Similarities Between the Second Trump Presidency and a Zombie Invasion

In 1985’s Day of the Dead, a former soldier, renamed as “Bub” (Sherman Howard), reacts strongly to walkman head phones.

I just finished reading The Living Dead by George A. Romero and David Kraus (Romero’s last zombie creation).
This novel was published in 2020, about three years after George Romero’s death.
Romero’s agent (Chris Roe). and Suzanne Desrocher (George Romero’s wife). asked David Kraus to finish the novel soon after Romero died.
[This piece contains spoilers.]

Back story: the novelization of Dawn of the Dead* (1978) was written by George Romero and Susanna Sparrow.
Therefore, The Living Dead is the first novel by George Romero that isn’t based on a script.
John Russo wrote the 1974 novelization of Night of the Living Dead; that work was based on the 1974 screenplay, written by John Russo and George Romero.

When he died, George Romero was working on a zombie film in which the living dead drove cars. Its' working title was Road of the Dead.

Five interesting facts about Romero’s series of zombie films, versus his novel:

(A) The novel shifts the zombie timeline to the early 2020’s. In the novel (just as in 2007’s Diary of the Dead), there are cell phones, computers, and the internet.

(B) Romero regretted the implication in Night of the Living Dead (1968) that a Venus probe produced the zombies. Shortly before his death, he asserted: “No one ever would, ever could, figure out why zombies came into existence.”

(C) Animals aren’t zombified in the Romero films, but they are in the novel. Certain species of mammals begin to prey on humans, but not on each other.

(D) Zombies have a time limit, roughly fifteen years. After that time period, the living dead slow down, decay, and begin to fall apart.

(E) If certain zombies have clear objectives that they want to fulfill, prior to becoming the living dead, then they will still do these actions after they become zombified (in both the films and the novel).

By reading the coauthor’s note, I learned that while The Living Dead might not exactly be what Romero would have written (had he lived a few more healthy years), Kraus tried to be as close as possible.
I think that if Romero had survived, the novel would have been much, much longer.

The novel is extremely gory, a bit uneven, and sometimes it’s even unclear.
The novel does give us George Romero’s last stories on zombies.
Since I’ve been fascinated with Romero’s work from 1968’s Night of the Living Dead through 2009’s Survival of the Dead, it was a good read.

The zombie version of Cholo DeMora (John Leguizamo) avenges himself on the owner of Fiddler’s Green, Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), in 2005’s Land of the Dead.

George Romero (1940-2017) was a Bronx-born film-maker, and the father of the modern zombie myth.
Because of his name, I had high hopes that Romero was a fellow Italian-American.
However, I was mistaken.
Although Romero was the grandchild of immigrants, his ancestry was half Lithuanian and half Spanish.
He became a citizen of Canada in 2009.

One of the things I liked most about the Romero films was his liberal sensibility.
In Night of the Living Dead, the hero is a black man who summons up the strength to help others, while the villain is a selfish, white “family man.”
In Day of the Dead, military grunts decide that they don’t want to work for the common good.
In Land of the Dead, selfish millionaires get their comeuppance.
It was obvious that Romero was a liberal from his first films.
Anyone who didn’t understand this, was just looking for a gore fest.

Avid zombie shoppers wandering a mall in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead.

In Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, Kim Paffenroth analyzes the film Land of the Dead. Paffenroth says,* in the chapter on that film, that the villain of the piece, Kaufman (played by Dennis Hopper):

Based his entire kingdom [Fiddler’s Green] on ignoring others’ rights and acting like a terrorist and a criminal. . . a potent and uncomfortable indictment of the United States, for all the disenfranchised and exploited on which we base our affluent and wasteful lifestyle.

Romero and Kraus end The Living Dead in Toronto, Canada, the city where Romero died at the age of 77.
Many of the main characters, who we’ve followed in Acts One and Two of the 635-page book, meet up in Toronto, in Act Three.
Surprisingly, they come to the conclusion that they shouldn’t have spent years killing the living dead after all.
The readers are left with a question: Are human beings really worth the attention of God? 

