August 29, 2024 • 57 mins
In 1918, teenager Nina McCall was detained, forcibly examined for an STI, and then imprisoned in a hospital for three months. Nina's story is horrifying, but it is not unique: throughout the 20th century, thousands of women endured similar ordeals, all thanks to an STI prevention program known as "The American Plan." Like many other women, Nina fought back, suing the officials responsible for her treatment. Could her lawsuit stop the Plan -- or at least get her justice?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to History on Trial, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Listener discretion advised. On October thirty first, nineteen eighteen, Nina
McCall's life changed. Nina, who had turned eighteen only two
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months before, was running errands in Saint Louis, a small
town in central Michigan. Outside the post office, she ran
into Saint Louis's deputy sheriff, Lewis Martin. Nina knew Martin.
He had a daughter, Bernice, who was close to Nina's age.
Nina had even been over to the Martin home to
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visit Bernice. The Martins had always been nice lately, though,
Deputy Martin had been acting strangely. He was always talking
to girls and young women, having tense conversations with them
on the street, and sometimes even taking them away in
his car. Nina didn't know what he was up to,
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but it made her uneasy. When Martin approached, she was
right to be frightened. Martin had bad news for her.
A state health official, he said, needed to examine her
for sexually transmitted infections, and they needed to do it
right away. Nina was confused and upset. She had never
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had sex, so how could she have a sexually transmitted infection,
but the sheriff had ordered her so Nina went home
and asked her mother Minnie, to accompany her to the
office of doctor Thomas J. Carney, the health official in
nearby Alma. When the McCalls got to Carney's office, the
doctor told Nina that somebody had reported her as having
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an STI and that he needed to examine her. Nina refused,
but Carney insisted, and when Nina still said no, he threatened,
telling Nina that she would be sent to prison if
she did not submit to the examination. Reluctantly, Nina agreed.
She had never had a gynecological examination before. The exam
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was terrifying and painful. After examining slides he had taken,
Carne informed Nina that she was quote slightly diseased. She
had gone rhea. Nina couldn't believe it, neither could her mother.
They argued, with Carney saying that Nina had never shown
any symptoms of an STI and had never even had sex.
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Carney was obstinate Nina had gonorrhea and she needed to
receive treatment. Not just any treatment, either, Nina would have
to be locked away for it. Taken to a detention
hospital and treated there. Why couldn't the treatment be done
at home, Minnie asked. It was too expensive for a
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single mother like Minnie, Carney explained. Nina said she would
get a job to help with the costs. Not possible,
Carney replied, either she agreed to go to the detention hospital,
or he would hang a red placuard on the front
of her family home, declaring in all capital letters that
someone inside had a venereal disease. Nina recoiled. The shame
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would be unbearable. She couldn't put herself or her family
through that, so she agreed to be committed to the
Bay City Detention Hospital. Seven days later, Carney's assistant, Ida Peck,
escorted Nina to the hospital in nearby Bay City, Michigan.
It was an imposing, three story brick building. Nina would
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be kept in the hospital for three months, forced to
do manual labor, while also enduring agonizing, ineffective treatments. Even
when she was finally declared disease free, state health officials
would continue to harass her and force her to get
further treatment. Nina's story sounds like something else out of
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a horror movie, but it was very real, and it
was not unique. Across the country. In nineteen eighteen, thousands
of women were being detained on the suspicion of having
an STI, forcibly examined, and imprisoned without due process. Health
officials were empowered to do all of these things under
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a program that became known hauntingly as the American Plan.
Originally put in place during World War One to protect
soldiers from STIs, the American Plan would linger on even
in peacetime. In some places, women were detained under American
Plan laws even as late as the nineteen seventies. The
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American Plan enjoyed broad popular support. Some of the most
famous public figures of the twentieth century Fiorello LaGuardia, Earl
Warren and Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name just a few,
were enthusias bastic, proponents and enforcers of the Plan. They
believed that the Plan kept Americans safe, But the women
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who suffered under the American Plan felt anything but safe.
They had been stripped of their rights, hurt and humiliated,
so they fought back. They escaped from detention, hospitals, held
hunger strikes, set fires, and some of them sued. One
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of those who pursued the legal path was Nina McCall,
who filed suit against doctor Thomas Carney, his assistant Ida Peck,
and the superintendent of Bay City Detention Hospital, Mary Corrigan,
for abusing her. The resulting trial, which took place in
nineteen twenty, would put the central tenets of the plan
to the test. Could public health concerns outweigh civil rights?
(05:53):
Welcome to History on trial. I'm your host, Mira Hayward.
This week Rock v. Carney. On April sixth, nineteen seventeen,
the United States declared war on Germany and entered World
War One. By July nearly two million American men had
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been called up as part of the medical exam. Upon
entering the military, soldiers were tested for syphilis and gonorrhea.
Many of them tested positive. Between August nineteen seventeen and
August nineteen eighteen, the Surgeon General of the Army reported
that nearly thirteen percent of all soldiers were admitted for
treatment for STIs. Sdis were costly and dangerous for the military.
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Sick men needed treatment and could not fight. To combat
the problem, the government attempted to reduce sex work around
military camps. In May nineteen seventeen, Senator Wesley Livesey Jones
introduced an amendment to the Selective Service Act, the act
that invoked the draft, called Section thirteen. Section thirteen empowered
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the Secretary of War to quote do everything by him
deemed necessary to suppress and prevent the keeping or setting
up of houses of ill fame, brothels, or body houses
within such distance as he may deem needful of any
military camp. Secretary of War Newton Baker wrote to officials
in locales with military camps and informed them that sex
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work should be shut down within a five mile radius
of every camp. The federal organization leading STI policy was
the Commission on Training Camp Activities, or the CTCA. The
ctca's law Enforcement division deployed investigators across the country to
look into whether cities were complying with the federal government's requests.
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These investigators were supplemented by agents from the Bureau of Investigation,
the predecessor of the FBI, private groups, and members of
the American Social Hygiene Association or ASHA. By the fall
of nineteen seventeen, thanks to these collaborations, the CTCA had
hundreds of investigators. At first, the ctca's work was limited
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to the areas around military camps, but soon Army medical
officers determined that approximately five out of every six cases
of sexually transmitted infection in soldiers had been acquired before
the soldier arrived at camp. If the army wanted healthy soldiers,
they needed a healthy civilian population. The federal government began
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encouraging states and cities to expand their repression of sex
work into areas outside of the five mile radius surrounding
military camps. This encouragement came with strong incentives. If cities
did not try to reduce STI rates, the military would
declare them off limits to soldiers or military camps, enormous
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economic blows. In order to ensure compliance, the federal government
also encouraged local jurisdictions to pass laws that allowed health
officials to detain, examine, and quarantine women. To provide guidance
for states, federal officials met in DC in March nineteen
eighteen to draft a model law which states could adapt
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and enact. The law contained twelve recommendations. These included a
requirement for physicians to report all STIs to the state
quarantine and compulsory treatment, prohibition of drug stores selling treatment
for STIs, thus requiring infective people to interact with physicians
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and government officials to get treatment, and most critically, empowering
local health officers to examine Quote persons reasonably suspected of
having syphilis, gonorrhea, or shancroid. The term reasonably suspected was
extraordinarily broad. A woman could be reasonably suspected of having
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an STI for activities as innocuous as walking with a soldier,
speaking to another woman thought to be a sex worker,
or even eating lunch alone. Women who were detained and
tested positive for syphilis and orgonrhea were sent to detention
hospitals or houses, which were essentially jails. Most had barbed
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wire fences, armed guards, or both inside in often squalid conditions,
The women were forced to perform taxing domestic labor, like
scrubbing floors or cleaning bathrooms. Administrators saw this work, besides
being unpaid labor that benefited the institution, as part of
a larger program of moral reform, and I wish you
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could see how big the air quotes I'm doing are.
It was not enough for inmates to be treated for
their physical conditions. Many officials involved in the American Plan
believed that these women needed instruction in conforming to a
specific set of moral and social norms. As part of
this program of behavioral correction, some detention houses used a
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silence rule. Women there were not allowed to speak to
or even smile at one another. If they disobeyed this
prohibition or any other orders, they could face corporal punishment.
The women did receive treatment for their sdis they usually
had no choice in the matter. These treatments were largely
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ineffective and often dangerous, since they were usually arsenic or
mercury based. Women also had their intelligence assessed with inaccurate,
discriminatory IQ tests. If a woman was bound to be
quote feeble minded, she could be imprisoned indefinitely. Feeble minded
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women were seen to be prone to immorality. In the
worst cases, some of these women were sterilized, usually without
their consent. At this point, you might be one ding
why I'm only talking about women. After all, sexually transmitted
infections don't discriminate on the basis of gender, but not
everyone is as enlightened as a syphilis bacterium. Although the
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Model law was gender neutral, its application never was very
Very few men were ever examined or quarantined under these laws.
There was a common misconception that women spread STIs more
than men did. As one federal public health official put it,
quote men take more precautions. Women are very negligent. It
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was an obviously sexist assumption. But as the historian Scott W.
Stern writes in his book The Trials of Nina McCall,
these laws were based entirely on assumptions. Assumptions that quote,
young women were responsible for the indiscretions of young men,
That promiscuity in women was worse than it was in men.
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That STIs merited jail time for women, That women could
not merely serve their time as men did, but that
they had to be cured of disease and be reformed
in order to merit release. Enforcement was also racist. CTCA
investigators were instructed to focus on black women and black neighborhoods. Unfortunately,
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many local officials saw no problems with any of these
assumptions or biases. States began passing the model law quickly.
You might also be wondering about the constitutionality of these laws.
Surely people could not be locked up without due process
right wrong, at least according to United States Attorney General
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Thomas Watt Gregory. On April third, nineteen eighteen, Gregory wrote
a letter to every United States attorney across the country
ordering that people arrested for prostitution should first be sent
to health officials for STI examination. If a woman was
found to be infected, she should be quarantined and treated.
Prosecution for her crimes should be suspended until she completed
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this quarantine, meaning that she would be locked up without trial.
Gregory called the constitutionality of this plan quote clear. He
also told the US attorneys to report any local officials
who refused to go along with the plan. Gregory sent
a similar message to all US district judges. Even before
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the creation of the model law, some states had used
their own initiative to make regulations. In October nineteen seventeen,
the Michigan State Board of Health ordered physicians to report
all cases of gonorrhea and syphilis and to apprehend, detain,
and treat anyone found to be infected. The secretary of
the board, Richard m Ollen, also met with pharmacists associations
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and got them to agree to stop selling STI treatments.
