--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained also comes from Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Hello, this is Robin. Hi, is this the Swedish Lutheran Church in Cambridge?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Oh, okay. Thank you. I'm working on a story about Pastor Henning Jacobson.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Yep, I'm sure this is about vaccination. Yes.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: A while ago, producer Gabrielle Burbay cold called a church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in search of the origin story of an argument we're all having right now.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: It started in this church 100 years ago.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Thank you for talking to me. This is like such a random call.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: No, no, no, no. I love this kind of stuff.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Where the current pastor picked up the phone. Are you in the church now?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Yeah, yeah. This is our organist practicing.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I just put on my mask. I'm a very talented organist. Here, listen.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Oh, I can hear that, yeah.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: The original pastor of this church was a guy named Henning Jacobson. who took a personal and very public stand over vaccination in 1902.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: What are you seeing right now?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: He's dignified, I would say. Dignified.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: sort of asking, what are you going to do with me? And I'm like, I don't know, Henning. I don't know, man.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I mean, it's almost a little bit unfortunate that, like, the thing, if 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Over where the line is between our rights over our bodies and our duty to others.
--:-- Julia Longoria: I'm Julia Longoria. this is The Experiment, a show about our unfinished country.
--:-- Julia Longoria: I once got a call from Swedish Public Radio. Did you know there was such a thing? I didn't.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Being the current pastor of a church that was founded by an anti-vaxxer is a bit of an odd thing for Pastor Luchahan.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Am I saying that right, by the way? Luchahan?
--:-- Julia Longoria: Yeah. Cool. It's German.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Because of the history, people call the church with certain expectations.
--:-- Julia Longoria: I think they called me thinking that ours was like an anti-vaccine church or something like that.
--:-- Julia Longoria: 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.
--:-- Julia Longoria: The story of 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.
--:-- Julia Longoria: So if we were going to do the movie in your head of how Henning's life went, how does it start?
--:-- Julia Longoria: Let's see. With the little knowledge I have, I have to figure out a movie.
--:-- Julia Longoria: The movie would have to start in Sweden.
--:-- Julia Longoria: The movie would start in Henning's boyhood, in 19th century rural Sweden in a town called Ilystad, which is a remote community settled near a big blue lake surrounded by rolling plains.
--:-- Julia Longoria: 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.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Henning first got vaccinated in Sweden when he was six years old.
--:-- Julia Longoria: And then he carries that memory into his later life.
--:-- Julia Longoria: And then I imagine him coming to this country, wide-eyed, 13 years old, and sort of being struck by the diversity of America.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Then he ends up going to college and seminary.
--:-- Julia Longoria: All I know about him is from the few records we have here at church, it's really not much to go on.
--:-- Julia Longoria: You know, you should really talk to a historian.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Sure. I'm Michael Wilrich.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: I'm chair of the history department at Brandeis University, and I'm the author of Pox, An American History.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Professor Wilrich has his own version of the Henning Jacobson biopic.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: I would open with him going down to the docks in Boston.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: A grown Henning Jacobson would take frequent trips from his home in Cambridge down to the city of Boston.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: He just worked on building this community of people from scratch, gathering people together.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Pastor Luchahan calls him a sort of community organizer.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: In 1901, there's a smallpox outbreak in the northeast of this country.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Smallpox was one of the most deadly diseases the world had ever seen at that point.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: It would result in fevers and oozing sores that would sometimes cover people's entire face and body.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 200 years later there were still outbreaks in major U cities
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And in 1901 Cambridge was in the middle of one of those outbreaks
--:-- Michael Wilrich: It was part of this wave of epidemics across the nation
--:-- Michael Wilrich: So the city of Cambridge decided to make vaccination mandatory
--:-- Michael Wilrich: They're very diligent about it. They go door to door.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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 offered slash asked slash demanded that he be vaccinated.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And Jacobson refused.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: He refuses because he believed that it was his right to refuse vaccination.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: He's like, nobody can tell me what to put in my body.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Part of the reason for that was that he had had some adverse side effects taking vaccines previously.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And I think his son did as well.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And so I imagine he was probably scared by that experience and he didn't want to live through it again.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Was there good reason for people to be scared or skeptical of vaccines?
