the death toll would peak and the city’s pre-epidemic confidence would shatter.