The American Plan

In 1918, the US Government created a plan to track, detain, and imprison women for the STIs brought home from soldiers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to American Shadows, a production of iHeartRadio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Reverend Sylvester Graham had
a unique perspective on sexual behavior. A. Graham claimed that
promiscuity had a lot to do with a person's diet.

(00:25):
While his belief may seem like a stretch, in the
mid eighteen hundreds, medicine had barely advanced past bleeding patients
to remove whatever ailed them. A Graham connected diet and sex.
While recovering from a long term illness in eighteen twenty six,
he spent considerable time thinking about a moral behavior and
its root causes. Although ideals of abstinence before marriage were

(00:47):
nothing new to his peers, A Graham noticed changes in
the American diet and in people's opinions about sex, and
he believed the two were connected. Graham began to preach
that a diet filled with fats, meats, and refined flour
took a toll on one's body and soul, that those
who ate these foods were often prone to many illnesses

(01:08):
and were generally more unhealthy. He reasoned that the more
immoral someone was, the more the body suffered. He and
others thought sex should be used for procreation and nothing
more so in the eyes of the church. An orgasm
was required from men during sex, but not women, and
that was part of the problem. Women were beginning to

(01:31):
stand up for their own points of view. Graham's over
zealous preaching incited an angry mob of women to violence
in eighteen thirty four when he tried lecturing them on chastity,
a concept they felt they had a fine grip on
all on their own, thank you very much. Worried that
sexual activity was rampant and harmful, he even urged married

(01:52):
couples to cut down on sex. To help curb the urge,
Graham suggested a diet high end fiber, fruit, vegetables, and
whole grains. Meat should only be eaten in small proportions
and no more than twice a day. His statements angered butchers,
who made their living on americans growing meat consumption. He
began styling himself as Doctor Graham, and he insisted that

(02:14):
smoking and drinking should also be avoided. A food should
be bland, no spices to wake any desires, not even pepper.
Food shouldn't even be physically warm. The more stimulating the food,
the higher the sexual appetite. In addition to diet, he
preached that drinking clean water, getting plenty of sunshine, exercising,
keeping up personal hygiene, and wearing comfortable clothing also reduced

(02:37):
carnal cravings. Given the changes in people's diets and women's rights,
Graham concluded that men could no longer control their urges.
To save them from sin and ill health, he devised
a coarse ground, wholewheat flower to promote well being and
control those urges. Stores began carrying Graham's flower. Devotees wrote

(02:59):
to Gram, thanking him for curing a wide range of
physical and mental health issues. Some all male boarding houses
began enforcing his hygiene and exercise regime and served the
men crackers made with Graham's flour. They contained no sugar
or fat and were usually softened by soaking or boiling
to make them more edible. In eighteen thirty eight, Oberlin

(03:21):
College incorporated the flour into their meal planning. While Americans
might have become healthier due to a better diet and
more exercise, it did little to make people abstain from sex.
So Graham doubled down on his efforts, which proved too
much for even his most devoted followers. Graham might have
faded from the public eye, but his crackers grew in popularity,

(03:45):
though the formula changed over the years, incorporating refined flour, sugar,
and fats. Today Graham crackers come in varieties like honey
and cinnamon, flavors that might have the Reverend spinning in
his grave. I'm Lauren Bogelbaum. Welcome to American Shadows. Sylvester

(04:11):
Graham was hardly alone in having stringent views of morality.
Ideas of what is moral and what is not have
long been debated, especially when it comes to sex. And
while our history books are full of interesting events, we
rarely hear about those where sex is at the forefront.
At the start of World War One, the United States

(04:33):
had a problem. Aside from a lack of available men
to fight in the war, forcing the government to implement
a military draft, a large number of soldiers had a
reputation for excessive drinking and promiscuity, and while rampant alcohol
consumption did present an issue in health and combat, it
was these sexual exploits and notoriety for sexually transmitted infections

(04:56):
or STIs that concerned the government. STIs became such an
epidemic among soldiers that military doctors treated more men for
gonorrhea and syphilis than more commonly transmissible diseases such as
measles or mumps. In fact, only influenzas surpassed STIs in
the number of infected soldiers. At first, the American Social