Michigan's regulations closely mirrored what would appear in the Model Law.
Less than a year later, Nina McCall would experience firsthand
with those regulations meant. Nina McCall was born on September second,
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nineteen hundred to Abe and Minnie McCall. Two years later,
Nina's younger brother, Vern arrived. The McCalls lived on a
farm outside of Bethany Township in central Michigan until nineteen ten,
when they moved to nearby Saint Louis. Saint Louis was
a small town, one where everybody knew everybody. In nineteen sixteen,
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Abe McCall died, leaving his family in a difficult financial position.
Within a year, Minnie McCall had to sell their home
in Saint Louis. Minnie, Nina, and Verne moved to Alma,
a neighboring town. It was at this point that seventeen
year old Nina stopped attending school altogether. Her attendance had
always been spotty, but after the move to Alma, she
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never went back. It was an exciting time to be
a young woman, even in a rural town like Alma.
More and more women were entering the workforce, giving them
greater economic power and a new level of independence. Young
women began to casually date more than they ever had before,
and rates of premarital sex rose. Nina herself began dating
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a young man named Lloyd Knapp. In May nineteen eighteen.
Nina and Lloyd filed for a marriage license, but they
never completed the paperwork and never married. A month later,
the McCalls moved back to Saint Louis. At the same time,
soldiers were beginning to flood at Central Michigan. Alma was
home to the Republic Motor Truck Company, which made trucks
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for the army, and soldiers arrived in droves to help
drive the trucks east. The presence of so many new
people met good things economically for the region, but there
were concerns too. In May, the Alma Record wrote that
the city council needed to quote do away with the
present state of affairs in the city, where men seemed
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to think that they are privileged to accost ladies. Only
some ladies were entitled to protection. Though the record also
noted quote the presence of so many men is said
to be bringing women of an unsavory reputation into the city.
The record need not have worried the city's health officer,
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Doctor Thomas J. Carney, was on the case. The forty
nine year old Carney, a NeDi of New Yorker, had
arrived in Alma three years earlier. An inflexible, dogmatic man
with strong beliefs, Carney was determined to root out any
sources of ill health, from unpasteurized milk to promiscuous women.
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Carney would be aided in his work by Ida Peck.
Peck had held a number of jobs all across Michigan
in her fifty seven years. She had been a school teacher,
a private nurse, and a factory foreman. But beginning in
September nineteen eighteen, Peck would be a welfare worker. According
to Peck, quote, a welfare worker is one who looks
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after the girls. In reality, it was less looking after
than looking into. Thomas Carney hired Peck to help enforce
Michigan's STI laws. Peck later described her work as identifying
and following women who quote raised a suspicion in my mind.
Then she would report these women to doctor Carney, who
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would have them detained and then examine them for STIs.
If their results were positive, Peck would escort the women
to the detention hospital in Bay City, fifty miles northeast
of Saint Louis, Ida. Peck first heard Nina mccaull's name
in early October nineteen eighteen. She was transporting women to
Bay City when one of them mentioned Nina's name. Nothing more,
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just her name, but that was enough for Peck to
put Nina on her radar. Less than a month later,
on October thirty, First Deputy Martin brought Nina into Carney's office.
Whether Carney and Peck had any reason for suspecting Nina
besides the fact that another woman mentioned her name is unknown,
but the reasons why didn't really matter one way or another.
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Nina had been sucked into the grinding machinery of the
American Plan. As an aside, the term American Plan entered
widespread use only after World War One. Federal officials used
the term occasionally before that, but it was only in
nineteen nineteen that American Plan became the name for this
set of state and federal policies. The name American Plan
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paralleled other national plans for the control of STIs and
sex work, like the French Plan, created under Napoleon. For example,
Nina didn't know the plan as anything. She might not
have even known how many other women were enduring what
she was. There were thousands of them in Michigan alone.
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Between July one, nineteen eight eighteenth and June thirtieth, nineteen nineteen,
one thousand, one hundred and twenty one people were forcibly
detained for treatment, one thousand and seventy two of them women.
But Nina felt so alone. She would later say that
she only told her mother and her two aunts about
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her experience because quote I was ashamed of it. To
contextualize Nina's reaction, STIs were so stigmatized at the time
that many newspapers would not even print the words venereal disease.
After Carney examined Nina, diagnosed her with gonorrhea and informed
her that she would need and her detention hospital for treatment,
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he sent her home for the night. On the bus
ride home, Nina discovered that, as a result of Carney's
gynecological exam, she had bled through her trousers. The next day,
Nina traveled back to Carney's office to report to the hospital.
Carney told her that i'da pas was sick and could
not escort her, so Nina would have to return later.
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He told her the same thing on every one of
her return visits for the next seven days. Strangely, for
a doctor who claimed that Nina was such a health
risk to her community, Garney didn't seem too stressed about
getting her quarantined. On November sixth, Ida Pek was well
enough to take Nina to Bay City. The hospital had
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been constructed in nineteen eleven to hold patients with contagious
diseases like smallpox and scarlet fever. In February nineteen eighteen,
Richard Olan, the head of Michigan State Board of Health,
had requested that the hospital be transformed into a detention
hospital for women obtained under the American Plan. The city
readily agreed, in part because the state would pay them
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for their services. Bay City would receive fifteen dollars per
patient per week, more than enough to cover any expenses
associated with the hospital. This kind of arrangement wasn't unusual.
Cities received state and federal funding to detain women, giving
them an economic incentive to enforce the plan. When Nina arrived,
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she met the hospital's superintendent, thirty six year old Mary Corrigan,
a former nurse. She was given her first meal. She
would later testify that the food was mainly potatoes and beets.
Then she was shown into a small room with two beds.
Nina would have to share a bed with another woman.
The hospital was overcrowded. Its maximum capacity was only fifty,
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but there were closer to sixty or maybe even sixty
five women there. When Nina arrived, A nurse drew Nina's
blood and sent it off for testing. Two weeks later,
the results came back. Nina had tested positive for syphilis.
We should take this result with a large grain of salt.
The test used at the time, the Wasserman test, had
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a false positive rate of twenty five percent, but the
results were never questioned by the officials at Bay City.
Nina began to receive injections to treat her syphilis. Treatment
at this time consisted of injections of mercury and arsenic.
Not only did these injections not treat syphilis, they actively
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harmed patients. Nina's hair began to fall out, her teeth
became sore and loose. Her arm where she got the
shots swelled up so much she could barely move it.
Despite these painful conditions, Nina was still forced to work.
While at Bay City. She washed dishes, scrubbed the operating
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room floors, and scoured toilets. The work was interminable, grueling,
and unpaid. There was little time for fun, and even
if there had been, the women at Bay City were
kept mainly inside. There was a ditch in front of
the hospital and inmates were not allowed past it. Nina
had initially been ordered to the hospital because of testing
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positive for gonorrhea, but while at Bay City, she received
only two treatments for this condition. Unsurprisingly, given the effect
the mercury and arsenic shots had on her, Nina did
not want to receive more treatment. When the doctor arrived
to administer gonerhea treatments, Nina simply stayed away. She only
received formal orders, which she did not disobey to receive treatment.
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Six weeks into her stay, a doctor applied a compounded
silver cream to her vulva, another ineffective treatment. Nina only
ever received two rounds of this topical cream. Despite the
ineffective infrequent applications, Nina was declared quote free from syphilis
and gottorrhea in the infectious stage. In January nineteen nineteen.
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If you're wondering how this is possible, you're not alone.
Scott Stern writes, quote, even if we were to believe
that she truly had syphilis and gonorrhea when Carney examined her,
and that the two infections coincidentally advanced to layton and
non contagious stages on their own, which was certainly possible.
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For this timeline to fit the timing of Nina's examination
and incarceration exactly, would have had to be a remarkable coincidence.
Whatever the cause, Nina was declared released from quarantine. She
was given train fare home. After three months, she was
finally free, but her ordeal would not end there. When
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Nina returned home, she found it difficult to find a job.
Richard Olin, the director of the State Board of Health,
claimed that there were programs to help women get employment
after release. Nina, for one, did not receive any assistance
of this kind. She eventually got a restaurant job in
nearby Mount Pleasant, but lost that job a week later
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when someone informed her employers that she had been at
Bay City. A week after Nina returned home, Ida Peck
showed up at the McCall house. Nina needed to report
to doctor Carney for further treatment, Peck said. Nina protested
that she had been declared free of disease. Peck told
Nina she could either get treatment or be sent to jail.
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Afraid of being sent away again, Nina began making the
journey to Carney's office every five days, receiving more painful
mercury injections. The shots made her body ache, she had
trouble walking. Even though Nina was complying with Peck's orders,
the welfare worker would not leave her alone. Peck showed
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up at her house regularly. Nina later said, quote, she
was just hounding the life out of me, chasing me
day and night. This was not an unusual experience for
former detainees. Most women who were released were on a
kind of parole. Social or welfare workers monitored the women
closely and often dictated their life choices, from what jobs
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they could do to where they could live. Women could
be declared parole violators for any number of my old
things like breaking curfew or wearing makeup, and sent back
to detention centers. After three months of harassment, Nina started
thinking about her options. I'd a Peck might be willing
to harass a teenager and her widowed mother, but maybe
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Nina thought Peck would back off if she had to
answer to a man. So Nina decided to get married.
I got married, Nina would later say, to get away
from her. But tragically, Nina's new husband, Claire Rock, only
posed new dangers. On their wedding night, Nina recounted, Claire
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told her quote, he just simply married me because I
had been in Bay City. He thought he could do
just as he pleased. He wanted to take me to Detroit.
He wanted me to make his living by having The
trial transcript is censored here, but we can read between
the lines Claire wanted to pimp her. Ida Peck was
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furious that Nina had dared to marry without her permission.
She showed up at the McCall home and told Minnie
that she was going to send Nina to jail. After
Nina returned from her honeymoon, a disastrous two day trip
during which Claire had gone to see another woman in Detroit,
she learned that Ida Pack had been harassing her mother.
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Was there no way to escape the shadow of Bay City. Desperate,
Nina made the decision to run. After a zigzagging journey,
she ended up in Detroit, where she stayed for the
next several months, trying to make a living. Ida Peck
kept after Minnie, demanding that she share her daughter's new address.
Minnie refused to tell her. Then something shifted. In September,
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Minnie wrote to Nina, telling her that she should come home.
