Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [140]
In March 1901, two cases of smallpox were discovered in Orange, New Jersey, a city of 24,000 known for its hat-making industry. The board of health hired a builder to construct a pesthouse at the city dump. But the site was surrounded by tenements filled with Italian workers and their families. As the carpenters set to work, a crowd gathered. By evening, 300 angry residents and just two policemen had gathered at the site. The crowd rushed the pesthouse. Someone lit a pile of wood shavings, and within minutes a blaze was making its way toward the structure. Firemen arrived, but a group of the residents stood on their hose, while one tried to cut it with a knife. Clubs flying, the police arrested three men. More police arrived, the crowd was driven back, and the fire was extinguished. The next night, a single pistol shot rang out at the dump. Men carrying axes and crowbars poured out from the surrounding tenements. In a few minutes they reduced the building to splinters. For good measure, a crowd returned later and set fire to the pile of broken wood.77
In the wake of the incident, the Orange Common Council refused to authorize construction of another pesthouse. The New York Times lamented that the revolt illustrated “the readiness with which well-ordered and generally law-abiding communities revert to barbarism when their fears or evil passions are aroused.” But one letter writer from Orange, a self-described “Sympathizer with the People,” saw justice in the crowd’s actions. “Simply because the residents in the vicinity of the ‘dump ground’ are working people they are to be made uncomfortable and their health and that of their children endangered because the Board of Health—so-called—chose to put a pesthouse up in the midst of their dwellings,” the sympathizer wrote. “Legally, I suppose, the people were in the wrong, but morally they had every right to act as they did.”78
The altogether ordinary Americans who defied public health measures during the nation’s turn-of-the-century war on smallpox left a deep mark upon the historical record. In their actions rather than their words—which, unlike those of the well-organized, predominantly middle-class antivaccinationists, were rarely recorded—they created a public transcript of opposition to the growth of institutional power in everyday life during the Progressive Era.
That record of dissent had political consequences. It forced compulsion to show its true self. It emboldened the antivaccination movement. It raised doubts in the heads of some lawmakers and a governor or two. And it even made an impression upon the institutions most removed from the common people, the courts. “It is a matter of common knowledge that the number of those who seriously object to vaccination is by no means small,” observed Justice Orrin Carter of the Illinois Supreme Court, “and they cannot, except when necessary for the public health and in conformity to law, be deprived of their right to protect themselves and those under their control from an invasion of their liberties by a practically compulsory inoculation of their bodies with a virus of any description, however meritorious it might be.”79
Compulsion engendered resistance even in those tightest of spaces whose inhabitants had no legal claim to liberty at all: prisons and jails. Vaccination was a routine part of penal discipline in the United States, as the young Jack London discovered when he was arrested for vagrancy during his long tramp across North America in the 1890s. London recounted the experience in a chapter of his book War of the Classes (1905), entitled “How I Became a Socialist.” While traveling near Niagara Falls, he was “nabbed by a fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty, sentenced out of hand to thirty days’ imprisonment for having no fixed abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed and chained to a bunch of men similarly circumstanced, carted down country to Buffalo, registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had my head clipped and my budding