Leader zombie Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) pumping gas, in 2005’s Land of the Dead. 

The American “heroes” of The Living Dead novel are a very diverse group:

• a black high school student who lives with her father in a trailer park, and is very skilled with a bow and arrow
• a near retirement Japanese-American master helmsman on an U.S. aircraft carrier (who happens to be gay)
• a blonde female autopsy technician in San Diego, who has a crush on her Latino boss
• a famous male TV newscaster known as “The Face.”
• a neurodivergent female statistician who works for the Government in D.C.

The “villain” of The Living Dead novel is an ex-movie producer called Richard Lindof.
He reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” because he comes from money, he limps, plus he’s rather ugly.
(However, “limping Lindof” appears in very few pages.)
The true villain of The Living Dead novel is human nature itself!

By the end of The Living Dead novel, one group (led by our heroes) is willing to compromise their own safety, lock up their guns, and live peacefully next to the dying zombies.
The group comes into conflict with another group (led by Lindof) that goes for chaos, and behaving viciously.
Mammals, like rats and dogs, become zombified.
However, the zombie mammals only attack humans, not each other.
Miraculously, one of the main characters turns into zombie hybrid.
Her eyes are not clouded white, she speaks, and she’s retained her pre-zombie personality.

The similarities between the second Trump presidency and a zombie invasion are the following:

1. We live in a state of fear. In Romero’s universe, we’re worried whether zombified rats will bite us while we sleep. In our universe, we wonder whether Trump will invade Venezuela or Nigeria.
2. We’re participating in a battle between a desire for the common good, and watching out only for our own lives and prosperity.
3. There are two sides and they don’t understand each other; each side believes they’re the prey of others out to do them wrong.

*The sections I quote from Gospel of the Living Dead, by Kim Paffenroth (Baylor University Press, 2006) carry footnotes that reference Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, a film director and college professor, who reviewed the film Land of the Dead in the Journal of Religion and Film (2005, Volume 9, Issue 2). 

Americans Voting for the Sizzle

A poster for Joe Dante’s 1987 political satire The Second Civil War. 

In the 1987 film, The Second Civil War (a film first created to stream on HBO), slick lobbyist Jack Buchan (the late great James Coburn) instructs the U.S. President (the fondly remembered Phil Hartman):

“No disrespect sir, but the American people vote for the sizzle, and not the steak.”

This late 1980’s dystopian satire* was set forty years in the future (the mid 2020’s).
Unfortunately, no network has had the nerve to brush the cobwebs off of this film.
It’s a comedy about immigration, and we can’t do comedies about immigration anymore!
The main plot is this: the Federal Government orders Idaho to accept one million Pakistani immigrants.
The Idaho Governor (Beau Bridges) objects, and a second Civil War results.
(My husband and I own a DVD of the film.)

Speaking of “sizzle,” one of the reasons that Trump was elected in 2016, was that people were tired of voting year after year, and seeing no real change in our unjust systems.
On November 18th, 2025, survivors of Epstein-Maxwell abuse gathered outside the Capitol.
They spoke of being ignored by five different administrations.
Several women mentioned contacting the FBI, and the Justice Department, and not being listened to because mere women were accusing rich and powerful men.

1939’s The Wizard of Oz, with the Wizard (Frank Morgan) revealed from behind the curtain.

Trump reminds me of the big green head in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Trump is the head, and the people who wrote Project 2025 are Professor Marvel (the person behind the curtain).
Trump has never been an “idea man.”
When pressed for an agenda, he rails against his enemies, blames other people, and lies that he has a “concept of a plan.”
During his November 2, 2025, 60 Minutes interview, with Norah O’Donnell, Trump actually said that he didn’t know the billionaire cryptocurrency founder (Changpeng Zhao), who he’d pardoned just a few days before!
Does Trump truly believe that ignorance makes actions OK?

