Coronavirus vaccine: lessons from the 19th-century smallpox anti-vaxxer movement

English physician and scientist, who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine, Edward Jenner sees off the anti-vaccinators.
Wikimedia/Wellcome Collection

Steven King, Nottingham Trent University

There is hope a coronavirus vaccine might be ready by the end of the year. But for it to eliminate COVID-19 a critical mass of people must be vaccinated. And if the protective benefits of a COVID-19 vaccine fall off rapidly (as seems to happen with naturally acquired antibodies) maintaining immunity will require multiple vaccinations. So unless people keep renewing their jabs, the critical mass will decline quickly.

How will politicians ensure critical mass and renewal? For UK prime minister Boris Johnson (who labels those who oppose vaccination as “nuts”) and others, vaccination is a matter of duty. There is a logical case (we know people who have died or suffered badly from COVID-19) and a moral case (to protect others if not yourself).

Yet anti-vaccination sentiment focused on the rights of citizens not to act is clear. A recent poll of 2,000 people across the UK found that 14% would refuse to take a vaccine.

The rights of citizens not to act mean that compulsory vaccination cannot be (and has not been) ruled out. The history of other vaccination programmes, particularly the first truly national campaign against smallpox, shows how difficult the balancing of rights and duties will be.

A disappearing act

The 19th-century invention of vaccination created a new national imperative for the UK to combat endemic smallpox. The risk of dying from smallpox for those who contracted it was substantially higher than that for COVID-19 today. Survivors gained immunity but often at the cost of physical scarring and long-term health problems.

Vaccination and subsequent elimination should have been a no-brainer. Yet local and regional outbreaks persisted across the 19th century.

Governments of this period assumed (sometimes incorrectly) that the middle-classes would realise the value of vaccination. The poor and marginal were different. For them, mass compulsory vaccination awaited.

The result was an explosive atmosphere. Rumours of deaths after vaccination and of the rounding up of the poor like animals generated a sustained popular backlash, with some organising under the umbrella of the National Anti-Vaccination League.

An attack on smallpox vaccination and the Royal College of Physicians’ advocation of it, 1812.
Wikimedia/Wellcome Collection

Yet even after vaccination became compulsory in 1853, there were many ways in which, by accident or design, ordinary people citizens avoided the jab. Some people simply disappeared from the records or failed to appear when asked. Those most prone to doing so (those in crowded households or immigrants, for example) were also the groups most susceptible to disease.

Census data consistently undercounts the national population. Undercounting in the 1800s may have missed around 10% of some communities. Even for the 2011 census, around 6.1% of the population is believed to have been missed. Achieving vaccination critical mass is difficult where you do not know the true size of the mass and the most vulnerable are the least detectable.

The poor also “clogged up” the vaccination system. Sometimes they agreed to participate and then did not turn up, a common feature for systems of compulsion where there is no ultimate sanction. On other occasions, as for instance at Keighley in 1882, people would supplement this activity with the sending of anonymous hate mail in an attempt to disrupt the work of local vaccinators.

Fight for their rights

Taking advantage of local tensions was also a useful avoidance technique. “Smallpox riots” in the face of attempts at crude compulsion were frequent and sustained.

Sometimes organised by local agitators, and sometimes spurred on by instances of children dying after vaccination, such unrest varied on a spectrum from small and localised to community-wide and sustained. Riots at Ipswich, Henley, Leicester and Newcastle were particularly notable.

Nor should we forget that vaccination opponents spread rumours about and caricatured vaccines and vaccinators, undermining the credibility of the system in the public imagination. These included one cartoon from the 1880s in which helpless children are shovelled into the mouth of a diseased cow while, at the other end, a doctor portrayed as the devil incarnate shovels dead children excreted by the cow into a cart bound for mass graves.

In July 2020 public figures stand accused of using Twitter to the same effect for COVID-19 vaccination.

Children are fed to a disease-ridden cow creature, representing vaccination.
Wikimedia/Wellcome Collection

Most forcefully, while politicians used the law in order to force vaccination, the law could also be turned against them. Penalties against parents for failing to vaccinate children, introduced in 1853 and strengthened in 1867, were routinely ignored by courts. Compulsory child vaccination was removed in 1898 and the freedom to refuse introduced.

Long-standing opposition to vaccination by some scientists as well as ordinary people crystallised in 1885 with a huge demonstration at Leicester (ironically the recent focus of a British local lockdown). This and ongoing smaller protests across the country forced the government to introduce a Royal Commission to reflect on the whole question of compulsion. The verdict ultimately fell on the side of the rights of the individual.