A woman had come to see her. Minnie told Nina,
and had given her advice about Nina's situation. Nina, this
woman had had said, ought to sue the government. The
woman was named Elizabeth Giffens. Her issues with the American
Plan were faith based. A Christian scientist, Elizabeth objected to
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the government forcing medical treatment on anyone. A wealthy, passionate woman,
Elizabeth told Manny that she would help the McCalls get
justice in Detroit. Nina must have felt a faint glimmer
of hope. It had been almost a year since Deputy
Martin had stopped her on the street and upended her life. Finally,
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after all this time, there might be a way to
fight back. But could a nineteen year old take on
the state government. On November third, nineteen nineteen, Nina McCall
filed suit against doctor Thomas Carney, welfare worker Ida Peck,
and hospital superintendent Mary Corrigan for conspiring together to quote
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transgress the lawful rights of this plaintiff and alleged that,
through quote wrongful assumption of power and authority, and by misrepresentation, coercion,
and duress, caused this plaintiff to be assaulted, maltreated, abused, arrested,
restrained and imprisoned, and grossly slandered, disgraced, and humiliated. The
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three attorneys who filed this suit on Nina's behalf were
some of the most prominent lawyers in Michigan. Dean Kelly
was a former prosecutor and judge. George Stone was also
a former judge. Seymour Person was a state representative. How
Nina came to have such high powered lawyers is unknown.
Nina denied on the stand that Elizabeth Giffins, the wealthy
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Christian scientist who had encouraged her to sue, was funding
her case. Elizabeth was supporting Nina in other ways, though
Nina soon became her housekeeper and chauffeur. Nina also lived
with the Giffens family at one point. She was by
now completely estranged from her husband, Claire Rock, though she
did keep his last name, which is why the case
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is known as Rock v. Carney. The trial date was
set for Tuesday, June first, nineteen twenty, at the Grashat
County Courthouse in Ithaca. The judge was Edward J. Money,
a forty seven year old circuit court judge with an
intense gaze and strong opinions. The jury consisted of twelve men.
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Though women had begun serving on juries in Michigan in
nineteen eighteen, somehow Nina ended up with an all male jury.
All three of the defendants, Carneie, Peck, and Corrigan appeared
along with their lawyers. Like Nina, they had brought in
serious legal firepower. O. L. Smith was the Grashat County Prosecutor,
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acting in a private capacity here. Smith was also the
former law partner of Nina's attorney, George Stone, and had
recently beaten Stone in the race for county prosecutor. Alva Cummins,
another defense lawyer, had been a county prosecutor in Ingham County.
Nina herself was the first to testify. Lawyer Dean Kelly
walked her through her story. The humiliating, painful gynecological exam,
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the confinement in the hospital, the excruciating injections, the harassment.
Even after she was released, Nina spoke plainly, laying out
the terrible details of her ordeal in a straightforward way.
On cross examination, lawyer Alva Cummins pushed Nina on her
romantic and sexual history. Hadn't she had frequent associations with
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soldier boys? No, Nina said. Didn't she know Lloyd Nap?
Nina said that she did know Lloyd Nap, This was
the young man she had once planned to marry, but
she denied knowing another local boy and soldier or In Strauss.
She denied that she and a friend had ever spent
the night with Lloyd and Orin. She denied accepting rides
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from men. The accusation, Cummins concluded, is that you had
improper relations with soldiers, Well, said, Nina, I didn't. Cummin's
intent with these questions was not necessarily to prove that
Nina was having sex with soldiers. It was to prove
that people believed that Nina was giving Carney and Peck
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reason to suspect her of having an STI. Next to
testify was Nina's mother, Minnie McCall. Minnie corroborated her daughter's narrative.
She also detailed how Ida Peck had harassed her while
Nina was in Detroit. After Minnie, Bay City Superintendent Mary
Corgan testified, she disagreed with Nina's portrayal of Bay City.
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Nina said that the inmates were only served beats and potatoes.
Corrigan said quote, the girls were provided with suitable food.
We had red beats, but that was not the exclusive
bill of fare. Corgan claimed that the women had more
freedom of movement than Nina had said they did. Coregan
also denied knowing doctor Thomas Carney on Cross. However, Dan
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Kelly got her to admit that she had placed a
call to doctor Carney in January to notify him of
Nina's release. Ida Peck testified next. Peck portrayed herself as
a woman simply doing her duty. She said that Nina
had never complained to her about the conditions at Bay City.
She said that she only had visited Nina and Minnie
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a handful of times. She denied ever threatening Nina. All
of her actions had been well within the scope of
her welfare work. In Peck's story, but on closer examination,
that story had holes. Peck claim the only reason she
had continued asking Minni for Nina's address was because she
(34:41):
was trying to help a jeweler's wife collect on a
bill that Nina owed for a ring she had purchased.
Why would a jeweler ask an acquaintance of his wife
to serve as a bill collector. Peck also denied confronting
Minnie on the day of Nina's wedding, saying, it is
not true that within twenty four hours, hours after I
heard of the girls being married, I was over there
(35:02):
to her mother's house, But only minutes later Peck admitted
that she saw them a calls quote the day Nina
was married. Peck's justification for bringing in women for examinations
also seemed vague. She simply said that if a girl
had a quote suspicious character, she would send them in.
Peck determined character, she said, by watching women and seeing
(35:25):
quote where they went and what they did. As for Nina,
Peck claimed that she had admitted to having sex with
Lloyd Nap. Plaintiff's lawyer, Seymour Person brought Nina back on
the stand after Peck's testimony to push back on this claim.
It is not true. Nina said that I told her
that I had sexual relations with this boy. I did
not have sexual relations with him. It's impossible for us
(35:49):
to know more than one hundred years later the extent
of Nina's relationship with Lloyd Nap, But I think it's
pretty unlikely that she would openly admit to having sex
with him to Peck, a virtual stranger who was in
the process of locking her up. Once Nina had finished testifying,
and once Alva Cummins had recross examined her and brought
(36:11):
up even more boys who he accused her of dating,
Nina denied all these claims. The plaintiff's side rested before
any defense witnesses testified. Alva Cummins made emotion asked the
charges be dismissed. Carney, Peck, and Corgan had acted within
their authority, he said, and they had not conspired to
(36:31):
do wrong. Their actions had all been taken individually. Dean
Kelly for the plaintiff, argued that the three defendants had
exceeded their authority. Judge one A took fifteen minutes to
consider the arguments. When he called the lawyers back in,
he announced that there was quote no proof in my judgment,
which shows a conspiracy between the three defendants. Thus, he
(36:54):
instructed Nina's lawyers to choose only one of the defendants
to proceed against. The lawyers chose Carney, believing that his
forced examination of Nina was beyond his authority. The defense
only called one witness, Richard Olan, the former head of
the State Board of Health and the current head of
the newly formed State Department of Health. Olan's job was
(37:17):
to rebut the plaintiff's argument that Carney had exceeded his authority.
He testified that he had employed doctor Carney as quote,
a medical inspector for the purpose of the venereal disease
campaign within his county. Dean Kelly objected that Olan did
not have the authority to employ doctor Carney in this way.
Cummins said he did. Judge Money told Olan to continue.
(37:40):
Cummins walked Oland through the state's policies through the creation
of detention hospitals, the enlistment of doctors to examine women,
and the enforced treatment of disease. After a cross examination
in which Dean Kelly unsuccessfully tried to get Ollen to
admit that women were supposed to have the option of
at home treatment Alva. Cummins made another motion. He asked
(38:02):
for a directed verdict. A directed verdict is ordered by
a trial judge when the judge believes that there is
only one reasonable decision that a jury could make based
on the evidence presented. In this case, Cummen said, quote,
we contend as a matter of law that doctor Carney
was within his authority and that there is no cause here.
(38:23):
Dean Kelly shot back that doctor Kearney was not within
his authority. In fact, Kelly said Carney had violated the
Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution and Article two, section
sixteen of the Michigan Constitution, both of which declared that
no person shall be quote deprived of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law. The jury had been
(38:46):
absent for these arguments. Now Judge ONEA summoned them back
in and made his ruling on the motion. This is
a very important case, he said, and involved some very
important legal principles. Did the state have the right to
police its citizens for the sake of public health? Jooney
believed it did. Within the statute. Joanne said, the local
(39:10):
health officer had the powers and acted within his authority
at the time. He did what it is claimed in
this case that he did do given that MONEE concluded,
you will, therefore, by direction of the Court, return a
verdict here of no cause of action. Nina had lost
(39:31):
her case. She was ordered to pay the defendants legal fees,
and her name was splashed across newspapers around the state,
but even still she was not ready to admit defeat.
A little over a year later, on June twenty third,
nineteen twenty one, her lawyers submitted an appeal, citing thirty
(39:53):
six errors they believed Judge Monette had committed during the trial.
By this point, Nina had more on her mind than
just her legal case. Five months after the trial, her
estranged husband, Claire Rock, was shot and killed in Detroit
by the angry ex husband of a girl he was seeing.
In April nineteen twenty one, Nina married again, this time
(40:16):
to Norman Hess, a plumber from Saginaw. On June twenty ninth,
six days after her lawyers filed the appeal, Nina gave
birth to a son, who she named John, after both
of her grandfather's. Heartbreakingly, John died only hours later. In December,
the Michigan Supreme Court issued their ruling on Nina's appeal,
(40:40):
They found in her favor. Justice Grandfellows, writing the opinion
for the majority, declared that quote, doctor Carney had the
power to make the examination, but he could not exercise
such power unless he had reasonable grounds to believe that
plaintiff was infected. Such good faith on his part was
(41:01):
a necessary prerequisite to the exercise of the power. I
am unable to follow the contention of defendant's counsel that
this record establishes such good faith. The Supreme Court overturned
Juanna's ruling and ordered a new trial for Nina's case.
This was a victory for Nina, to be sure, but
(41:22):
in a dark turn, Nina's victory may very well have
turned out to be other women's loss, because it set
a dangerous precedent. To explain how Rock v. Carney impacted
future American plan cases, we have to return to Justice
Fellows's Michigan Supreme Court opinion. Fellows had found that Carne
(41:47):
did not have reasonable grounds to examine Nina, but he
hadn't objected to the law that granted Carne his powers.
The power exists in the boards of health. Fellows wrote
to quarantine persons in affected with these diseases and to
make such examination as the nature of the disease requires
to determine its presence. This finding would later be cited
(42:09):
in future cases to justify the state's power to examine
and quarantine people, and there would be many such future
cases because the American Plan was far from over. Even
though it had begun as a wartime program, the Plan's
architects and many Americans wanted the program to continue after
(42:31):
the war ended in November nineteen eighteen. In April nineteen nineteen,
the Michigan State legislature passed a bill that, per the
Detroit Free Press, empowers the state Board of Health to
continue what it has been doing throughout the war. By
nineteen twenty one, every US state had passed similar legislation.
