20 “The Anti-Vaccinationists,” Northwestern Lancet (Minneapolis), 21 (Feb. 1, 1901), 61. On the groups cited between 1879 and 1900, see Martin Kaufman, “The American Anti-Vaccinationists and Their Arguments,” BHM, 50 (1976), 465–66. Membership numbers for 1901 from Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac, 1901 (Brooklyn, 1901), 308. On California: “Question of Compulsory Vaccination,” SFC, Oct. 16, 1904, 7. On Colorado: “Medical legislation in Colorado.” NYMJ, Mar. 2, 1901, 378. On Connecticut: “The Anti-Vaccinators of Connecticut,” by “One Who Knows Them,” American Medical Journal, 31 (Jan. 1903), 9–12. On Massachusetts: see the Massachusetts Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society’s 1902 pamphlet, “A Vaccination Crusade and What There Is in It” GFP, Box 177, Folder 8. On Minnesota: “Sanitation and Legislation in Minnesota,” St. Paul Medical Journal, 5 (June 1903), esp. 456–57. On Missouri: “Vaccination Tyranny,” The Life (“A monthly magazine of Christian metaphysics”), November 1905, 222–23. On Pennsylvania: Pitcairn, Vaccination. On Utah: “Vaccination War On,” SLH, Jan. 24, 1901, 8. On Berkeley: “Bitter Fights Against Law,” SFC, Aug. 12, 1904, 4. On Cleveland: “Medical News,” CMJ, 2 (Mar. 1903), 164. On Milwaukee: Leavitt, Healthiest City, 94, 267. On St. Paul: J. W. Griggs, of the AntiVaccination Society of St. Paul, to William Lloyd Garrison, Oct. 26, 1904, GFP, Box 176, Folder 14. On the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.
21 Leo Tolstoy to William Tebb, quoted in Antivaccination News and Sanatorian (New York), June 1895, 7, GFP, Box 176, Folder 11. [George] Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters: 1874–1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Viking, 1965), 448. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Vaccination a Delusion—Its Penal Enforcement a Crime,” in idem, The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898), 232. Vaccination was edited by F. D. Blue and published for the Anti-Vaccination Society of America as “a journal of health, justice and liberty, that tells the truth about vaccination.” The Liberator was the official organ of the Minnesota Health League and billed as “a monthly journal devoted to freedom from medical superstition and tyranny.” Its editor, from 1902 to 1907, was Lora C. Little. See William Tebb, Sanitation, Not Vaccination, the True Protection Against Small-Pox, A Paper Read Before the Second International Vaccination Congress at Cologne, October 12th, 1881 (London, n.d.), CHM. “Antivaccination Movement,” MN, Feb. 11, 1899, 178. On Harry Weinberger’s career as an antivaccination attorney during the 1910s, see HWP, esp. Box 21, Folders 3–11, Box 48, Folders 4–14.
22 Nadja Durbach, “ ‘They Might as Well Brand Us’: Working-Class Resistance to Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England,” Social History of Medicine, 13 (2000): 45–62. Durbach, “Class, Gender, and the Conscientious Objector to Vaccination, 1898–1907,” Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002): 58–83. Durbach, Bodily Matters, 197.
23 Martin Kauffman was perhaps the first scholar to point out the connection between antivaccinationism and the licensure issue in the United States. Kauffman mistakenly concluded that this was practically all there was to antivaccinationism, and he saw the licensure debate as largely a professional grievance, rather than a larger struggle for freedom of belief. Kauffman, “American Anti-Vaccinationists.”
24 R. Swinburne Clymer, Vaccination Brought Home to You (Terre Haute, IN: Frank D. Blue, 1904), 27. On the history of alternative medicine, see esp. John Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science, 80–94; Johnston, ed., Politics of Healing; and James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
25 Massachusetts Sanitary Commission, Report of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health (Boston, 1850), 58.
26 Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 161. Whorton, Nature Cures, 9–19.
