There seems to be a widespread belief in the United States that the government has never compelled people to do stuff that they'd rather not do, and that this is deeply ingrained in American history.
This is quite contrary to the truth.
The first muster of Colonial militia. You were in it because you were a male sixteen years of age or older. No conscientious objection. No moral exceptions. No exceptions at all. If you were a man, you showed up. Professionalism, in the depiction, probably exaggerated. Cat. . probably not.
Now, this obviously comes about due to the recent actions by the Biden Administration to compel wider vaccinations. What you believe on the justice of that is up to you, and I'm not commenting on it. That's up to you.
Rather, I'm commenting on the myth, and it's a real fable, that the government, or more properly governments, cannot compel you to do something of this type, and never has before. That's wholly incorrect.
Indeed, even in the category of vaccinations and quarantines, the nation has a long history of government compulsion. At one point during the Revolutionary War George Washington issued an order compelling his soldiers to receive dangerous live small pox vaccinations.
Compelled them, that is.
And that vaccination method actually was dangerous. Some people contracted small pox from it and died. He reasoned the danger to the health of the army outweighed the danger to anyone individual, and the soldiers were vaccinated.
And since that time there's been over two hundred years of the government compelling members of the military into various health regimes. I myself have been vaccinated by the U.S. government twice for small pox and once for yellow fever, even they didn't ask my opinion on it at all.
Okay, you are likely saying, that's the military, and the military is subject to a separate provison of the constitution, but. . .
Well, all sorts of government bodies have compelled vaccinations of children for decades. Parents protested, but the vaccinations occurred anyhow. This is why diphtheria, for example, doesn't really exist anymore.
And the government has compelled quarantine orders as well, up to and including simply imprisoning some infectious people for the balance of their lives. Mary Mallon, aka "Typhoid Mary" provides one such example. She was employed as a cook until determined to be highly infections and then put in a sanitarium for the rest of her life.
And going back to the military, it's well established that the government can compel you to serve in the military even if it means you'll get killed. Contrary to what people probably believe, the United States government has been much more muscular about that than other English-speaking countries. The Australians and Canadians, for example, didn't conscript during World War One at all. They both did during World War Two, but it was only at the very end of the war, when manpower needs exceeded those willing to volunteer for overseas service, that such soldiers were made to serve overseas. The US, in contrast, conscripted right from the onset of World War One, something the British didn't even do at the onset of their involvement, and we conscripted prior to our entry in World War Two.
Registering for the draft, 1917.
Indeed, up until after the Civil War, every American male served, by compulsion, in their local state militia no matter what. You had no choice. You were in it. And if that meant they mobilized you to go fight the British, or the Mexicans, other Americans, or Indians, your opinion on it wasn't asked.
The government can, beyond that, compel you to provide other services. Conscripting people right off the highway to fight forest fires, for example, is something that's within living memory of Americans today. I personally know one person who was compelled to do just that.
Drilling rig crew in 1941, before OSHA required them to wear hardhats, steel toed boots, and fire resistant clothing.
And, right now, the government compels all sorts of people to wear hard hats, fire resistant clothing, and the like. It compels children to receive some sort of education, no matter what their parents might think about it. It compels everyone to pay for all sorts of things, from school lunch programs to nuclear arms, no matter what they think about that.
So why is this belief so common?
I don't really know, but part of it is that we don't know our own history. Even regular histories often claim that the Civil War conscription act was the nation's first, totally ignoring that there was universal male compulsion to serve in the militia at the time, which is a type of conscription.
And part of it simply is that the current population is young enough to have forgotten all the various compulsory acts noted above.
When I was first a student in school, for example, we were vaccinated at school. This was the late 60 and early 70s. Since then this has just been rolled into regular health care provided by family doctors, so hardly anyone under their late 50s remembers a time when you were lined up and given shots at school, or a sugar cube with the polio vaccine. And it wasn't once either, it was more than once.
And you have to be my age as well to recall when people still really remembered the "draft" as a real thing. I can recall the draft being eliminated in the early 70s, and Jimmy Carter restoring draft registration in the mid 70s. People actually worried about being drafted, even though the Selective Service Act wasn't actually operating in that fashion. It was a real thing. Perhaps it was a real thing because so many of us had fathers, uncles or even older brothers who had been drafted. An uncle, for example, "volunteered for the draft" in the late 1950s, serving in the Army just before I was born. My father volunteered for the USAF in the early 50s, but he was subject to recall until the early 1970s when I recall his being released from the Individual Ready Reserve, something he'd been kept in for nearly 20 years. When I served in the Guard, we were frequently told about how this worked in regard to our "obligor" period of six years, which every American male had, and also told that irrespective of our Guard service fulfilling our obligor duties, we were still subject to recall as veterans.
Indeed, the government doesn't really make us do much, directly, in terms of service anymore. And that has a real impact on things. Since the conservative Reagan administration of the late 70s and early 80s, there's been a really strong and growing societal belief in indivdiual liberty being predominant over collective needs. We'll note the 60s below, but if we look at it over the long haul, collective security predmonated in the 10s, waned as a societal goal in the 20s, and then roared back from 1929 through the early 1960s. This was all in response ot external threats, but it's very clear that Americans in most of the early 20th Century were pretty willing to have a strong government role in lots of things up to and including telling people what to do in order to meet a collective goal. Starting in 1976 this really started to retreat and has been in retreat every since. The current view of indivdiual liberty is much stronger than it was prior to that time.
What the government none the less still does does do is to make us serve in all sorts of additional camouflaged ways, through taxes and regulations.
