Today, Explained - The original anti-vaxxer

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

When a Swedish American pastor refused to get a smallpox vaccine in 1902, he ended up in the United States Supreme Court. The Atlantic’s new podcast The Experiment tells the story of Pastor Henning Jacobson. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained, I'm Sean Ramos from, but today we're bringing you The Experiment. The Experiment is a new show from The Atlantic and WNYC. And if you listen to Today Explained regularly, which you do, you'll hear a lot of great journalism from the Atlantic on the show. And even occasionally, you've probably heard great journalism from WNYC on our show. We've talked to innumerable journalists from the Atlantic and a few from WNYC on our show. And they're both collaborating on a new show all about the ongoing experiment that is our country, the United States, our attempt to find a more perfect union. And this episode we're bringing you today is all about who you could call the original anti-vaxxer. He's a guy who didn't want

to get the shot and ended up at the Supreme Court and sort of changed our country. And you're going to like the episode and you're going to want to find The Experiment wherever you listen to your podcasts and hit that follow button, I'm told, or that subscribe button or whatever button continues to give you the free shows from The Experiment. Enjoy. Hello, this is Robin. Hi, is this the Swedish Lutheran church in Cambridge? We haven't been that in a very long time, but yes. I'm the pastor of Faith Lutheran Church.

How can I help you? Oh, okay. Thank you. I'm working on a story about Pastor Henning Jacobsen. Yep. I'm sure this is about vaccination. Yes. A while ago, producer Gabrielle Burbe cold called a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts in search of the origin story of an argument

we're all having right now. We're in the midst of the most ambitious vaccine rollout the world has ever seen. There is finally hope that all of this will end. But this hope depends almost entirely on how many people will be willing to get the vaccine. There's still real fear around what this vaccine will do to us. And this battle between hope and fear, it's not the first time we've seen it in this country. It started in this church a hundred years ago. Thank you for talking to me. This is like such a random call. No, no, no. I love this kind of stuff. Where the current pastor picked up the phone.

Are you in the church now? Yeah, yeah. This is our organist practicing. I just put on my mask. I'm a very talented organ now? Yeah, yeah. This is our organist practicing. I just put on my mask. We have a very talented organist. Here, listen. Oh, I can hear that, yeah. The original pastor of this church was a guy named Henning Jacobson, who took a personal and very public stand over vaccination in 1902. What are you seeing right now? I see two portraits of Henning Jacobson leaning against the wall.

He looks like a, he's got like wild hair and a wild beard kind of. I think he was like kind of like a fire and brimstone sort of creature. He's dignified, I would say. Dignified. Sort of asking, what are you going to do with me? And I'm like, I don't know, honey. I don't know, man. I mean, it's almost a little bit unfortunate that like the thing that you Google his name the first time it pops up is Henning Jacobson versus the state of Massachusetts, which is like, you know, in some sense, I suppose he was the first anti-vaxxer.

This week, the story of a man who took a stand for something he believed in and asked the Supreme Court to step into an argument that we still haven't settled over where the line is between our rights over our bodies and our duty to others.

I'm Julia Longoria. This is The Experiment, a show about our unfinished country. I once got a call from Swedish Public Radio. Did you know they were such a thing? I didn't. Being the current pastor of a church that was founded by an anti-vaxxer is a bit of an odd thing for Pastor Lutjohan. Am I saying that right, by the way? Lutjohan?

Yeah. Cool. It's German. Because of the history, people called the church with certain expectations. I think they called me thinking that ours was like an anti-vaccine church or something like that. And I'm like, sorry, man, I have to disappoint you. Like, we had a flu shot at the soup kitchen at our church just the other day. The story of the Henning Jacobson's case has this weird quality about it, where people keep reaching back to try and find some kind of meaning

from the life of this one anti-vax pastor. So if we were going to do the movie in your head of how Henning's life went, how does it start? Let's see. With the little knowledge I have, I have to figure out a movie. The movie would have to start in Sweden. The movie would start in Henning's boyhood,

in 19th century rural Sweden, in a town called Illestad, which is a remote community settled near a big blue lake surrounded by rolling plains. If you wanted to focus the movie on what he is most famous or infamous for, which is the Supreme Court case, then a Hollywood movie would probably start with him sweating and in pain, having his first bad experience of the vaccine.