--:-- Michael Wilrich: There was pretty good reason.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Public health departments would send out teams of vaccinators very often in the middle of the night into tenement districts, usually inhabited by, you know, immigrant working class people.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: They go door to door on these sort of vaccine rates.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And those who refused were handcuffed and vaccinated at gunpoint.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Wow.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: There was outright violence used to compel people to be vaccinated, and Jacobson certainly would have been aware of that.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: I mean, call me an anti-vaxxer, but that sounds really extreme.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: It's the very extreme edge of this.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Every local community of any significant size might have an anti-vaccination league or society.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Typically they'd form during an epidemic or during some period when compulsion was on the rise.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: They'd meet in small meeting places.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: They would publish leaflets that they'd circulate on the city streets.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Jacobson attended at least one anti-vax meeting, but he wasn't officially part of the movement.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: All he did was, for himself, refuse to get vaccinated.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: This sort of set this chain of events in motion in which he ended up being brought before a local criminal court.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: and the charge was the crime of refusing vaccination.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And eventually, a team of lawyers took on Jacobson's case and fought it in court.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The question of the case was whether Jacobson could be fined $5 for refusing to be vaccinated.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: One of my strange pandemic outings over the summer was in search of the graveyard of one of Jacobson's lawyers.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: She lives in Boston, where she's the director of Northeastern Center for Health Policy and Law.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: I think I found what is his tombstone only a few miles away from my house.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Really?
--:-- Wendy Parmet: And I went, wow!
--:-- Wendy Parmet: And then, you know, nobody else knows what the hell I'm doing.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: But it was something to do on a pandemic Saturday, right?
--:-- Wendy Parmet: She is completely obsessed with this case, like dedicated much of her career to understanding it.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Jacobson, to me, is this incredibly rich case.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: It is so Delphic.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Delphic, as in like a Greek oracle?
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Yeah, in the sense that different people read it differently because you can see in it what you want to see in it.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: And I think, as with many texts, we bring our own worldviews into what we see in Jacobson.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: You can see this in the arguments that Jacobson's lawyers made.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: They were all over the map, laying out almost like a menu of options for why someone might object to a vaccine.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: They sort of threw the whole constitutional kitchen sink at this case.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: 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.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Religious ideas also made their way into some of their arguments.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: There's a lot of religious terminology in the briefs.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: I don't have the exact quote up.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: My computer went to bed.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Can I give you one second to wake up my computer?
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Yeah, of course.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: And I will find it.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Okay, so this is from the brief before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court filed on behalf of Jacobson asked, quote, Can the free citizen of Massachusetts, who is not yet a pagan nor an adulterer, be compelled to undergo this rise and to participate in this new, no revived form of worship of the sacred cow?
--:-- Wendy Parmet: As in vaccines are a worship of a sacred cow?
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Well, there was this view.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: The word vaccine itself is from the Latin for cow.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: The word vaccine comes from vaca or cow.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Cows were a key part of the first vaccines ever made for smallpox.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: A country doctor might keep a cow on hand for the purpose of producing vaccine.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Scientists found that people who were exposed to cowpox from cows had immunity to smallpox.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Smallpox vaccine as material was live viruses taken from oozing sores on the bellies of calves.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: Vaccines and their precursors injected the material from boils.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: The pus and put it under the skin of somebody who had not had smallpox.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: I'm probably telling you more than you want to know.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: That just, like, opened up a new room in my brain.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: I had no idea that it was.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: And you can find similar language in contemporary anti-vaccinationist websites.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: It's pagan. You're putting something of the cow in you.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: You're worshiping the cow in the revering of vaccination.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: This fear and anger towards vaccination goes way back.
