Pox (45 page)

The vaccine safety issue was always the most politically promising of the antivaccinationists' arguments. Even the staunchest defenders of vaccination had to concede, as did Dr. William Welch of Philadelphia Municipal Hospital, “this measure is not entirely devoid of some danger.” The appalling record of American-made vaccines during the 1898–1903 epidemics lent the issue a new urgency. Vaccine safety concerned everyone, especially parents. In most communities, children were the segment of the population most vulnerable to compulsory vaccination and thus to whatever dangers attended the procedure. Many antivaccination texts featured photographs of children—deformed, disabled, or lying dead in their coffins—identified by their captions as “Victims of Vaccination.”
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The finest American example of the victims-of-vaccination genre was Lora Little's 1906 book,
Crimes of the Cowpox Ring: Some Moving Pictures Thrown on the Dead Wall of Official Silence
. The culmination of Little's work as editor of
The Liberator
, the book delivered on the muckraking promise of its title. Little was the Ida Tarbell of the antivaccination movement, a dogged reporter driven by a powerful vision of the injustices committed by business interests in collusion with corrupt or feckless state governments. Little drew upon the most effective tactics of the contemporary muckraking genre. Hers was a journalism of exposure, built from interviews, affidavits, and the public record, and written in the sensational style that made Lincoln Steffens a household name. And like thousands of muckraking pieces that appeared in American magazines between 1900 and World War I, Little's book narrated a clash of “the people” against organized economic interests through affecting portraits of individuals. With its short profiles of 336 “victims” of vaccination, most of them fatal,
Crimes of the Cowpox Ring
was not just an indictment of vaccination and its perpetrators. The book was a compendium of pain and loss. The most moving story in it was Little's own.
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Born in 1856, in a log cabin in the Minnesota Territory, Lora Little had worked as a seamstress, teacher, printer, and homemaker. In
Crimes of the Cowpox Ring
, she described her painful decision to allow her only child, seven-year-old Kenneth, to be vaccinated in 1895 so he could attend public school in Yonkers, New York. “He must go to school, and he could not go to school until he was vaccinated,” she recalled. “Here was a risk. Children had died from vaccination. Why subject my only darling to this thing?” But all the other children were getting vaccinated. “He needed the association that school life afforded. If I were to keep him at home and teach him myself, and he miss the common lot, and be marked as an exception, perhaps as queer, with a freakish mother who would not let him be vaccinated—how would all this affect his life?” It was a dilemma shared by countless mothers and fathers. Little feared not only the loss of the privilege of a public education but social ostracism, for her child and herself. Ultimately, she consented. Kenneth was vaccinated. Soon after, he suffered an attack of “catarrh of severe and stubborn kind,” followed by measles, and then diphtheria “without known exposure.” It was the diphtheria that killed him. Though she could never prove it, Little was convinced the vaccination was to blame. “My child was as really torn from me by the vaccinator, as tho he had died the day his arm was punctured.” Three years later, Little was living with her husband, a civil engineer, in Minneapolis, speaking out against the local school board's vaccination rule and criticizing the Army's system of vaccination.
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In
Crimes
, Little argued that vaccination persisted, in the face of great opposition, because it served the economic interests of its “agents and producers.” The “cowpox ring” had always been willing to face down the statistical evidence that vaccination was no preventive of smallpox. But they responded with a “conspiracy of silence” to the “other side of the statistical question, the ruin wrought by vaccine virus.” This silence was the ring's “last and most impregnable stronghold.”
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She began collecting cases on January 1, 1902, culling newspapers and conducting interviews with “the afflicted” or a surviving parent or relative. Even though she was unable to investigate all of the reports and rumors she received, she went to press with the stories of 336 confirmed (to her satisfaction) victims of vaccination from across the United States. She provided names, dates, and locations for each case (including many verifiable in surviving local newspapers). Most of the accidents had happened during the epidemics of 1898–1903. The “victims” suffered postvaccination complications including anemia, blindness, blood poisoning, cancer, diphtheria, erysipelas, impetigo, lockjaw, meningitis, and tuberculosis.
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There is no way to confirm that vaccination caused all of this hurt and heartache. It is possible to dismiss Little's project as an exercise in overly simplistic post hoc reasoning: the children died following vaccination, therefore vaccination must have been the cause. Still, many of Little's “victims” had suffered complications acknowledged by medical scientists as possible, if rare, results of vaccination, whether caused by impure vaccine or secondary infection of the vaccine wound.

