Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [186]
For Albert Pear, too, the Supreme Judicial Court was the end of the fight. He made no further appeal. But Jacobson had not finished litigating. It seems likely that the Massachusetts Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society played a role in Pear’s decision to step aside and let Jacobson appeal his case alone to the nation’s highest court. Although Pear had a higher local profile, Jacobson’s case presented a richer set of legal issues.
When Reverend Jacobson appeared for sentencing in the Middlesex County Superior Court on June 15, 1903, he had a new lawyer with him, George Fred Williams. The court fined Jacobson $5; Williams immediately filed a petition for a writ of error to the U.S. Supreme Court. The defendant asked for reversal on the grounds that the Massachusetts law violated the U.S. Constitution—specifically the Preamble, the Fifth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the “spirit of the Constitution.” The superior court had also erred, Williams charged, in excluding Jacobson’s offer of evidence.96
In 1904, the Supreme Court had no choice but to hear the case. Congress did not give the Court power to pick and choose its own constitutional cases until 1925. Appeals went out in alternative medical journals across the nation for donations to help the Massachusetts Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society pay Henning Jacobson’s legal costs. The minister’s case had become a national cause célèbre for the movement, the first vaccination case to reach the Supreme Court.97
George Fred Williams was fifty years old when he took on Jacobson’s case: a famous lawyer, political insurgent, and former U.S. congressman. Born to a patrician family in Dedham, Massachusetts, he attended Dartmouth College and the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. As a young Boston lawyer in the 1880s, Williams emerged as an impassioned leader—along with the future mayor Josiah Quincy and the lawyer Moorfield Storey—of the Massachusetts Mugwumps, reform-minded men of privilege who bolted the Republican Party to support Grover Cleveland’s 1884 presidential campaign. Once in the Democratic Party, Williams never left. He showed a greater interest than most Mugwumps ever had in the problems and politics of “the slums.”98
Williams was no stranger to long-shot political causes. As William Jennings Bryan’s top political lieutenant in New England, he spoke out against the Spanish-American War and for Philippine independence, advocated tariff reduction and public ownership of utilities, called for an eight-hour workday and a progressive system of taxation that would “require full contribution from wealth and bear as lightly as possible on labor and the poor,” and stood for “liberty and self-government everywhere under the stars and stripes.” He ran as the Democratic nominee for Massachusetts governor three times in the 1890s, and lost every time. But he remained a force, bearing the Bryan standard at state and national conventions. By 1904, “this David of Massachusetts,” as the Boston Arena styled him, had largely retired from politics. But he still loved a good fight. As recently as 1903 Williams had argued, and lost, a bankruptcy case before the Supreme Court.99
On December 6, 1904, a large audience, including several members of the Massachusetts Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society, filled the Old Senate Chamber in the U.S. Capitol to watch the Supreme Court hear oral argument in Jacobson v. Massachusetts. With Williams leading Jacobson’s legal team, the pastor’s constitutional case assumed a different tone. The well-reasoned brief that Williams and his partner, James A. Halloran, submitted to the Supreme Court contained few of the libertarian fireworks of the Pickering and Ballard briefs. Williams scotched the Fifth Amendment argument—a claim that was both futile (because the Supreme Court had long maintained that the Bill of Rights did not reach the states) and unnecessary