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system to abolish compulsory vaccination. The decentralized structure of the American political system made their task fundamentally different from that of their counterparts in England. Although the English Vaccination Acts were administered locally, they were the legislative product of a single national body, Parliament. That focused reform efforts. A half century of protest and lobbying culminated in the hearings before the Royal Commission on Vaccination, which in turn persuaded Parliament to make an exception for conscientious objectors. The U.S. Congress had no such power. When public health officials and medical societies sought authority to enforce vaccination on unwilling members of the public, they necessarily turned to local boards of health and education, city councils, county courts, and, ultimately, to state legislatures. The antivaccinationists had to make their case for abolishing compulsion to the same bodies.

Antivaccinationists used every political weapon available. They flooded legislatures with petitions. They litigated. They turned out the vote. Although the “tyrannical” boards of health were normally appointive bodies, insulated from democratic pressures, local school boards were typically elective. During the epidemics of 1898–1903, a number of communities made their school board elections turn upon the candidates’ positions on the vaccination question. The voters of Norwich, Connecticut, turned their board of education into a bulwark against compulsion.65

But in the antivaccination fight, the big game was a state law banning compulsory vaccination. From Massachusetts to California, several state legislatures debated such measures around the turn of the century. In the end, the antivaccinationists won their biggest victory in the nation’s youngest state.

In 1900, the predominantly Mormon state of Utah was just four years old. With smallpox threatening in the mountain states, Utah became a battleground over compulsory vaccination. That year, three thousand cases of smallpox were reported to the state board of health; twenty-six people had died. The scale of the epidemic alarmed health officials, but its relative mildness (with a case-fatality rate of less than 1 percent) sharpened popular sentiment against compulsion. The new mild type variola virus continued to spread dissension as efficiently as it did disease.66

In January, when Salt Lake City boards of health and education moved to compel vaccination of public schoolchildren, a de facto schools strike erupted. Eight thousand of the city’s schoolchildren failed to present “the scars of vaccination entitling them to their seats.” In April, one Salt Lake father, John E. Cox, won a court order compelling the school board to admit his unvaccinated daughter; on appeal, the Utah Supreme Court upheld the board’s action as a “reasonable regulation in the aid of the public health.” The Salt Lake Medical Society and the state and local boards of health came to the defense of compulsion. Meanwhile, meetings of the Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League in Salt Lake City attracted crowds of two hundred people or more.67

Like many other leagues that first surfaced during the epidemics of 1898–1903, the Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League formed in response to a new effort to enforce vaccination. Unlike the long-standing antivaccination societies (the sort that produced journals and books), these new leagues were not necessarily led by irregular doctors eager to drive back state medicine in general. Instead, these more transient political organizations tended to be single-issue groups with a much broader base of activated people. They borrowed rhetoric and ideas from the antivaccination literature but in the interest of their own immediate fight. These groups could be stunningly effective.

The Utah league left a fuller impression on the historical record than most. The Salt Lake Herald covered its meetings and reported the names of the league’s leaders, speakers, and members assigned to draft resolutions—a cross-section of nineteen of the most involved