Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [130]
In the winter of 1899, Surgeon General Wyman received a flurry of dispatches from Laredo, a border city of 15,000 people, the majority of them of Mexican descent. Virulent smallpox had raged there for months, with 376 cases and 83 deaths reported in January and February. (The death rate indicates an epidemic of classic variola major.) Hamilton advised the local authorities “to issue some law compelling vaccination, by force if necessary.” In March, Texas health officer W. T. Blunt arrived from Austin. City officials set about fumigating homes, vaccinating, and removing infected residents by force to the pesthouse. The actions targeted the poorer barrios on the east side of town. Meeting strong resistance from the residents, Blunt called in the Texas Rangers. In the ensuing violence, one Mexican American leader was killed, thirteen people were wounded, and twenty-one were arrested. A contingent of the U.S. Tenth Cavalry arrived, and Hamilton took charge of the local vaccination corps. Even with so many soldiers in the area, fifteen residents “had to be reported, arrested, and then vaccinated.”36
Even beyond the nation’s borders, the mark of vaccination became a powerful signifier of American rule. In September 1905, more than 650 black contract laborers from Martinique traveled aboard the French steamship Versailles to Colón, a port city located near the Atlantic entrance to the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone. As the crowded ship approached the port, laborers in canoes paddled up to the ship, warning the passengers that poor treatment and harsh conditions awaited them on shore. The messengers said that vaccination, required of all immigrant laborers by the American sanitary regulations of the Isthmian Canal Commission, would produce “an inextinguishable mark” that would make it impossible for them ever to leave the Isthmus. The migrants refused to leave the ship. The next morning, officials persuaded 500 of them to land. But 150 men remained on board and demanded to be returned to Martinique. A force of Panamanian and Canal Zone police forced the migrants from the ship. According to The Washington Post, “nearly everyone of them had been clubbed, and several were bleeding from nasty wounds.” Many had jumped overboard. Later that same afternoon, all of the laborers were vaccinated, loaded on a train, and shipped out to Corozal, where they were put to work building the canal.37
In the hands of a subordinate people, a rumor can be a surprisingly potent political tool—a “weapon of the weak”—even when the rumor is not true. But the canoe riders of Colón did not exaggerate. In the Canal Zone, only the immigrant workers were compelled to be vaccinated. The doctors uniformly scraped their right arms. Foremen and canal officials used the marks—much as the slave catchers of the remembered past had used brands—to identify and apprehend runaway workers in the Panamanian jungle.38
Watching with dismay as smallpox spread across the American heartland in 1901, Dr. James Hyde of Chicago’s Rush Medical School urged state and local governments to use their full police powers to eradicate this affront to modern civilization. Like many of his professional peers, Hyde found the metaphor of the vaccine scar as passport irresistible. He urged that American governments require this medical mark for entry into the country’s civic spaces. “Vaccination should be the seal on the passport of entrance to the public schools, to the voters’ booth, to the box of the juryman, and to every position of duty, privilege, profit or honor in the gift of either the State or the Nation,” he declared. In one respect, vaccination seemed superior to a printed identity document; this government-certified ticket of immunity was stamped indelibly upon the body. Seasoned health officials did not trust the paper vaccination certificates issued by private physicians; they always