Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [50]
The aldermen did not rescind the ordinance. They did not have to. The city vaccinators met with such widespread resistance in Wilmington’s neighborhoods and workplaces that the board of health suspended the entire campaign just a few days after it had begun. All of the vaccinators had found the work dispiriting. The city’s strategy of sending black doctors into African American neighborhoods had not overcome the residents’ concerns about vaccination. One African American woman drove a black physician from her doorstep with an axe. An African American man brandished a gun to defend his threshold from a city vaccinator and two policemen, all of them black. White vaccinators hadn’t fared much better in white working-class neighborhoods. As the city hall protest had shown, compulsory vaccination was perceived as dangerous and unjust by many people, regardless of race.28
By the time the city vaccinators ceased their unfinished work, Johnson and Harge had begun to recover. No further smallpox cases had come to light.
The Wilmington smallpox skirmishes of 1898 would be overshadowed in the city’s memory by the bloody race riots that came just ten months later during the November elections. The riots left more than ten blacks dead in the streets of Wilmington, caused thousands to leave the city, and put Democrats in control of the city government. Soon after that tragic episode, the North Carolina Board of Health issued its annual report. Citing the Wilmington smallpox outbreak as a cautionary tale, the board lamented that the city government’s efforts to stamp out the disease had been “so violently resisted by the negroes as to cause the abandonment of the attempt.” Absent from the report was any mention of the white and black pesthouse mobs, or the biracial coalition of Wilmington men, some five hundred strong, who had together taken a stand at city hall as workingmen and breadwinners opposed to compulsory vaccination.29
For C. P. Wertenbaker, the pesthouse fires and antivaccination protests marked the beginning of an education in the contentious politics of southern smallpox control. Wherever Wertenbaker went, he saw smallpox engender intense conflict between “the public health” as a political ideal and “the public” as a fractious social reality. The public health implied a unity of purpose and interests—within the medical profession, between physicians and the state, and between state and society—that Wertenbaker rarely encountered. Instead, he found governments that wouldn’t govern and citizens who wouldn’t let them when they tried.
He witnessed this conflict in Wilmington in January 1898. He saw it that February in Charlotte, where white cotton mill workers, fearing vaccine poisoning, refused to comply with the city government’s vaccination order. He saw it again in March in Middlesboro, Kentucky, where local officials rebelled against their own legal duties as keepers of the public health. When Wertenbaker returned to Wilmington in April, Wyman forwarded to him a letter that J. W. Babcock of the Columbia, South Carolina, Board of Health had sent to Senator Benjamin R. (“Pitchfork Ben”) Tillman. As smallpox raged in the capital city, the board had ordered a general vaccination. “My private opinion,” Babcock told the senator, “is that we shall not get much cooperation from the white people, and none at all from the