(05:20):
Hygiene Association tried closing brothels and dance halls where they
determined that antisocial venereal disease carriers worked, and instead of
arresting the men visiting the brothels, they arrested the women working.
Those arrested were tested and treated. Additionally, the association sought
to rehabilitate a weak minded women. The association began providing

(05:45):
other forms of recreation for the men, teaming up with
the YMCA, films like Fit to Fight, attempted to educate
men on the effects STIs had on their abilities as soldiers,
but the association's initiative was unsuccessful. In nineteen eighteen, the
government implemented the Chamberlain Khan Act, better known as the

(06:05):
American Plan. The law stated that the Secretary of War
and the Secretary of the Navy were quote authorized and
directed to adopt measures for the purpose of assisting the
various States in caring for civilian persons whose detention, isolation, quarantine,
or commitment to institutions may be found necessary for the

(06:27):
protection of the military and naval forces of the United
States against venereal diseases. They reasoned that men were only
acting on their carnal urges and were hardly able to
resist loose women. Uninfected men who visited brothels often came
away with STIs, so to them, probiscuous women were the carriers.

(06:48):
Soldiers who returned home and spread infections to their unsuspecting
wives or girlfriends weren't considered the problem. Authorities argued that
infected men were not carriers. Instead, they blamed women. The
American Plan gave the government and law enforcement the right
to arrest, quarantine, test, and treat any woman suspected of

(07:10):
a moral behavior. No actual proof was needed. The morning
of October thirty first, nineteen eighteen, started like any other
for Nina McCall, a seventeen year old woman living in
the small town of Saint Louis, Michigan. The weather forecast
called for flurries the following evening, and Nina wanted to
finish her errands early. She exited the post office in

(07:32):
the town's business district, just as she had done countless
times before, and Nina lived a few blocks away in
an apartment she shared with her mother and brother. As
she left, her eyes met with Lewis Martin's, the town's
deputy shaff Nina knew the deputy fairly well. As a
young teen, she had been friends with Martin's daughter. Before

(07:53):
she was at the door, Martin ordered her to report
for inspection without recourse or due process. The doctor forcibly
stripped and examined Nina. At first, he declared she had gonarrhea,
then decided it was syphilis. Nina had no say in
the matter, nor any regarding what happened next. She'd seen
the placards outside other women's homes, the ones that read

(08:15):
venereal disease in large red letters. Given that she had
never had sex, Nina was sure she couldn't possibly have
an infection and insisted the doctor's findings were incorrect. The
doctor insulted that she was calling him a liar, physically
threatened her. Then he treated her with arsenic Afterward, he
and the deputy forced her to sign a document acknowledging

(08:37):
his findings, the two men informed her that she would
have to spend six weeks in a detention center, where
she would be subjected to more exams and treatments. Six
weeks turned into three months for Nina and thousands of
other women. The reign of terror had begun. In nineteen eighteen,

(09:02):
Nina was one of one thousand and seventy two women
in Michigan alone who were arrested on suspicion of immoral behavior.
None were given an explanation for the perceived transgression. If
the arresting officer suspected a woman of immoral behavior, his
word was enough. With the American plan in place, law

(09:22):
enforcement across the country took to the streets in what
was akin to witch hunts. On February twenty ninth of
nineteen nineteen, Sacramento police working in the Morality Squad set
out to cleanse the city of im moral women. At
nine thirty that morning, they arrested a missus Sodfried. Within
the hour, they arrested one Lena Rosarine. By noon, that

(09:44):
arrested six women purely on suspicion. By the end of
the day, the department had twenty five women in custody.
The arrests had become commonplace, humiliated and embarrassed. Most women
fortunate enough to be released after the exams went home
and stayed quiet about their ordeal. To do otherwise would
raise eyebrows about their actions, risking shame and further humiliation.

(10:08):
There were some women, however, who did not go home quietly.
On that day in February, Margaret Hennessy and her sister
walked to the meat market in Sacramento, where they planned
to do some grocery shopping. The two women chatted as
they made their way down the street. One officer Ryan
approached them, and the women smiled, expecting to move past him.

