Thomas Mullen

Q&A with the Author

Where did you get the idea for the book?

Years ago I read a magazine article about a virologist who, among other things, was studying the 1918 flu virus. I had never heard of the 1918 flu, nor had most people I spoke to about it, and I was stunned at the sheer number of people who died in the pandemic (for example: far more Americans died of the flu than died during World War I, which happened concurrently). The article mentioned parenthetically that the flu had been so lethal and terrifying that some towns had attempted to stay healthy by closing the roads into town and preventing any outsiders from entering. I immediately visualized a scene in which two bored guards are confronted by a cold, hungry outsider begging for food and shelter. What would they possibly do? The moral dilemma fascinated me: would they act out of charity and compassion to aid the man, or would they put their own lives and those of their families above the stranger's life, forcing him to die in the woods? And what would happen if the two guards made different decisions when faced with this dilemma—how would each of their decisions affect their friendship and, more importantly, the society they lived in?

Did some American towns really close themselves off from the outside world in an effort to keep the flu out?

Yes. The sheer scale of the 1918 flu, combined with the lack of information provided by the distracted war government and the borderline censored newspapers, created an unimaginable panic on the home front during the Great War. Mayors and governors claimed the sickness was no more than a minor flu and that it was already on the wane, and the papers wrote heart-warming stories about soldiers recovering from bouts of la grippe, but all citizens had to do was look out their windows to see hearses weighed down by more bodies than they could carry. How could this be happening? Add the fact that germ theory was relatively new and not widely understood, and factor in the absence of most young, capable physicians—nearly all of whom had been recruited to assist in the war effort, leaving U.S. towns with only the doddering doctors from an earlier era, when medical schools had not even required their graduates to be literate—and the result was a terrified community searching for any possible way out of this horror. Some secluded towns, in areas such as the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, did indeed endeavor to protect themselves from the flu by closing the roads into town and preventing any outsiders from entering. In some cases, this drastic strategy actually worked.

Still, I was unable to unearth much information beyond anecdotes about such towns, but this was probably a good thing, as it allowed my novelist's imagination to take over. Commonwealth is a fictional town, and the unique circumstances that befall it in The Last Town On Earth are entirely invented.

Why did you make Commonwealth a progressive, workers' community rather than a regular town?

Two reasons, one practical and one thematic.

I needed to create a town that could realistically close itself off from the "outside world," so it couldn't be a town that closely bordered any neighboring communities. It couldn't have daily mail delivery, or a train depot, or a well-tended road leading to the next hamlet. The more I sketched the novel out in my head, the more the town started to seem like a hidden-away retreat. Because 1918 was an age rich with communes, collectives and other progressively conceived enclaves, it seemed a natural choice; the state of Washington was particularly hospitable to such experimental towns, having not only a rich history in progressive and radical politics but also the impenetrable forests in which attempted utopias could hide.

Because such towns were typically founded in response to what was perceived as the modern world's coarse and materialistic treatment of mankind, I thought these ideas meshed well with the central dilemma of the novel: what do we owe to our fellow man, and to what degree is it morally acceptable for us to allow selfishness to dictate our decisions? To what degree do self-defense and self-interest allow us to bend moral principles? Workers' communities like Commonwealth were created because their founders believed they could create a better society based on fair play and shared goals. Rather than making Commonwealth a full-blown socialist or communist haven, I thought it would be more interesting—and would challenge more assumptions behind the usual criticisms of capitalism and democracy—to make it a socialist/capitalist hybrid. The workers are given homes and equal votes in town decisions, yes, but the mill survives only by selling its product to businessmen from other towns, including the U.S. Army, which greatly relied on timber producers of the Pacific Northwest for building fighter planes and the army cantonments that were hurriedly constructed in 1917 and 1918.

What was the American Protective League?

Because America had avoided active involvement in The Great War for so many years, when the Wilson Administration finally decided to join in the hostilities, it realized that it had to do a lot of convincing to win over a skeptical public. To that end, President Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information, which launched a propaganda campaign unprecedented in size and scope. This is when the character of Uncle Sam was born, and countless patriotic tunes hit the airwaves (such as "Save Your Kisses Till The Boys Come Home" and "Hello Central, Give Me No-Man's Land"). Four-Minute Men unleashed their impassioned oratory in movie theaters and taverns, and "Wake Up, America" Day spawned parades across the country. Mottoes encouraged Americans to keep working hard ("Business As Before—Only More"), conserve food ("Don't Eat Less—Waste Less"), buy Liberty Bonds, save peach pits for the production of gas masks, plant victory gardens so that farms could focus on feeding soldiers, and express their patriotism as loudly as possible.

