Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [146]
For men and women who espoused a form of radical individualism, critics of vaccination were quick to recognize the power of association. “From all parts of the state, and indeed from all parts of the country,” declared the Minneapolis-based Northwestern Lancet in February 1901, “come reports of the organization of small anti-vaccination societies, whose first work is to embarrass health and school officials in their efforts to prevent the spread of small-pox.” As vaccination enforcement surged, organizations long moribund sprang back to life and new leagues appeared on the scene. The longest-running groups had formed in response to the first major wave of compulsory vaccination laws during the 1870s and 1880s. The granddaddy of them all, the Anti-Vaccination Society of America, was established in New York in 1879, during a visit from England’s William Tebb.
Between 1879 and 1900, other organizations formed, including the New England Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League (1882, Hartford), the American Anti-Vaccination Society (1885, New York), the American AntiVaccination League (1889, New York, claiming 380 members by 1901), and an Indiana-based organization called the Anti-Vaccination Society of America (1895, claiming 200 members by 1901). Around the turn of the century, state leagues were up and running in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Utah, and other states, in addition to the welter of local societies in communities such as Berkeley, Boston, Brooklyn, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and St. Paul. The existence of two distinct organizations, each calling itself “the” AntiVaccination Society of America, attests to a lack of coordination in the movement. The antivaccinationists had little of the organizational discipline (or membership base) of a national interest group such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, whose success in winning protective legislation for female factory workers rested on its ability to mobilize affiliated organizations at every level of the polity. By comparison to the GFWC, the antivaccination movement was an unmade bed.20
Still, even their detractors had to admit that the antivaccinationists constituted a genuine movement, complete with its own polemicists, its own journals (notably the Terre Haute–based Vaccination, 1898–1906, and The Liberator, 1898–1907); its own international literature of pamphlets and books; and its own lawyers (including C. Oscar Beasley of Philadelphia, who specialized in vaccine injury suits, and Harry Weinberger of New York, for whom antivaccination was part of a distinguished career in defense of civil liberties). The societies sent delegates to international congresses in Paris, Cologne, and Berlin. Every well-read American antivaccinationist knew that Leo Tolstoy sympathized with the cause, as he did “with every struggle for liberty in any sphere of life”; that George Bernard Shaw called vaccination “a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft”; and that the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had predicted, in 1898, that the practice “will, before many years have passed, be universally held to be one of the foulest blots on the civilization of the nineteenth century.” As American antivaccinationists saw the international “Vaccination Question,” theirs was the enlightened view of the matter. The apologists for state medicine were the true cranks. The antivaccinationists were determined to wipe the blot of compulsion from the statute books of the United States.21
Who were the antivaccinationists?