It is not hard to imagine the 2021 human rights case in which a court must decide on the balance of the legal and collective duty of citizens to get vaccinated against COVID-19 nd the individual right to choose.

Our political and medical elites believe that people will accept moral responsibility: “get vaccinated”. Yet little thought has gone into how a mass vaccination programme works.

We will see some of the lessons of 20th-century vaccination schemes repeated, with public information campaigns and elements of coercion via vaccination programmes in schools and care homes. Nonetheless, the lack of serious credence given to anti-vaccination “nuts” and the resistance that a vaccination programme may generate feels oh so 19th-century.

Steven King, Professor of Economic and Social History, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

FDR’s forest army: How the New Deal helped seed the modern environmental movement 85 years ago

Bridge built by CCC workers, Shady Lake Recreation Area, Arkansas.
Jerry Turner, CC BY-SA

Benjamin Alexander, City University of New York

Eighty-five years ago, on April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order allocating US$10 million for “Emergency Conservation Work.” This step launched one of the New Deal’s signature relief programs: the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. Its mission was to put unemployed Americans to work improving the nation’s natural resources, especially forests and public parks.

Today, when Americans talk about “big government,” the connotation is almost always negative. But as I show in my history of the Corps, this agency infused money into the economy at a time when it was urgently needed, and its work had lasting value.

Corps workers planted trees, built dams and preserved historic battlefields. They left trail networks and lodges in state and national parks that are still widely used today. The CCC taught useful skills to thousands of unemployed young men, and inspired later generations to get outside and help conserve America’s public lands.

CCC recruits at work in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, 1936.

The spiritual value of outdoor work

Roosevelt had sketched out much of his concept for the CCC well before his inauguration on March 4, 1933. Proposing the corps on March 21, he asserted that it would be “of definite, practical value” to the nation and the men it enrolled:

“The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans, who are now walking the streets and receiving private or public relief, would infinitely prefer to work. We can take a vast army of these unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate to some extent at least the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability.”

Congress enacted the bill on March 31, and Roosevelt signed it that day. Although there was no precedent for such a vast mobilization, enrollment started a week later in New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and other major cities, then fanned out across the country. By midsummer, some 250,000 men aged 18 to 25 had signed up. Their six-month term might be spent at one camp or several; it might be located across the continent or, rarely, just across town.

Poster by Albert M. Bender, Illinois WPA Art Project, Chicago, 1935.
Library of Congress

Another day, another dollar

CCC recruits came from families on relief. Agents from local welfare offices screened prospects, then passed them along to the Army for a physical examination and a final decision. The Army also managed the huge task of transporting successful applicants to hundreds of work camps. The corps established operations in all 48 states and the territories of Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii and the Virgin Islands, as well as a separate American Indian division.

Most enrollees were young unmarried men, but the CCC also created special companies of war veterans. This policy was Roosevelt’s response to the 1932 Bonus March, in which thousands of World War I veterans camped out in Washington, D.C., demanding early payment on promised military service bonuses, only to be evicted at gunpoint by order of then-president Herbert Hoover. (Some scholars believe this debacle helped clinch Roosevelt’s election later that year.)

CCC recruits could only bring a single trunk; tools were provided on-site. Many Corps members packed musical instruments, and some brought their dogs, which became company mascots. At the start many recruits slept in tents and bathed in nearby rivers. Those without experience in the great outdoors learned key lessons fast, such as how to avoid using poison ivy for toilet paper. Some succumbed to homesickness and dropped out, but most adjusted, forming baseball teams, music combos and boxing leagues.

Although the CCC was a civilian organization, the camps were run by the Army and bore some of its hallmarks. Dining facilities were called mess halls, beds had to be made tightly enough to bounce a quarter off them, and workers woke to the sound of reveille and went to sleep with taps. Commanding officers had final say over most issues.

At work sites, the Agriculture and Interior departments – custodians of U.S. public lands – were in charge. CCC members planted 3 billion trees, earning the nickname “Roosevelt’s tree army.” This work revitalized U.S. national forests and created shelter belts across the Great Plains to reduce the risk of dust storms. The corps also surveyed and treated forests to control insect pests and created forest fire prevention systems. Over its decade of operation, 42 enrollees and five supervisors died fighting forest fires.

