No joke, certainly- and certainly a issue. But no where near as deadly as cigarette smoking.
And second hand smoke kills 50000 Americans a year. I dont think there is even a single death from “second hand chaw”. 
People IME were still passing jugs around at least well into the 1980’s. Wine jugs at parties, water jugs in the fields, canteens when out camping. I never did figure out any specific reason why this stopped.
Probably the answer to the question “Were there any social practices permanently killed off by X” can always be answered NO–because there are still some people who will retain that practice. Thus if I were to ask “Were there any social practices permanently killed off by HIV/AIDS?” what would your response be? What immediately comes to mind is the use of condoms instead of bareback sex by male homosexuals, fewer male homosexuals having massive numbers of one-night stands and quitting needle sharing by heroin addicts. But of course none of these changes were 100%, just as the change in spitting was not 100%.
I see your point. But in my mind this would be like saying that the reason smoking is banned in bars and restaurants in most parts of the country is “because” of the Surgeon General’s report in the early 1960s linking smoking to lung cancer.
It certainly played at least some part, but we continued to have pretty much (to varying degrees) unrestricted smoking for 30 to 35 years after that. Then a younger generation came along that wasn’t told that smoking was cool. Then public opinion shifted to allow these bans. And there are still parts of the country that don’t have them.
So if you said that the 1960s Surgeon General’s report “caused” current bans, you would definitely be partially correct. But I don’t think that was what the OP was looking for (although he/she could certainly speak for him/herself). Maybe the Spanish flu accelerates some spittoon bans, but it definitely was not a “because the Spanish flu happened, then to hell with all of these filthy spittoons”!
And also, in some restaurants- smoking still occurs. Small local eateries, I have seen it myself.
So, yes, some practices still occur, but now they are so rare to be remarkable.
This actually started happening in 1915, for reasons of practicality for the increased number of women in the workplace, largely due to the war.
WWI did a lot to flatten the social structure in places with a pronounced class system like the UK, and I think the flu at the end of the war furthered the same trend. The lack of men meant that lots of upper-class women had to either remain spinsters or marry “unsuitable” men, including those not of their class. Probably to a lesser extent, upper-class men going off to war got exposed to “unsuitable” women as nurses or ambulance drivers or the like, and married some of them. I suppose they showed this on Downton Abbey? I don’t know, I never watched it. I did read about the phenomenon in a few books.
I told you that there were previous public health efforts to eliminate public spitting and your answer is “that doesn’t prove Spanish flu killed off spittoons”? No, but it sure should make you think there’s better suspects than the gentleman class killing it off.
Yes, you are correct. The Flu and TB combined to reduce Chaw. It’s not quite gone, but it was largely replaced by cigarettes.
As a dentist my observation over 30 years is that dip and chew are worse then smoking. I’ve seen a few dippers/chewers in their 20’s and a dozen or so in their 30’s with oral cancer. Never had a patient who was a smoker with lung cancer in their 20’s or 30’s despite the fact that I had quite a few more smoker patients then dippers/chewers.
On a personal note I’d rather someone dip or chew because second hand smoke affects everyone who is in contact with it. If you smell smoke it is in your system. May not be much but it is there. Never had anyone spit tobacco juice on me.
And there may very well be. However, if that theory is correct you should see some data that before 1918 there were X number of spittoons in public places and a precipitous drop off in the next few years. Or maybe you see an explosion in the sales of cigarettes after 1918, and a corresponding decline in the sale of chewing tobacco or snuff.
If you don’t see that, and if there is no data to support that, then the idea that the Spanish flu curtailed public spittoons is as much of a guess as mine is.
Uh, no. If I point out a well known example of spitting being frowned upon for public health concerns just before the Spanish flu, that lends at least some legitimacy to the idea Spanish flu made spitting even less popular. Not conclusive evidence but not nothing. You literally have nothing to support your guess other than “elites always be bugging”.
Instead of dispensing caned or bottled drinks Soviet vending machines had a communal glass that everyone drank out of and then rinsed out with a small hose.
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But if it was announced before the Spanish flu then it was not caused by the Spanish flu, agreed?