I’ve been unable to trace it back, but a few days after Trump took office, in 2016, one pundit said that he’d never realized (until that election) how many Americans simply didn’t care if the world “blew up.”
I keep going back to this memory over the past nine years.
Why did so many people want something (anything, anyone) to shake up the status quo?
Weren’t they worried about the nuclear football?
Couldn’t they see that Trump just cared about himself?

An “old” Italian-American saying.

Is America mainly a nation of gamblers?
I guess that would make sense.
Most of our ancestors—at least the ones who came here willingly—gambled with their lives as they made their way to these shores.
They gambled that the ads published in European newspapers (promising streets paved with gold) would be accurate.
They gambled on surviving, as they traveled from Boston to California in wagon trains.
Men and women gambled that they wouldn’t die of diphtheria, or dysentery, or scarlet fever.
Women gambled that they wouldn’t die in childbirth, or starve to death. 

Why are Canadians not gamblers?
Why are they not as divided, and not as violent, as Americans?
Is it because most of their population came to Canada for safety, and for land?
Is it because Canada’s population is so much smaller in proportion to its’ land mass?
Is it because the Canadian climate is colder?
Is it because Canadians are more likely to be bilingual?
(The official languages of Canada are English and French.)

Is Canada so different from the US because Canada has never been dependent on slavery, and the tainted wealth that slavery brought?
Upper Canada ended slavery in 1793.
It’s estimated that there were only about 4,000 African slaves in Canada, when Canadian slavery was totally abolished in 1834. 

Volume 5 of the 1997 Collier’s Encyclopedia (page 268, in the “Canada” article) postulates that: “Canadians have shown a persistent desire to not become Americans.”
While Americans talk about being “a melting pot,” many Canadians have viewed their country as “a mosaic.”
Canadian citizens (except Inuits, and other native groups) have been encouraged to keep their ethnic individuality.
I much prefer the concept of a mosaic, over that of a melting pot.

Of course, like all countries, Canada has not been free of ethnic conflicts, or of racism.
Native groups have been oppressed and discriminated against.
In the 1990’s, French-Canadian citizens still tended to make less money than non-French-Canadian citizens.
Although most Canadians consider themselves “middle-class,” there are still class divisions, as well as a gap between the rich and the poor.

Americans have long been different from Canadians, however, in that Americans tend to be more materialistic, more violent, and “better” risk-takers.

Although the giant lumberjack, Paul Bunyan, is part of both American and Canadian folklore, he originated in Canada.

Another difference between the U.S. and Canada is that there were no “heroic thieves” (like Billy the Kid, and the Sundance Kid), or a “Wild West,” in the Canadian national mythology.
Instead, Canada was the place where Paul Bunyan was born, and wild creatures like Sasquatch or Wendigo roamed the forests.

The question comes down to this: Are Canadians generally a touch more conservative, less materialistic, and less “sensation-seeking,” than Americans?

* The Second Civil War (the 1997 HBO film), is close in title (at least) to Alex Garland’s 2024 thriller Civil War, that starred Kristen Dunst. Although the two films have a few things in common, they are polar opposites in terms of sensibility. Both films are about another Civil War, but in the current time period. Both films also feature news journalists (and a U.S. President) as main characters.

Imperfect Fathers and del Toro’s Frankenstein

Baron Frankenstein (Charles Dance, left) talks to his son, Victor, in del Toro’s Frankenstein.

Unless you want to be spoiled, don’t read these musings until you’ve seen Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.
This memorandum contains spoilers.

With the possible exception of Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein (1994), Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is the closest movie to Mary Shelley’s novel than any of the other Frankenstein films.*
The “Frankenstein” 2011 play (performed with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, switching between Victor Frankenstein and his “creature”) follows the Shelley novel more closely than either film.
However, that’s a play that was filmed, not a movie.