There was some opposition to the Plan. Opponents believed that
(42:55):
the oppressive, sexist enforcement of the Plan laws were harming
women more than they were helping them, but there were
limits to this opposition. Take this quote from journalist H. L. Menkin,
a prominent Plan critic. Quote, if patrols go out after
suspicious women in the manner indicated by the press accounts,
a great many innocent women will be abominably persecuted. Many
(43:18):
of these opponents saw no problem with sex workers being
locked up without due process. Their concern was reserved for
innocent women. Another group who had begun to speak out
against the plan was the American Medical Association. The AMA
opposed government intervention into healthcare. It was their lobbying, not
(43:40):
the lobbying of people concerned about the sexist and unconstitutional
aspects of the Plan, that would convince the federal government
to step back from funding the plan. In December nineteen twenty,
Congress declined to provide money for Plan programs. But just
because the federal government no longer funded the plan did
not mean that it was dead. States and cities still
(44:02):
had their own plan laws, however, reduced funding, and during
the Great Depression, funding dried up almost entirely. Did disincentivize
some institutions and states. Bay's City Detention Hospital, for example,
was shut down in nineteen twenty one due to a
lack of funding as well as concerns about the hospital's
(44:23):
body accounting practices, but soon the money would return. In
the late nineteen thirties, a new Surgeon General, Thomas Perrin,
revitalized the federal conversation about STI prevention. In May nineteen
thirty eight, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Venereal Disease Control Act,
granting millions of dollars of federal funding for STI investigations
(44:46):
and control. The advent of World War II in nineteen
thirty nine further strengthened federal resolve to fund STI prevention programs.
Even before the United States entered the war in December
nineteen forty one, measures were being taken to reinvigorate the
American Plan. In spring nineteen forty one, a new federal agency,
(45:06):
the Social Protection Division, was born. Tasked with getting local
officials to enforce their Plan laws. The SPD acquired thirty
abandoned civilian conservation core camps and turned them into rapid
treatment centers. These centers functioned much like the detention hospitals
of the earlier Plan, and they were filled almost exclusively
(45:28):
with women, thousands of them. And once again, even when
the original impetus for the centers the war ended, the
programs continued. But now the plan faced a new obstacle,
one more powerful than any political or moral objection. Antibiotics penicillin,
(45:49):
discovered in nineteen twenty nine, could effectively and quickly treat
both syphilis and gonorrhea. The antibiotic had initially been difficult
to mass produce, and then even once this problem was solved,
distribution was restricted in order to prioritize military use during
the war, but in April nineteen forty five, restrictions on
(46:10):
penicillin were removed. Given the widespread access to fast treatment,
it became harder for officials to justify extended quarantines. In
nineteen forty six, Congress declined to fund the Social Protection Division,
but still the American Plan would not die. It would,
(46:30):
in fact, outlive Nina McCall hesse after the Michigan Supreme
Court overturned Judge Ononai's ruling and granted Nina the right
to a new trial. Nina filed suit again in January
nineteen twenty two, but for unknown reasons, she never pursued
the suit, and the case was dismissed in November nineteen
twenty five. Nina and her husband Norman lived a quiet
(46:55):
life after the death of her baby John. Nina had
no more biological children, but she and Norman did raise
her orphaned cousins. Tragically, these two children also died young
one aged twenty the other nineteen. Nina herself died of
a brain tumor on July twenty first, nineteen fifty seven,
(47:17):
age fifty six. She is buried in Floral Gardens Cemetery,
a five minute drive from Bay City Detention Hospital. By
nineteen fifty seven, the year that Nina died, the world
had changed in many ways since her detention in nineteen eighteen,
but the American Plan was still in full force in
(47:40):
cities as varied as Denver, Salt Lake City, and Terre Haute, Indiana,
among many others. Women were detained and examined for STIs
under Plan laws well into the nineteen seventies. The endurance
of this program belied the fact that it was a
failure in controlling STIs. During World War One, the only
(48:02):
thing that had actually worked to reduce STIs amongst soldiers
was chemical prophylaxis, prophylaxis administered not to female sex workers
but to the soldiers. But ultimately, the American Plan was
never really about reducing STIs. It was about controlling women's sexuality.
(48:23):
When it became clear that penicillin could revolutionize treatment, some
American Plan officials were upset. One high ranking official, Walter
Clark said in nineteen forty four, quote the venereal disease
problem cannot be solved by the fine them and treat
them method alone. The New York Herald Tribune described Clark's conclusions, quote,
(48:46):
more stringent methods must be employed by the authorities, he
said in repressing the tendency to sex promiscuity. More than
three decades later, in nineteen seventy seven, a Monterey County, California,
police commander spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the
county's practice of forcing sex workers to get STI tests.
(49:07):
His message was stark, quote Venereal disease was not our concern.
Cleaning up the streets was our concern more than anything else.
It was a harassing technique that falls within legal parameters
for the police, so that we don't have to worry
about the Civil Liberties Union or the Public Defender's Office
or somebody like that issuing a court order against us. Fortunately,
(49:32):
by the nineteen seventies, the civil liberties unions were beginning
to fight back. During World War II, the American Civil
Liberties Union had actually supported the plan, but in nineteen
seventy four ACLU attorney Deborah Hinkle, working in tandem with
the sex workers rights organization COYOTE, filed suit against the
(49:52):
City of San Francisco for their practice of holding women
arrested for prostitution or related offenses for seventy two hours
and sssibly examining them for STIs. A month later, a
San Francisco Superior Court judge issued an injunction halting enforcement
of this practice. Hinkle filed a similar suit in Alameda
(50:12):
County with similar results. County officials appealed. The director of
California's state Health Department spoke out against these enforced holds, saying, quote,
the Department of Health cannot support actions disguised as preventive
health measures that are actually intended to achieve law enforcement objectives,
particularly when they appear to constitute a denial of basic rights.
(50:36):
The California Court of Appeal agreed, saying that the practice
was discriminatory. Men who were arrested for soliciting sex workers
were not similarly held and examined. Alameda County, uninterested in
detaining men, ended their practice soon after, but as usual,
(50:57):
like a persistent infection, perhaps the American plan kept popping back. Today,
the laws that enabled the Plan. Laws that allow state
officials to determine which diseases are suitable for quarantine are
still on the books of every single state. Most of
these laws include provisions that allow for the examination of
(51:19):
people reasonably suspected of carrying quarantinable disease. Of course, there
are legitimate cases of quarantine or other restrictive measures employed
for public health reasons. That's why I think it's so
important to distinguish the American Plan from other public health initiatives, because,
at the end of the day, as that Monterey police
(51:40):
officer said, it was not truly about public health. If
government officials wanted to control STIs, there were myriad other
options that did not involve imprisoning women without due process.
But none of these options would have allowed officials to
police women's bodies and behavior like the American Planned. As
(52:01):
Scott Stern writes in his superb book about both Nina's
case and the Plan's overall history, quote, the plans legacy
is not merely these laws and these precedents. It is
the philosophy they helped to cement that women and promiscuous
people are dangerous and morally inferior, that they need to
(52:21):
be stopped, locked up, and reformed. This philosophy and the
practice of policing the sex lives of stigmatized groups, especially women,
has a long history. This philosophy endures to this day.
That's the story of Rock v. Carney. Join me after
the break to learn about one more recent recurrence of
(52:43):
planned philosophy and how people fought back. In late nineteen
eighty five, a poll found that a majority of Americans
supported quarantining those with AIDS. Legislators across the country began
introducing bills calling for laws that empowered the state to
(53:06):
test anyone suspected of having HIV or AIDS and quarantining them,
but support for these measures was not unanimous. Quickly, people
began fighting back in opposing quarantine laws. Physicians, scholars, and
activists turned to the past to show how quarantines wrongly
(53:27):
applied were not only ineffective but dangerous. They wrote about leprosy,
about yellow fever, about tuberculosis. They also wrote about the
American Plan. The language of these AIDS bills, wrote scholar
and activist Beth Bergmann in nineteen eighty seven, is strikingly
similar and frequently identical, to that of syphilis quarantine and
(53:50):
testing provisions written nearly a century ago, where medicine and
science were lacking citizens, legislatures and courts based their actions
on cultural stare rieotypes. Fortunately, though there were several cases
of AIDS quarantines, no mass quarantine movement or policy ever
came to be. The historian Alan Brandt also drew connections
(54:12):
between the past and the present. In nineteen eighty five,
Brandt published his book No Magic Bullet, A Social History
of Venereal Disease in the United States since eighteen eighty,
which explored the cultural contexts which shaped public health approaches
to STIs. Two years later, he reissued the book, now
with a new chapter addressing AIDS. Brandt emphasized the danger
(54:36):
of connecting disease with morality, writing that quote, so long
as disease is equated with sin, that there can be
no magic bullet. After the publication of Brant's book, many
AIDS activists reached out to him to learn more about
the history of STI policy in the United States. Brant
(54:56):
was touched by this effort, but also unsurprised. In his words,
quote history does provide us with a way of understanding
and approaching the present. I have been reflecting on this
quote while writing this episode. I consider myself decently well
versed in, or at least obsessed with American history, but
(55:17):
I had never heard of the American Plan. Neither had
Scott Stern, the author of the Trials of Nina McCall,
before a professor mentioned it offhandedly in one of his
undergraduate history classes. I am grateful to Stern and to
all other historians of the plan for illuminating this dark
chapter in our past. Without learning about it, how can
(55:39):
we ever fully understand our present. Thank you for listening
to History on Trial. My main sources for this episode
were Scott W. Stern's book The Trials of Nina McCall,
Sex Surveillance and the decades long government plan to imprison
promiscuous Women, and Alan M. Brandt's book, Oh Magic Bullet,
(56:01):
A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States
since eighteen eighty. Special thanks to Scott Stern for answering
my questions about Nina's story, as well as providing some
excellent photos which you can see on our instagram at
History on Trial. For a full bibliography, as well as
a transcript of this episode with citations, please visit our
(56:22):
website History on Trial podcast dot com. History on Trial
is written and hosted by me Mira Hayward. The show
is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer
Trevor Young and executive producers Dana Schwartz, Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick,
(56:43):
and Mira Hayward. Learn more about the show at History
on Trial podcast dot com and follow us on Instagram
at History on Trial and on Twitter at Underscore History
on Trial. Find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(57:04):
favorite shows.
