Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 84, Number 1, 2016

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As the latest battle over public health reforms in Progressive Era Utah, the Cox case and the vaccination controversy divided and combined residents in new and complicated ways. During the early twentieth century, middle-class Mormons and non-Mormon “gentiles” worked with reformers nationally to establish sewers, water mains, hospitals, dental clinics, and laws to advance their communities, physical welfare, and claims to white racial and patriotic superiority over dark-skinned immigrants from southeastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, as well as African Americans.2 While often successful, the Mormon-gentile alliance remained small and somewhat precarious due to longstanding tension between Mormon and non-Mormon communities. Cooperation among Mormons was perhaps more unstable, attributable in large part to competing class-based perceptions about gentiles, civil governance, and medical care. A Mormon in good standing, Cox came to represent working and lower middle-class churchgoers who remained dubious about official state interference in the realm of public health and who continued to rely on health regimens and folk cures popular in Mormon medicinal culture. Many Mormon church leaders came to disagree with Cox, siding instead with Doxey—also a Mormon—as well as medical doctors, health professionals, and other middle-class Mormons and gentiles who embraced vaccination and modern medical science.3 Besides inflaming and complicating religious divisions between and amongst Mormons and gentiles, the vaccination controversy reflected competing legal arguments about the role of the state in community health and safety issues.

In the Cox case, city defendants deployed liberal legal arguments to challenge the plaintiff’s 2 Ben Cater, “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870–1915,” Utah Historical Quarterly 82 (Spring 2014): 92–113. Good books on this topic include Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). “Gentile” is a historical category used by and against non-Mormons in the nineteenth century, although it is no longer an acceptable term to delineate religious identity.

3 Frank Esshom, Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah Pioneers Book Publishing Company, 1913), 847.

view of personal liberty and power of the state.

Community health and safety were top priorities, they argued, making “the police power of the state . . . large and expansive enough to meet and satisfy all demands upon the government in this respect. The power is only restricted by the limitations of government.”4 Judge Alfred N. Cherry, a strict constitutionalist, believed in the efficacy of vaccination but ruled on January 29 in the plaintiff’s favor, disputing city health and education boards’ authority to create and enforce health laws. Cox and his supporters, including the church-owned Deseret News, did not celebrate long, however, since three months later the city, with help from state secretary of health Dr. Theodore Beatty, successfully appealed to Utah’s supreme court.5 That the higher court’s decision frustrated many Mormons was not unexpected. Mormons, like other populist sects of the nineteenth century, remained suspicious of elitism in the developing field of scientific medicine.

As late as the early twentieth century, some church leaders accused doctors of pecuniary interests and of intentionally providing harmful or ineffective medical cures. Others encouraged ordinary people to rely on their own sense and experience to adjudicate bodily matters. In the weeks leading up to the Cox trial, church circulars criticized vaccination while advising Mormons about botanical and faith healing, and dietary health. Churchgoers were counseled to receive the anointing of oil, and priestly blessings by church elders. The Deseret News published information about folk therapeutics, including dried onions, rumored to be a prophylactic, as well as tea made of sheep droppings.6 4 State of Utah ex rel. John E. Cox, Respondent, v. the Board of Education of Salt Lake City and Samuel Doxey, Appellants, 21 Utah 403 (1900).

5 “Reports of Cases Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Utah, including Portions of the October Term, 1899, and February Term, 1900,” vol. 21 (Chicago: Callaghan and Company, 1901), 421–28.

6 Deseret News, December 13, 1900; November 13, 1900; January 15, 1900. “Take two ounces cream of tartar, one ounce of Epsom salts and one lemon, sliced. Pour one quart boiling water over these ingredients and sweeten to taste. To be taken cold, a small wine (glassful) three times a day, or in a little larger quantity night and morning. That is for adults; smaller quantities for children according to age, and not enough to act as too much of a purgative.” N. Lee Smith, “Herbal Remedies: God’s Medicine?” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 12 (June 1979): 52.