Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [150]
In 1900, with the vaccination controversy heating up across the United States, church leaders adopted a new conciliatory stance toward the government. By that time, the young church had gained extensive experience with the American legal system. Christian Science parents had faced prosecution for failing to provide medical treatment for sick children. In some states, authorities arrested Christian Scientists for practicing medicine without a license. (In their defense, the faith healers argued that they were “practicing religion, not medicine,” an argument for religious liberty that American courts increasingly accepted.) In 1900, Eddy issued a terse statement on compulsory vaccination. She advised her followers that “if the law demand an individual to submit to this process, he obey the law; and then appeal to the gospel to save him from any bad results.” Two years later, Eddy advised Christian Scientists to cooperate with health boards by reporting contagious diseases, including smallpox. Both actions were taken in a time when the church and its faithful were struggling for recognition and religious liberty in the states. Eddy cited Matthew 22:21: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” But reports from local communities showed that some Christian Scientists continued to dodge vaccination and to insist upon healing smallpox-infected family members by prayer alone.34
Concerned parents formed the largest recruitment pool for the antivaccination societies. Many American parents, including many who would never formally join a society, viewed school vaccination requirements as an unwarranted usurpation of their domestic authority and an unconstitutional denial of every child’s “right” to a public education. More viscerally, many parents feared vaccination would harm their children. Behind almost every antivaccination leader lay a family horror story. J. W. Griggs, president of the Anti-Vaccination Society of St. Paul, recalled how he lost his “faith in the strange practice” of vaccination when his daughter got small-pox, even though she had been vaccinated twice for school. “I began to study the question,” he wrote. “As I looked into it, I began to see the dangers of this process of poisoning the fountain of life, and a little at a time to learn of the disasters and deaths resulting from it—some immediately, and others more remotely; and thus I was stimulated actively to oppose the practice and to work for the repeal of the compulsory vaccination law in this State.” The Pittsburgh industrialist John Pitcairn, already wary of vaccination as an adherent of homeopathy and the Swedenborgian religion, recalled the suffering of his son Raymond from complications of vaccination. Liberator editor Lora Little (of Minneapolis) and Louis H. Piehn (an Iowa banker and first president of the midwestern Anti-Vaccination Society of America) each had a child die from the effects, they believed, of state-mandated school vaccination.35
Critics had trouble making up their minds about the influence of antivaccinationist ideas on American public opinion. Reporting on a meeting of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brooklyn in 1901, the Timessneeringly commented, “Nine men, one boy, and seven reporters were present.” Of course, the same words attested to the antivaccinationists’ talent for getting their message heard. Health officials dismissed them as inconsequential anonymities, but when their own vaccination campaigns came up short, the same men blamed antivaccinationism. “Although the vaccine house is built upon a rock, and is not likely to fall,” declared one Boston health department bulletin in 1902, “the noisy storm has frightened many of our people into a dangerous neglect or opposition to vaccinal protection.”36
Antivaccinationism was as old as vaccination itself. In the United States, the protest actually preceded the practice. In 1798, two years before Dr. Benjamin