Henning first got vaccinated in Sweden when he was six years old. And then he carries that memory into his later life. And then I imagine him coming to this country, wide-eyed, 13 years old, and sort of being struck by the diversity of America. Then he ends up going to college and seminary. All I know about him is from the few records we have here at church, it's really not much

to go on. You know, you should really talk to a historian. Can you introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Michael Wilrich. I'm chair of the history department at Brandeis University, and I'm the author of Pox, An American History. Professor Wilrich has his own version of the Henning Jacobson biopic.

I would open with him going down to the docks in Boston. A grown Henning Jacobson would take frequent trips from his home in Cambridge down to the city of Boston. Waiting as immigrant ships came into the harbor, meeting the Swedish immigrants who came off those ships and finding jobs and housing for them, and basically being a kind of working-class minister. He just worked on building this community of people from scratch, gathering people together.

Pastor Luchahan calls him a sort of community organizer. He founded a church, an immigrant church here, among people who were for the most part poor laborers who came to this country not with a lot of money, seeking economic opportunity. In 1901, there's a smallpox outbreak in the northeast of this country. Smallpox was one of the most deadly diseases the world had ever seen at that point. It would result in fevers and oozing sores that would sometimes cover

people's entire face and body. It was the same disease that European settlers brought to North America in the 17th century when it killed Native American populations and many, many people. 200 years later, there were still outbreaks in major U.S. cities. And in 1901, Cambridge was in the middle of one of those outbreaks. It was part of this wave of epidemics across the nation. So the city of Cambridge decided to make vaccination mandatory. They're very diligent about it. They go door to door. And I guess Jacobson was sufficiently prominent because of his role as a minister in the community that the chairman of the local board of health came to

his door and knocked on his door and, you know, offered refuses because he believed that it was his right to refuse vaccination. He's like, nobody can tell me what to put in my body. Part of the reason for that was that he had had some adverse side effects taking vaccines previously. And I think his son did as well. And so I imagine he was probably scared by that experience and he didn't want to live through it again. Was there good reason for people to be scared or skeptical of vaccines? There was pretty good reason.

Public health departments would send out teams of vaccinators very often in the middle of the night, into tenement districts, usually inhabited by immigrant working class people. They go door to door on these sort of vaccine raids. And they inspect the arms of everyone who lived in these homes to see that they had been recently vaccinated, that they had a kind of vaccine scar on their upper arms. In his own community of Cambridge, people are jumping out of windows and running the other way or getting doctors to sign phony

vaccination certificates. I found one episode in the historical record from Kentucky where the vaccinators went into an African-American neighborhood of this community and ordered everybody to get vaccinated. And those who refused were handcuffed and vaccinated at gunpoint. Wow. There was outright violence used to compel people to be vaccinated, and Jacobson certainly would have been aware of that. I mean, call me an anti-vaxxer, but that sounds really extreme. It's the very extreme edge of this. Though most Americans did accept vaccines at the time,

this kind of forcible vaccination was part of the reason there was a healthy transatlantic anti-vaccination movement already in motion. Every local community of any significant size might have an anti-vaccination league or society. Typically, they'd form during an epidemic or during some period when compulsion was on the rise. They'd meet in small meeting places. They would publish leaflets that they'd circulate on the city streets. Jacobson attended at least one anti-vax meeting, but he wasn't officially part of the movement. All he did was, for himself,

refuse to get vaccinated. This sort of set this chain of events in motion in which he ended up being brought before a local criminal court and the charge was the crime of refusing vaccination. And eventually, a team of lawyers took on Jacobson's case and fought it in court. The question of the case was whether Jacobson could be fined $5 for refusing to be vaccinated. To help us of Jacobson's lawyers. She lives in Boston, where she's the director of Northeastern Center for Health Policy and Law. I think I found what is his tombstone only a few miles away from my house. Really? And I went, wow! And then, you know, nobody else knows what the hell I'm doing.

But it was something to do on a pandemic Saturday, right? She is completely obsessed with this case, like, dedicated much of her career to understanding it. Jacobson, to me, is this incredibly rich case. It is so Delphic. Delphic, as in like a Greek oracle? Yeah, in the sense that different people read it differently because you can see in it what you want to see in it.