Essentially, Branagh brought into his story the creation of a female “creature,” and got further away from the original story.
On the other hand, del Toro brought in an additional character (Harlander), plus he changed the main female character Elizabeth.
(Harlander fills in partly for the Henry Clerval character (in the novel); however, while Clerval was the voice of love and sanity, Harlander portrays a purely materialistic point of view.)
Del Toro’s mysterious Elizabeth becomes the only idealistic figure in the del Toro film, but her motivations are unclear.

I loved the del Toro film.
However, it didn’t hit me in the gut as much as my two favorite del Toro films, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.
I didn’t identify with Elizabeth in Frankenstein, as I identified with Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, or Elisa in The Shape of Water.
Instead, if I identified with anyone, it was with the creature.

Del Toro’s very tall creature (Jacob Elordi) in his 2025 Frankenstein.

Perhaps, Frankenstein is more a man’s film, than a woman’s film.
It’s mainly about two males, their relationships with their father-figures, and a battle against materialism.
It's also more of an action film.

Certainly, del Toro’s creature (Jacob Elordi) is more of a “superman” than Branagh’s creature (Robert De Niro), or the Universal Frankenstein (Boris Karloff), was.
The skin of del Toro’s creature heals miraculously after being shot.
He “dies,” and then recovers, at least twice.
He seems to have the strength of fifty men.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein differs from Mary Shelley’s novel, in that Victor Frankenstein’s father (Charles Dance) is a benign presence in the novel, but a malignant presence in the film.
In the novel, Victor’s father is not interested in science, and is a loving mate to his wife.
In the film, however, his father is a physician obsessed with his career.
Another older “father” figure (Harlander, played by Christoph Waltz) is invented for the film, in order to provide funds for Victor’s experiments, and to portray the purely materialistic viewpoint. 

Was Victor (Oscar Isaac) a “bad father” to his creation because he was badly parented by the males in his life?
The creature is lucky enough to find a more caring father (than Victor had), in the person of the blind man (David Bradley) in the forest.
Learning from the blind man is how the creature begins to communicate with others, and to say more than the two words “Victor” and “Elizabeth.”

The creature, as drawn in the Bernie Wrightson “Frankenstein” graphic novel.

In terms of looks, the creature resembles what Mary Shelley described in her novel, and the work of artist Bernie Wrightson (who del Toro thanks in the end credits).
Wrightson (1948-2017), one of the creators of “Swamp Thing,” drew the creature in his 1983 “Frankenstein” graphic novel.
The Wrightson drawings make the creature look a bit more cadaver-like, than the film does.

Another significant difference between the book and the film is the character of Elizabeth.
In Shelley’s novel, Elizabeth is a foster sister who Victor grew up with.
(In the novel, Victor describes his adopted sister Elizabeth as “the beautiful and adored companion of all my occupations and my pleasures.”)
In del Toro’s film, Elizabeth (Mia Goth) is a wealthy stranger betrothed to Victor’s younger brother (William, played by Felix Kammerer), plus she’s Harlander’s niece.

Elisa (Sally Hawkins, left) with the amphibian man (Doug Jones) in The Shape of Water.

Unlike the Elizabeth in the novel, del Toro’s Elizabeth is enraptured by the strangeness of Victor’s creature as soon as she sees him.
Her attraction to the creature brings up memories of Elisa’s fascination with the amphibian man in The Shape of Water.

I didn’t realize (until I read the end credits), that Mia Goth played both Victor’s mother Claire (in a dark wig), and Elizabeth (in a red wig).
Mia Goth is quite different in the two roles.
As Claire, she’s a fragile woman, devoted to her son, and afraid of her husband.
As Elizabeth, she’s a much more exotic female, newly released from a convent, independent, and (although she’s religious) very interested in the sciences.

