DONALD'S PLOT TO KILL HIS OWN VOTERS:

In the days before the parade, Philadelphia officials distributed 20,000 flyers urging citizens to cover their mouths when they coughed or sneezed. "If the people are careless," Krusen was quoted as saying in the Phil­a­del­phia Even­ing Bul­le­tin the day of the parade, "thousands of cases may develop and the epidemic may get beyond control." That same article reported that 118 people in the city had been diagnosed with the virus. But still he permitted the parade to proceed. On the 28th, a snaking line of Boy Scouts, marching bands, women's auxiliaries, and troops 2 miles long wound its way up Broad Street. War­planes flew overhead as an enormous, tightly packed crowd of 200,000 cheered. Within three days, every bed in Phil­a­del­phia's 31 hospitals was occupied. Within a week, 45,000 citizens were infected and the entire city had shut down.

It was too late. By the second week in November, 12,000 Phila­del­phians were dead, and the phrase "bodies stacked like cordwood" had become commonplace among the survivors. "It was an apocalyptic scene," said Davis. "In some cases, public-health nurses would be walking into tenements and finding whole families dead." Bodies piled up on sidewalks after the city morgue, capable of holding only 36 people, was overwhelmed. Within six months, 16,000 were dead, and 500,000 Phil­a­del­phians had fallen ill with the flu. Mean­while, unsubstantiated rumors circulated among the frightened populace that the Germans had unleashed the flu on U.S. soil via spies who'd arrived on U-boats.

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