--:-- Wendy Parmet: This sense that it is somehow unnatural and ungodly goes way back.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The court held that he could be.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The Supreme Court said, yes, Jacobson, you have to pay the fine.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The court's decision was really pretty interesting.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Historian Michael Wilrich again.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The opinion of the court was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, who was a Civil War veteran.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And for him, it was clear that this case was a legitimate exercise of the police power of the state.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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, Now, 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: When there is a virus or some other disease coming in, personal liberty has to take a backseat to public safety.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Since 1900, an estimated 300 million people in the world have died from smallpox.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: It was because of these mass vaccination campaigns that the very last no natural case of smallpox was recorded in 1977.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: It's the first human disease to have been completely eradicated from the planet because of vaccines.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: There was this very short period, this wisp of history, where humanity thought we had conquered infection.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: We just sort of assumed that contagion was only the stuff of horror films and movies.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: It was behind us.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Once you recognize contagion's ubiquity, You realize that so much of human history has been forged by battles over contagion.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Contagion and epidemics have brought out the best in humanity and the worst in humanity.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Contagions have been the excuse for so many atrocities in the world and so much discrimination.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Witches were, you know, plague came and Jews were killed and witches were burned.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And we see this throughout history.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And so it's a very delicate balance.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Contagion brings out fear in all of us.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: He did it because he was scared.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I think I mentioned Penning Jacobson and his legacy in my sermon.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Pastor Luchahan has thought a lot about Jacobson's fear.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: At the very beginning of coronavirus, when everything was just starting to shut down, he thought about what to say to his congregation.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: He didn't want them to be afraid.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And so he preached about a story in the Bible that he thought could help.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: It was about how, like, there are these poisonous snakes.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: In the book of Numbers, God sent down a plague of poisonous snakes on the people of Israel.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: The disobedient people of God wandering through the desert are punished by God.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And Moses, who was chosen by God to lead these people through the desert, watched as deadly snakes killed them one by one.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: They were dying in droves, and people were terrified.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And everybody who looks at the bronze snake on the pillar gets healed.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: So that's the story.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Okay. And there's a number of different ways to interpret that.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Yeah, I'm like, what's the message of that?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: What's the message?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Right.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: the healing is going to come from the poison itself.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: How do the people bitten by the snake get healed?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: By looking at an image of the very snake.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Right.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: This idea that somehow the deadly poison of the snake is also a way to unlock the possibility of healing.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And it's come true in modern vaccination.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Most of the way we get vaccinations is by somehow altering the disease itself.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And ironically, injecting the disease into a human being.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I mentioned Henning and I said, look, this is not just true about medicine.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: and 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?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: You know, you can't keep running away.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: You got to go back to where the disease started.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And that's where the key is.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Jacobson's case paved the way for governments to require vaccination for kids in schools.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: It's been cited in New York and California recently to strike down people's religious objections to vaccines.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: We can be grateful for his work here.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: At the same time, also saying the dude was terribly mistaken about this one thing for which, unfortunately, he's most famous now.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: We don't get to make this perfect, pristine, founding father of him.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: You know, he was complicated.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Henning Jacobson was complicated.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And so is the legacy of his case.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Have you heard of Buck v. Bell?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: No.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Tell me about it.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That, after the break.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the line between liberty and duty to others is not always so easy to draw.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 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.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the other hand, you want that to be carefully measured.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The first time he read about the Jacobson case was actually as a footnote in a very different case.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: I knew about this case because I had written an earlier book that dealt a lot with eugenics.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And Jacobson, the case, was the only precedent cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in the case of Buck v. Bell.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Buck v. Bell is, you know, one of the sort of scariest U.S. Supreme Court decisions of all time.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: At the center of Buck v. Bell is a woman named Carrie Buck.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: She was born in 1906 one year after the Supreme Court handed down Jacobson case
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Carrie was just three years old when her mom Emma Buck was institutionalized for being quote feeble-minded and sexually promiscuous.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Her dad wasn't in the picture, so officials put Carrie in foster care with a family called Dobbs.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: She stayed with that family for 14 years
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Until one day, she learned that she was pregnant
--:-- Michael Wilrich: She said that Dobbs' nephew had raped her
--:-- Michael Wilrich: But the family put her in an institution
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The same one where her mom was
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The baby, Vivian, was born in 1924
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The institution where Carrie and Emma were living chose Carrie as the first one to be sterilized.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Carrie got a lawyer and took her case to the Supreme Court.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The opinion was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Oliver Wendell Holmes writes an opinion that's just very painful to read today.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: It's a short, pithy, appalling opinion.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: He said that, you know, in the most famous line of that case, three generations of imbeciles are enough.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: The court ruled that the state did have the power to sterilize Carrie Buck against her will.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: It's just horrific opinion.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: And his only citation in that case is Jacobson versus Massachusetts.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Can you walk me through the logic there?