(10:30):
Ryan promptly arrested them. The two explained who they were
and what they were doing. They offered identification and told
the officer that if they were arrested, Margaret's six year
old son, currently at school in a nearby convent, would
have no one to care for him. Officer Ryan remained unmoved.
To him, two women walking together unchaperoned by a man

(10:52):
was proof of immoral behavior. He took both women to
what the city referred to as the Canary Cottage, a
hospital for isolating and examining women. A male doctor poked
and prodded Margaret and her sister. After a lengthy gynecological exam,
the doctor determined that they were free from disease. They

(11:12):
were released, though they were still ordered to appear in
court the next morning. The fact that they were free
of STIs didn't clear them of the charge of acting immrally.
Angry over their treatment, Margaret went to the press to
defend her reputation. There's no record of whether Margaret was
successful or not. A woman could be taken in for

(11:33):
anything that raised suspicion. Some were arrested for changing jobs,
eating alone at a diner, walking alone, laughing, or other
acts that might appear flirtatious. No one needed proof a
woman was selling sex for money. If an officer determined
her behavior was unladylike, he could arrest her on suspicion

(11:54):
of soliciting. Those determined to be diseased based purely on
a physical exam were imprisoned. The guards looked down on them,
often beating them or abdussing them with cold water, or
throwing them into solitary confinement. When interred, the women were
subjected to further exams, treatment, consisted of mercury injections and

(12:14):
oral drugs containing arsenic standard treatments for STIs. At the time,
some women were even sterilized. The American Plan had plenty
of political supporters, including New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and
California's Governor Earl Warren. Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory took
the time to write to each state urging them to

(12:37):
enforce the plan. He assured them that the American Plan
and the arrests were constitutional. Gregory also personally wrote to
each US district judge instructing them against interfering with arrests.
Across the nation, mayors and governors enthusiastically enforced the law.
In Michigan, Nina's life in the base entered detention facility

(12:58):
was deplorable. She and the others had no privacy. All
incoming and outgoing mail was opened and read. The facility
had any letters that mentioned physical or medical treatment destroyed,
and the facility wasn't alone in its actions. Inmates across

(13:22):
the nation had to sign statements granting their jailers the
right to scrutinize mail. Many prohibited the women from seeing visitors, guards,
threatened women with additional detention or treatments if they refused
their sexual advances. The mercury and arsenic in the pills
and injections made Nina ill, and she began to lose
her hair. She and other women were often kept in

(13:44):
the state of malnourishment every day. Nina asked to go
home every day. The answer was no. Until January of
nineteen nineteen, she was released, but was told case workers
would watch her for the rest of her life, that
so much as a smile could send her back to
the detention center. And Nina accepted a marriage proposal in

(14:05):
the hopes that being a married woman might keep her safe.
It did not. The woman assigned to monitor Nina was
furious to learn of her marriage. Social worker Ida Peck
paid a visit to Nina's ill mother and pressured her
for information on Nina's whereabouts. Nina's husband, Claire Rock, saw
an opportunity with his new wife prostitution. He moved to

(14:30):
Mount Pleasant and took Nina with him. When his plan
to sell his wife to other men for sex didn't
work out, he left her for another woman. Nina did
her best to disappear in Detroit. She couldn't return home
without subjecting herself to another investigation from Ida Peck. Given
her husband's attempt to prostitute her out, a pack would

(14:51):
undoubtedly send her back to the detention center. Abandoned and broke,
Nina missed her family. She looked forward to their only
connect letters. One day, she received a letter from her
mother that changed everything. A wealthy Christian scientist by the
name of Elizabeth Beverly Barr Givens had visited Nina's mother

(15:12):
and presented an opportunity. She wanted Nina to help her
sue the state of Michigan and oppose the American Plan.
By now, women's stories had begun to creep into the press.
Letters poured into politicians and judges, demanding to know why
infected men who behaved the same as women, and often
far worse, were not held accountable. While sex workers were

(15:36):
arrested and sent to detention centers for treatment, the men
who paid for their services were not. Gives hired three
of the state's most prominent attorneys and invited Nina to
stay with her while the case and trial unfolded. In
September of nineteen nineteen, and Nina returned to her hometown.
On November third, her lawyers filed the suit. While Nina

(15:58):
and Missus Gives waited for the trial, set for June
of nineteen twenty, Nina worked odd jobs to support herself
and helped Gibbons around the house. The weather on June
first proved to be as stormy as the trial. The jurors,
all male, listened to Nina and other witnesses relay the
horrors of her treatment and imprisonment. Nina recounted how she

