In 1918, as war raged in Europe, the government of the United States of America waged war on a different and much more nebulous opponent: venereal disease.
As President Woodrow Wilson said, "The Federal Government has pledged its word that as far as care and vigilance can accomplish the result, the men committed to its charge will be returned to the homes and communities that so generously gave them with no scars except those won in honorable conflict." Unfortunately, the scourge of venereal disease made upholding this proclamation difficult. With thousands of men incapacitated daily due to syphilis and gonorrhea, not only was the military failing to protect the young men it had been entrusted, it was suffering from the economic burden of hospitalizing and treating them, as well as the loss of manpower their sicknesses meant.
As was written by Raymond B. Fosdick, the chairman of The Commission on Training Camp Activities in 1918, “In some cases as much as thirty-three and a third per cent of the men have been made ineffective through venereal disease. We cannot afford to have any condition of that kind in connection with American troops.”
Such commission, abbreviated as the CTCA, was established in April 1917, the same month the U.S. entered WWI, as an agency within the United States Department of War. The Military Morale Section (MMS), which became the Morale Branch at the war's end, was founded a year later as American Forces were deployed to Europe.
Ostensibly the CTCA, and later the MMS, existed to help provide recreational and educational activities for military men stationed in massive training camps across the country and overseas. They worked with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) as well as other civilian groups to build libraries, organize choirs, set up organized athletic activities (in particular boxing), and generally provide "positive recreational forces... to take the place of the things [they were] trying to eliminate" like drinking, fighting, rabblerousing, and—especially relevant to venereal diseases—engaging prostitutes.
But the governmental entities didn’t stop at providing morally allowable alternatives to visiting the red-light districts that were widespread at the time. In the interest of “protecting the troops directly from the evils to which they have been exposed for years and years," the 65th United States Congress passed the Chamberlain–Kahn Act on July 9th, 1918. The act implemented a public health program that came to be known as the American Plan. It authorized the military, police, and public health officers to arrest any woman “reasonably suspected” of prostitution and subject her to an invasive screening for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). If she tested positive, she could be forcibly "quarantined" in jails, hospitals, and even former brothels converted to keep such fallen women in. Some who tested negative were incarcerated anyways, as their presumed promiscuity was deemed a public health threat.
While the law was itself gender-neutral, in its application, the Chamberlain-Kahn Act was used almost exclusively to target women. As just one example, in 1918, of the 1,121 people in Michigan hospitalized under suspicion of STIs, 95.6% were women. Lower-class, non-white, and otherwise marginalized women were subjected to the worst abuse. Black women were often segregated from white women, jailed in subpar facilities, and subjected to racist violence. Some were sterilized against their will or without their knowledge. Government officials warned that women of color were less moral and intent on infecting soldiers. They considered Black people in particular a “syphilis soaked race.”
The phrasing “reasonably suspected” gave practical carte blanche to its enforcers to arrest anyone they pleased. Nearly anything could make you a suspect, from being seen with a soldier to eating alone in a restaurant to simply existing in public.
Breakouts and rebellions in what some women referred to as concentration camps were common. Historian Scott W. Stern, who wrote The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison Promiscuous Women, notes, "In one wing of the horribly overcrowded Louisville jail quarantined women staged a riot about once a week." He writes that women in Los Angeles hacked through a fence with a stolen butcher knife and, in Seattle, tied the guards up in sheets and busted through the glass to escape. Some of the facilities created to isolate such "suspicious" women would go on to be used as camps to imprison Americans of Japanese and German descent, prisoners of war, and conscientious objectors during World War II.
Over 30,000 women were detained and examined throughout the war under the Chamberlain-Kahn Act. The CTCA's actions led to the shutdown of more than 100 red-light districts nationwide. And the rates of venereal disease amongst military men remained quite high anyways.
Historian Eric Wycoff Rogers contends that the American Plan's function was not only to reduce rates of venereal diseases but to leverage sexuality as a motivating force for its conscripted soldiers to embrace their roles in the unpopular war. Rogers writes, "sexual denial, status anxiety and perceived pressure from women – this was a powerful combination... In striving for the approval of women, the morale planners hoped soldiers would perform their duties without complaint, fight harder, and be willing to risk their lives.”
The War Department believed that sexually satisfied men could not be easily motivated. To this end, the CTCA encouraged the YMCA to strategically recruit women to work in the canteens on either side of the Atlantic that were attractive enough to stimulate the men but old enough to uphold their morals and refrain from sexual activity. Chaperoned dances were held in locales close to training camps in the U.S. and designated leave areas in France. Soldiers were heavily encouraged to write home to wives and sweethearts. Pinup photos were widespread, but so were posters, pamphlets, and other propaganda aimed at educating on the dangers of venereal diseases.
At the same time, through the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the Women and Girls section of the CTCA, the Department of War addressed women directly through actions like sending speakers to training-camp-adjacent settlements to teach about the dangers of sexually engaging with the troops.
Stern writes that the American Plan should be viewed “less as a limited public health response to World War I and more as a system of laws, a collection of enforcement procedures, and an attitude toward women and disease that continued for much of the twentieth century.” The federal agency responsible for enforcing this program lost its funding in 1922, but nearly every state continued to arrest, examine, and lock up women for decades.
To this day, “every single state still has a law on its books that endows government authorities with the power to determine which diseases are suitable for quarantine and isolation. In many states, the American Plan laws ... have survived largely unchanged.” For example, in the late 1940s, San Francisco police officers sometimes threatened to have women vaginally examined if they didn’t give in to their sexual demands.
It might seem ludicrous that such laws could be levied today, but just three decades ago, the Chamberlain-Kahn Act and American Plan were invoked in debates around government-imposed quarantines for HIV/AIDS patients. As Stern writes, “In the few cases in which some manner of isolation and quarantine of HIV/AIDS patients did occur, the authorities were acting in the shadow of the American Plan,” proving that such practices can be legally reintroduced, this time aimed at a different disease.
Even notwithstanding the potential for future abuse, the American Plan’s effects on perceptions and policing of female sexuality, especially regarding sex workers, have been numerous. As Barbara Meil Hobson wrote in her book Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition, “during World War I, panic about venereal disease completed the transformation of the image of the prostitute from sex-victim to sex-villain.” Remembering that practically any “promiscuous” (read: sexually active) woman was considered a prostitute, this transformation is exemplified in a line from an August 1917 letter from Marcia Louise Bradley, a mother from Oregon, to Secretary of War Newton Baker: “Shoot the lewd women as you would the worst German spy; they do more damage than all the spys [sic].”