--:-- Michael Wilrich: How do you get from, yes, the state can vaccinate you in a smallpox epidemic to you can sterilize a woman against her will?
--:-- Michael Wilrich: Well, it's the dangerous far end of the idea that we need to sacrifice ourselves for the common good.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: this is the eugenicist 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 wonder holmes's point of view jacobson stands for the proposition that people need to sacrifice their individual.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: You know, we all need to give up something for the common good.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: 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.
--:-- Michael Wilrich: It's the dangerous perversion of Jacobson, and Jacobson's calling to the common good, and Jacobson's invocation of the social contract.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Pastor Luchahan had always thought that Jacobson was wrong to refuse the vaccine and that the Supreme Court was right.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: But he did not know about this part of Jacobson's legacy.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: So Jacobson's case was cited in this ruling.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Basically, it said that there was a state interest in cutting fallopian tubes of someone.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Oh, yeah, I did hear about this. Yeah, forced sterilization of people who had mental illnesses.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Can I read you a Supreme Court ruling, a little excerpt from the Supreme Court ruling?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: It says, the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And then it references Jacobson v. Massachusetts.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: and then the opinion goes on to say three generations of imbeciles are enough.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Oh my goodness.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That's heartbreaking.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: The case was used in one of the most infamous Supreme Court cases we've ever had.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Wow, I didn't know that.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That makes me see his case in a different light, honestly.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Because I think movements like eugenics that sort of deny the full dignity and personhood of people who are different in any way, it's just so obviously for me against what society should stand for.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Dissidents, people who had cognitive disabilities, Jews.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: We see in many forms of dictatorship that this pattern keeps coming back.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Like you want to create this ideal world that doesn't have the undesirables in it.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: A part of me, I mean, I'm speaking completely personally.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I'm not speaking for anybody here.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: But like 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I can see that.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I can see that case for public health being made.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: I, of course, absolutely cannot see a public health argument for forced sterilization of any group of people.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And I'm appalled that one could go from one to the other, but I suppose I can see.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That's messy.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That's real messy.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That takes a lot of energy.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That quality is not necessarily a bad thing, right?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That's something that we value today.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: My goodness.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: If Henning was doing what he did today, how many people would stan him online, right?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: How many people would it be out there just doing Kickstarter fundraisers for him and all kinds of stuff?
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: That kind of stuff can just totally change the direction of what you originally intended to do.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: 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.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: Try to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, what they're going through.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And then try to make some sort of judgment.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And there's plenty little about that happening right now, unfortunately.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And maybe that wasn't Henning's strongest quality.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: But he subscribed to the same confessions and beliefs that I do.
--:-- Robin Luchahan: And I think that's our task right now, too.
--:-- Julia Longoria: This episode was produced by Julia Longoria and me, Gabrielle Burbay, with editing by Catherine Wells.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Fact Check by Will Gordon.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Sound design by David Herman.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Music by Tasty Morsels.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Our team also includes Emily Botin, Matt Collette, Tracy Hunt, Alvin Melleth, and Natalia Ramirez.
--:-- Julia Longoria: 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.
--:-- Julia Longoria: And don't forget to rate and review us on apps like Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
--:-- Julia Longoria: The Experiment is a co-production of The Atlantic and WNYC Studios.
--:-- Julia Longoria: Thanks for listening.
