In watching the 1944 Captain America serial (for which I’ll have a full write-up next week), I was struck by the title of the first chapter, “The Purple Death,” a title shared by the first chapter of the 1940 serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. In Captain America, the Purple Death refers to the extract of a rare orchid that makes its victims susceptible to hypnotic control (the “death” part comes when the victims are ordered to kill themselves, helpless to resist); in Flash Gordon, it’s a mysterious, fatal disease spread from Mongo to Earth that leaves its victims marked by a purple spot.
The pulps (as well as comic strips and serials) were known for lurid, vividly-drawn stories with larger-than-life heroes and impossibly wicked villains to match. Purple is an attention-getting color, to the point that we speak of “purple prose.” I was also reminded of the Purple Empire, one of the enemy nations that Operator #5 fought against in the 1930s. (I thought there might be some significance to that, but the Operator series included a rainbow of enemy nations, possibly influenced by the color-coded War Plans developed by the U. S. military during the 1920s and ’30s.)
In reading and watching stories from the 1930s and ’40s, I’ve encountered the phrase “purple death,” or uses of purple as a dangerous and dramatic color, enough times that I wondered if there was an underlying connection. So, in the spirit of Philip J. Reed’s Pop Questions, I’m asking: what’s the significance of the color purple in the pulps, and why particularly is death purple? Does it refer to the livid color of a bruise or the marks left by strangulation? Is it the association with royalty, by extension gaudy and powerful? I have a few leads that seem likely, but if anyone reading this has a specific answer, I’d love to hear it.
Purple is associated with death and mourning in many cultures, including the Victorians of the nineteenth century, for whom purple was the color of “demi-mourning,” to be worn after a period of wearing black. It was also the color of royalty, originally due to the rarity and high cost of purple dyes in the ancient world. It would certainly match both the dramatic style and frequent (if shallow) references to history and classic literature in the pulps if that were the reason. I don’t have statistics at hand, but my hunch is that as comic books became the dominant medium for pulp storytelling, more villains than heroes had purple uniforms or color schemes.
However, the most likely answer goes back to the 1918 influenza epidemic: the disease killed quickly, and often left its victims purple in color as their lungs filled with blood and starved the body of oxygen. One book on the subject is even titled Purple Death. According to some estimates, as many as 50 million people worldwide died during from the disease. Just as pulp heroes were often veterans of the Great War, so the memory of the epidemic would have resonated with writers and readers in the decades that followed. In Flash Gordon, the Purple Death was also a disease, and the scenes of public panic and the scramble to find a cure hearken directly to the 1918 epidemic; by comparison, the use of the phrase in Captain America is almost poetic, but would likely have still induce a twinge of fear for those who remembered it. Even today, with no direct memory of the influenza epidemic, it sounds ominous.
So perhaps that’s the answer. If any readers have more details to offer, or facts to contradict my speculations, I’d love to hear them. Any other examples of purple as a color marking death or danger are, of course, welcome.
Medleyana 
I suspect you are right about the influenza epidemic being the
main source for the colour purple being seen as “dangerous and dramatic color.”
However, there is another possible source. Suzanne Nalbantian,
in the book “Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel” purple was often used in French Symbolist and Decadent
writing to symbolise the decline of a society (writings like Paul Verlaine sometimes compared their society to the declining Roman Empire using purple symbolism).
Now, it turns out that several American writers of dark fantasy,
like Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith
were familar with French Decadent writing (Chambers’ “The Demoiselle d’Ys ” is a homage to Gautier, Smith translated several poems by Baudelaire, and Lovecraft refers to Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier several times in his non-fiction).
The pulp connection? Lovecraft and Smith would have been
regularly published in “Weird Tales”, even though they both disliked writing for pulps and only submitted their work there because none of the mainstream magazines would publish it. Chambers didn’t write for pulps, but from the 1920s on pulps like “Weird Tales” and “Famous Fantastic Mysteries” reprinted his fantasy work.
Chambers occasionally mentions purple in his weird fiction
(though he more often uses yellow, as in the title of his most famous book, TKIY).
HPL’s monsters are often purple in colour (like in “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Dunwich Horror”).
Smith’s poetry and stories (such as “The Last Incantation” and “The Isle of The Torturers” ) often mention exotic purple clothes and furniture as part of their baroque and morbid atmosphere.
It’s possible the people writing adventure pulp stories, comics and movie serials might have picked up on this symbolism of purple and made use of it.
That makes a lot of sense, at least as a contributing factor. The Purple Death being the extract of a rare orchid in the Captain America serial would seem to draw from that atmosphere of exoticism and decadence. Thanks for pointing out this connection!
“The Purple Cloud” (1901) by M. P. Shiel is a more likely explanation as it was a very well known novel at the time of its publication. Both H. G. Wells & H. P. Lovecraft gave it high praise. It later formed the basis of the film “The World, the Flesh and the Devil” (1959).
It tells the story of a man on a polar expedition who discovers a mysterious and deathly Purple Cloud. Massive global deaths ensue, wrought by the Purple Cloud, and the man becomes ruler of the world and builds a huge palace to his own glory. He and a young woman become the heirs to the future of humanity.
Ah, thank you! I know Shiel’s name but have not read that story. Thanks for reading!