DescriptionDuring the 1918 influenza pandemic nearly fifty million people perished worldwide from the flu virus, including 675,000 in the United States and 22,000 in the state of New Jersey alone. While the Department of Health of the State of New Jersey acted swiftly to the pandemic by issuing mandatory closings of all public gathering places, the municipality of Newark, under the leadership of Mayor Charles P. Gillen, chose not to adhere entirely to the quarantines. Of the 29,000 Newarkers who were stricken with the flu, 2,800 people died within three months. Gillen paid little attention to the numbers during the influenza crisis and took an anomalous approach in handling a contagious disease. Even as the figures continuously conveyed that more people were contracting influenza, Gillen still refused to follow national and state quarantines that would have shut down his city fully to prevent the spread of disease. Conscious of his own political standing in the time of Prohibition, Gillen defined his mayoral practices by his politics rather than by the people who were suffering from disease. While seemingly satisfying his constituents’ thirst for liquor by allowing saloons to stay open in order to distribute alcohol for “medicinal purposes,” ordinary citizens were dying in his city. Over ten percent of the deaths from influenza in the state of New Jersey occurred in Newark. While no one could have predicted where the greatest numbers of deaths would take place, Gillen’s political handling of the influenza crisis in Newark is reminiscent of how much one person could impact the health care of a city and calls into question whether some of the causalities from influenza in Newark could have been prevented.