27 Whorton, Nature Cures, 69, 133, esp. 134.
28 John Duffy, The Sanitarians, 153. Whorton, Nature Cures, 135–39.
29 “American Medical Association Advising Compulsory Vaccination,” Indiana Medical Journal, 18 (May 1900), 470. See Leslie J. Reagan, “Law and Medicine,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, ed. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), vol. 3, 232–67.
30 Davidovitch, “Negotiating Dissent,” esp. 13. J. W. Hodge, “The Decline in Smallpox Which Preceded and Accompanied the Introduction of Vaccination—To What Was It Due?,” Medical Visitor, 19 (June 1903), 269. New England Eclectics quoted in Alexander Wilder, “From ‘Vaccination,’ ” Health, Oct. 1901, 340. Clymer, Vaccination Brought Home to You. “The Late Dr. T. V. Gifford,” Phrenological Journal, 116 (Nov. 1903), 164.
31 Whorton, Nature Cures, 19. Johnston, “Introduction,” in Politics of Healing, 1–11.
32 Jenny Franchot, “Spiritualism,” in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Cambridge, MA: Wiley, 1995), 650–51. “Smallpox in Zion City,” NYT, Aug. 12, 1904, 7. Henry Warner Bowden, “Dowie, John Alexander,” http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-00399.html, American National Biography Online Feb. 2000, accessed June 9, 2009.
33 State ex rel. Adams v. Burdge, 95 Wis. 390 (1897). “Christian Science and Vaccination,” BMJ, 39 (Dec. 1899), 369. “Dies of Disease He Defied,” NYT, Jul. 26, 1902, 5. James Colgrove, State of Immunity, 57.
34 Whorton, Nature Cures, 135. Mary Baker Eddy, “Obey the Law,” Christian Science Journal, 18 (Mar. 1901), 724. “Christian Scientists’ Change of Front,” ibid., Nov. 14 ,1902, 2. “Christian Science Did It,” NYT, Aug. 19, 1903, 1. See John C. Myers, “Christian Science and the Law,” Law Notes, 12 (April 1908), 5–6.
35 Griggs, introduction to Lora C. Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring: Some Moving Pictures Thrown on the Dead Wall of Official Silence (Minneapolis: The Liberator Pub. Co., 1906), 3. Clymer, Vaccination Brought Home to You, 6. Piehn’s story is told in D. D. Palmer and B. J. Palmer, The Science of Chiropractic: Its Principles and Adjustments (Davenport, IA: The Palmer School of Chiropractic, 1906), 377–79. On Pitcairn, see Colgrove, State of Immunity, 52–53.
36 “Anti-Vaccination League,” NYT, Jan. 6, 1901, 5. BOSHD 1902, 36.
37 Quoted in Andrew Dickson White, “New Chapters in the Warfare of Science: XII. Miracles and Medicine,” Part II, PSM, June 1891, 161. C. W. Amerige, Vaccination a Curse (n.p., 1895).
38 Alfred Milnes, What About Vaccination? The Vaccination Question Plainly Put and Plainly Answered (London: The Anti-Vaccination League, 1893), 20.
39 J. W. Hodge, “The Decline in Smallpox Which Preceded and Accompanied the Introduction of Vaccination—To What Was it Due?,” Medical Visitor, 19 (June 1903), 252–78, esp. 261, 276. See Milnes, What About Vaccination?, 14–18; Charles Creighton, “Vaccination,” Encyclopedia Britannica , 9th ed. (London, 1888); Edgar Crookshank, “Professor Crookshank’s Evidence Before the Royal Vaccination Commission,” BRMJ, 2 (1894), esp. 618.
40 Hodge, “Decline in Smallpox,” 258, 276.
41 Pitcairn, Vaccination, 4. Wallace, “Vaccination a Delusion,” esp. 271–86. Hodge, Vaccination Superstition , 10, 29–30.
