Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [5]
The health department’s vaccination corps was now scraping the arms of the poor at the rate of fifteen hundred per day. Resistance to vaccination had abated in some of the infected areas—where the people were, in the words of one city vaccinator, “well scared up.” More than five hundred poor people called each day for free vaccinations at the board of health’s headquarters on West Fifty-sixth Street, most of them mothers with little children in tow. But with each new outbreak in another of the island’s crowded tenement districts, the vaccination corps met fresh resistance. Over time, the corps would ever more closely resemble a military outfit. Across the city, private physicians and druggists bought up “hitherto unheard of quantities” of the health department’s vaccine stock. At factories, department stores, and offices, employers told their employees to get vaccinated or not bother showing up. On Wall Street, the managers of the New York Stock Exchange set up their own on-site vaccination station. All employees had to submit to the procedure before they could take their positions in the great scrum of the trading floor.16
Among the many political effects of the widening epidemic in New York City was an earnest moral discourse, as the city’s chattering classes mulled the significance of the event. The ancient and filthy scourge of smallpox had struck at the very heart—and, it seemed to many, the very moment—of modern American civilization.
The New York Times, the moderately progressive voice of elite opinion, published a series of editorials in which it called the epidemic “a matter of grave public concern.” The editors cautioned their affluent readers against indifference; the outbreak was no longer safely confined to “the congested tenements of one locality.” “Public conveyances and places of public assembly bring all classes together to such an extent that only the recluse can feel quite safe,” the Times advised, “and not even the recluse if ministered to by servants who visit friends in the infected districts.”17
Such a recognition of the inescapable interdependence of modern urban life stood as the grand unifying theme of the many disparate progressive reform campaigns of the turn of the century: movements for safer working conditions, social insurance for wage earners and their families, better housing for the poor, new programs to rehabilitate criminals, and innumerable measures to protect the public health. The same ethical and political logic, which held individual liberty subordinate to the collective interests of society, underlay the Times’s call for universal vaccination: “This is not only a wise measure of personal precaution, but it is a public duty which every citizen owes to those with whom he comes in daily contact.” The Times was prepared to take this logic to its furthest conclusion and endorse the most punitive measures for vaccination in the “great and crowded city.” But the editors expected that such measures would prove unnecessary. The “anti-vaccination heresies” that had spread so perniciously in England and other foreign countries in recent years would find few followers in the United States, the Times insisted. “Here a saving common sense has prevailed in all classes of the population, and smallpox works serious ravages only in remote corners inhabited by out-and-out savages.” A progressive appeal to social interdependence, civic obligation, and enlightened common sense did not, in this instance, imply tolerance, empathy, or solidarity. Or good taste: three people had recently died in the city, ravaged by smallpox. Were they “savages”? 18
These were, of course, the overheated ruminations of editorial writers. The Times’s editors got the high moral tone of the moment just right, and the facts of the historical events unfolding around them all wrong.
In December 1900, the United States was in the throes of an extraordinary five-year wave of smallpox epidemics.