But Lora Little's book is most powerful at its least rational, as a dutifully compiled archive of belief and grief—not just hers, but of the hundreds of parents who told her their sad stories. “91.
Death
. Henry C., son of H.C. Petterson, St. Paul. Vaccinated Aug. 1901 to go to school. Three vaccinations in succession were necessary to get a take. Child then took sick, and was never able to go to school. Was not confined to bed, but gradually grew weaker til he died, Nov. 2, 1901. He was a fat, healthy little fellow all his life until vaccinated. The sore that formed on his arm never healed. Three doctors tried to save his life.” Little patiently recorded hundreds of such stories. Neither doctors nor city health officials nor his boss could persuade railroad conductor Homer E. Sturdevant of Buffalo that his daughter's death from blood poisoning in May 1902 was not caused by the vaccine that had been scraped into her arm thirteen days earlier. Sturdevant paid to have the cause of death, as he saw it, inscribed on Lucille's tombstone in Forest Lawn Cemetery: “Lucille Sturdevant died May 28, 1902, aged 6 years. Vaccination poisoning at School 35.”
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Like its antimonopoly and child protection arguments, the distinctive libertarian thrust of American antivaccinationism engaged an area of broad public concern. A robust language of personal liberty, anchored in the Anglo-American common law tradition and the state and federal constitutions, lay at the heart of antivaccinationist ideology. “Every man's house is his castle,” wrote the San Diego spiritualist James Martin Peebles in 1900, “and upon the constitutional grounds of personal liberty, no vaccination doctor, lancet in one hand and calf-pox poison in the other, has a legal or moral right to enter the sacred precincts of a healthy home and scar a child's body for life.” The passage illustrates the rhetorical range of these unlikely radicals: their righteous mixture of religion and constitutionalism, masculine prerogative and republican domesticity, a faith in clean living and a suspicion of state medicine, old-fashioned populism and a new libertarianism that might have startled old John Stuart Mill himself.
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The American antivaccinationists were personal liberty fundamentalists. They quoted chapter and verse from Mill's
On Liberty
(1859): “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” They reached past Mill to Sir William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century commentator on the common law whose
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765–69) formed part of the ideological bedrock of the American Revolution. Blackstone wrote (as Pitcairn reminded his early twentieth-century audiences), “The right of personal security consists in a person's legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health and his reputation.” So precious were the personal rights to life and limb, that the laws of England and America pardoned “even homicide, if committed in defense of them.” Compulsory vaccination—the
only
medical procedure required by the state—trampled upon these elemental liberties. The antivaccinationists found support for their beliefs in the fundamental law of their nation. As the New England freethinker George E. Macdonald commented, “The law under which [the vaccinators] operate should carry a clause providing that all sections of the Constitution guaranteeing the security of person or property are hereby repealed.”
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From alternative medicine, antivaccinationists learned that the key to health was to preserve the body's “integrity”—the soundness of its constitution, the purity of its blood. Vaccinators invaded “the integrity of the healthy body,” said Dr. Hodge, penetrating the skin and corrupting the blood. How could introducing pus matter from a diseased cow into a healthy human body possibly protect a person from disease? “The right of every man to his own body, to keep it clean and pure and uncontaminated by poison, the right of every parent to guard the life and health of his children, are among the most sacred of human rights!” declared the New York–based
Anti-Vaccination News and Sanatorian.
Lora Little agreed. “It is because vaccination robs us of our physical integrity, contaminates and destroys our bodies,” she wrote, “that we object to it.”
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The vaccination question always circled back to freedom of belief. Chairman Durgin dared the Boston antivaccinationists to test their “belief ” through a public “exhibition of faith, by exposure to smallpox without vaccination.” American antivaccinationists proposed their own test of the state's vaccination “rite.” “Let those, then, who have faith in the rite get poxed just as often as they choose to, and be satisfied with their own ‘protection,' ” said J. W. Hodge. “Being themselves ‘secure' they can have no valid reason for inflicting the loathsome rite upon the unwilling and unbelieving.” Public health officials countered that the purpose of universal vaccination was to render an entire community invulnerable to infection. Still, even some of the most ardent believers in compulsion, such as
The New York Times
, had to concede there was “a shadow of logic” in arguments like Hodge's. The
Times
cited the “natural inclination” of the enlightened public not to see “fellow-mortals cut off untimely by a preventable disease.” Beyond altruism, another motive justified compulsion. “[T]he presence of smallpox in any community endangers business as well as life,” said the
Times
.
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The antivaccinationists' libertarian radicalism seems utterly out of place in the Progressive Era. Their uncompromising defense of personal liberty sounds almost quaint next to the progressive intellectuals' brilliant assault upon laissez-faire and classical liberal individualism. As the forces of industrial capitalism and urbanization fashioned a more connected and self-consciously interdependent society around the turn of the century, leading progressives—including Jane Addams, Louis Brandeis, and John Dewey—called for a new liberalism that would value social interests above individual autonomy. Under modern social conditions, the progressives argued, a new concept of liberty was required. Liberty defined as “freedom from” government interference (the right to be left alone) may have made sense in the agrarian world of Jefferson and Jackson. But in Roosevelt's United States—an industrial nation of cosmopolitan cities, powerful corporations, and stark inequalities between rich and poor—the old liberty fell short. “Real liberty,” redefined as the individual citizen's capacity to participate fully in the economy and polity, required purposeful government intervention. In this new self-consciously “social” age in Europe and the United States—with its movements for social Christianity, social democracy, and socialized law—the antivaccinationists carried the torch for individualism.
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But their individualism was not simply a quaint artifact of America's agrarian past. No less than the progressives' concept of social interdependence, the antivaccinationists' individualism bore the impress of its historical moment. The antivaccinationists fashioned their defense of a robust conception of personal liberty—bodily integrity, freedom of belief, the right not to participate in a state-sanctioned rite—in response to real changes in American society, culture, and politics. Like Mill, writing in Victorian England, the turn-of-the-century American antivaccinationists wrote at a time when their government was in fact reaching more deeply than ever before into their nation's economy and society. They challenged the expansion of the American state at the very point where state power penetrated the skin.

Was antivaccinationism
antiprogressive
? Most defenders of compulsory vaccination thought so. To them, antivaccinationism was founded in misguided individualism and willful ignorance. Antivaccinationists countered that theirs was the true cause of progress. Vaccination, they pointed out, originated as a folk remedy—“the tradition of the milk-maids”—promoted by Jenner back when physicians still routinely bled their patients. The medical profession's blind adherence to the Jennerian rite had diverted resources from sanitation and hygiene, the real scientific advances of the nineteenth century. The genuine American progressives were men like Tom Johnson and Martin Friedrich of Cleveland, who stood up to the cowpox trust and abandoned the dangerous and unpopular policy of vaccination. Benjamin O. Flower, founder of the reform magazine
Arena
, praised Cleveland's action as an example of “the best progressive thought of the age.”
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