You're listening to History on Trial, a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Listener discretion advised. On October thirty first, nineteen eighteen, Nina
McCall's life changed. Nina, who had turned eighteen only two
(00:21):
months before, was running errands in Saint Louis, a small
town in central Michigan. Outside the post office, she ran
into Saint Louis's deputy sheriff, Lewis Martin. Nina knew Martin.
He had a daughter, Bernice, who was close to Nina's age.
Nina had even been over to the Martin home to
(00:41):
visit Bernice. The Martins had always been nice lately, though,
Deputy Martin had been acting strangely. He was always talking
to girls and young women, having tense conversations with them
on the street, and sometimes even taking them away in
his car. Nina didn't know what he was up to,
(01:02):
but it made her uneasy. When Martin approached, she was
right to be frightened. Martin had bad news for her.
A state health official, he said, needed to examine her
for sexually transmitted infections, and they needed to do it
right away. Nina was confused and upset. She had never
(01:23):
had sex, so how could she have a sexually transmitted infection,
but the sheriff had ordered her so Nina went home
and asked her mother Minnie, to accompany her to the
office of doctor Thomas J. Carney, the health official in
nearby Alma. When the McCalls got to Carney's office, the
doctor told Nina that somebody had reported her as having
(01:45):
an STI and that he needed to examine her. Nina refused,
but Carney insisted, and when Nina still said no, he threatened,
telling Nina that she would be sent to prison if
she did not submit to the examination. Reluctantly, Nina agreed.
She had never had a gynecological examination before. The exam
(02:08):
was terrifying and painful. After examining slides he had taken,
Carne informed Nina that she was quote slightly diseased. She
had gone rhea. Nina couldn't believe it, neither could her mother.
They argued, with Carney saying that Nina had never shown
any symptoms of an STI and had never even had sex.
(02:32):
Carney was obstinate Nina had gonorrhea and she needed to
receive treatment. Not just any treatment, either, Nina would have
to be locked away for it. Taken to a detention
hospital and treated there. Why couldn't the treatment be done
at home, Minnie asked. It was too expensive for a
(02:53):
single mother like Minnie, Carney explained. Nina said she would
get a job to help with the costs. Not possible,
Carney replied, either she agreed to go to the detention hospital,
or he would hang a red placuard on the front
of her family home, declaring in all capital letters that
someone inside had a venereal disease. Nina recoiled. The shame
(03:18):
would be unbearable. She couldn't put herself or her family
through that, so she agreed to be committed to the
Bay City Detention Hospital. Seven days later, Carney's assistant, Ida Peck,
escorted Nina to the hospital in nearby Bay City, Michigan.
It was an imposing, three story brick building. Nina would
(03:40):
be kept in the hospital for three months, forced to
do manual labor, while also enduring agonizing, ineffective treatments. Even
when she was finally declared disease free, state health officials
would continue to harass her and force her to get
further treatment. Nina's story sounds like something else out of
(04:00):
a horror movie, but it was very real, and it
was not unique. Across the country. In nineteen eighteen, thousands
of women were being detained on the suspicion of having
an STI, forcibly examined, and imprisoned without due process. Health
officials were empowered to do all of these things under
(04:22):
a program that became known hauntingly as the American Plan.
Originally put in place during World War One to protect
soldiers from STIs, the American Plan would linger on even
in peacetime. In some places, women were detained under American
Plan laws even as late as the nineteen seventies. The
(04:45):
American Plan enjoyed broad popular support. Some of the most
famous public figures of the twentieth century Fiorello LaGuardia, Earl
Warren and Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name just a few,
were enthusias bastic, proponents and enforcers of the Plan. They
believed that the Plan kept Americans safe, But the women
(05:08):
who suffered under the American Plan felt anything but safe.
They had been stripped of their rights, hurt and humiliated,
so they fought back. They escaped from detention, hospitals, held
hunger strikes, set fires, and some of them sued. One
(05:28):
of those who pursued the legal path was Nina McCall,
who filed suit against doctor Thomas Carney, his assistant Ida Peck,
and the superintendent of Bay City Detention Hospital, Mary Corrigan,
for abusing her. The resulting trial, which took place in
nineteen twenty, would put the central tenets of the plan
to the test. Could public health concerns outweigh civil rights?
(05:53):
Welcome to History on trial. I'm your host, Mira Hayward.
This week Rock v. Carney. On April sixth, nineteen seventeen,
the United States declared war on Germany and entered World
War One. By July nearly two million American men had
(06:15):
been called up as part of the medical exam. Upon
entering the military, soldiers were tested for syphilis and gonorrhea.
Many of them tested positive. Between August nineteen seventeen and
August nineteen eighteen, the Surgeon General of the Army reported
that nearly thirteen percent of all soldiers were admitted for
treatment for STIs. Sdis were costly and dangerous for the military.
(06:41):
Sick men needed treatment and could not fight. To combat
the problem, the government attempted to reduce sex work around
military camps. In May nineteen seventeen, Senator Wesley Livesey Jones
introduced an amendment to the Selective Service Act, the act
that invoked the draft, called Section thirteen. Section thirteen empowered
(07:02):
the Secretary of War to quote do everything by him
deemed necessary to suppress and prevent the keeping or setting
up of houses of ill fame, brothels, or body houses
within such distance as he may deem needful of any
military camp. Secretary of War Newton Baker wrote to officials
in locales with military camps and informed them that sex
(07:25):
work should be shut down within a five mile radius
of every camp. The federal organization leading STI policy was
the Commission on Training Camp Activities, or the CTCA. The
ctca's law Enforcement division deployed investigators across the country to
look into whether cities were complying with the federal government's requests.
(07:47):
These investigators were supplemented by agents from the Bureau of Investigation,
the predecessor of the FBI, private groups, and members of
the American Social Hygiene Association or ASHA. By the fall
of nineteen seventeen, thanks to these collaborations, the CTCA had
hundreds of investigators. At first, the ctca's work was limited
(08:10):
to the areas around military camps, but soon Army medical
officers determined that approximately five out of every six cases
of sexually transmitted infection in soldiers had been acquired before
the soldier arrived at camp. If the army wanted healthy soldiers,
they needed a healthy civilian population. The federal government began
(08:32):
encouraging states and cities to expand their repression of sex
work into areas outside of the five mile radius surrounding
military camps. This encouragement came with strong incentives. If cities
did not try to reduce STI rates, the military would
declare them off limits to soldiers or military camps, enormous
(08:53):
economic blows. In order to ensure compliance, the federal government
also encouraged local jurisdictions to pass laws that allowed health
officials to detain, examine, and quarantine women. To provide guidance
for states, federal officials met in DC in March nineteen
eighteen to draft a model law which states could adapt
(09:14):
and enact. The law contained twelve recommendations. These included a
requirement for physicians to report all STIs to the state
quarantine and compulsory treatment, prohibition of drug stores selling treatment
for STIs, thus requiring infective people to interact with physicians
(09:35):
and government officials to get treatment, and most critically, empowering
local health officers to examine Quote persons reasonably suspected of
having syphilis, gonorrhea, or shancroid. The term reasonably suspected was
extraordinarily broad. A woman could be reasonably suspected of having
(10:00):
an STI for activities as innocuous as walking with a soldier,
speaking to another woman thought to be a sex worker,
or even eating lunch alone. Women who were detained and
tested positive for syphilis and orgonrhea were sent to detention
hospitals or houses, which were essentially jails. Most had barbed
(10:21):
wire fences, armed guards, or both inside in often squalid conditions,
The women were forced to perform taxing domestic labor, like
scrubbing floors or cleaning bathrooms. Administrators saw this work, besides
being unpaid labor that benefited the institution, as part of
a larger program of moral reform, and I wish you
(10:45):
could see how big the air quotes I'm doing are.
It was not enough for inmates to be treated for
their physical conditions. Many officials involved in the American Plan
believed that these women needed instruction in conforming to a
specific set of moral and social norms. As part of
this program of behavioral correction, some detention houses used a
(11:07):
silence rule. Women there were not allowed to speak to
or even smile at one another. If they disobeyed this
prohibition or any other orders, they could face corporal punishment.
The women did receive treatment for their sdis they usually
had no choice in the matter. These treatments were largely
(11:27):
ineffective and often dangerous, since they were usually arsenic or
mercury based. Women also had their intelligence assessed with inaccurate,
discriminatory IQ tests. If a woman was bound to be
quote feeble minded, she could be imprisoned indefinitely. Feeble minded
(11:48):
women were seen to be prone to immorality. In the
worst cases, some of these women were sterilized, usually without
their consent. At this point, you might be one ding
why I'm only talking about women. After all, sexually transmitted
infections don't discriminate on the basis of gender, but not
everyone is as enlightened as a syphilis bacterium. Although the
(12:13):
Model law was gender neutral, its application never was very
Very few men were ever examined or quarantined under these laws.
There was a common misconception that women spread STIs more
than men did. As one federal public health official put it,
quote men take more precautions. Women are very negligent. It
(12:35):
was an obviously sexist assumption. But as the historian Scott W.
Stern writes in his book The Trials of Nina McCall,
these laws were based entirely on assumptions. Assumptions that quote,
young women were responsible for the indiscretions of young men,
That promiscuity in women was worse than it was in men.
(12:57):
That STIs merited jail time for women, That women could
not merely serve their time as men did, but that
they had to be cured of disease and be reformed
in order to merit release. Enforcement was also racist. CTCA
investigators were instructed to focus on black women and black neighborhoods. Unfortunately,
(13:18):
many local officials saw no problems with any of these
assumptions or biases. States began passing the model law quickly.
You might also be wondering about the constitutionality of these laws.
Surely people could not be locked up without due process
right wrong, at least according to United States Attorney General
(13:39):
Thomas Watt Gregory. On April third, nineteen eighteen, Gregory wrote
a letter to every United States attorney across the country
ordering that people arrested for prostitution should first be sent
to health officials for STI examination. If a woman was
found to be infected, she should be quarantined and treated.
Prosecution for her crimes should be suspended until she completed
(14:02):
this quarantine, meaning that she would be locked up without trial.
