Author: Michael Willrich File Type: pdf From Publishers WeeklyTodays controversies over vaccinations pale beside the pitched battles fought at the turn of the 20th century, to judge by this probing work. Historian Willrich (City of Courts) revisits the smallpox epidemic that ravaged the United States from 1898 to 1904 and sparked a showdown between the burgeoning Progressive-era regulatory regime and Americans fearful of the new Leviathan state and the specter of state medicine. Anxious to stamp out the contagion, public health officials in the South quarantined African-Americans in detention camps if they were suspected of carrying the disease and vaccinated others at gunpoint in New York paramilitary vaccination squads raided immigrant tenements, forcibly inoculating residents and dragging infected children off to pesthouses their coercive methods sparked occasional riots and lawsuits that helped remake constitutional law. Willrich sees merit on both sides draconian public health measures saved thousands of lives, but resisters did have legitimate concerns about vaccine safety and side effects, racial targeting and bodily integrity. He does tend to romanticize anti-vaccine activists, whose movement he associates with feminism, free speech, and abolitionism, styling them as libertarian radicals engaging in intimate acts of civil disobedience. Still, his lucid, well-written, empathetic study of a fascinating episode shows why the vaccine issue still pricks the American conscience. Photos. (Apr. 4) (c) PWxyz, LLC. The untold story of how Americas Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century. At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the nascent American empire. In Pox, award-winning historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nations continentwide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the twentieth century. At the dawn of the activist Progressive era and during a moment of great optimism about modern medicine, the government responded to the deadly epidemic by calling for universal compulsory vaccination. To enforce the law, public health authorities relied on quarantines, pesthouses, and virus squads-corps of doctors and club-wielding police. Though these measures eventually contained the disease, they also sparked a wave of popular resistance among Americans who perceived them as a threat to their health and to their rights. At the time, anti-vaccinationists were often dismissed as misguided cranks, but Willrich argues that they belonged to a wider legacy of American dissent that attended the rise of an increasingly powerful government. While a well-organized anti-vaccination movement sprang up during these years, many Americans resisted in subtler ways-by concealing sick family members or forging immunization certificates. Pox introduces us to memorable characters on both sides of the debate, from Henning Jacobson, a Swedish Lutheran minister whose battle against vaccination went all the way to the Supreme Court, to C. P. Wertenbaker, a federal surgeon who saw himself as a medical missionary combating a deadly-and preventable-disease. As Willrich suggests, many of the questions first raised by the Progressive-era antivaccination movement are still with us How far should the government go to protect us from peril? What happens when the interests of public health collide with religious beliefs and personal conscience? In Pox, Willrich delivers a riveting tale about the clash of modern medicine, civil liberties, and government power at the turn of the last century that resonates powerfully today. From Publishers WeeklyTodays controversies over vaccinations pale beside the pitched battles fought at the turn of the 20th century, to judge by this probing work. Historian Willrich (City of Courts) revisits the smallpox epidemic that ravaged the United States from 1898 to 1904 and sparked a showdown between the burgeoning Progressive-era regulatory regime and Americans fearful of the new Leviathan state and the specter of state medicine. Anxious to stamp out the contagion, public health officials in the South quarantined African-Americans in detention camps if they were suspected of carrying the disease and vaccinated others at gunpoint in New York paramilitary vaccination squads raided immigrant tenements, forcibly inoculating residents and dragging infected children off to pesthouses their coercive methods sparked occasional riots and lawsuits that helped remake constitutional law. Willrich sees merit on both sides draconian public health measures saved thousands of lives, but resisters did have legitimate concerns about vaccine safety and side effects, racial targeting and bodily integrity. He does tend to romanticize anti-vaccine activists, whose movement he associates with feminism, free speech, and abolitionism, styling them as libertarian radicals engaging in intimate acts of civil disobedience. Still, his lucid, well-written, empathetic study of a fascinating episode shows why the vaccine issue still pricks the American conscience. Photos. (Apr. 4) (c) PWxyz, LLC. About the AuthorMichael Willrich is the award-winning author of City of Courts. He is an associate professor of history at Brandeis University and a former journalist who wrote for The Washington Monthly, City Paper, The New Republic, and other magazines. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The untold story of how Americas Progressive-era war on smallpox sparked one of the great civil liberties battles of the twentieth century. At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the nascent American empire. In Pox, award-winning historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nations continentwide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the twentieth century.At the dawn of the activist Progressive era and during a moment of great optimism about modern medicine, the government responded to the deadly epidemic by calling for universal compulsory vaccination. To enforce the law, public health authorities relied on...

Author: Charles R. Kesler File Type: pdf Over the past 10 years, the Claremont Review of Books has become one of the preeminent conservative magazines in the United States, offering bold arguments for a reinvigorated conservatism that draws upon the timeless principles of the American Founding and applies them to the moral and political problems we face today. With essays by the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, Richard Brookheiser, James Q. Wilson, Allen C. Guelzo, Victor Davis Hanson, Ross Douthat, and many others, this collection surveys the range of issues addressed in the Claremont Review of Books first decade, from the conservative critique of American progressivism to foreign policy, politics, history, and culture. Liberally illustrated with art director Elliot Banfields popular cartoons, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness provides the magazines many devotees with a treasured keepsake of a tumultuous decade and will be of interest to all those who care about American politics and culture. Among the contributors are Hadley Arkes, Martha Bayles, the late William F. Buckley, Jr., Paul Cantor, James Ceaser, Joseph Epstein, Christopher Flannery, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred McClay, Cheryl Miller, the late Jaroslav Pelikan, Joseph Tartakovsky, Michael Uhlmann, Algis Valiunas, William Voegeli, and the late James Q. Wilson. **ReviewAn excellent sampling of the CRBs first decade. (The Weekly Standard) [This book], like the magazine, shines on its literary quality alone. (Claremont Review of Books) ReviewFor lovers of conservatism, books, or both, this journal is a must. (National Review) A life in journalism, and in Washington, has taught me three things. First, not only do ideas have consequences, only ideas have large and lasting consequences. Second, books are still the primary carriers of ideas. Third, the Claremont Review of Books offers invaluable reflections on the most thoughtful books about politics. (George Will, winner of the Pulitzer Prize) Full of splendid essays and reviewswell written, based on deep scholarly knowledge, raising issues of lasting importance. I read it cover to cover. (Michael Barone, senior political analyst, Washington Examiner, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute, co-author, The Almanac of American Politics) One of the best and most intelligent things to happen to the conservative movement. (William J. Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, author of The Book of Virtues) Invaluable, entertaining, and educational all at the same time. (Jonah Goldberg, syndicated columnist and editor-at-large, National Review Online) In my judgment, the best review of books in America. Its also simply one of the best periodicals in America. I read each issue eagerly and attentivelywith both pleasure and profit. (William Kristol, editor, The Weekly Standard) By far the best review of books around, both in its choice of books and topics and in its treating them in depth, in style, andmost unusual of allwith real thought, instead of politically correct rhetoric. (Thomas Sowell, Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University) An indispensable publication. Every issue is full of original perspectives on the big questions to the small corners of life that illuminate them. (Mark Steyn, author, After America)