42 Richard L. McCormick, “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review, 86 (1981): 247–74. Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History, 10 (1982), 123–24.
43 Felix Oswald, Vaccination A Crime; With Comments on Other Sanitary Superstitions (New York: Physical Culture Publishing Company, 1901), 4, 98. Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, 6. “Cope, Porter Farquharson, Publicist, Lecturer,” in John W. Jordan, Encyclopedia of Pennsylvania Biography (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1914), vol. 2: 696–701, esp. 698.
44 “Medical Monopoly,” Metaphysical Magazine, 8 (1898), 70–77 [From Boston Evening Transcript, Mar. 2, 1898]. Twain quoted in Whorton, Nature Cures, 137.
45 “Medical Monopoly,” 70, 71, 72. “Called Trust Legislation,” BG, Mar.
3, 1898, 7.
46 “Medical Monopoly,” 74, 73, 75. “Against a Medical Trust,” BG, Mar. 8, 1898, 6. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902). Idem, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA, 1975). For a concise introduction to James’s thought, see James T. Kloppenberg, “James, William,” in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg, 346–49.
47 “Dr. Pfeiffer Protests,” BG, Apr. 29, 1901, 8. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Revised Laws, 1901,1, Ch. 76, Sec. 9.
48 “Plan War on Vaccine,” WP, Feb. 10, 1910, A2. “Antivaccination,” MN, May 25, 1895, 586. Editorial, Health, 52 (March 1902): 495–96.
49 William M. Welch and Jay F. Schamberg, Acute Contagious Diseases (Philadelphia, 1905), 134. “Antivaccination,” MN, May 25, 1895, 586. See, e.g., Oswald, Vaccination A Crime, and Clymer, Vaccination Brought Home to You.
50 Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, 5. See Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, ed., Muckraking: Three Landmark Articles (Boston, 1994), 1–39.
51 Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, 74, 18. The best work to date on Little is Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 197–206, esp. 199.
52 Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, 6–7.
53 Ibid., 7–8.
54 Ibid., 12–14, 29. “Victims of State Blood Poisoning,” Liberator, Supplement September 1904, 1, GFP, Box 177, Folder 8. “Vaccination ‘Points,’ ” CC, Aug. 16, 1902, 11. See John H. McCollom, “Vaccination: Accidents and Untoward Effects,” MC, Jan. 1, 1902, 125.
55 James Martin Peebles, Vaccination, A Curse and a Menace to Personal Liberty (Battle Creek, MI: Peebles Pub. Co., 1900), 138. Edward Whipple, A Biography of James M. Peebles, M.D., A.M. (Battle Creek, MI: published by author, 1901), 506.
56 Mill and Blackstone quoted in Pitcairn, Vaccination, 1–2. George E. Macdonald, “The ‘Vaccination’ Outrage,” from Truth Seeker, reprinted in Liberty (Not the Daughter but the Mother of Order), May 19, 1894, 10. Curiously, Mill himself did not mention the vaccination question in his treatise. His main principle—that “the sole end of which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”—would seem to cut either way. Compulsory vaccination was a measure intended to protect others, but at least from the antivaccinationist perspective, it was not a necessary measure. As many argued at the time, a man who refused to be vaccinated was, by the vaccinationists’ own theory, no threat to the members of the population who were vaccinated. The general response from supporters of vaccination was twofold: 1) there would always be some for whom vaccination did not work; the only way to protect them was by immunizing everyone else; and 2) the best way to permanently stamp out an epidemic in a community was to vaccinate everyone, leaving the virus with no one to infect. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. David Spitz (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 11.1.
57 J. W. Hodge, “Is the Compulsory Infliction of the Jennerian Rite by the State, Expedient, Justifiable, or Possible?” Medical Century, 14 (Dec. 1906), 360. “To All Who Care for Human Rights!” Anti-Vaccination News and Sanatorian (New York), June 1895, 3, GFP, Box 176, Folder 11. Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, 62–63.