Although del Toro’s creature is as full of rage as Shelley’s creature in the novel, he does not kill except to defend himself.
He doesn’t commit the sin of raping or killing Elizabeth.
He doesn’t kill an innocent child.
He doesn’t plant evidence (a necklace) pointing toward another killer for a murder that he committed. He does cause Victor Frankenstein’s death, but (at the end of the film), he’s as filled with remorse, as the creature is in Mary Shelley’s novel.
After all, Victor is the creature’s foster father.

*I’ve also written about Roger Corman’s Frankenstein film, in three memorandums: “Must Knowledge Lead to Progress? Part I,” “Must Knowledge Lead to Progress? Part 2,” and “Losing a Dime Making a ‘Message’ Film.”

Alien Government

In Alien: Earth, Prodigy leader Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and Weyland-Yutani leader Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) face off when Boy Kavalier hijacks a Weyland-Yutani spaceship filled with alien species.

On Alien: Earth (Hulu), which just ended on a cliff-hanger, some of the most interesting plot lines involve the companies who run the Earth in 2120 (about a hundred years in the future).
In the world of Alien: Earth, the planet is controlled by five mega corporations, just as it was run by all-powerful Weyland-Yutani in 1979’s Alien, 1986’s Aliens, and 2024’s Alien: Romulus.

In the Alien: Earth universe, three other companies are mentioned (Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold).
However, the two companies featured in the series, are Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani.
Prodigy Corporation controls Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Weyland-Yutani owns North and South America (plus planets Mars and Saturn).
These companies run the planet, and control all humanity.
There are no governments.
Regular people have no guaranteed rights.
The only goals are more profit, and power, for the companies.

Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is the owner of Prodigy.
Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) runs Weyland-Yutani.
They each are surrounded by servants (both real humans, and artificial beings), who obey (or seem to obey?) their whims.
In the opening crawl, for Alien: Earth, artificial beings are listed as three types: Cyborgs, Synths, and Hybrids.

Medic Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther) wants to go back to school, and become a doctor. However, Prodigy Corporation has other ideas. Joe is forced to continue his work contract, and remain in a military search and rescue team.

Living conditions on Earth are extremely depressing.
There seems to be a wide division between the rich and the poor.
The wealthy elite live in giant sky-scrapers where they enjoy decadent parties.
The worker class lives in tiny slum apartments that don’t appear to have kitchens.
In episode 2 of Alien: Earth, a group of very wealthy people are having a costume party.
(The party was organized to celebrate the purchase of a famous baseball once thrown by Reggie Jackson in 1977.)
In that same city, members of the military live in drab, dark spaces with few amenities, and hang out together on a roof-top. 

As I watched the series, I wondered if Alien: Earth is the future that the leaders of Russia and America have in mind for earth’s peoples.
Do they really desire a world in which only the oligarchs have autonomy, and in which most humans are subservient to them?

250 years after 1776, does the Right want us to go back to a version of North America (the 1600’s?) run by the Company of New France, the Dutch West India Company, Virginia Company of London, The Plymouth Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company?
George III, and the British government, took over the rule of the thirteen colonies when private companies weren’t able to give British royalty the tax profits that they expected.

Star Fleet headquarters in San Francisco as seen in Star Trek from Star Trek: the Next Generation onward.

In 1966, the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) told corporate sponsors that his show would be “Wagon Train in space.”
However, what he didn’t tell sponsors is that he envisioned an Earth in which class divisions, and racial divisions, were eradicated!
In the Star Trek world, the people of earth voted for a President.
It was a democratic (small D) society. 

Thinking back, many of Roddenberry’s scripts were very “woke.”
Perhaps, that’s why the show was cancelled after three seasons.
After Roddenberry died (in 1991), new show-runners introduced the Black Ops group Section-31, and major wars against alien races, to the Star Trek canon.

Captain Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) and Dr. Teresa Ramirez (Sol Rodriquez) are caught up in an ICE raid (in an alternate time-line's 2024), in the season 2 “Watcher” episode of Star Trek: Picard.

