Life, 1912-01-18 · page 17 of 44
Life — January 18, 1912 — page 17: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This 1911 *Life* magazine article satirizes Herbert A. Thorpe of Staten Island, who refused to vaccinate his two healthy children for public school admission. The piece presents his legal challenge—suing for $10,000 damages—as absurd yet exposes genuine tension between individual liberty and public health law. The satire cuts both ways: while mocking Thorpe's anti-vaccination stance as irrational ("distasteful"), the article also critiques the government's catch-22—punishing truancy while simultaneously barring vaccinated children from school, forcing expensive private tutoring. The accompanying illustration depicts rural poverty, suggesting vaccination refusal traps families in disadvantage. The top cartoon about the "illustrator's model" is unrelated advertising content. The article's real point: mandatory vaccination represents state overreach, though the author seems skeptical of Thorpe's actual grievance.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
*LIPE* Menmen HAN fa “1 BEG YOUR PARDON, LOOKS SO FAMILIAR.” “THAT IS NOT SURPRISING, I ASSURE YOU, I AM THE HEROINE OF FORTY SHORT STORIES, FIVE BEST SELL- ERS AND EIGHT SERIALS RU: |G NOW, I POSE FOR MR. FLAGIRSTY, THE ILLUSTRAT Why Go to School ? R. HERBERT A. THORPE of Staten Island is evi- dently—so far as the authorities are concerned—an intensely disagreeable person. He is the father of two children—perfectly healthy children at that. These children have been refused admittance to the public schools of New York because Mr. Thorpe refuses to permit them to be vaccinated. The idea of vaccination is distasteful to Mr. Thorpe, not only on general principles, which appear perfectly plain MADAME, BUT YOUR FACE 165 to some misguided people, but also because of certain ex- periences which Mr. Thorpe himself has had in the past. And quite singular to relate—a thing indeed which may seem reprehensible in itself—Mr. Thorpe has an affection- ate regard for his own children, and so he has brought suit against the authorities for ten thousand dollars’ dam- ages because of their refusal to admit two perfectly healthy children to the public schools, It is really rather an interesting situation. On the one hand, we have a stringent law which states that chil- dren are obliged to go to school, and if they stay away from school they are punished for truancy. In case this offense is persisted in, the parents may even be sent to jail for keeping them out of school. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Constitution of the United States which compels a perfectly healthy person to have injected into his system a poison whose fatal results have been manifested in so many instances. Mr. Thorpe naturally feels that in case everybody else is vaccinated who wishes to be, assuming this treatment is a preventive of smallpox, that his children are, therefore, the only ones who are running any risk, and, as a consequence, they ought not to be kept out of the public schools. At any rate, the idea that any healthy child shall be refused a public education, compelling his parents not only to pay his taxes, but also undergo the expense of private tutoring, is an exhibition of injustice that is offensive to merican. “NOW SEE WHAT YE GET FOR COMIN OUT YER RU 5” OUT WITH-