And I think, as with many texts, we bring our own worldviews into what we see in Jacobson. You can see this in the arguments that Jacobson's lawyers made. They were all over the map, laying out almost like a menu of options for why someone might object to a vaccine. They sort of threw the whole constitutional kitchen sink at this case. They argued that vaccination was dangerous, that compulsion was unnecessary, that this was a violation of every individual's right to make choices about their own bodies. Religious ideas also made their way into some of their arguments. There's a lot of religious terminology in the briefs. I don't have the exact quote up.

My computer went to bed. Can I give you one second to wake up my computer? Yeah, of course. And I will find it. Okay, so this is from the brief before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court filed on behalf of Jacobson asked, quote, nor an idolater be compelled to undergo this rise and to participate in this new, no revived form of worship of the sacred cow. As in vaccines are a worship of a sacred cow? Well, there was this view. The word vaccine itself is from the Latin for cow. The word vaccine comes from vaca or cow. Cows were a key part of the first vaccines ever made for smallpox. A country doctor might keep a cow on hand for the purpose of producing vaccine. Scientists found that people who were

exposed to cowpox from cows had immunity to smallpox. Smallpox vaccine as material was live viruses taken from oozing sores on the bellies of calves. Vaccines and their precursors injected the material from boils. The pus. And put it under the skin of somebody who had not had smallpox. I'm probably telling you more than you want to know. That just like opened up a new room in my brain. I had no idea that. And you can find similar language in contemporary anti-vaccinationist websites. It's pagan.

You're putting something of the cow in you. You're worshiping the cow in the revering of vaccination. Wow. This fear and anger towards vaccination goes way back. This sense that it is somehow unnatural and ungodly goes way back. This sense that it is somehow unnatural and ungodly goes way back. These are the arguments that Jacobson's lawyers made to a judge, but the court struck all those arguments down. Jacobson lost his case at the local level, and then his lawyers appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.

Jacobson is the first case where the Supreme Court took a claim of sovereignty over one's body in terms of medical treatment seriously. This was one of the first times the court was presented with this big question. Where do our rights over our bodies end and our duty to the common good begin? And for Jacobson, the question was, could he be fined for choosing his rights over his own body over his duty to the people of Massachusetts?

The court held that he could be. The Supreme Court said, yes, Jacobson, you have to pay the fine. The court's decision was really pretty interesting. Historian Michael Wilrich again. The opinion of the court was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, who was a Civil War veteran. And for him, it was clear that this case was a legitimate exercise of the police power of the state. Smallpox was extremely dangerous. And he insisted that by the same logic that a government can raise an army to prevent a military invasion and can

compel individual citizens to take up arms and risk being shot down in the defense of their country, by that same sort of rationale, the government can fight off a deadly disease and demand individuals to be vaccinated, even if it violated their sense of personal liberty or conscience or whatever. When there is a virus or some other disease coming in, personal liberty has to take a backseat to public safety. Pastor Robin Lucha-Honigan. And, you know, this is a sticky and tricky thing to argue and to try to get right.

And it turns out that he was on the losing side of history there. Since 1900, an estimated 300 million people in the world have died from smallpox. It was because of these mass vaccination campaigns that the very last known natural case of smallpox was recorded in 1977. It's the first human disease to have been completely eradicated from the planet because of vaccines. There was this very short period, this wisp of history, where humanity thought we had conquered infection. After the smallpox outbreak that Jacobson lived through and the influenza pandemic of 1918, there weren't very many large epidemics in the U.S.

until 60 years later when we started to battle AIDS. We just sort of assumed that contagion was only the stuff of horror films and movies. It was behind us. Once you recognize contagion's ubiquity, you realize that so much of human history has been forged by battles over contagion. Contagion and epidemics have brought out the best in humanity and the worst in humanity.