In season 2, of Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023), Admiral Picard (Patrick Stewart) finds himself transported to an alternate time-line by the godlike alien Q (John de Lancie).
In one time-line, Earth is under a Fascist government that uses alien races (like Vulcans and Klingons) as slave laborers.
Season 2 tells the story of Picard, and his team, fighting to prevent this horrible time-line from beginning by traveling back to 2024.

While Earth in the Star Trek universe is a utopia, the Alien universe can best be described as dystopian: “an imagined state in which there is great suffering and injustice.”

In the first Alien film, Ash (Ian Holm), the only artificial being in the Nostromo crew, is beheaded by Parker.

It’s clear, in the first Alien (1979), that the Nostromo crew is not valued by Weyland-Yutani.
When they learn that their cargo ship is being diverted to investigate a mysterious transmission, the crew has no say in the matter.
They must check out the alien signal, or lose their salaries (or shares).
Later, Ash (the great Ian Holm) is revealed as an android.
Ash has obviously been placed on the Nostromo to make sure that profit is valued over human life.
Similarly, in Alien: Earth, the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay) chooses loyalty to Weyland-Yutani, and the transport of his dangerous cargo, over the lives of his crew mates.

The modified cargo containers that housed the “colonist/workers” in 2024’s Alien: Romulus.

In Alien: Romulus (2024), the young mine workers (who we meet at the beginning of the film) are being forced to extend their work contracts by Weyland-Yutani.
It seems that the teenage “colonists” are trapped in an indentured servant situation.
They work under brutal conditions, and live in squalid, modified cargo containers.
Many of the parents (who brought them to planet LV-410), have already died from overwork and a toxic environment.
The older workers died, just as generations of immigrants died, building the United States of America.

Looking at world events, I guess that the future described in the Alien stories, is a lot more likely than the future described in the Star Trek stories.
Let’s pray that this isn’t the case.

In 1381, Wat Tyler (1341-1381), leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, demanded of King Richard II, that all hierarchy be abolished (except for the king’s lordship), and that serfdom be abolished in England.
The 14-year-old King agreed to Tyler’s arguments, but soon after, Wat Tyler was beheaded, and all agreements were rescinded.
People have fought for basic rights, and an end to hierarchy, for a very very long time.
How far have we really gotten in ending hierarchy?

Around 550 years later, on February 20, 1933, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, informed a group of 25 German industrial leaders that: “We are about to hold the last election. Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”*
Does American society believe in continuing our democratic system?
Can a democracy be maintained?
How much democracy will be permitted by our AI, and human, overlords?

*Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923-1941, by Susan Ronald, page 84 (2023, St. Martin’s Publishing group, Macmillan).

The Little Villains Call’d the Smallpox

Dr. Edward Jenner vaccinating an adult, from Real Heroes Comics, Issue 15, page 31.

The history of vaccination is quite interesting.*
Many of us have read that British physician Edward Jenner (1749-1823), vaccinated people in the late 1700s.
However, smallpox vaccination has a long history, before 1796.
Dr. Jenner was responsible for refining the process (using cowpox pus instead of smallpox pus) so that people wouldn’t die, or become very ill, after a smallpox vaccination.

A Chinese man with pustules, and variolation (the practice of inoculating people with smallpox pus).

The first reference to smallpox inoculation (1549), in medical literature, was made by Chinese pediatrician Wan Quan (1499-1582). Variolation (the practice of inoculating people with smallpox pus) became common place in China in the late 1500’s.
The technique had a mortality rate as high as one death per thousand patients, but patients who under went it were immune to smallpox.
Since smallpox itself had a 20-30% mortality rate, patients were willing to undergo the procedure.
Variolation spread to Africa, and parts of Europe.

Onesimus explained the practice of smallpox vaccination to Cotton Mather.

Around 1706, Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather (a Harvard graduate) learned of vaccination from one of his slaves, a man called Onesimus.
Onesimus had been vaccinated in Africa, years before he was brought to America, and enslaved.
Mather went on to promote vaccination during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721-1722.
(Mather finally released Onesimus from slavery in 1716.)
You can read the full comic strip that I excerpted HERE!

