Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [145]
Many antivaccinationists had close intellectual and personal ties to a largely forgotten American tradition and subculture of libertarian radicalism. That tradition took on a feverish new life as industrial capitalism, progressive reform, and the professionalization of knowledge fostered the rise of a distinctly modern interventionist state during the Progressive Era. The same men and women who joined antivaccination leagues tended to throw themselves into other maligned causes of their era, including anti-imperialism, women’s rights, antivivisection, vegetarianism, Henry George’s single tax, the fight against government censorship of “obscene” materials (under the late nineteenth-century “Comstock laws”), and opposition to state eugenics. Seventy-year-old Dr. Montague R. Leverson—an English immigrant, onetime California state assemblyman, and perennial leader of the Brooklyn Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League—was denounced, accurately, by The New York Times as “an extreme advocate of personal liberty,” an “untiring writer of letters and pamphlets” on “all sorts of impracticable theories” from the injustice of the obscenity laws to the lawlessness of the U.S. war in the Philippines. It was the antivaccinationists’ uncompromising defense of personal liberty, as they understood it—and not merely their unorthodox medical beliefs—that placed them, in the eyes of so many of their contemporaries, on the wrong side of history. That same “crankiness” makes their words and works an unusually revealing porthole to their times.17
Antivaccinationism was a worldwide phenomenon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The American activists were well aware of the vaccination riots that rocked Montreal in 1885 and Rio de Janeiro in 1904. They knew (if only through Kipling’s stories) of the grassroots resistance that Britain’s vaccination campaigns had aroused across India. But given their common language and the legal and political traditions that they shared, American antivaccinationists always felt an especially close connection to their English counterparts. And together the English and American antivaccinationists proudly claimed the mantle of another unpopular movement: the transatlantic nineteenth-century antislavery movement.18
A natural affinity linked abolitionism and antivaccinationism. Both upheld bodily self-possession as the sine qua non of human freedom; both distrusted institutions; and each evoked public scorn in its time as the dangerous cause of a lunatic fringe. Frederick Douglass told an English correspondent in 1882 that compulsory vaccination had long offended his “logical faculty” as a man “opposed to every species of arbitrary power.” Some antivaccinationists, including the English leader William Tebb ( 1830–1917) and the California spiritualist Dr. James Martin Peebles (1822–1922), lived long enough to participate in both movements. For others, antislavery provided a rich source of moral inspiration and political rhetoric. Beginning in 1902, Lora C. Little of Minneapolis edited The Liberator, a smartly written antivaccination journal named after William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper from antebellum Boston. Little’s Liberator was well known to Garrison’s son, William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. (1838–1909), a businessman reformer whose causes included anti-imperialism, free trade, women’s rights, repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and antivaccinationism. During the 1840s the elder Garrison renounced the U.S. Constitution as a pro-slavery compact, a “covenant with death,” and “an agreement