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members. All of these activists, who came to meetings in the Fourteenth Ward from areas across the city, were white (hardly surprising for Salt Lake City in 1900). And most were male. In economic status, the group ranged more widely. Lucretia Kimball, a banker’s wife, served on the resolutions committee with publisher J. H. Parry, bookkeeper D. H. Tatham, wrapper-of-dry-goods H. J. Walk, and hardware salesman James M. Barlow. The first elected officers of the league included President Thomas Hull, an office manager; Vice President Scott Anderson, a bill poster; Secretary C. S. Booth, a bookkeeper; and Treasurer Bernard H. Schettler, a banker. More than half (ten) of the activists had been born outside the United States: a striking number (seven) were natives of Great Britain, two hailed from Sweden, and one from Germany—all countries where compulsory vaccination of infants was national policy. But the nine others were native-born Americans, the majority from Utah. All in all, the group seems to have been a bastion of white, male, taxpaying respectability—neither a working-class “mob” nor a “coterie” of “crank” doctors.68

The 1900 Census reveals the most important commonality among these members. All but one was a parent of one or more schoolchildren. (The other, attorney LeGrande Young, had children who were already grown.) Most of the members had large families. H. J. Walk had nine children living at home, including three at school and three school-bound. Of the six children in Bernard Schettler’s household, four were still in school. The Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League was an organization of local taxpaying parents with a strong sense of ownership in the city’s schools.

Outside critics, including The Denver Post, decried the surging antivaccination movement in Utah as a Mormon phenomenon—a charge local newspapers such as the Ogden Standard-Examiner roundly denied. Neither census records nor local newspaper accounts identified the religious composition of the league, though its membership certainly matched the profile of a predominantly Mormon organization. Church leaders were in fact divided on the issue. Although Mormon teachings had nothing in particular to say about vaccination, decades of political conflict with the U.S. government prepared Utah Mormons to view with distrust any use of government authority to impose scientific beliefs or behavioral mandates upon the public without democratic deliberation. Distinctly Mormon voices—such as Charles W. Penrose’s Deseret Evening News, an organ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—applauded the public opposition to compulsory vaccination. Still, religious imagery and language is notably absent from the public record of the controversy. The Deseret Evening News said the people of Utah were open to persuasion on the vaccination question: “It is the policy of force which arouses the indignity of the great bulk of the citizens.” The relative homogeneity of the Utah citizenry may help explain the exceptionally strong support there for antivaccinationism. But there is little evidence to suggest that most Mormons viewed antivaccination as a Mormon cause.69

The goals and rhetoric of the Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League reflected its broad social base. Its purpose was not to debate the merits of vaccination, but to prevent the Salt Lake City Board of Health from compelling healthy schoolchildren—their healthy schoolchildren—to submit to the procedure. Beyond that, the organization urged the legislature to “keep from the statutes anything that savors of compulsory vaccination.” The league made its case in the constitutional keywords of American public life: popular sovereignty, separation of powers, and the rule of law. “The highest medical authority is divided on the question of vaccination,” one resolution noted, “many taking the ground that it is always dangerous, and sometimes productive of fatal results.” To date, the legislature had faithfully “expressed the sentiment of the people by refusing to pass a compulsory vaccination law.” The health