(16:20):
had been subjected to repeated exams. Though she insisted that
she had never been with any man before her husband,
she testified that the exams were so rough that she bled. Afterwards.
Quietly and eloquently, she told the court about the humiliation
she had endured and the punishment she had received. The
court listened as she told them how she had been

(16:41):
threatened and hunted, how her life had been ruined, all
for meeting the deputy's eyes as she left the post
office that winter day. The defense argued that Nina was
indeed a loose woman who deserved everything that had happened
to her. In the end, the jury agreed with the defense,
and the judge ordered Nina to pay the defendant's legal costs.

(17:02):
Nina and her attorneys appealed, taking the case to the
Michigan Supreme Court. In nineteen twenty one, the court ruled
in Nina's favor. Though she'd won, the judge cautioned that
her treatment and probation would have been within the States
rights had there been reasonable suspicion that she was infected.
The era of the American Plan was a dark time

(17:24):
for women. Nina and tens of thousands of others like
her were stripped of their dignity and denied their rights
from the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which prohibits searches and
seizures without reasonable cause. The government had opened over thirty
of what they called rehabilitation centers across the nation, in
many complete with barbed wire and armed guards. However, America

(17:48):
was hardly the first to implement the arrest, examination, and
detention of women. The American Plan had been inspired and
modeled after similar laws in European countries. During World War One,
Nina's story faded from public memory. She remarried and did

(18:12):
her best to move on with her life. In nineteen
fifty seven, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and
died at a nursing home at the age of just
fifty six. While it would seem that Nina's victory paved
the way to abolish the American Plan, it had the
opposite effect. The American Social Hygiene Association doubled down on
their efforts against women who they believed acted immorally and

(18:35):
were a menace to public health. Even after medical science
advanced and penicillin became the standard treatment for Gonerha, syphilis
and other sexually transmitted infections in the early nineteen forties,
women were still harassed, arrested, and locked up for a
suspicion of having a venereal disease. The American Plan remained

(18:56):
in effect and remained enforceable for decades. The last attention
center used to quarantine women shut down in nineteen fifty three,
thirty four years after they first opened. Not one woman
received an apology or compensation. Legislators held firm that they
hadn't done anything wrong. The American Plan lost steam in

(19:18):
the fifties and sixties, partly due to lawsuits. The civil
rights movement and the Women's lib movement made it more
difficult to round up women off the streets and punish
them unjustly. Yet even through those movements, the Chamberlain Conact
remained active. Women marching for civil rights in Birmingham feared
being subjected to arrests and strip searches in nineteen sixty five,

(19:41):
and their fears weren't unsubstantiated. That same year, eighteen year
old writer Andrea Dwarkin was arrested outside the United Nations
Building in New York. A. Dwarkan was protesting the Vietnam
War when she was arrested. Police sent her to the
New York Women's House of Detention, known for housing fist women,

(20:01):
and Dwarkan was subjected to a strip search, followed by
a gynecological exam from two male doctors so violent that
she bled for days afterward. Not one to stay quiet
or take abuse, Dworkin wrote to the Commissioner of Corrections
she had been arrested for protesting, yet should been forcibly
examined under the Family Plan Act. After her release, Dwarkin

(20:24):
testified about her treatment and assault at the facility before
a grand jury. Unfortunately, the court refused to make an indictment.
The trial made both national and international news. Drkan's case
caused outrage in San Francisco, a former sex worker and
activist banded with an ACLU lawyer to challenge how arrests

(20:45):
were made in California. The Court of Appeals ruled that
Oakland police officers would have to quarantine men during prostitution
arrests too. Instead, prostitution arrests declined sharply. By the nine seventies,
the Chamberlain con Act, also known as the American Plan,
had lost many of its supporters, and the government passed

(21:08):
amendments redirecting the law away from sex workers, real or imagined,
and towards education and vaccination. However, the law remains active
to this day. There's more to this story. Stick around
after this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

(21:34):
Advice on birth control has been around for millennia. In
the first century CE, philosopher Pliny the Elder advised men
to pull out before climax and in a time when
we have more reliable methods of preventing pregnancy. Its advice
some groups still give. Reliable birth control is relatively new,

