Here's an article from February 1932 in Time magazine about an outbreak of smallpox in a small city in Massachusetts. Note the jocular tone throughout. Vaccination mandates were treated as entirely unremarkable, and resisters were caricatured as witless bumpkins.
But ... FREEDOM!
As Kris Kristofferson said “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”. It’s just astonishing that a marriage of connivence between crazy anti-vaxxers and a supposedly hyper-masculine guy who was terrified that wearing a mask would smear his makeup. It really is the John Birch Society’s country now.
'It really is the John Birch Society’s country now.'
An autocracy if they can keep it. Ben Franklin would appreciate the irony.
But ... FREEDOM!
But ... FREEDUMB!
Fixed.
FYI, Fitchburg is by nobody's definition a "small town," and probably hasn't been one for a couple hundred years.
He probably should have said “small city”, but I think the essence of what he’s saying is accurate. I was born in Leominster FWIW.
How about small city?
That'll do just fine. Thanks.
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong "Fitchburg," but the internet tells me that it has a population of ~42,000 (and that, fwiw, a couple hundred years ago its population was under 2,000). I think that Kevin was perfectly justified in calling it a small town--"village" or "hamlet" would be too far, but small town sounds right to me.
The small town I associate my youth with (I didn't live IN town, just nearby) had a population of 3,000. There was another community nearby even smaller than that, but it was a place and an identity. Maybe 500 people? Maybe 1000?
42,000 is not a small town in my book. And yet it is much smaller than the cities we hear about. A "smaller city" is maybe what I might call it.
I live in a town of 1,200, and there are many towns in this state (VT) a lot smaller.
Interesting! In my experience, a community of 1,200 is exactly what I would refer to as a village or hamlet. That's smaller than the highschool I went to!
There is actually a real term for cities which are too small to be metropolitan areas (50K residents) and too large to be towns, villages or hamlets (10K > 50K). This term is micropolitan. Fitchburg fits the current definition to a T (or is that a mu?).
+μ!
Here in MA, a community is defined by the form of government (population doesn't matter: Plymouth has 60 thousand people but is a town; a place with 500 could be a city). Fitchburg has a mayor and so is a city. Towns have town meetings.
A police department chauffeur is “a cop?”
That quibble aside, far more people in 1932 were intimately familiar with potentially deadly disease. Something we definitely lack. And the Me Generation was fifty-odd years away, as was I suspect distrust in “the establishment” …
Drove the paddy wagon?
Whether a city or town, is seems Fitchburg has not appreciably grown in population since 1930: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitchburg,_Massachusetts
The vaccine rendered many infertile in 1932, and of course the infertility was passed down to succeeding generations.
Heh!
"Witless bumpkins" still applies.
A useful phrase! I'll keep it in mind. It seems particularly appropriate, on this first Coup de'tat anniversary.
If COVID wasn't asymptomatic or so mild in the vast majority of cases and instead gave you hideous bumps and then scars on your face, I imagine there would be a lot less vaccine pushback.
See Polio and Iron Lung.
There'd also be less pushback if it primarily struck the very young.
Hm, anyone got a plan for, the 240th anniversary of Daniel Webster's birth on the 18th of January? Get vaccinated in Fitchburg, maybe?
:-).
Drop this gem into the player.
https://youtu.be/0UKag0tlpRY
Interesting that the central jocularity of the piece is perpetrated by Mrs. Henderson, the meddling lady lawyer from Boston who costs a police chauffeur his job . . .
"Except for one person" - who was invited to speak at the house of another person, after her offer from a third of a platform at the church was withdrawn, and the tail-end of the article describes 30 hold-outs.
"Note that she is treated as a humorously hysterical woman" - was she? The sentence before is "But not all of excited Fitchburg was tractable."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tractable She thus being implied to be not easily controlled. Perhaps her "crying" something is what you tweaked on, but it isn't clear she was being described in terms beyond reporting of her actions in the vernacular of the day.
One other notable bit from the article - describing it as the "150th birth anniversary" of Daniel Webster rather than the 150th "birthday" - a phrasing which always grates when used in reference to the dead.
I don’t care what everyone else says, rick_, I enjoy watching you pick nits.
🙂
Lets also remember that the smallpox vaccine of those days was quite a bit more unpleasant than modern mRNA vaccines; it crated an open sore on the upper arm that was bothersome for several months. I know, I had the vaccine as a bay and then again at 20.
Congratulations on finding this article!