58 Hodge, “Compulsory Infliction,” 359. “Topics of the Times,” NYT, Dec. 9, 1901, 8.
59 See, generally, Willrich, City of Courts.
60 Hodge, “Decline in Smallpox,” 276. B. O. Flower, “How Cleveland Stamped Out Smallpox,” Arena, 27 (Apr. 1902), 429.
61 Robert Johnston has argued with great insight that American antivaccinationism constituted a “middle-class populism of the body”; Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 178. My own view is that personal liberty concerns loomed larger than populism in most antivaccinationists’ thinking about the politics of public health.
62 Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, 61. Nichols, Vaccination, 27. Clymer, Vaccination Brought Home to You, 78.
63 Michael Willrich, “The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930,” Law and History Review, 16 (1998): 63–111.
64 Little, Crimes of the Cowpox Ring, 62–63.
65 “Anti-Vaccinators of Connecticut,” 9–12.
66 State Board of Health data reported in “A Danger Signal,” OSE, Feb. 5, 1901.
67 “Vaccination War On.” “M’Millan Bill Now Law,” OSE, Feb. 22, 1901. “Smallpox and Vaccination,” ibid., Jan. 26, 1900. State ex rel. Cox v. Board of Ed., 9 Utah 401 (1901). “Supreme Court Decision,” OSE, May 1, 1900. “Vaccination War On,” SLH, Jan. 24, 1901, 8.
68 The nineteen people I have identified as “activated” members of the Utah league were named in newspaper articles as either having leadership positions in the organization, speaking out against compulsory vaccination at a meeting, or serving on a committee to draft resolutions. Others named as “present” at the meeting I did not assume to be more than passive listeners. I was able to locate eighteen of the nineteen members, unmistakably, in the 1900 U.S. Census. The nineteenth named participant was J. H. Parry, the name of a well-known book publisher in Salt Lake City at the time. I have assumed that if this J. H. Parry was not the same publisher, a responsible newspaper would have identified him otherwise to avoid confusion. “Antis Hold Session,” SLH, Jan. 14, 1900. “Vaccination War On,” ibid., Jan. 24, 1901, 8. Twelfth Census of the United States (1900): Schedule 1—Population: Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah.
69 “The Topic of the Hour,” Deseret Evening News, Jan. 24, 1901, 4. Denver Post charge of Mormon involvement reported in “A Danger Signal,” OSE, Feb. 5, 1901. In a brief account, Thomas G. Alexander has also argued that Mormon church members and leaders were divided on the vaccination question; Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, esp. 195. See, generally, Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, NC, 2002).
70 “Antis Hold Session.”
71 Laws of the State of Utah, Passed at the Fourth Regular Session Legislature of the State of Utah Held at Salt Lake City, the State Capital, in January, February, and March, 1901 (Salt Lake City, 1901), 15. “Vaccination War On.” “Dr. MacLean’s Startling Challenge to Anti-Vaccinationists,” SLH, Jan. 26, 1901, 1. “Board of Education Defies Board of Health,” ibid., Jan. 26, 1901, 1. Thomas Hull, “Events of the Month,” Improvement Era, Mar. 4, 1901, 397–98.
72 “Governor Wells Vetoes Anti-Vaccination Bill,” SLH, Feb. 9, 1901, 1. “McMillan Bill Vetoed,” OSE, Feb. 8, 1901. Hull, “Events of the Month.” “From the Editor’s Notebook,” Medical Standard, 24 (March, 1901), 165.
73 “Hearing Over,” BG, Feb. 5, 1902, 4. “Repeal Wanted,” ibid., Jan. 30, 1902, 2. “Vaccination,” ibid., Feb. 1, 1902, 4. “All in Favor,” ibid., Feb. 4, 1902, 4. “Loss to Boston,” ibid., Feb. 3, 1902, 4. “AntiVaccination,” Boston Evening Transcript, Feb. 19, 1902, 1. “Vaccination Bills In,” ibid., Feb. 20, 1902, 3.