The Great Depression had the impact of making the generations that lived through them really comfortable with both. Tax rates were high all the way into the 1980s, and it wasn't until then that people really groused about it. The regulatory state came in during the 1930s and has never gone away, but again it really wasn't until the 1980s that people complained about it. By and large, Americans were really comfortable with big government and its role all the way up until the mid 1970s. Something happened then.
What that something is, isn't clear, but the disastrous Vietnam War may have been part of it, combined with a Baby Boomer generation that at first rebelled against the government telling it to do anything. Indeed, the same basic impulse that lead the counterculture to assert that nobody could tell them what to do as it was contrary to "Freedom", as an extreme left wing ideology, isn't really very far from the same impulse on the far right. They're basically the same concept. If the government and the culture can't, for example, tell you not to smoke dope or drop LSD, well it can't tell you not to get vaccinated. Kris Kristofferson was completely wrong when he wrote "freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose", but those lyrics as a counterculture anthem sung by Janis Joplin probably ring truer for the right, than the left, today.
As part of that, this is also the era in which Roe v. Wade became the Supreme Court imposed law of the land. Roe represented an evolution of legal thinking, albeit a poorly drafted and intellectually muddy one, but one that held that a person had a certain sovereignty over their own body that couldn't be violated by the government. This was really a wholly new, post World War Two concept, as prior to that the law really didn't have the view that being "secure in your person" extended to a sort of radical sovereignty over your own body. Indeed, much of the law that existed prior to Roe in this regard still exists, which makes the reasoning of Roe all the weaker.
It can't be denied, however, that Roe opened up the floodgates to all sorts of "my body, my choice" type of arguments. Prior to the mid 20th Century the law regulated all sorts of individual conduct in this area. Cohabitation was generally illegal, if not widely enforced, there were considerably more restrictions on marrige than there are now, and we're not referencing the shocking racial ones of the time. Many acts in thsi area, i.e., sexual acts, that are unaddressed by the law now, where then. All of this was regarded as a perfectly valid topic for the law. Radical sovereignty over ones own person is actually, therefore, a very new concept in American law and American's concepts of the law.
All of this creates an interesting situation in which it may simply be the case that American society reacted to decades of strong government influence at the same time that the Supreme Court started to have a liberal sense of libertarianism. The law of unintended consequences is always at work, so the combination of the two brought about a rigth wing libertarianism that relied in part o a left wing judicial libertaranism, the latter of which never sought to to inspire the political former.
And, of course, the strong identification of the "individual" has always been there in American culture, even if it's very much a myth in a lot of ways. Daniel Boone, braving the frontier, all by his lonesome, remains very much part of us, even if he didn't brave the frontier by his lonesome.
Now, again, I'm not telling people what to think in regard to vaccines here. I'm not even telling people that they should submit to them or not. Rather, what I'm trying to do, and likely failing at, is placing the argument in context.
It just isn't the case that it's an American thing to be free of the government telling you exactly what it demands of you in an emergency, at least it hasn't been for much of our history. The government has been doing that since the time the Congress was the Continental Congress. So that part of the debate shouldn't be in the debate at all, or if it is, what it should be the case is that it should be recognized as part of the societal revolution that came about in the 1960s and 1970s.. And if it is discussed in an historical context or a libertarian context, it should be remembered that such debates have wider impacts.
That is, if it really is against something, either Natural Law or Constitutional Law, to tell you to get a vaccination, to what else does that apply and are we comfortable with that? What else can the government not really tell you to do, and how much of what it is telling you to do now, can it really not? Is this really a call for the application of traditional American concepts of liberty, or is it an advancement of libertarianism? And do we want that.
Or should we be debating something else, or framing this debate differently.
Anyway its looked at, we may be seeing one of the great societal shifts in views at work. After the Civil War the United States Supreme Court massively expanded the ability of the government to act in every aspect of American life, but then, following the end of Reconstruction, it went in the other direcdtion and restricted it. It remained restrictive in its views until the Great Depression, when it went roaring in the other direction. In the 1950s through the 1980s the Court became very liberal and acted to forciably expand what it argued were rights, and while sections of the public very much reacted to it, by and large that was accepted. It nonetheless helped spawn the Tea Party movement and right wing populism and libertarianism which has been very much in the news recently.
But disasters tend to operate towards central governmental power. There was early resistance to the expansioin of government power in the 1930s but by the 1940s that resistance had more or less evaporated. The heat of the Great Depression and then World War Two caused that. There was very little concern abotu the large role of the government in the 1950s and 1960s even as resistance to the Vietnam War occured in that latter decade. The real reaction to long government expansion, as already noted, only came in the late 1970s and 1980s.
What about now? The legislature is about to convene in a special session and lots of state attorney generals will be suing over the Biden orders. Many individuals feel that the orders violate individual liberty, with many having concepts, as noted above, that really only date back a few decades. At the same time, in some regions of the country, support for government action on all sorts of things is stronger than it has been at any point since the 1930s.
As we write this, the state legislature is getting ready to go into a special session. A result of that special session will be to reinforce the widespread view that the Biden Administration is acting unconstitutionally. History's example here, however, suggests caution.
The convening of legislatures following the 1860s election which sought to exercise state sovereignty over Federalism in reaction to Lincoln's eletion and the coming restrictions on the expansion of slavery brought about instead the Civil War and its immediate end. I don't mean to suggest that vaccine requirements and slavery are in any way similiar, but the example of a state attempt to restrict Federal authority resulting in violence first and a massive expansion of government authority tells us something.
The same example could be given by way of the 1950s and 60s efforts to oppose Federal civil rights expansion, which resulted in a reaction in Southern states that was far from successful.
Opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal not only didn't succeed, but was effectively crushed with even the Supreme Court coming around to his views, providing another example.
Somebody should put a "Proceed With Caution" sign up in Cheyenne. And a review of American history would be a good idea prior to October.