Gregory called the constitutionality of this plan quote clear. He
also told the US attorneys to report any local officials
who refused to go along with the plan. Gregory sent
a similar message to all US district judges. Even before
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the creation of the model law, some states had used
their own initiative to make regulations. In October nineteen seventeen,
the Michigan State Board of Health ordered physicians to report
all cases of gonorrhea and syphilis and to apprehend, detain,
and treat anyone found to be infected. The secretary of
the board, Richard m Ollen, also met with pharmacists associations
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and got them to agree to stop selling STI treatments.
Michigan's regulations closely mirrored what would appear in the Model Law.
Less than a year later, Nina McCall would experience firsthand
with those regulations meant. Nina McCall was born on September second,
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nineteen hundred to Abe and Minnie McCall. Two years later,
Nina's younger brother, Vern arrived. The McCalls lived on a
farm outside of Bethany Township in central Michigan until nineteen ten,
when they moved to nearby Saint Louis. Saint Louis was
a small town, one where everybody knew everybody. In nineteen sixteen,
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Abe McCall died, leaving his family in a difficult financial position.
Within a year, Minnie McCall had to sell their home
in Saint Louis. Minnie, Nina, and Verne moved to Alma,
a neighboring town. It was at this point that seventeen
year old Nina stopped attending school altogether. Her attendance had
always been spotty, but after the move to Alma, she
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never went back. It was an exciting time to be
a young woman, even in a rural town like Alma.
More and more women were entering the workforce, giving them
greater economic power and a new level of independence. Young
women began to casually date more than they ever had before,
and rates of premarital sex rose. Nina herself began dating
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a young man named Lloyd Knapp. In May nineteen eighteen.
Nina and Lloyd filed for a marriage license, but they
never completed the paperwork and never married. A month later,
the McCalls moved back to Saint Louis. At the same time,
soldiers were beginning to flood at Central Michigan. Alma was
home to the Republic Motor Truck Company, which made trucks
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for the army, and soldiers arrived in droves to help
drive the trucks east. The presence of so many new
people met good things economically for the region, but there
were concerns too. In May, the Alma Record wrote that
the city council needed to quote do away with the
present state of affairs in the city, where men seemed
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to think that they are privileged to accost ladies. Only
some ladies were entitled to protection. Though the record also
noted quote the presence of so many men is said
to be bringing women of an unsavory reputation into the city.
The record need not have worried the city's health officer,
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Doctor Thomas J. Carney, was on the case. The forty
nine year old Carney, a NeDi of New Yorker, had
arrived in Alma three years earlier. An inflexible, dogmatic man
with strong beliefs, Carney was determined to root out any
sources of ill health, from unpasteurized milk to promiscuous women.
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Carney would be aided in his work by Ida Peck.
Peck had held a number of jobs all across Michigan
in her fifty seven years. She had been a school teacher,
a private nurse, and a factory foreman. But beginning in
September nineteen eighteen, Peck would be a welfare worker. According
to Peck, quote, a welfare worker is one who looks
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after the girls. In reality, it was less looking after
than looking into. Thomas Carney hired Peck to help enforce
Michigan's STI laws. Peck later described her work as identifying
and following women who quote raised a suspicion in my mind.
Then she would report these women to doctor Carney, who
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would have them detained and then examine them for STIs.
If their results were positive, Peck would escort the women
to the detention hospital in Bay City, fifty miles northeast
of Saint Louis, Ida. Peck first heard Nina mccaull's name
in early October nineteen eighteen. She was transporting women to
Bay City when one of them mentioned Nina's name. Nothing more,
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just her name, but that was enough for Peck to
put Nina on her radar. Less than a month later,
on October thirty, First Deputy Martin brought Nina into Carney's office.
Whether Carney and Peck had any reason for suspecting Nina
besides the fact that another woman mentioned her name is unknown,
but the reasons why didn't really matter one way or another.
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Nina had been sucked into the grinding machinery of the
American Plan. As an aside, the term American Plan entered
widespread use only after World War One. Federal officials used
the term occasionally before that, but it was only in
nineteen nineteen that American Plan became the name for this
set of state and federal policies. The name American Plan
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paralleled other national plans for the control of STIs and
sex work, like the French Plan, created under Napoleon. For example,
Nina didn't know the plan as anything. She might not
have even known how many other women were enduring what
she was. There were thousands of them in Michigan alone.
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Between July one, nineteen eight eighteenth and June thirtieth, nineteen nineteen,
one thousand, one hundred and twenty one people were forcibly
detained for treatment, one thousand and seventy two of them women.
But Nina felt so alone. She would later say that
she only told her mother and her two aunts about
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her experience because quote I was ashamed of it. To
contextualize Nina's reaction, STIs were so stigmatized at the time
that many newspapers would not even print the words venereal disease.
After Carney examined Nina, diagnosed her with gonorrhea and informed
her that she would need and her detention hospital for treatment,
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he sent her home for the night. On the bus
ride home, Nina discovered that, as a result of Carney's
gynecological exam, she had bled through her trousers. The next day,
Nina traveled back to Carney's office to report to the hospital.
Carney told her that i'da pas was sick and could
not escort her, so Nina would have to return later.
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He told her the same thing on every one of
her return visits for the next seven days. Strangely, for
a doctor who claimed that Nina was such a health
risk to her community, Garney didn't seem too stressed about
getting her quarantined. On November sixth, Ida Pek was well
enough to take Nina to Bay City. The hospital had
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been constructed in nineteen eleven to hold patients with contagious
diseases like smallpox and scarlet fever. In February nineteen eighteen,
Richard Olan, the head of Michigan State Board of Health,
had requested that the hospital be transformed into a detention
hospital for women obtained under the American Plan. The city
readily agreed, in part because the state would pay them
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for their services. Bay City would receive fifteen dollars per
patient per week, more than enough to cover any expenses
associated with the hospital. This kind of arrangement wasn't unusual.
Cities received state and federal funding to detain women, giving
them an economic incentive to enforce the plan. When Nina arrived,
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she met the hospital's superintendent, thirty six year old Mary Corrigan,
a former nurse. She was given her first meal. She
would later testify that the food was mainly potatoes and beets.
Then she was shown into a small room with two beds.
Nina would have to share a bed with another woman.
The hospital was overcrowded. Its maximum capacity was only fifty,
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but there were closer to sixty or maybe even sixty
five women there. When Nina arrived, A nurse drew Nina's
blood and sent it off for testing. Two weeks later,
the results came back. Nina had tested positive for syphilis.
We should take this result with a large grain of salt.
The test used at the time, the Wasserman test, had
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a false positive rate of twenty five percent, but the
results were never questioned by the officials at Bay City.
Nina began to receive injections to treat her syphilis. Treatment
at this time consisted of injections of mercury and arsenic.
Not only did these injections not treat syphilis, they actively
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harmed patients. Nina's hair began to fall out, her teeth
became sore and loose. Her arm where she got the
shots swelled up so much she could barely move it.
Despite these painful conditions, Nina was still forced to work.
While at Bay City. She washed dishes, scrubbed the operating
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room floors, and scoured toilets. The work was interminable, grueling,
and unpaid. There was little time for fun, and even
if there had been, the women at Bay City were
kept mainly inside. There was a ditch in front of
the hospital and inmates were not allowed past it. Nina
had initially been ordered to the hospital because of testing
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positive for gonorrhea, but while at Bay City, she received
only two treatments for this condition. Unsurprisingly, given the effect
the mercury and arsenic shots had on her, Nina did
not want to receive more treatment. When the doctor arrived
to administer gonerhea treatments, Nina simply stayed away. She only
received formal orders, which she did not disobey to receive treatment.
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Six weeks into her stay, a doctor applied a compounded
silver cream to her vulva, another ineffective treatment. Nina only
ever received two rounds of this topical cream. Despite the
ineffective infrequent applications, Nina was declared quote free from syphilis
and gottorrhea in the infectious stage. In January nineteen nineteen.
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If you're wondering how this is possible, you're not alone.
Scott Stern writes, quote, even if we were to believe
that she truly had syphilis and gonorrhea when Carney examined her,
and that the two infections coincidentally advanced to layton and
non contagious stages on their own, which was certainly possible.
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For this timeline to fit the timing of Nina's examination
and incarceration exactly, would have had to be a remarkable coincidence.
Whatever the cause, Nina was declared released from quarantine. She
was given train fare home. After three months, she was
finally free, but her ordeal would not end there. When
(25:30):
Nina returned home, she found it difficult to find a job.
Richard Olin, the director of the State Board of Health,
claimed that there were programs to help women get employment
after release. Nina, for one, did not receive any assistance
of this kind. She eventually got a restaurant job in
nearby Mount Pleasant, but lost that job a week later
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when someone informed her employers that she had been at
Bay City. A week after Nina returned home, Ida Peck
showed up at the McCall house. Nina needed to report
to doctor Carney for further treatment, Peck said. Nina protested
that she had been declared free of disease. Peck told
Nina she could either get treatment or be sent to jail.
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Afraid of being sent away again, Nina began making the
journey to Carney's office every five days, receiving more painful
mercury injections. The shots made her body ache, she had
trouble walking. Even though Nina was complying with Peck's orders,
the welfare worker would not leave her alone. Peck showed
(26:33):
up at her house regularly. Nina later said, quote, she
was just hounding the life out of me, chasing me
day and night. This was not an unusual experience for
former detainees. Most women who were released were on a
kind of parole. Social or welfare workers monitored the women
closely and often dictated their life choices, from what jobs
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they could do to where they could live. Women could
be declared parole violators for any number of my old
things like breaking curfew or wearing makeup, and sent back
to detention centers. After three months of harassment, Nina started
thinking about her options. I'd a Peck might be willing
to harass a teenager and her widowed mother, but maybe
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Nina thought Peck would back off if she had to
answer to a man. So Nina decided to get married.
I got married, Nina would later say, to get away
from her. But tragically, Nina's new husband, Claire Rock, only
posed new dangers. On their wedding night, Nina recounted, Claire
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told her quote, he just simply married me because I
had been in Bay City. He thought he could do
just as he pleased. He wanted to take me to Detroit.
He wanted me to make his living by having The
trial transcript is censored here, but we can read between
the lines Claire wanted to pimp her. Ida Peck was
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furious that Nina had dared to marry without her permission.
She showed up at the McCall home and told Minnie
that she was going to send Nina to jail. After
Nina returned from her honeymoon, a disastrous two day trip
during which Claire had gone to see another woman in Detroit,
she learned that Ida Pack had been harassing her mother.
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Was there no way to escape the shadow of Bay City. Desperate,
Nina made the decision to run. After a zigzagging journey,
she ended up in Detroit, where she stayed for the
next several months, trying to make a living. Ida Peck
kept after Minnie, demanding that she share her daughter's new address.
