The Triumph of Populist Human Rights: Anti-Vaccinationism and the 1913 Defeat of Eugenic Sterilization in Oregon

“The Triumph of Populist Human Rights” explores the only time in world history that eugenic sterilization was put to a vote of the people. In 1913, the Oregon legislature passed a eugenics bill that required compulsory sterilization of (using the language of the time) habitual criminals, perverts, the insane, and the feeble-minded. Quite exceptionally, an organized opposition to the bill arose, mainly outside the Catholic Church. That opposition was spearheaded by Lora C. Little, an Oregon resident at that time and arguably the most important anti-vaccinationist nationally during the early twentieth century.

At the time, the ideological and political fates of vaccination and sterilization were tightly connected, as best indicated in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s infamous opinion in Buck v. Bell: “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” Lora Little used the languages and ideas of both populism and anti-vaccinationism to strenuously oppose compulsory sterilization as a barbaric human right abuse. She argued that the common people had much greater wisdom in matters of public health than medical and political elites, and that all common people—including the most vulnerable (prisoners, people with severe cognitive and mental health problems, and sexual minorities) had robust rights to marry, reproduce, and have full bodily autonomy.

Little recruited the most prominent populists in Oregon at the time, including leaders of the People’s Power League, in her campaign. And in November 1913, the common people of Oregon decisively voted down eugenic sterilization. This vote helps us to reconsider the complex legacies of both anti-vaccinationism and populism. Despite those movements’ more problematic legacies, at certain historical moments, anti-vaccinationists and populists could promote civil liberties, human rights, and the protection of the most marginal--and in momentous ways.