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knew better than to expect their bosses or the state to support them during that period of disability. Some washed off vaccine (as Martin Friedrich spied workmen doing at an Ohio factory). Others walked off job sites rather than be vaccinated. African American workers, in particular, dreaded vaccination. In June 1900, the New York State Board of Health ordered the vaccination of five hundred black workers at the Wash & Company brickyard in Stockport, New York, about thirty miles down the Hudson from Albany. According to The New York Times, when fifty of the laborers “refused to submit,” Governor Theodore Roosevelt sent in the Hudson Company of the state militia, “ninety men strong,” to enforce vaccination against the “unruly negroes.”51

Violence was always a possibility when health officials clashed with American workers. In 1902, smallpox struck the neighboring mining cities of Lead and Deadwood, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Both cities ordered a general vaccination, but the miners balked. The city physician of Lead—accompanied by four assistants, the sheriff, and five deputies—conducted a nighttime raid of the city’s crowded saloons, gambling dens, and theaters. At the Gold Mine Saloon, the officers covered both entrances and proceeded to vaccinate everyone in the place. Several fights broke out, but eventually the police overwhelmed the miners.52

Controlling smallpox on the nation’s vast network of railroads was obviously a crucial step to stamping out the American epidemics. But how? In the winter of 1902, Chicago health officials announced a Chicago-sized plan. The Second City stood at the hub of the nation’s transportation networks. The same central geographical position that made Chicago such an economic force—bringing grain, lumber, and livestock from the rural hinterland to American markets and sending Montgomery Ward catalogues back in the other direction—made the city vulnerable to smallpox outbreaks all over the Middle West. In January 1902, about 10,000 cases of smallpox—roughly three fourths of all reported cases in the United States—occurred within a few hours’ train ride from Chicago. The Chicago Health Department decided to use the Second City’s position as the railroad hub of the Middle West to stamp out smallpox in a ten-state region with 25 million inhabitants. City health officials made an agreement with officials of the major companies serving Chicago to spur “wholesale vaccination and revaccination in every infected locality” of the region by enforcing a strict inspection of all travelers from those communities. The railroads also ordered all of their employees serving the Chicago routes to submit to vaccination or lose their jobs. And every car entering the city from any direction had to be fumigated for six hours before new passengers were allowed to enter it.53

Across the American political landscape, public ambivalence about compulsory vaccination during the turn-of-the-century epidemics registered in the statute books. Mississippi, one of the states hardest hit by virulent smallpox in 1900 and 1901, enacted a new law authorizing county boards to order compulsory vaccination (which many refused to do). Rhode Island passed a new law in 1902 that mandated vaccination of all children before their second birthday and empowered the state board of health to order vaccination of all “inmates of hotels, manufacturing establishments, hospitals, asylums, and correctional institutions.” That same year, Massachusetts gave local health boards authority to compel vaccination at will.54

Other states, though, moved the other way. Wisconsin governor Robert M. La Follette vetoed a new compulsion statute in 1901, insisting (as the Journal of the American Medical Association remarked with disbelief) that “he does not believe an emergency exists which demands a law repugnant to so many good citizens!” In Utah that same year, grassroots opposition to compulsory public school vaccination spurred the legislature to pass a law banning compulsion. The Wasatch Wave applauded the statute: “it robs the tyrant