Contagions have been the excuse for so many atrocities in the world and so much discrimination. Witches were, you know, plague came and Jews were killed and witches were burned. And we see this throughout history. And so it's a very delicate balance. Contagion brings out fear in all of us. In the times we're living right now,

it's not hard to get inside of Henning Jacobson's head when he refused the vaccine. He did it because he was scared. I think I mentioned Henning Jacobson and his legacy in my sermon. Pastor Lucha Han has thought a lot about Jacobson's fear. At the very beginning of coronavirus, when everything was just starting to shut down, he thought about what to say to his congregation. He didn't want them to be afraid. And so he preached about a story in the Bible that he thought could help. It was about how like there are these poisonous snakes. In the book of Numbers,

God sent down a plague of poisonous snakes on the people of Israel. The disobedient people of God wandering through the desert are punished by God. And Moses, who was chosen by God to lead these people through the desert, watched as deadly snakes killed them one by one. They were dying in droves, and people were terrified. And then Moses does this strange thing where he has a bronze snake made, and he puts it up on a pillar, and he displays it in front of everyone, and everybody who looks at the bronze snake on the pillar gets healed. So that's the story.

Okay. And there's a number of different ways to interpret that. Yeah, I'm like, what's the message of that? What's the message? Right. The healing is going to come from the poison itself. How do the people bitten by the snake get healed? By looking at an image of the very snake. I also mentioned to the congregation, you know, it's also reminiscent of a very famous image that we see so often in medical sciences, which is also a serpent around a staff.

Right. This idea that somehow the deadly poison of the snake is also a way to unlock the possibility of healing. And it's come true in modern vaccinations. Most of the way we get vaccinations is by somehow altering the disease itself

and ironically injecting the disease into a human being. I mentioned Henning and I said, look, this is not just true about medicine, this is true about a lot of our lives. You know, do you want to overcome your deepest fears and your most profound hang-ups? Well, often it is by actually going to the root of where they come from and facing up to them

rather than running away from them. You know, you can't keep running away, you got to go back to where the disease started. And that's where the key is. Jacobson's case paved the way for governments to require vaccination for kids in schools. It's been cited in New York and California recently to strike down people's religious objections to vaccines. Pastor Luchahan is glad that Jacobson lost this case, even if it means he's not sure where to put up that portrait of Jacobson in his church. We can be grateful for his work here. At the same time, also saying the dude was terribly mistaken about this one thing

for which unfortunately he's most famous now. And I think in a way, maybe that's beautiful because it then means that we don't get to make an idol of him. We don't get to make this perfect, pristine founding father of him. You know, he was complicated. Henning Jacobson was complicated. And so is the legacy of his case. 20 years after his case was decided, the government used the same argument that it used against Jacobson to make one of the darkest, most infamous decisions in U.S. history. Have you heard of Buck v. Bell?

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Over the years, people keep reaching back into Henning Jacobson's case, looking for answers not just to vaccination questions, but to bigger questions about how much power the government should have over our bodies. And the line between liberty and duty to others is not always so easy to draw. It's just an incredibly complicated legacy because you, on the one hand, you want governments to be able to respond quickly and effectively in the public interest during a deadly epidemic. On the other hand, you want that to be carefully measured.

Historian Michael Wilrich again. The first time he read about the Jacobson case was actually as a footnote in a very different case. I knew about this case because I had written an earlier book that dealt a lot with eugenics. And Jacobson, the case, was the only precedent cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in the case of Buck v. Bell. Buck v. Bell is, you know, one of the sort of scariest U.S. Supreme Court decisions of all time. At the center of Buck v. Bell is a woman named Carrie Buck. She was born in 1906, one year after the Supreme Court handed down Jacobson's case. Carrie was just three years old when her mom, Emma Buck, was institutionalized for being, quote,

feeble-minded and sexually promiscuous. Her dad wasn't in the picture, so officials put Carrie in foster care with a family called Dobbs. She stayed with that family for 14 years, until one day she learned that she was pregnant. She said that Dobbs' nephew had raped her. But the family put her in an institution, the same one where her mom was. The baby, Vivian, was born in 1924. In that same year, Virginia passed a law that allowed the forced sterilization of people who were unfit, or, quote,

afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent. The institution where Carrie and Emma were living chose Carrie as the first one to be sterilized. Carrie got a lawyer and took her case to the Supreme Court. The opinion was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Oliver Wendell Holmes writes an opinion that's just very painful to read today. It's a short, pithy, appalling opinion. He said that, you know, in the most famous line in that case,

