It is all too easy to look either at national events apart from local history, or local history divorced from national events. The national anti-vaccination movement may have been led by prominent leaders who wrote, traveled and lectured extensively, but its support came from the small anti-vaccination minorities in cities and towns across the nation. One such anti-vaccination minority existed in Bryn Athyn and other small societies of the New Church.19 To understand the anti-vaccination movement and how it gained its leaders, principally John Pitcairn, we ought to examine the issue on the local level in places such as Bryn Athyn.
While it is impossible to say how many members of the General Church (centered in Bryn Athyn) were opposed to the idea of vaccination before the crisis, which took place in the early weeks of 1906, but a variety of sources in New Church Life attack the practice, while no New Church literature from the time defends vaccination. These sources alone prove that Bryn Athyn and the New Church possessed a vocal minority of people opposed to vaccination. Like other previously mentioned anti-vaccinationists they saw it as a dangerous medical procedure and as an insidious attack on individual freedom. What made New Church communities unique in their opposition was that some condemed the practice from the perspective of their New-Church beliefs.
The earliest recorded comments on vaccination in the New Church are those of Reverend J. Potts, whose paper was published by the National Anti-Vaccination League in England in 1882. He wrote: "It is now a well-known fact—an undeniable fact that the most frightful and revolting maladies of all human maladies is communicable, and is communicated by vaccination to little children."20 Not only was vaccination dangerous, but he asked incredulously, "How is it that the free people of this country can be brought to submit themselves to a compulsory medical operation, and how is it that the parents of this free land can be induced to hand over their new-born children to the vaccinator?"21 Potts next argued from the perspective of the New Church. "The blood of little children corresponds to innocent life. To take matter and put it into the blood of a little child corresponds to introducing the foul corruptions of hell into innocent life."22
Potts was certainly not alone among members of the New Church, in light of the following evidence of anti-vaccinationism found in New Church Life. Harvey Farrington, MD, opened his article in New Church Life by mentioning the danger to health and freedom associated with vaccination, and then shifted to a spiritual exploration of vaccination. "To the New Churchman, however, statistics alone, and the experience which they are supposed to represent, are not sufficient. He must search out the principle which governs within."23 According to Farrington, vaccination turns Divine order on its head since it addresses the most external part of the problem, namely the skin, and then works inwards corrupting everything. Healing from Divine order, on the other hand, would be to administer a medicine that would be properly digested and radiate healing outwards reaching the skin last.24
New Church people also expressed themselves through letters to the editor of New Church Life. A. Roy of Toronto wrote to suggest a book by a Dr. Scott Tebb of England, condemning vaccination which "is a most interesting and instructive book, and turns the statements of the advocates of vaccination against the practice which they seek to uphold."25 The heroine of an anonymously written novel published in New Church Life calls vaccination "from hell."26
In considering John Pitcairn's views on vaccination during this same period, we have very little firm textual evidence. We can assume that as a central figure in the Church, he read at least some of the substantial number of spiritual and natural attacks on vaccination written by other members of the New Church. If so, this may have been the source of his initial opposition toward vaccination, which in time grew to be a great issue for him. His letters, unfortunately, reveal no explicit statement of an opposition to vaccination from a spiritual level, though scraps of evidence give us clues that he probably did have spiritual reasons. William Frederic Pendleton, with whom John Pitcairn disagreed during the vaccination crisis, wrote at its height that "it became clear to me that we were making it a matter of spiritual conscience, and a fundamental of the Church."27 This is a tantalizing quote because Pendleton tactfully refuses to mention who exactly was making it a "matter of spiritual conscience." Since, however, Pitcairn was the leader of the anti-vaccination faction in Bryn Athyn, it seems likely that he was meant. Besides this, James Colgrove surmises that,
Pitcairn's opposition to vaccination was rooted partly in Swedenborgian teachings and in his devotion to homeopathy, an alternative medical practice that many Church members embraced. He was also influenced by the fact that, years earlier his son Raymond had suffered an adverse reaction to being vaccinated as a child.28
This quote provides an interesting guess29 that John Pitcairn opposed vaccination for spiritual reasons, as well as a convincing theory that his own negative experience contributed to his opposition to the practice. Regardless of whether Pitcairn believed that vaccination was spiritually wrong, it is certain that Pitcairn was strongly opposed to vaccination because he wrote to Pendleton. "That we should differ in a matter upon which I had long had deep convictions was a grief to me."30
It is uncertain how many members of the New Church agreed with these anti-vaccination sentiments. It remains clear that at least John Pitcairn and a vocal minority within the Church opposed compulsory vaccination before the crisis of 1906. Bryn Athyn and the New Church thus fit well within the national debate over vaccination, where a small but vocal minority of Americans in communities all across the nation stood in opposition to compulsory vaccination for much the same reasons. In these communities, including Bryn Athyn, some prominent anti-vaccinationists such as Lora Little and Charles Higgins rose to take a leadership role in the activism against compulsory vaccination. John Pitcairn would fulfill this role for Bryn Athyn, beginning as just another member of the community who opposed compulsory vaccination, and later rising to become a prominent national leader in the movement.
Conclusion
In the early twentieth century John Pitcairn joined a vocal minority of Americans opposed to the implementation of compulsory vaccination laws, and waged a war for public opinion. Those who made up the movement argued vehemently that vaccination was a dangerous medical practice, and more importantly that government had no right to impose medical procedures on a free people. John Pitcairn had never liked vaccination, but only began to fight it actively when a case of smallpox threw Bryn Athyn into turmoil. Pitcairn and others in Bryn Athyn debated whether to defy the compulsory vaccination law or submit to a practice they held strong convictions about. Pitcairn eventually conceded to Bishop Pendleton's plea that he avoid making Bryn Athyn a battlefield for his anti-vaccination efforts because they were endangering the Church. He realized that he could help end vaccination, both in Bryn Athyn as well as other communities, by joining other like-minded anti-vaccinationists on the national level. Like the other leaders in this minority movement, Pitcairn argued that compulsory vaccination posed both health risks and a threat to individual freedom. Pitcairn chose to avoid risking harm to his church, and instead played a key supporting role in the battle for public opinion in the attempt to repeal compulsory vaccination legislation.
22 Ibid., 6.
23 Harvey Farrington, "Vaccine, Antitoxin, and the Rest," New Church Life (1899): 76.
24 Farrington, 77.
25 A.K. Roy, "Vaccination Arraigned," New Church life (1899): 41.
26 New Church Life, "The True Story of One Girl's Life: Chapter VIII," (1886): 9.
27 William Frederic Pendleton to Bellinger. February 16, 1906. Swedenborg Library Archives, Academy of the New Church.
28 Colgrove, 5.
29 I call it a guess because Colgrove provides no specific source for his statement of Pitcairn's spiritual reasons, and because I could find none.
30 John Pitcairn to William Frederic Pendleton. March 27, 1906. John and Gertrude Pitcairn Archives, Academy of the New Church, Bryn Athyn, PA.
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