The darker side of such patriotic fervor was the American Protective League, a grassroots organization, deputized by the Department of Justice, that rapidly spread across the country, encompassing a membership of 300,000. The APL was comprised of patriotic civilians who watched out for suspected German spies, eavesdropping on neighbors' conversations and making sure all Americans were acting with sufficient loyalty. Some vigilante "super-patriots" were known to break into immigrants' homes and demand they kiss the flag, force fellow citizens to buy Liberty Bonds, raid towns to round up draft dodgers, and attack conscientious objectors.

I had never heard of the APL when I began my preliminary outline of the book, but as I researched the era and learned about its activities, I thought it fit in well with questions the book raises about isolationism, community, and morality. What would APL members think when they learned that a nearby town had suspiciously closed its doors during wartime—especially a town made up of radicals and leftists?

What were the Espionage and Sedition Acts?

Nearly one quarter of Americans in 1918 were of German ancestry, heightening fears that spies were rampant on the home front, and leading to intense pressure on all Americans to prove their loyalty to the war and to their country. "Everybody is either loyal or not loyal at a time like this," one government announcement explained.

To ensure loyalty, Congress in 1917 passed the Espionage Act, which made it illegal, "when the U.S. is at war," to "willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or "willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States." According to Geoffrey R. Stone's Perilous Times: Free Speech In Wartime, the law was intended to apply only to brazen attempts to disrupt America's military efforts (such as conscripting and transporting troops), but in the hands of overzealous lawmen it was used to silence dissidents who so much as suggested that war was a bad idea or Wilson was wrong—which is precisely what many anti-war and peace organizations had been doing for years. Approximately 900 Americans were jailed under the Espionage Act, according to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States—including a U.S. Congressman. Suffragists who saw peace as a key plank in the women's movement picketed outside the White House and were often arrested for their anti-war views.

Undaunted, Congress soon followed with the Sedition Act of 1918, which placed even more stringent limits on what criticisms Americans could level against their government. Though both laws were blatant violations of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court upheld them, under the logic that, in wartime, all bets are off (an extralegal theory that does not appear in the Constitution). Those decisions have been lamented by more recent courts and by historians, and the Espionage and Sedition Acts have been viewed as regrettable errors committed by panicked legislators and an equally panicked judiciary. Such opinions have not been unanimous, however: the Bush Administration has recently raised the possibility that the laws could be used to prosecute journalists who write stories that, in the administration's opinion, reveal aspects of the "war on terror" that should be kept secret.

In 1918, the laws became easy weapons that civic leaders could use against anyone whose politics ran against that of the reigning administration, including labor unions who criticized what they believed was "a rich man's war" and the growing legion of socialists and communists who had become emboldened by the recent Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (which resulted in Russian troops pulling out of the war, putting a greater strain on the European allies and the U.S.). Since so many Americans felt muzzled and persecuted as a result of these laws and the culture of fear that they engendered, they would have added a volatile element to a town like Commonwealth, and would have given the leaders of neighboring areas a legal reason to suspect wrongdoing in that closed-off town.

What's the deal with this book and the bird flu?

This may sound unbelievable in 2006, when articles about bird flu and the 1918 pandemic appear every day, but back when I conceived of the story and wrote The Last Town on Earth, I had trouble finding much information on the pandemic. It had been weirdly swept under the carpets of history, perhaps because it had taken place during World War I, which took up all the ink in most history texts. None of the great writers who came of age in that decade (Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Dos Passos) wrote about the flu in their fiction, and I found few histories of the pandemic (John Barry would remedy this in 2004 with the publication of The Great Influenza, which is now the definitive work on the event, and highly recommended to anyone wishing to learn more about the period, but by then I'd nearly finished my rough draft.)

Part of what drove me in writing the book, then, was the sense that this was a major event that, for whatever reason, had been forgotten. Little did I know that new research in October 2005 would reveal that the 1918 flu had been a bird flu, and that the new bird flu in Asia would therefore stir up new fears of a coming pandemic. This turned the 1918 flu from a historical footnote to the subject of endless CNN scare reports, seemingly overnight. Many readers and critics may argue that my book has become more timely as a result, but this was certainly an unplanned development.