Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [162]
From Boston to Berkeley, the vaccination issue revealed tensions at the heart of American public life in the Progressive Era. The conflict pitted scientific authority against democracy, rising government social intervention against an uncompromising individualism, an increasing paternalism in public policy against the rights of parents themselves. Striking communities across the United States with a disease often perplexingly mild, the epidemics brought old debates to a head and provided both sides with new fuel for argument.
For the antivaccinationists, the epidemics provided a welter of fresh evidence. They cited the deaths from smallpox of hundreds of previously vaccinated U.S. soldiers in the Philippines. Martin Friedrich’s Cleveland experiment replaced the antivaccination stronghold of Leicester, England, as the American antivaccinationists’ favorite exhibit in their case for a sanitary approach to smallpox. To the Rivalta, Italy, syphilis outbreak and other Old World examples of vaccination gone awry, 1901 brought Camden—an appalling new American monument to the “victims of vaccination.” The violent clashes between virus squads and working-class populations in innumerable local places provided a powerful public record of the czarist “tyranny” inflicted by public health boards upon the public they were meant to serve.
Lora Little was one of the few American antivaccinationist writers whose vision of the question extended to racial politics. Seemingly alone among her peers, she saw the connection between the bludgeoning of Martinican laborers in the Panama Canal Zone and physical force vaccination in American tenement districts. It was Little, the careful student of newspapers and medical journals, who protested the “brutal invasion” of an African American faith-healing church in Philadelphia by a vaccinating force. “It is time we had a Reconstructed North,” she declared. To Little, writing from her desk in Minneapolis, the routine violence that attended public health enforcement in so many African American neighborhoods showed how far the nation had fallen from “the true idea of freedom and equality before the law which has been the professed ideal of our government.” For Little, at least, the constitutional problem of compulsory vaccination was not just the harm it did to liberty; in practice, the measures also trampled the promise of equal protection of the laws.78
For health officials, too, the epidemics provided a fund of new data and experience. Some were moved to question the practicality of compulsion, convinced by the experience of those years that persuasion might be the better way to achieve their goal of a well-vaccinated community. But others were strengthened in their belief that ignorance was best met with force. From health departments and hospitals across the United States came the evidence: the unvaccinated suffered far worse than the well vaccinated. Before the Boston epidemic ended, in May 1903, 1,596 cases of smallpox were reported, with 270 deaths. A majority of the sufferers showed no evidence of previous vaccination. They died at twice the rate of vaccinated patients .79
And so, to their nemeses the antivaccinationists, leading American public health officers and physicians threw down the gauntlet. The dares issued by men like Boston’s Samuel Durgin and Salt Lake City’s Alexander MacLean were born of medical certitude and frustration. To such men, the smallpox epidemics provided many stories of the proverbial chicken “coming home to roost,” as the trusted “fool-killer” smallpox stole the health and lives of a number of committed opponents of compulsory vaccination. In July 1902, The New York Times reported that the well-known