Minnie refused to tell her. Then something shifted. In September,
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Minnie wrote to Nina, telling her that she should come home.
A woman had come to see her. Minnie told Nina,
and had given her advice about Nina's situation. Nina, this
woman had had said, ought to sue the government. The
woman was named Elizabeth Giffens. Her issues with the American
Plan were faith based. A Christian scientist, Elizabeth objected to
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the government forcing medical treatment on anyone. A wealthy, passionate woman,
Elizabeth told Manny that she would help the McCalls get
justice in Detroit. Nina must have felt a faint glimmer
of hope. It had been almost a year since Deputy
Martin had stopped her on the street and upended her life. Finally,
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after all this time, there might be a way to
fight back. But could a nineteen year old take on
the state government. On November third, nineteen nineteen, Nina McCall
filed suit against doctor Thomas Carney, welfare worker Ida Peck,
and hospital superintendent Mary Corrigan for conspiring together to quote
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transgress the lawful rights of this plaintiff and alleged that,
through quote wrongful assumption of power and authority, and by misrepresentation, coercion,
and duress, caused this plaintiff to be assaulted, maltreated, abused, arrested,
restrained and imprisoned, and grossly slandered, disgraced, and humiliated. The
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three attorneys who filed this suit on Nina's behalf were
some of the most prominent lawyers in Michigan. Dean Kelly
was a former prosecutor and judge. George Stone was also
a former judge. Seymour Person was a state representative. How
Nina came to have such high powered lawyers is unknown.
Nina denied on the stand that Elizabeth Giffins, the wealthy
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Christian scientist who had encouraged her to sue, was funding
her case. Elizabeth was supporting Nina in other ways, though
Nina soon became her housekeeper and chauffeur. Nina also lived
with the Giffens family at one point. She was by
now completely estranged from her husband, Claire Rock, though she
did keep his last name, which is why the case
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is known as Rock v. Carney. The trial date was
set for Tuesday, June first, nineteen twenty, at the Grashat
County Courthouse in Ithaca. The judge was Edward J. Money,
a forty seven year old circuit court judge with an
intense gaze and strong opinions. The jury consisted of twelve men.
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Though women had begun serving on juries in Michigan in
nineteen eighteen, somehow Nina ended up with an all male jury.
All three of the defendants, Carneie, Peck, and Corrigan appeared
along with their lawyers. Like Nina, they had brought in
serious legal firepower. O. L. Smith was the Grashat County Prosecutor,
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acting in a private capacity here. Smith was also the
former law partner of Nina's attorney, George Stone, and had
recently beaten Stone in the race for county prosecutor. Alva Cummins,
another defense lawyer, had been a county prosecutor in Ingham County.
Nina herself was the first to testify. Lawyer Dean Kelly
walked her through her story. The humiliating, painful gynecological exam,
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the confinement in the hospital, the excruciating injections, the harassment.
Even after she was released, Nina spoke plainly, laying out
the terrible details of her ordeal in a straightforward way.
On cross examination, lawyer Alva Cummins pushed Nina on her
romantic and sexual history. Hadn't she had frequent associations with
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soldier boys? No, Nina said. Didn't she know Lloyd Nap?
Nina said that she did know Lloyd Nap, This was
the young man she had once planned to marry, but
she denied knowing another local boy and soldier or In Strauss.
She denied that she and a friend had ever spent
the night with Lloyd and Orin. She denied accepting rides
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from men. The accusation, Cummins concluded, is that you had
improper relations with soldiers, Well, said, Nina, I didn't. Cummin's
intent with these questions was not necessarily to prove that
Nina was having sex with soldiers. It was to prove
that people believed that Nina was giving Carney and Peck
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reason to suspect her of having an STI. Next to
testify was Nina's mother, Minnie McCall. Minnie corroborated her daughter's narrative.
She also detailed how Ida Peck had harassed her while
Nina was in Detroit. After Minnie, Bay City Superintendent Mary
Corgan testified, she disagreed with Nina's portrayal of Bay City.
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Nina said that the inmates were only served beats and potatoes.
Corrigan said quote, the girls were provided with suitable food.
We had red beats, but that was not the exclusive
bill of fare. Corgan claimed that the women had more
freedom of movement than Nina had said they did. Coregan
also denied knowing doctor Thomas Carney on Cross. However, Dan
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Kelly got her to admit that she had placed a
call to doctor Carney in January to notify him of
Nina's release. Ida Peck testified next. Peck portrayed herself as
a woman simply doing her duty. She said that Nina
had never complained to her about the conditions at Bay City.
She said that she only had visited Nina and Minnie
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a handful of times. She denied ever threatening Nina. All
of her actions had been well within the scope of
her welfare work. In Peck's story, but on closer examination,
that story had holes. Peck claim the only reason she
had continued asking Minni for Nina's address was because she
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was trying to help a jeweler's wife collect on a
bill that Nina owed for a ring she had purchased.
Why would a jeweler ask an acquaintance of his wife
to serve as a bill collector. Peck also denied confronting
Minnie on the day of Nina's wedding, saying, it is
not true that within twenty four hours, hours after I
heard of the girls being married, I was over there
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to her mother's house, But only minutes later Peck admitted
that she saw them a calls quote the day Nina
was married. Peck's justification for bringing in women for examinations
also seemed vague. She simply said that if a girl
had a quote suspicious character, she would send them in.
Peck determined character, she said, by watching women and seeing
(35:25):
quote where they went and what they did. As for Nina,
Peck claimed that she had admitted to having sex with
Lloyd Nap. Plaintiff's lawyer, Seymour Person brought Nina back on
the stand after Peck's testimony to push back on this claim.
It is not true. Nina said that I told her
that I had sexual relations with this boy. I did
not have sexual relations with him. It's impossible for us
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to know more than one hundred years later the extent
of Nina's relationship with Lloyd Nap, But I think it's
pretty unlikely that she would openly admit to having sex
with him to Peck, a virtual stranger who was in
the process of locking her up. Once Nina had finished testifying,
and once Alva Cummins had recross examined her and brought
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up even more boys who he accused her of dating,
Nina denied all these claims. The plaintiff's side rested before
any defense witnesses testified. Alva Cummins made emotion asked the
charges be dismissed. Carney, Peck, and Corgan had acted within
their authority, he said, and they had not conspired to
(36:31):
do wrong. Their actions had all been taken individually. Dean
Kelly for the plaintiff, argued that the three defendants had
exceeded their authority. Judge one A took fifteen minutes to
consider the arguments. When he called the lawyers back in,
he announced that there was quote no proof in my judgment,
which shows a conspiracy between the three defendants. Thus, he
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instructed Nina's lawyers to choose only one of the defendants
to proceed against. The lawyers chose Carney, believing that his
forced examination of Nina was beyond his authority. The defense
only called one witness, Richard Olan, the former head of
the State Board of Health and the current head of
the newly formed State Department of Health. Olan's job was
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to rebut the plaintiff's argument that Carney had exceeded his authority.
He testified that he had employed doctor Carney as quote,
a medical inspector for the purpose of the venereal disease
campaign within his county. Dean Kelly objected that Olan did
not have the authority to employ doctor Carney in this way.
Cummins said he did. Judge Money told Olan to continue.
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Cummins walked Oland through the state's policies through the creation
of detention hospitals, the enlistment of doctors to examine women,
and the enforced treatment of disease. After a cross examination
in which Dean Kelly unsuccessfully tried to get Ollen to
admit that women were supposed to have the option of
at home treatment Alva. Cummins made another motion. He asked
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for a directed verdict. A directed verdict is ordered by
a trial judge when the judge believes that there is
only one reasonable decision that a jury could make based
on the evidence presented. In this case, Cummen said, quote,
we contend as a matter of law that doctor Carney
was within his authority and that there is no cause here.
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Dean Kelly shot back that doctor Kearney was not within
his authority. In fact, Kelly said Carney had violated the
Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution and Article two, section
sixteen of the Michigan Constitution, both of which declared that
no person shall be quote deprived of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law. The jury had been
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absent for these arguments. Now Judge ONEA summoned them back
in and made his ruling on the motion. This is
a very important case, he said, and involved some very
important legal principles. Did the state have the right to
police its citizens for the sake of public health? Jooney
believed it did. Within the statute. Joanne said, the local
(39:10):
health officer had the powers and acted within his authority
at the time. He did what it is claimed in
this case that he did do given that MONEE concluded,
you will, therefore, by direction of the Court, return a
verdict here of no cause of action. Nina had lost
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her case. She was ordered to pay the defendants legal fees,
and her name was splashed across newspapers around the state,
but even still she was not ready to admit defeat.
A little over a year later, on June twenty third,
nineteen twenty one, her lawyers submitted an appeal, citing thirty
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six errors they believed Judge Monette had committed during the trial.
By this point, Nina had more on her mind than
just her legal case. Five months after the trial, her
estranged husband, Claire Rock, was shot and killed in Detroit
by the angry ex husband of a girl he was seeing.
In April nineteen twenty one, Nina married again, this time
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to Norman Hess, a plumber from Saginaw. On June twenty ninth,
six days after her lawyers filed the appeal, Nina gave
birth to a son, who she named John, after both
of her grandfather's. Heartbreakingly, John died only hours later. In December,
the Michigan Supreme Court issued their ruling on Nina's appeal,
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They found in her favor. Justice Grandfellows, writing the opinion
for the majority, declared that quote, doctor Carney had the
power to make the examination, but he could not exercise
such power unless he had reasonable grounds to believe that
plaintiff was infected. Such good faith on his part was
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a necessary prerequisite to the exercise of the power. I
am unable to follow the contention of defendant's counsel that
this record establishes such good faith. The Supreme Court overturned
Juanna's ruling and ordered a new trial for Nina's case.
This was a victory for Nina, to be sure, but
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in a dark turn, Nina's victory may very well have
turned out to be other women's loss, because it set
a dangerous precedent. To explain how Rock v. Carney impacted
future American plan cases, we have to return to Justice
Fellows's Michigan Supreme Court opinion. Fellows had found that Carne
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did not have reasonable grounds to examine Nina, but he
hadn't objected to the law that granted Carne his powers.
The power exists in the boards of health. Fellows wrote
to quarantine persons in affected with these diseases and to
make such examination as the nature of the disease requires
to determine its presence. This finding would later be cited
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in future cases to justify the state's power to examine
and quarantine people, and there would be many such future
cases because the American Plan was far from over. Even
though it had begun as a wartime program, the Plan's
architects and many Americans wanted the program to continue after
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the war ended in November nineteen eighteen. In April nineteen nineteen,
the Michigan State legislature passed a bill that, per the
Detroit Free Press, empowers the state Board of Health to
continue what it has been doing throughout the war. By
nineteen twenty one, every US state had passed similar legislation.
