Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [160]
The climax of Utah’s “vaccination war” came in January 1901, as the legislature debated a bill introduced by Rep. William McMillan, a Mormon bishop from Salt Lake City. The McMillan bill made it unlawful for any public board to compel the vaccination of any “person of any age” or to make vaccination “a condition precedent to the attendance at any public or private school in the state of Utah, either as pupil or as teacher.” The bill was the most controversial piece of legislation in the state’s short life. While the hearings went on, the Salt Lake Board of Education passed a resolution, on a slim majority of 5 to 4, holding that it was “not the duty” of school officials and teachers to enforce the Utah Board of Health’s vaccination order. At the insistence of Dr. T. B. Beatty, secretary of the state board, those five members of the local school board were arrested. The Utah Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League held a mass meeting, adopting “strong resolutions” in favor of the McMillan bill. Inside the statehouse, the defenders of compulsion seemed determined to confirm their critics’ worst charges about them. Dr. Beatty testified that the critics of vaccination did not understand science. Dr. Alexander MacLean offered to expose his own vaccinated son to “the most virulent forms of smallpox” in the city pesthouse, if a critic of vaccination agreed to “subject his unvaccinated child to a similar danger.”71
On January 31, 1901, the Utah legislature passed the McMillan bill by a wide margin: 37 to 6 in the House, 13 to 5 in the Senate. Governor Heber M. Wells vetoed the bill. “To place among our statutes such a bill would be a step backwards, which will be disastrous,” he cautioned. Political credibility seemed to loom as large in his mind as public health. He had received dispatches from nearly every American governor, standing “almost as a unit for vaccination.” If the law stood, Utah would be one of the few states that forbade local boards of health to order vaccination to stamp out smallpox. Both houses of the legislature voted to override Wells’s veto. Newspapers and medical journals across America reported with disbelief the anti-vaccinationists’ triumph. The Medical Standard denounced the law as a “pronunciamento”—a Mormon coup d’état. “It is an unpleasant thing to suggest at the present juncture and we hope our friends in Utah may be spared,” the journal warned, “but it usually happens that chickens of this kind ‘come home to roost.’ ”72
The following year, Immanuel Pfeiffer and the Massachusetts antivaccinationists put several bills before the General Court’s joint committee on public health. All of the bills aimed to repeal the state’s compulsory vaccination laws. All were killed in committee, an outcome the activists may well have anticipated. Antivaccination bills were a more common event in Massachusetts than in Utah. The packed hearings on Beacon Hill had the aspect of ritualized performances: public bouts between old foes who knew each other’s arguments well. But that did not lessen the public drama.
Day after day, committee members and the assembled public heard speeches by health officials (including Chairman Durgin and Dr. McCollom) and doctors from both sides of the vaccination question. Dr. Pfeiffer testified that the board of health’s vaccination stations were places unfit to hold cattle. Dr. Caroline E. Hastings of Boston claimed smallpox tended to increase in proportion to the extent of vaccination in a community. Jessica L. Henderson, a mother from suburban Wayland, vowed she would go to jail before allowing her children or herself to be vaccinated. On the other side, Durgin and his peers paid the antivaccinationists the compliment of taking their campaign seriously. The defenders of compulsion assembled a parade of luminaries from the fields