Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [168]
One of the holdouts was Pastor Jacobson, who lived just two blocks from 77 Norfolk Street. None of these details would make it into the legal record of his case, leaving later generations of readers of Jacobson v. Massachusetts with no real context for Justice Harlan’s statement that the Cambridge Board of Health had battled “the evils of a smallpox epidemic that imperiled an entire population.” Jacobson really did take his stand against compulsory vaccination at the epicenter of a smallpox emergency. His own neighbors were falling sick and dying. More than three months had passed since Dr. Spencer first visited his apartment. The stakes had risen dramatically. But the pastor hadn’t budged.18
Meanwhile, at the height of the Cambridgeport outbreak, which would be remembered as the most serious phase of the city’s 1901–2 epidemic, Spencer still refrained from prosecuting anyone. Although his vaccination campaign helped keep the epidemic from reeling out of control, outbreaks continued to strike across the city in July, reaching North Cambridge and the brickyards, where several French Canadian laborers would die of the disease. One of the Cambridge residents afflicted that month was Putnam J. Ramsdell, a Christian Scientist who publicly denounced vaccination. The smallpox killed him.19
On July 17, 1902, Edwin Spencer finally swore out a criminal complaint against Henning Jacobson. Like hundreds of other Americans at the turn of the century, the minister found himself summoned before a local judge, charged with the crime of refusing vaccination.20
Jacobson appeared for trial on July 23 in the Third District Court of Eastern Middlesex County, before Associate Justice Samuel W. McDaniel. Local “inferior courts” like McDaniel’s were the workhorses of the American legal system. Sometimes called “poor man’s courts,” they handled the great mass of everyday civil suits—landlords and tenants suing each other, laborers fighting bosses for unpaid wages, collection agencies demanding payment from debtors—as well as criminal cases below the grade of felony. McDaniel was exceptionally well qualified for the position. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he had served on the school board and the city council.21
Entering the courtroom, Jacobson noticed that he was not alone. Vaccination cases were typically recorded, in the custom of America’s adversarial legal culture, as a conflict involving only two parties: the state versus the lone defendant. But many of these legal conflicts arose from collective, or nearly simultaneous, acts of resistance. Three other men, presumably strangers to one another, waited to be tried alongside Jacobson for the same offense. They were Albert Pear; Frank W. Cone, an inspector with the city water department; and Ephraim Gould, a Canadian-born carpenter. Two other vaccine refusers had been summoned to court that day. Gould’s wife, Maggie, defaulted. Paul Morse, a French Canadian brick burner, had relented and submitted to vaccination. Judge McDaniel dismissed the case against him.22
Of the four remaining defendants, the press showed an interest only in Albert Pear. Dashing and “widely respected,” the thirty-one-year-old Pear was a public figure. The son of a local Republican Party leader, he had served Cambridge for eight years as assistant city clerk, and he had acquired a reputation as “one of the most strenuous antivaccinationists in the city.” As he told a Boston Globe reporter at the courthouse, “I do not propose that the board of health shall dictate to me what medicine I shall put into my system.” Troubled by muscular rheumatism, Pear said his doctor had advised him against vaccination and had given him some “powders” to ward off smallpox.23
Judge McDaniel tried the four defendants together, without a jury. City Solicitor Gilbert A. A. Pevey stated the case against them: the state law authorized local health