Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [154]
The finest American example of the victims-of-vaccination genre was Lora Little’s 1906 book, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring: Some Moving Pictures Thrown on the Dead Wall of Official Silence. The culmination of Little’s work as editor of The Liberator, the book delivered on the muckraking promise of its title. Little was the Ida Tarbell of the antivaccination movement, a dogged reporter driven by a powerful vision of the injustices committed by business interests in collusion with corrupt or feckless state governments. Little drew upon the most effective tactics of the contemporary muckraking genre. Hers was a journalism of exposure, built from interviews, affidavits, and the public record, and written in the sensational style that made Lincoln Steffens a household name. And like thousands of muckraking pieces that appeared in American magazines between 1900 and World War I, Little’s book narrated a clash of “the people” against organized economic interests through affecting portraits of individuals. With its short profiles of 336 “victims” of vaccination, most of them fatal, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring was not just an indictment of vaccination and its perpetrators. The book was a compendium of pain and loss. The most moving story in it was Little’s own.50
Born in 1856, in a log cabin in the Minnesota Territory, Lora Little had worked as a seamstress, teacher, printer, and homemaker. In Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, she described her painful decision to allow her only child, seven-year-old Kenneth, to be vaccinated in 1895 so he could attend public school in Yonkers, New York. “He must go to school, and he could not go to school until he was vaccinated,” she recalled. “Here was a risk. Children had died from vaccination. Why subject my only darling to this thing?” But all the other children were getting vaccinated. “He needed the association that school life afforded. If I were to keep him at home and teach him myself, and he miss the common lot, and be marked as an exception, perhaps as queer, with a freakish mother who would not let him be vaccinated—how would all this affect his life?” It was a dilemma shared by countless mothers and fathers. Little feared not only the loss of the privilege of a public education but social ostracism, for her child and herself. Ultimately, she consented. Kenneth was vaccinated. Soon after, he suffered an attack of “catarrh of severe and stubborn kind,” followed by measles, and then diphtheria “without known exposure.” It was the diphtheria that killed him. Though she could never prove it, Little was convinced the vaccination was to blame. “My child was as really torn from me by the vaccinator, as tho he had died the day his arm was punctured.” Three years later, Little was living with her husband, a civil engineer, in Minneapolis, speaking out against the local school board’s vaccination rule and criticizing the Army’s system of vaccination.51
In Crimes, Little argued that vaccination persisted, in the face of great opposition, because it served the economic interests of its “agents and producers.” The “cowpox ring” had always been willing to face down the statistical evidence that vaccination was no preventive of smallpox. But they responded with a “conspiracy of silence” to the “other side of the statistical question, the ruin wrought by vaccine virus.” This silence was the ring’s “last and most impregnable stronghold.”52
She began collecting cases on January 1, 1902, culling newspapers and conducting interviews with “the afflicted” or a surviving parent or relative. Even though she was unable to investigate all of the reports and rumors she received, she went to press with the stories of 336 confirmed (to her satisfaction) victims of vaccination from across the United States. She provided names, dates, and locations for each case (including many verifiable in surviving local newspapers). Most of the accidents had happened during the epidemics of 1898–1903. The “victims” suffered postvaccination complications including anemia, blindness, blood