Mass Graves & 1920 Deadly Pandemic Struggles

   There are many lessons our nation has to relearn because we've either suppressed or forgotten.  The deadly 1921 Tulsa racial war was just one of several.
  This past year we started digging graveyards to find uncharted graves. We're now finding some. But now we must find out when they were interned, and why we had no record?
  There are several graveyards with uncharted graves, in Oklahoma.  Bodies were buried and no one held the cemeteries accountable.  All over the world there were mass gravesites in 1919 & 1920.  But the reasons were not so much a racial issue, but a pandemic crisis.
  In Oklahoma's Eastern State mental hospital, there's a graveyard with far less headstones than bodies, & no cemetery records for hundreds of deceased Oklahomans who were wards of the state. Their families no longer even have open access to lay flowers without applying for a permit for a visit.  No one held the state accountable for properly running a cemetery. Even our Attorney General banned an effort to properly identify the 1172 unmarked graves.

Viral pandemics, racial unrest, mounting death tolls, and emergency powers being recklessly wielded; are just some of the ways we're reliving the events of 100 years ago.

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  But the scenario of mass deaths in 1918-1920 was unique. Without a cremation option or easy access to backhoe power equipment, manual digging was done by a limited workforce. Young men were off to war, or just coming home. Many of them were gravely ill from the Spanish Flu. And folks were terrified of being anywhere near deceased victims. In many communities across the globe, corners were cut and extra bodies were often buried above, beneath, and along side the coffins of the listed person who purchased the grave plot. Often the unclaimed bodies or those without a purchased grave plot were buried without a coffin, because a shortage of coffins was increasing the cost & availability, everywhere.

  So for Tulsans who are paying vast sums of city treasury on finding potential casualties from the 1921 riots & carnage, we may not ever know if additional deaths can be confirmed, even if we find 500 unmarked Tulsa graves. 

 For all we know, Jimmy Hoffa could be one of the 1172 unmarked bodies buried at this state cemetery.

  What we may have to come to terms with, is that burying the dead doesn't always get carried out in the neat & orderly way that it's supposed to be done... especially when we leave it up to an unaccountable govt. to do it.

Here's an article from History.com

The Mass Graves of the Spanish Flu Era

  As a terrifyingly lethal influenza virus swept across the globe between 1918 and 1920, history’s deadliest pandemic claimed the lives of approximately 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in the United States. Nearly 200,000 Americans died from the “Spanish Flu” in October 1918 alone, making it the deadliest month in the country’s history.
  With cremation an uncommon practice at the time, the sheer number of bodies overwhelmed the capacity of undertakers, gravediggers and casket makers to keep pace with the arduous task of burying the dead. At the same time, a prohibition on public gatherings that included funerals and wakes compounded the pain of many grief-stricken families who could not properly mourn the loss of their loved ones.
  America Was Unprepared for the Flu’s Mass Mortality​

"Gravediggers at Boston’s New Calvary Cemetery were spotted dumping corpses out of caskets into graves so that the coffins could be used again."

  Nancy K. Bristow, a University of Puget Sound history professor and author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, says the United States had been caught unprepared for the outbreak partly because advances in bacteriology made many Americans believe they could control infectious diseases.
  “This is not what Americans in 1918 expected to occur,” she says. “An enormous number of people died very quickly, particularly on the Eastern Seaboard where the flu struck first, and they didn’t have an opportunity to prepare in any way.”
  The mass mortality led to macabre scenes. Red Cross nurses in Baltimore reported instances of visiting flu-ravaged homes to discover sick patients in bed beside dead bodies. In other cases, corpses were covered in ice and shoved into bedroom corners where they festered for days.

  Inundated undertakers stacked caskets in funeral home hallways and even in their living quarters. In New Haven, Connecticut, six-year-old John Delano and his friends played outside of a mortuary, scaling a mountain of caskets piled on a sidewalk, unaware of the contents inside. “We thought—boy, this is great. It’s like climbing the pyramids,” he recalled.
  Cemeteries struggled to handle the soaring death toll. With gravediggers absent from work—either because they had contracted the flu or were afraid that they would—grieving families were sometimes forced to excavate tombs for their loved ones. In New Brunswick, New Jersey, 15 workhouse inmates were handed spades and picks to dig graves under the watchful eyes of guards. In Baltimore, city employees were called into emergency duty as gravediggers while soldiers from Fort Meade were pressed into service to bury a three-week backlog of 175 bodies at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
  Casket companies, already busy supplying coffins for the thousands of doughboys killed in World War I, could not keep up with the demand. Facing a desperate shortage in the nation’s capital, District of Columbia Commissioner Louis Brownlow hijacked two train cars filled with 270 coffins bound for Pittsburgh and rerouted them to the city hospital under armed guard. Gravediggers at Boston’s New Calvary Cemetery were spotted dumping corpses out of caskets into graves so that the coffins could be used again. The War Industries Board ordered casket makers to manufacture only plain caskets and immediately cease production of “all fancy trimmed and couch and split panel varieties.” It limited casket sizes for adults to 5 feet, 9 inches and 6 feet, 3 inches.