There was some opposition to the Plan. Opponents believed that
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the oppressive, sexist enforcement of the Plan laws were harming
women more than they were helping them, but there were
limits to this opposition. Take this quote from journalist H. L. Menkin,
a prominent Plan critic. Quote, if patrols go out after
suspicious women in the manner indicated by the press accounts,
a great many innocent women will be abominably persecuted. Many
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of these opponents saw no problem with sex workers being
locked up without due process. Their concern was reserved for
innocent women. Another group who had begun to speak out
against the plan was the American Medical Association. The AMA
opposed government intervention into healthcare. It was their lobbying, not
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the lobbying of people concerned about the sexist and unconstitutional
aspects of the Plan, that would convince the federal government
to step back from funding the plan. In December nineteen twenty,
Congress declined to provide money for Plan programs. But just
because the federal government no longer funded the plan did
not mean that it was dead. States and cities still
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had their own plan laws, however, reduced funding, and during
the Great Depression, funding dried up almost entirely. Did disincentivize
some institutions and states. Bay's City Detention Hospital, for example,
was shut down in nineteen twenty one due to a
lack of funding as well as concerns about the hospital's
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body accounting practices, but soon the money would return. In
the late nineteen thirties, a new Surgeon General, Thomas Perrin,
revitalized the federal conversation about STI prevention. In May nineteen
thirty eight, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Venereal Disease Control Act,
granting millions of dollars of federal funding for STI investigations
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and control. The advent of World War II in nineteen
thirty nine further strengthened federal resolve to fund STI prevention programs.
Even before the United States entered the war in December
nineteen forty one, measures were being taken to reinvigorate the
American Plan. In spring nineteen forty one, a new federal agency,
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the Social Protection Division, was born. Tasked with getting local
officials to enforce their Plan laws. The SPD acquired thirty
abandoned civilian conservation core camps and turned them into rapid
treatment centers. These centers functioned much like the detention hospitals
of the earlier Plan, and they were filled almost exclusively
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with women, thousands of them. And once again, even when
the original impetus for the centers the war ended, the
programs continued. But now the plan faced a new obstacle,
one more powerful than any political or moral objection. Antibiotics penicillin,
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discovered in nineteen twenty nine, could effectively and quickly treat
both syphilis and gonorrhea. The antibiotic had initially been difficult
to mass produce, and then even once this problem was solved,
distribution was restricted in order to prioritize military use during
the war, but in April nineteen forty five, restrictions on
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penicillin were removed. Given the widespread access to fast treatment,
it became harder for officials to justify extended quarantines. In
nineteen forty six, Congress declined to fund the Social Protection Division,
but still the American Plan would not die. It would,
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in fact, outlive Nina McCall hesse after the Michigan Supreme
Court overturned Judge Ononai's ruling and granted Nina the right
to a new trial. Nina filed suit again in January
nineteen twenty two, but for unknown reasons, she never pursued
the suit, and the case was dismissed in November nineteen
twenty five. Nina and her husband Norman lived a quiet
(46:55):
life after the death of her baby John. Nina had
no more biological children, but she and Norman did raise
her orphaned cousins. Tragically, these two children also died young
one aged twenty the other nineteen. Nina herself died of
a brain tumor on July twenty first, nineteen fifty seven,
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age fifty six. She is buried in Floral Gardens Cemetery,
a five minute drive from Bay City Detention Hospital. By
nineteen fifty seven, the year that Nina died, the world
had changed in many ways since her detention in nineteen eighteen,
but the American Plan was still in full force in
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cities as varied as Denver, Salt Lake City, and Terre Haute, Indiana,
among many others. Women were detained and examined for STIs
under Plan laws well into the nineteen seventies. The endurance
of this program belied the fact that it was a
failure in controlling STIs. During World War One, the only
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thing that had actually worked to reduce STIs amongst soldiers
was chemical prophylaxis, prophylaxis administered not to female sex workers
but to the soldiers. But ultimately, the American Plan was
never really about reducing STIs. It was about controlling women's sexuality.
(48:23):
When it became clear that penicillin could revolutionize treatment, some
American Plan officials were upset. One high ranking official, Walter
Clark said in nineteen forty four, quote the venereal disease
problem cannot be solved by the fine them and treat
them method alone. The New York Herald Tribune described Clark's conclusions, quote,
(48:46):
more stringent methods must be employed by the authorities, he
said in repressing the tendency to sex promiscuity. More than
three decades later, in nineteen seventy seven, a Monterey County, California,
police commander spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the
county's practice of forcing sex workers to get STI tests.
(49:07):
His message was stark, quote Venereal disease was not our concern.
Cleaning up the streets was our concern more than anything else.
It was a harassing technique that falls within legal parameters
for the police, so that we don't have to worry
about the Civil Liberties Union or the Public Defender's Office
or somebody like that issuing a court order against us. Fortunately,
(49:32):
by the nineteen seventies, the civil liberties unions were beginning
to fight back. During World War II, the American Civil
Liberties Union had actually supported the plan, but in nineteen
seventy four ACLU attorney Deborah Hinkle, working in tandem with
the sex workers rights organization COYOTE, filed suit against the
(49:52):
City of San Francisco for their practice of holding women
arrested for prostitution or related offenses for seventy two hours
and sssibly examining them for STIs. A month later, a
San Francisco Superior Court judge issued an injunction halting enforcement
of this practice. Hinkle filed a similar suit in Alameda
(50:12):
County with similar results. County officials appealed. The director of
California's state Health Department spoke out against these enforced holds, saying, quote,
the Department of Health cannot support actions disguised as preventive
health measures that are actually intended to achieve law enforcement objectives,
particularly when they appear to constitute a denial of basic rights.
(50:36):
The California Court of Appeal agreed, saying that the practice
was discriminatory. Men who were arrested for soliciting sex workers
were not similarly held and examined. Alameda County, uninterested in
detaining men, ended their practice soon after, but as usual,
(50:57):
like a persistent infection, perhaps the American plan kept popping back. Today,
the laws that enabled the Plan. Laws that allow state
officials to determine which diseases are suitable for quarantine are
still on the books of every single state. Most of
these laws include provisions that allow for the examination of
(51:19):
people reasonably suspected of carrying quarantinable disease. Of course, there
are legitimate cases of quarantine or other restrictive measures employed
for public health reasons. That's why I think it's so
important to distinguish the American Plan from other public health initiatives, because,
at the end of the day, as that Monterey police
(51:40):
officer said, it was not truly about public health. If
government officials wanted to control STIs, there were myriad other
options that did not involve imprisoning women without due process.
But none of these options would have allowed officials to
police women's bodies and behavior like the American Planned. As
(52:01):
Scott Stern writes in his superb book about both Nina's
case and the Plan's overall history, quote, the plans legacy
is not merely these laws and these precedents. It is
the philosophy they helped to cement that women and promiscuous
people are dangerous and morally inferior, that they need to
(52:21):
be stopped, locked up, and reformed. This philosophy and the
practice of policing the sex lives of stigmatized groups, especially women,
has a long history. This philosophy endures to this day.
That's the story of Rock v. Carney. Join me after
the break to learn about one more recent recurrence of
(52:43):
planned philosophy and how people fought back. In late nineteen
eighty five, a poll found that a majority of Americans
supported quarantining those with AIDS. Legislators across the country began
introducing bills calling for laws that empowered the state to
(53:06):
test anyone suspected of having HIV or AIDS and quarantining them,
but support for these measures was not unanimous. Quickly, people
began fighting back in opposing quarantine laws. Physicians, scholars, and
activists turned to the past to show how quarantines wrongly
(53:27):
applied were not only ineffective but dangerous. They wrote about leprosy,
about yellow fever, about tuberculosis. They also wrote about the
American Plan. The language of these AIDS bills, wrote scholar
and activist Beth Bergmann in nineteen eighty seven, is strikingly
similar and frequently identical, to that of syphilis quarantine and
(53:50):
testing provisions written nearly a century ago, where medicine and
science were lacking citizens, legislatures and courts based their actions
on cultural stare rieotypes. Fortunately, though there were several cases
of AIDS quarantines, no mass quarantine movement or policy ever
came to be. The historian Alan Brandt also drew connections
(54:12):
between the past and the present. In nineteen eighty five,
Brandt published his book No Magic Bullet, A Social History
of Venereal Disease in the United States since eighteen eighty,
which explored the cultural contexts which shaped public health approaches
to STIs. Two years later, he reissued the book, now
with a new chapter addressing AIDS. Brandt emphasized the danger
(54:36):
of connecting disease with morality, writing that quote, so long
as disease is equated with sin, that there can be
no magic bullet. After the publication of Brant's book, many
AIDS activists reached out to him to learn more about
the history of STI policy in the United States. Brant
(54:56):
was touched by this effort, but also unsurprised. In his words,
quote history does provide us with a way of understanding
and approaching the present. I have been reflecting on this
quote while writing this episode. I consider myself decently well
versed in, or at least obsessed with American history, but
(55:17):
I had never heard of the American Plan. Neither had
Scott Stern, the author of the Trials of Nina McCall,
before a professor mentioned it offhandedly in one of his
undergraduate history classes. I am grateful to Stern and to
all other historians of the plan for illuminating this dark
chapter in our past. Without learning about it, how can
(55:39):
we ever fully understand our present. Thank you for listening
to History on Trial. My main sources for this episode
were Scott W. Stern's book The Trials of Nina McCall,
Sex Surveillance and the decades long government plan to imprison
promiscuous Women, and Alan M. Brandt's book, Oh Magic Bullet,
(56:01):
A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States
since eighteen eighty. Special thanks to Scott Stern for answering
my questions about Nina's story, as well as providing some
excellent photos which you can see on our instagram at
History on Trial. For a full bibliography, as well as
a transcript of this episode with citations, please visit our
(56:22):
website History on Trial podcast dot com. History on Trial
is written and hosted by me Mira Hayward. The show
is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer
Trevor Young and executive producers Dana Schwartz, Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick,
(56:43):
and Mira Hayward. Learn more about the show at History
on Trial podcast dot com and follow us on Instagram
at History on Trial and on Twitter at Underscore History
on Trial. Find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(57:04):
favorite shows.
Host
Mira Hayward
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