2024/11/01 by Julia Bowes · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #American History and Culture #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Race, History, and American Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0738248024000282
openalex publication_date 2024/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This article revisits the roots of anti-statism in the United States by analyzing opposition to the introduction of compulsory school vaccination and medical examinations at the local and state levels in the Progressive Era. It shows that the widespread use of compulsory schooling laws to promote vaccination in the late nineteenth century, which led to establishing compulsory school medical exams and school nurse programs in the early twentieth, precipitated intense conflicts over states’ police powers. Exploring the controversy over school vaccine requirements in Utah between 1899 and 1901, the article reveals that resistance to public health interventions in schools fused skepticism of science with a gendered defense of individual and parental rights to challenge states’ power over children. The article then traces how these conflicts filtered up to the federal level, framing arguments against a proposed federal department of health in the 1910s. Led by the National League for Medical Freedom, opponents directly linked the reach of the police powers via compulsory school health initiatives with the expansion of federal power, arguing they were connected in a plot to establish “state medicine” that imperiled the gendered freedom of the “individual”—i.e., the white male citizen—over the home.