The Great Horse Flu:
A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America
by Thomas G. Andrews (University of North Carolina Press)
This book is about the Great Horse Flu of the late 19th Century. It is a small, obscure epidemic, you probably have not heard of it. Only it is not an epidemic, but a epizootic, proving once and for all that the Actually Guy has been around for generations, but also proving that descriptive linguistics reigns, in that people started to refer to any disease as an epizootic or in a slangified variation of same.
Actually, it was not small and obscure, but it has escaped the modern imagination. And to some point I feel necessary to stop the review and say how this book feels like a parody a points, something like The Old Negro Space Program. The idea that there was a major disease, now mostly forgotten, that contributed to an economic collapse, now mostly forgotten, sped a major city’s near destruction, now mostly forgotten, and set back the cause of racial justice in a way that acts as a predicative to the U.S.’ current political decline is interesting; that it all came down to horses, even as the horse was being replaced by other technology (and probably sped that along too) in a sort of ‘last mile problem’ for logistics is just…silly.
Except that it seems basically accurate, and to the author’s credit this is not a How One Virus Invented the World. The claims are understated, and he largely is interested in describing a forgotten influence rather than saying everything is Horse Flu, if only because writers at the time sometimes did so, usually with racist ends.
The picture here is decidedly not macro, which is because the book demonstrates how any economic or material pressure transfigures itself pressure upon the marginalized (arguably including the horses themselves), as they suffer the most for it happening at the same time as the majority hoists the blame of it all on them, or finds new and usual ways to exploit them. As such, this is a rather “woke” book, but in ways that are rather fun. Expressing the variations of structural racism in such proximity and arising out of the same causes does a lot of work to show how hollow and made up it is.
Naturally that will flag some complaint, as will the dive into the science of disease, which seems like a necessary precursor but the only point where the book does not stick the landing, which is unfortunate in that it is so early in it. The other problem is something that felt like a problem reading it, but less so after the read, which is that the blurbing here focuses on a sort of Connections-grade idea about the failure of Reconstruction. But the text itself is not so square on target. Yet I was not disappointed in this after the conclusion, because the whole of the book contains the argument and makes it as well as a singular section would, it is just not structured the way that it might seem.
My thanks to the author, Thomas G. Andrews, for writing the book, and to the publisher, University of North Carolina Press, for making the ARC available to me.
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