Major planting areas for the Shelterbelt Project, 1933-42.
U.S. Forest Service

Corps members created and landscaped 711 state parks, and built lodges and hiking trails in dozens of national parks and monument areas. Many of these facilities are still in use today. Attractions including the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, and Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg and Shiloh bear signatures of CCC work.

For their labors, corps members received $30 a month – but as a condition of enrollment, the CCC sent $22 to $25 each pay period home to their families. Still, at Depression prices, $5 was enough to visit nearby dance halls and meet girls once or twice a week. These forays sometimes ended in fights with jealous local men, but also led to many lifelong marriages.

Ripple effects

In total, close to 3 million workers and their families received support from the CCC between 1933 and 1942. The corps also provided jobs for well over 250,000 salaried employees, including reserve military officers who ran the camps and so-called “local experienced men” – unemployed foresters who lived near the camps and were hired mainly to help supervise enrollees on the job.

Camps also hired unemployed teachers to offer informal evening classes. Some 57,000 enrollees learned to read and write during their CCC stints. Camps offered many other classes, from standard subjects like history and arithmetic to vocational skills such as radio, carpentry and auto repair.

Like other New Deal programs, the CCC had flaws. Party patronage heavily influenced hiring of salaried personnel. Although the law creating the CCC banned racial discrimination, black enrollment was capped. Many African-American enrollees were housed in “colored camps” and could only go into town for recreation and romance if black communities existed to serve them.

A racially mixed CCC Company in Pineland, Texas in 1933, with African-American members grouped at far right.
University of North Texas Libraries., CC BY-ND

The CCC also discriminated socially, enrolling young men with families but excluding rootless transients who wandered from town to town in search of work and food. These men could have reaped great benefits from the CCC, but its leaders imagined an unbridgeable cultural gap between young men who came from families and others who came from the byroads. And the corps only enrolled men, although Eleanor Roosevelt convinced her husband to let her and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins organize a smaller network of “She-She-She” camps for jobless women.

Congress terminated funding for the CCC in 1942, after the United States entered World War II, although Roosevelt argued that it still played an essential role. Many men who had gained physical strength and learned to handle Army discipline in the CCC later entered the armed forces.

The tree army’s legacy

Beyond its physical impact, the corps helped to broaden public support for conservation. In the 1940s and 1950s, youth groups such as the Oregon-based Green Guards volunteered in local forests clearing flammable underbrush, cutting fire breaks and serving as fire lookouts. Others, such as the Student Conservation Association, advocated for wilderness protection and conservation education. Hundreds of former CCC enrollees helped lead these efforts. Today many teenagers work in national parks, forests and wildlife refuges every summer.

Although it is hard to picture a CCC-style initiative winning political support today, some of its ideas still resonate. Notably, the Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan and some proposals for upgrading U.S. infrastructure present federal spending on projects that benefit society as a legitimate way to stimulate economic growth. The CCC combined that strategy with the idea that America’s natural resources should be protected so that everyone could enjoy them.

Benjamin Alexander, Lecturer in social science, New York City College of Technology, City University of New York

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Article: WWI – The Movement Towards War

The link below is to an article that looks at the lead up to World War I. This article looks at the general movement towards war in Europe, particularly in the Balkans and with the Ottoman Empire.

For more visit:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/50683/world-war-i-centennial-conrad-urges-war-against-serbia

Article: WWI – Moving Towards War

The link below is to an article that considers the movement towards war prior to WWI.

For more visit:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31834/world-war-i-centennial-austria-hungary-escalates-kaiser-convenes-war-council

Article: The Suffragettes

The link below is to an article looking at the history of the Suffragette movement.

For more visit:
http://www.neatorama.com/2013/01/14/You-Go-Girls-The-Suffragettes/

Today in History – 1 May 1328 and 1707

Scotland: Independence Gained and Lost

Scotland became a unified kingdom in 843 under King Cináed I, who united the Scots and the Picts. It would grow in size over time, but the Kingdom of Scotland began in 843.

Edward 1 (England) brought the majority of Scotland under his control in 1296, though Scotland regained its independence via the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. The wars for regaining Scottish independence was begun by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce (King Robert I). The independence of Scotland was recognized by England with the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton, signed on this day in 1328.

In 1603 the realms of England and Scotland were united by the accession of James VI to the throne of England. However, it wasn’t until this day in 1707, when the Treaty of Union was passed by the Parliament of Scotland which brought into being the United Kingdom. With this act Scotland lost its independence and there remains a movement to regain it.