Pox (46 page)

To some antivaccinationists, the progressiveness of their cause lay in their fundamental belief in the right of ordinary citizens in a democracy to participate in scientific deliberation and medical decision making. Antivaccinationists pointed out that the demand for compulsory vaccination laws had not come from the general public but from health officials and medical societies. Which was why compulsory vaccination so often joined the regular physician's lancet to the policeman's nightstick.
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Lora Little—the movement's most democratic voice—was a keen student of the burgeoning American archive of popular resistance to compulsory vaccination. Violent imagery pervaded antivaccination texts: the frontispiece of Clymer's book pictured a police officer, armed with a copy of the Vaccination Law, seizing a baby from its mother's lap while the angel of death waited with open arms. Lora Little found material enough in the public record. “It is for this ghoulish work that churches, theaters, business blocks, and whole neighborhoods have been raided;” she wrote, “ocean liners' populations cowpoxed; a shipload of negro laborers driven off the vessel with clubs at Panama, and poisoned in spite of resistance; arrests have been made and innocent persons cast into jail and there jabbed with the virus; and most atrocious of all, the annual army of babies graduating from nursery into school are required to bare their little arms and receive this injection of disease.” For middle-class antivaccinationists, the plight of working-class vaccine refusers, “pinioned by police officers and vaccinated,” revealed the “tyranny” and “despotism” of the entire system of state medicine. “If this can be done and upheld by the legal machinery of this country, what next have we to expect?” asked Clymer. “Why not chase people and circumcise them? It surely would be a good preventative against certain kinds of disease. Why not catch the people and give each a compulsory bath?”
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It may sound absurd to contemporary ears, but antivaccinationists were in fact more conscious than were most progressives of the coercive potential of the new interventionist state. In a few short years, American eugenicists would be persuading state legislatures to enact compulsory sterilization laws for the “feeble-minded,” epileptics, and other people deemed “unfit” to reproduce. The eugenicists' chief legal precedent for their measures would be compulsory vaccination.
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For Lora Little, though, antivaccinationism was ultimately more than a struggle for personal liberty—though it most certainly was that. It was also a progressive movement for the democratization of health. “A first step in health culture,” she called it. She envisioned the struggle against compulsory vaccination leading to a broader, popular movement for health, a grassroots culture alternative to, and when necessary in opposition to, the official, top-down health movement of the state.
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T
he most ambitious American antivaccinationists tried to use the political system to abolish compulsory vaccination. The decentralized structure of the American political system made their task fundamentally different from that of their counterparts in England. Although the English Vaccination Acts were administered locally, they were the legislative product of a single national body, Parliament. That focused reform efforts. A half century of protest and lobbying culminated in the hearings before the Royal Commission on Vaccination, which in turn persuaded Parliament to make an exception for conscientious objectors. The U.S. Congress had no such power. When public health officials and medical societies sought authority to enforce vaccination on unwilling members of the public, they necessarily turned to local boards of health and education, city councils, county courts, and, ultimately, to state legislatures. The antivaccinationists had to make their case for abolishing compulsion to the same bodies.

Antivaccinationists used every political weapon available. They flooded legislatures with petitions. They litigated. They turned out the vote. Although the “tyrannical” boards of health were normally appointive bodies, insulated from democratic pressures, local school boards were typically elective. During the epidemics of 1898–1903, a number of communities made their school board elections turn upon the candidates' positions on the vaccination question. The voters of Norwich, Connecticut, turned their board of education into a bulwark against compulsion.
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But in the antivaccination fight, the big game was a state law banning compulsory vaccination. From Massachusetts to California, several state legislatures debated such measures around the turn of the century. In the end, the antivaccinationists won their biggest victory in the nation's youngest state.

In 1900, the predominantly Mormon state of Utah was just four years old. With smallpox threatening in the mountain states, Utah became a battleground over compulsory vaccination. That year, three thousand cases of smallpox were reported to the state board of health; twenty-six people had died. The scale of the epidemic alarmed health officials, but its relative mildness (with a case-fatality rate of less than 1 percent) sharpened popular sentiment against compulsion. The new mild type variola virus continued to spread dissension as efficiently as it did disease.
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In January, when Salt Lake City boards of health and education moved to compel vaccination of public schoolchildren, a de facto schools strike erupted. Eight thousand of the city's schoolchildren failed to present “the scars of vaccination entitling them to their seats.” In April, one Salt Lake father, John E. Cox, won a court order compelling the school board to admit his unvaccinated daughter; on appeal, the Utah Supreme Court upheld the board's action as a “reasonable regulation in the aid of the public health.” The Salt Lake Medical Society and the state and local boards of health came to the defense of compulsion. Meanwhile, meetings of the Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League in Salt Lake City attracted crowds of two hundred people or more.
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Like many other leagues that first surfaced during the epidemics of 1898–1903, the Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League formed in response to a new effort to enforce vaccination. Unlike the long-standing antivaccination societies (the sort that produced journals and books), these new leagues were not necessarily led by irregular doctors eager to drive back state medicine in general. Instead, these more transient political organizations tended to be single-issue groups with a much broader base of activated people. They borrowed rhetoric and ideas from the antivaccination literature but in the interest of their own immediate fight. These groups could be stunningly effective.