(21:55):
but when you consider human evolution, but practices ranging from
abstinence to more unorthodox methods have always been discussed. Egyptian
women around fifteen hundred BCE mixed a thick paste of honey,
sodium carbonate and crocodile dung as a spermicide, and while

(22:16):
crocodile dung may have actually increased their chances of pregnancy
by altering their pH levels, other solutions directly impacted women's
lives or health. Some rather bizarre methods may have actually
worked to some degree. Acacia dum, for instance, was later
found to have some spermicidal properties. Fast forward to eighteen

(22:37):
thirty nine, when Charles Goodyear discovered a way of treating rubber,
which led to the first rubber condom in eighteen fifty five.
Given their size and the need for a custom fitting,
rubber condoms weren't exactly popular, especially in the United States,
and while preventing pregnancy has long been part of human history,

(22:58):
there have also been those who believed that discussing sex,
much less birth control, was a serious morality issue. Anthony
Comstock made it his mission to do what he considered
to uphold Christian morality when he spearheaded the Comstock Act
in eighteen seventy three, which censored everyone, including doctors, from

(23:18):
discussing birth control a Margaret Sanger, a nurse and activist,
defied the Act and began offering advice on birth control
in the twentieth century. Her pamphlets quickly landed her and
arrest and indictment for breaching obscenity laws. For a while,
Sanger fled the country to avoid trial, eventually returning in
nineteen sixteen, she opened a family planning clinic, the first

(23:42):
of its kind, though officials shut it down in less
than two weeks. Undeterred, Sanger formed the Birth Control League,
which would later be rebranded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger's work led her to biologist Gregory Goodwin Pinkis. In
nineteen fifty a. Pincus had recently lost his job at

(24:02):
Harvard A. Sanger approached him with a job offer to
help her create a pill women could take to prevent pregnancy.
A thirty states still enforced anti birth control laws, so
the proposition was controversial, if not risky. For Sanger, the
partnership was a means to give women some control in
family planning, an autonomy over their bodies. She also did

(24:26):
at least partially align herself with at least part of
the eugenics movement, specifically limiting reproduction in people with mental
and physical disabilities or those living in poverty. A wealthy
philanthropist by the name of Catherine Dexter McCormick funded the project.
Sanger and Pinks teamed up with obstetrician John Rock. The

(24:47):
three tested the effects of progesterone on rabbits and rats.
Pincus took it a step further, though, He suggested they
take their discovery and experiment to Puerto Rico, where laws
were a bit more relax. Puerto Rico had authorized family
planning clinics and had encouraged contraception practices since nineteen thirty seven,

(25:08):
probably due to the aforementioned eugenics. The government there took
the practice to extremes, often pressuring women to have a
hysterectomy after the birth of their second child. The governor
believed that the poor were ignorant and couldn't control themselves.
A Pincus, Rock, and Sanger set up a clinical trial
recruiting women from a local medical university in nineteen fifty five.

(25:31):
Half the women quickly dropped out, fearing potential side effects.
Pincus decided on a different approach this time, recruiting poor
women who were desperate to prevent pregnancy wore hysterectomies. The
group set up a lab in the Rio Piethos neighborhood
in San Juan. Two hundred and sixty five women signed
up for the trial. None were given safety information regarding

(25:53):
potential side effects such as blood clots, depression, or nausea.
A pincus focused on efficiency over potential side effects. Three
women died during the trial. No autopsies were performed, so
it's unclear whether the fatalities were related to the pill.
The FDA approved the pill for contraception prevention on May

(26:14):
ninth of nineteen sixty The pill remained controversial, but by
nineteen sixty five it became the most widely used form
of birth control, putting women in control of their fertility. Today,
the safer reformulations lessen the side effects while offering ninety
nine percent efficiency. However, in twenty twenty two, many political

(26:35):
leaders voted against a rule to prevent states from banning
a woman's right to birth control. American Shadows as hosted
by Lauren Vogelbaum. This episode was written by Michelle Muto
researched by Ali Steed and produced by Miranda Hawkins and

(26:55):
Trevor Young, with executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex BOMs, and
Matt Frederick. To learn more about the show, visit grimanmil
dot com. From more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.