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learned that the key to health was to preserve the body’s “integrity”—the soundness of its constitution, the purity of its blood. Vaccinators invaded “the integrity of the healthy body,” said Dr. Hodge, penetrating the skin and corrupting the blood. How could introducing pus matter from a diseased cow into a healthy human body possibly protect a person from disease? “The right of every man to his own body, to keep it clean and pure and uncontaminated by poison, the right of every parent to guard the life and health of his children, are among the most sacred of human rights!” declared the New York–based Anti-Vaccination News and Sanatorian. Lora Little agreed. “It is because vaccination robs us of our physical integrity, contaminates and destroys our bodies,” she wrote, “that we object to it.”57

The vaccination question always circled back to freedom of belief. Chairman Durgin dared the Boston antivaccinationists to test their “belief ” through a public “exhibition of faith, by exposure to smallpox without vaccination.” American antivaccinationists proposed their own test of the state’s vaccination “rite.” “Let those, then, who have faith in the rite get poxed just as often as they choose to, and be satisfied with their own ‘protection,’ ” said J. W. Hodge. “Being themselves ‘secure’ they can have no valid reason for inflicting the loathsome rite upon the unwilling and unbelieving.” Public health officials countered that the purpose of universal vaccination was to render an entire community invulnerable to infection. Still, even some of the most ardent believers in compulsion, such as The New York Times, had to concede there was “a shadow of logic” in arguments like Hodge’s. The Times cited the “natural inclination” of the enlightened public not to see “fellow-mortals cut off untimely by a preventable disease.” Beyond altruism, another motive justified compulsion. “[T]he presence of smallpox in any community endangers business as well as life,” said the Times.58

The antivaccinationists’ libertarian radicalism seems utterly out of place in the Progressive Era. Their uncompromising defense of personal liberty sounds almost quaint next to the progressive intellectuals’ brilliant assault upon laissez-faire and classical liberal individualism. As the forces of industrial capitalism and urbanization fashioned a more connected and self-consciously interdependent society around the turn of the century, leading progressives—including Jane Addams, Louis Brandeis, and John Dewey—called for a new liberalism that would value social interests above individual autonomy. Under modern social conditions, the progressives argued, a new concept of liberty was required. Liberty defined as “freedom from” government interference (the right to be left alone) may have made sense in the agrarian world of Jefferson and Jackson. But in Roosevelt’s United States—an industrial nation of cosmopolitan cities, powerful corporations, and stark inequalities between rich and poor—the old liberty fell short. “Real liberty,” redefined as the individual citizen’s capacity to participate fully in the economy and polity, required purposeful government intervention. In this new self-consciously “social” age in Europe and the United States—with its movements for social Christianity, social democracy, and socialized law—the antivaccinationists carried the torch for individualism.59

But their individualism was not simply a quaint artifact of America’s agrarian past. No less than the progressives’ concept of social interdependence, the antivaccinationists’ individualism bore the impress of its historical moment. The antivaccinationists fashioned their defense of a robust conception of personal liberty—bodily integrity, freedom of belief, the right not to participate in a state-sanctioned rite—in response to real changes in American society, culture, and politics. Like Mill, writing in Victorian England, the turn-of-the-century American antivaccinationists wrote at a time when their government was in fact reaching more deeply than ever before into their nation’s economy