74 “Hearing Over.” “Death From Lockjaw,” CC, Jan. 4, 1902, 5.
75 “Seven Bills,” BG, Feb. 20, 1902, 3. “Work Well Ahead,” ibid., Feb. 23, 1902, 24. “Brakeman’s Bill,” ibid., Feb. 27, 1902, 6. “Antis Gain Point,” ibid., Mar. 11, 1902, 11. “Long and Busy,” ibid., Mar. 5, 1902, 4.
76 “An act to prevent compulsory vaccination and to prevent vaccination being made a condition precedent to school attendance,” General Laws of the State of Minnesota . . . 1903 (St. Paul, 1903), ch. 299. “Sanitation and Legislation in Minnesota,” in section entitled, “Hygiene and Public Health,” ed. Henry M. Bracken [sec. of state board of health], St. Paul Medical Journal, 5 (June 1903), 456. “Anti-Vaccination Law in Minnesota,” Medical Sentinel (Portland, OR), 11 (June 1903), 331–32. Little (1903) quoted in Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 358, n. 8. William J. Mayo, “The Medical Profession and the Issues Which Confront It,” SCI, new ser. 23 (Jun. 15, 1906), 900.
77 “Anti-Vaccination Crusade,” Pacific Medical Journal, 47 (Sep
t. 1904), 535. “Bitter Fights Against Law,” SFC, Aug. 12, 1904, 4. “Question of Compulsory Vaccination,” ibid., Oct. 16, 1904, 7. Governor George C. Pardee’s veto message, Mar. 8, 1905, in The Journal of the Senate During the Twenty-Sixth Session of the Legislature of the State of California, 1905 (Sacramento, 1905), 1445. “Vetoes Anti-Vaccination Bill,” Los Angeles Herald, Mar. 9, 1905, 2. “May Open a Private School to Evade Law,” SFC, Jul. 18, 1905, 6.
78 Little quoted in Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 201.
79 Albert et al., “Last Smallpox Epidemic,” 375.
80 “Dies of Disease He Defied,” NYT, Jul. 26, 1902, 5. “Anti-Vaccinationist Offered Up,” Medical Sentinel, 11 (June 1903), 332. “Topics of the Times,” NYT, Aug. 13, 1904, 6. “Smallpox in Zion City,” ibid., Aug. 12, 1904, 7.
81 “Dr. Pfeiffer Has Smallpox,” BG, Feb. 9, 1902, 1.“Pfeiffer Yet Alive,” ibid., Feb. 10, 1902, 1.
82 “Dr. Pfeiffer Has Smallpox.” “Pfeiffer Yet Alive,” BG, Feb. 10, 1902, 1. Nichols, Vaccination: A Blunder in Poisons, 51. See also “Dr. Pfeiffer’s Condition Encouraging,” BG, Feb. 11, 1902, 3; Albert et al., “Last Smallpox Epidemic,” 377.
83 “Bedford May Sue,” BG, Feb. 17, 1902, 1.
EIGHT: SPEAKING LAW TO POWER
1 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). Brown v. Board of Education, 337 U.S. 483 (1954). Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963).
2 Transcript of Record, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, U.S. Supreme Court, October Term, 1904, No. 70-175, filed June 29, 1903, 5, 4 [hereafter “Jacobson USSC Transcript”]. Twelfth Census of the United States (1900): Schedule No. 1—Population: Cambridge, Massachusetts, Enumeration District No. 691. Today, Pine Street, which lies just north of Massachusetts Avenue, is not generally considered part of Cambridgeport; but it was in 1902. See “Small Pox Scourge. Alarming Outbreak of the Disease in a Section of Cambridgeport,” Cambridge Chronicle, Jun. 21, 1902, 4. American wage figure in 1900, from “Responses to Industrialism,” Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/us26.cfm, accessed December 17, 2009.
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