three generations of imbeciles are enough. The court ruled that the state did have the power to sterilize Carrie Buck against her will. It's just horrific opinion. And his only citation in that case is Jacobson versus Massachusetts. Can you walk me through the logic there? How do you get from, yes, the state can vaccinate you in a smallpox epidemic to you can sterilize a woman against her will? Well, it's the dangerous far end of the idea that we need to sacrifice ourselves for the common good. This is the eugenicist's opinion, and it assumes that her children would be equally degenerate,

equally impaired mentally. To be clear, none of this was true. None of this was true about her. To Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' point of view, Jacobson stands for the proposition that people need to sacrifice their individual, you know, we all need to give up something for the common good. He talks about how the best people are conscripted into the army to fight for the nation, and giving up your fallopian tubes is no big deal. It's the dangerous perversion of Jacobson, and Jacobson's calling to the common good, and Jacobson's invocation of the social contract. Pastor Luchahan had always thought that Jacobson was wrong to refuse the vaccine and that the Supreme Court was right. But he did not know about this part of Jacobson's legacy. Tell me about it.

So Jacobson's case was cited in this ruling. Basically, it said that there was a state interest in cutting fallopian tubes of someone. Oh, yeah, I did hear about this. Yeah, forced sterilization of people who had mental illnesses. Can I read you a Supreme Court, a little excerpt from the Supreme Court ruling? It says, the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. And then it references Jacobson v. Massachusetts. And then the opinion goes on to say, three generations of imbeciles are enough. Oh my goodness.

That's heartbreaking. The case was used in one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases we've ever had. Wow, I didn't know that. That makes me see his case in a different light, honestly. How so? different in any way, it's just so obviously for me against what society should stand for. You know, I'm from Germany. And so my grandfather's generation was part of the movement that did just that to all kinds of people. Dissidents, people who had cognitive disabilities, Jews. We see in many forms of dictatorship that this pattern keeps coming back. Like you want to create this ideal world that doesn't have the undesirables in it. A part of me, I mean, I'm speaking completely personal.

I'm not speaking for anybody here. But like, a part of me, my basic attitude would be like, I can see how in a pandemic as scary as smallpox or epidemic as the case may be, that a government would decide, okay, we got to vaccinate everybody. I can see that. I can see that case for public health being made. I, of course, absolutely cannot see a public health argument for forced sterilization

of any group of people. And I'm appalled that one could go from one to the other, but I suppose I can see. I suppose, in a sense, it's the same question of personal liberty versus public safety, but then the question is, like, who gets to say what public safety is? That's messy. That's real messy. I just wonder, like, thinking about him as somebody who had these convictions,

who was stubborn about them, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court, right? That takes a lot of energy. That quality is not necessarily a bad thing, right? That's something that we value today. I mean, looking back on that part of his life, what do you think his life can teach us about the sort of legal battles, any battles we're fighting today? I don't know, because right now we're in a historical and cultural moment, especially in this country, where a lot of people are taking stances and being quite intransigent about their stances. It's very popular right now to die on a hill, as they say,

and to be gung-ho about it, and then have all these people online cheering you on as you do. My goodness, if Henning was doing what he did today, how many people would stan him online, right? Like how many people would it be out there just like doing Kickstarter fundraisers for him and all kinds of stuff? I'm almost kind of grateful that that wasn't possible back then because who knows, that kind of stuff can go to your head. That kind of stuff can just totally change the direction of what you originally intended to do.

I want to make a case for actually less gung-ho intransigence, less dying on a hill, less stubbornness in defending causes, and more listening, assuming the best about the other person's intention. Try to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, what they're going through. And then try to make some sort of judgment. And there's plenty little about that happening right now, unfortunately. And maybe that wasn't Henning's strongest quality, but he subscribed to the same confessions and beliefs that I do, and I think that's our task right now, too. This episode was produced by Julia Longoria and me, Gabrielle Burbay,

with editing by Catherine Wells, fact-check by Will Gordon, sound design by David Herman, music by Tasty Morsels. Our team also includes Emily Botin, Matt Collette, Tracy Hunt, Alvin Melleth, and Natalia Ramirez.

If you're liking our show, please take a minute to tell a friend about it or share this episode online using the hashtag The Experiment Podcast. And don't forget to rate and review us on apps like Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. The Experiment is a co-production of The Atlantic and WNYC Studios. Thanks for listening.