(bright music) - I'm Starla Sampaco, in the Crosscut KCTS 9 newsroom.
(intriguing music) Historians have compared the COVID-19 pandemic and its massive effects on society to that of the 1918 Spanish flu, and found remarkable similarities.
Crosscut columnist, Knute Berger, writes that the end of the pandemic in the early 1920s ushered in a rough reactionary period in America.
It was called "the mean decade".
People were frustrated by war, inflation and pandemic restrictions.
Washington state experienced a period of intolerance and political extremism, including a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
New anti-immigration laws targeting Asians were passed to keep America white.
"History is rhyming hard," Berger warns, "hoping that our 2020s don't mirror the meanness of the 1920s."
I'm Starla Sampaco, find nonprofit Northwest news every day on crosscut.com.
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