When Donald Trump first declared that the coronavirus shutdown would be over by Easter, he was embracing a hallowed American tradition of happy-talk denial. As the polymath president (part wartime leader, part Nobel-level epidemiologist) said last week, “Our people are full of vim and vigor and energy. They don’t want to be locked into a house or an apartment or some space. It’s not for our country, and we are not built that way.”

America was never built that way, as the history of the influenza pandemic a century ago demonstrates. In October 1918 alone, 195,000 Americans died from the virus. Yet President Woodrow Wilson, obsessed with a war in Europe that would end on November 11, made no public references to the disease. And states received no assistance from Washington, not even from the Food and Drug Administration.

Meanwhile, the big-city newspapers—the dominant news sources in the days before radio—sugarcoated the truth, practicing an alarming level of self-censorship. Any article or headline suggesting more than casual concern about the disease would be open to attack for undermining morale on the home front during the Great War.

“As terrifying as the disease was, the press made it more so,” John M. Barry wrote in his epic history, The Great Influenza. “They terrified by making so little of it, for what officials and the press said bore no relationship to what people saw and touched and smelled and endured. People could not trust what they read.”

The result was a crash course in how public ignorance coupled with rampant misinformation tragically delayed efforts to contain the virus. At least, unlike Trump, Wilson was neither promoting untested treatments in White House briefings nor suggesting that New York hospitals were selling face masks on the black market. But the papers from 1918 are also a reminder that clueless public officials, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (who kept the beaches open during spring break), are only the latest in a long line of American leaders who allowed business values to trample public health in an emergency.