The Utah league left a fuller impression on the historical record than most. The
Salt Lake Herald
covered its meetings and reported the names of the league's leaders, speakers, and members assigned to draft resolutions—a cross-section of nineteen of the most involved members. All of these activists, who came to meetings in the Fourteenth Ward from areas across the city, were white (hardly surprising for Salt Lake City in 1900). And most were male. In economic status, the group ranged more widely. Lucretia Kimball, a banker's wife, served on the resolutions committee with publisher J. H. Parry, bookkeeper D. H. Tatham, wrapper-of-dry-goods H. J. Walk, and hardware salesman James M. Barlow. The first elected officers of the league included President Thomas Hull, an office manager; Vice President Scott Anderson, a bill poster; Secretary C. S. Booth, a bookkeeper; and Treasurer Bernard H. Schettler, a banker. More than half (ten) of the activists had been born outside the United States: a striking number (seven) were natives of Great Britain, two hailed from Sweden, and one from Germany—all countries where compulsory vaccination of infants was national policy. But the nine others were native-born Americans, the majority from Utah. All in all, the group seems to have been a bastion of white, male, taxpaying respectability—neither a working-class “mob” nor a “coterie” of “crank” doctors.
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The 1900 Census reveals the most important commonality among these members. All but one was a parent of one or more schoolchildren. (The other, attorney LeGrande Young, had children who were already grown.) Most of the members had large families. H. J. Walk had nine children living at home, including three at school and three school-bound. Of the six children in Bernard Schettler's household, four were still in school. The Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was an organization of local taxpaying parents with a strong sense of ownership in the city's schools.

Outside critics, including
The Denver Post
, decried the surging antivaccination movement in Utah as a Mormon phenomenon—a charge local newspapers such as the Ogden
Standard-Examiner
roundly denied. Neither census records nor local newspaper accounts identified the religious composition of the league, though its membership certainly matched the profile of a predominantly Mormon organization. Church leaders were in fact divided on the issue. Although Mormon teachings had nothing in particular to say about vaccination, decades of political conflict with the U.S. government prepared Utah Mormons to view with distrust any use of government authority to impose scientific beliefs or behavioral mandates upon the public without democratic deliberation. Distinctly Mormon voices—such as Charles W. Penrose's
Deseret Evening News
, an organ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—applauded the public opposition to compulsory vaccination. Still, religious imagery and language is notably absent from the public record of the controversy. The
Deseret Evening News
said the people of Utah were open to persuasion on the vaccination question: “It is the policy of force which arouses the indignity of the great bulk of the citizens.” The relative homogeneity of the Utah citizenry may help explain the exceptionally strong support there for antivaccinationism. But there is little evidence to suggest that most Mormons viewed antivaccination as a Mormon cause.
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The goals and rhetoric of the Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League reflected its broad social base. Its purpose was not to debate the merits of vaccination, but to prevent the Salt Lake City Board of Health from compelling healthy schoolchildren—
their
healthy schoolchildren—to submit to the procedure. Beyond that, the organization urged the legislature to “keep from the statutes anything that savors of compulsory vaccination.” The league made its case in the constitutional keywords of American public life: popular sovereignty, separation of powers, and the rule of law. “The highest medical authority is divided on the question of vaccination,” one resolution noted, “many taking the ground that it is always dangerous, and sometimes productive of fatal results.” To date, the legislature had faithfully “expressed the sentiment of the people by refusing to pass a compulsory vaccination law.” The health board's action—“to compel a medical operation not authorized by law” and not justified by the “condition of the public health”—threatened to “usurp the authority of the people.” The people should resist by “an emphatic protest.” And that the people delivered.
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The climax of Utah's “vaccination war” came in January 1901, as the legislature debated a bill introduced by Rep. William McMillan, a Mormon bishop from Salt Lake City. The McMillan bill made it unlawful for any public board to compel the vaccination of any “person of any age” or to make vaccination “a condition precedent to the attendance at any public or private school in the state of Utah, either as pupil or as teacher.” The bill was the most controversial piece of legislation in the state's short life. While the hearings went on, the Salt Lake Board of Education passed a resolution, on a slim majority of 5 to 4, holding that it was “not the duty” of school officials and teachers to enforce the Utah Board of Health's vaccination order. At the insistence of Dr. T. B. Beatty, secretary of the state board, those five members of the local school board were arrested. The Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League held a mass meeting, adopting “strong resolutions” in favor of the McMillan bill. Inside the statehouse, the defenders of compulsion seemed determined to confirm their critics' worst charges about them. Dr. Beatty testified that the critics of vaccination did not understand science. Dr. Alexander MacLean offered to expose his own vaccinated son to “the most virulent forms of smallpox” in the city pesthouse, if a critic of vaccination agreed to “subject his unvaccinated child to a similar danger.”
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On January 31, 1901, the Utah legislature passed the McMillan bill by a wide margin: 37 to 6 in the House, 13 to 5 in the Senate. Governor Heber M. Wells vetoed the bill. “To place among our statutes such a bill would be a step backwards, which will be disastrous,” he cautioned. Political credibility seemed to loom as large in his mind as public health. He had received dispatches from nearly every American governor, standing “almost as a unit for vaccination.” If the law stood, Utah would be one of the few states that forbade local boards of health to order vaccination to stamp out smallpox. Both houses of the legislature voted to override Wells's veto. Newspapers and medical journals across America reported with disbelief the anti-vaccinationists' triumph. The
Medical Standard
denounced the law as a “pronunciamento”—a Mormon coup d'état. “It is an unpleasant thing to suggest at the present juncture and we hope our friends in Utah may be spared,” the journal warned, “but it usually happens that chickens of this kind ‘come home to roost.' ”
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The following year, Immanuel Pfeiffer and the Massachusetts antivaccinationists put several bills before the General Court's joint committee on public health. All of the bills aimed to repeal the state's compulsory vaccination laws. All were killed in committee, an outcome the activists may well have anticipated. Antivaccination bills were a more common event in Massachusetts than in Utah. The packed hearings on Beacon Hill had the aspect of ritualized performances: public bouts between old foes who knew each other's arguments well. But that did not lessen the public drama.