In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) introduced the idea of smallpox vaccination to the British royalty.
Lady Montagu was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey.
That is where she had learned about inoculations.
Montagu had both of her own children vaccinated against smallpox, and encouraged the royal family to do the same.

The cover of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, by Elizabeth A. Fenn (published in 2001).

In 1777, General George Washington ordered that the entire Continental Army be inoculated, because of the 1775-1782 smallpox epidemic during the Revolutionary War.
General Washington had had a mild case of smallpox in 1751, so he was already immune.

As I learned in Dearest Friend (a biography of First Lady Abigail Adams by Lynne Withey), the entire John Adams family underwent smallpox inoculations.
John Adams (the second U.S. President) was inoculated in 1763, before he married Abigail.
In a letter to his fiancé, he joked that he:

must permit the little Villains call’d the small Pox to have their Feast this Spring. [colonial-era spelling, and capitalization]

Mrs. Adams, and several of the Adams children, were inoculated in 1775.
This procedure usually took at least six to seven weeks.
First, the secluded patients would take various debilitating medications (laxatives and diuretics), preparing themselves for inoculation.
Then, they’d be infected with the virus, and (hopefully) merely experience a mild form of the disease.
Two of the Adams children became dangerously ill, but that was common at the time.

British DVD cover from 80,000 Suspects (1963) a British film about a smallpox epidemic in the city of Bath.

The American Medical Association didn’t push for compulsory smallpox vaccination until 1899.
Some American citizens did rebel.
In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Jacobson vs Massachusetts, and ruled that it was within the authority of local governments to make vaccination requirements of their citizens, and to levy fines against those who resisted.
There were still smallpox outbreaks around the world, as late as the 1970’s.

The “Vaccination and Immunization” article, in volume 23 of Collier’s Encyclopedia, points out that no vaccine is 100% effective.
Factors like age, nutritional status, and overall immunologic competence can make a vaccine much less effective.
Vaccinations, like medicines, act differently on different people, and medical studies try to determine what’s what.
There can also be side effects with vaccination, sometimes serious side effects.
However, just because vaccines don’t work 100% of the time, or occasionally cause side effects, doesn’t indicate that we should rid ourselves of vaccines.
Isn’t that just throwing the baby out with the bath water?

Still from The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 movie, in which public health doctors seek a diamond-smuggler spreading smallpox.

On September 17, 2025, Senator Rand Paul interrogated former CDC Director Susan Monarez, PhD, about the COVID-19 vaccine.
They argued whether the vaccine reduces hospitalization for children under 18, and whether the CDC should change recommendations for infants under six months old.
Ms. Monarez was appearing before the Senate, because in August of 2025, she had been fired for refusing to loyally rubber stamp all of RFK Jr’s vaccine policies, sight unseen!

This change in attitude toward vaccination, from 1776 to 2025, is fascinating.
250 years ago, John Adams, his family, and the entire colonial army, took a risk, so they would not live in fear of those “little villains call’d the smallpox.”
People of the time joked about “the smallpox,” even though they greatly feared it.
Today, around 23% of Americans don’t trust scientists as a group (Pew Research Center).
Some say that it isn’t enough if a vaccine just minimizes their disease symptoms.
Any vaccine has to be “perfect,” and work in every case, for them to roll up their sleeves.
In 1776, smallpox vaccination was a long risky process.
Today, some folks believe that one almost risk-free injection is an imposition on their freedom.

*Most, but not all, facts pertaining to vaccination are taken from the “Vaccination and Immunization” article in volume 23 of Collier’s Encyclopedia. Fun fact that I didn’t find in Collier’s, but did discover in the above comic book about Onesimus: Ben Franklin was against smallpox inoculation in his youth. However, he accepted its’ usefulness when he reached adulthood.