Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [157]
Was antivaccinationism antiprogressive? Most defenders of compulsory vaccination thought so. To them, antivaccinationism was founded in misguided individualism and willful ignorance. Antivaccinationists countered that theirs was the true cause of progress. Vaccination, they pointed out, originated as a folk remedy—“the tradition of the milk-maids”—promoted by Jenner back when physicians still routinely bled their patients. The medical profession’s blind adherence to the Jennerian rite had diverted resources from sanitation and hygiene, the real scientific advances of the nineteenth century. The genuine American progressives were men like Tom Johnson and Martin Friedrich of Cleveland, who stood up to the cowpox trust and abandoned the dangerous and unpopular policy of vaccination. Benjamin O. Flower, founder of the reform magazine Arena, praised Cleveland’s action as an example of “the best progressive thought of the age.”60
To some antivaccinationists, the progressiveness of their cause lay in their fundamental belief in the right of ordinary citizens in a democracy to participate in scientific deliberation and medical decision making. Antivaccinationists pointed out that the demand for compulsory vaccination laws had not come from the general public but from health officials and medical societies. Which was why compulsory vaccination so often joined the regular physician’s lancet to the policeman’s nightstick.61
Lora Little—the movement’s most democratic voice—was a keen student of the burgeoning American archive of popular resistance to compulsory vaccination. Violent imagery pervaded antivaccination texts: the frontispiece of Clymer’s book pictured a police officer, armed with a copy of the Vaccination Law, seizing a baby from its mother’s lap while the angel of death waited with open arms. Lora Little found material enough in the public record. “It is for this ghoulish work that churches, theaters, business blocks, and whole neighborhoods have been raided;” she wrote, “ocean liners’ populations cowpoxed; a shipload of negro laborers driven off the vessel with clubs at Panama, and poisoned in spite of resistance; arrests have been made and innocent persons cast into jail and there jabbed with the virus; and most atrocious of all, the annual army of babies graduating from nursery into school are required to bare their little arms and receive this injection of disease.” For middle-class antivaccinationists, the plight of working-class vaccine refusers, “pinioned by police officers and vaccinated,” revealed the “tyranny” and “despotism” of the entire system of state medicine. “If this can be done and upheld by the legal machinery of this country, what next have we to expect?” asked Clymer. “Why not chase people and circumcise them? It surely would be a good preventative against certain kinds of disease. Why not catch the people and give each a compulsory bath?”62
It may sound absurd to contemporary ears, but antivaccinationists were in fact more conscious than were most progressives of the coercive potential of the new interventionist state. In a few short years, American eugenicists would be persuading state legislatures to enact compulsory sterilization laws for the “feeble-minded,” epileptics, and other people deemed “unfit” to reproduce. The eugenicists’ chief legal precedent for their measures would be compulsory vaccination.63
For Lora Little, though, antivaccinationism was ultimately more than a struggle for personal liberty—though it most certainly was that. It was also a progressive movement for the democratization of health. “A first step in health culture,” she called it. She envisioned the struggle against compulsory vaccination leading to a broader, popular movement for health, a grassroots culture alternative to, and when necessary in opposition to, the official, top-down health movement of the state.64
The most ambitious American antivaccinationists tried to use the political