During World War I, U.S. federal officials became concerned that a huge percentage of men in the military were infected with syphilis or gonorrhea. These diseases were not only a health risk to the soldiers, but it’s also a national security risk as well. If the soldiers couldn’t perform their soldierly duties, it hurt the U.S. war effort and the country couldn’t have that.
In 1918, Congress passed the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, also known as the American Plan. The law gave the government the power to quarantine any women suspected of having a sexually transmitted disease (STD). Under the law, a woman was detained, put through a medical examination and if it revealed an STD, the discovery would act as proof of prositution. The thinking at the time was that the men were getting the STDs from prostitutes, and if you cut down on the prositution, it would cut the STD rates. The law went into effect and covered a five-mile radius next to any military base. Never did it cross the officials’ minds that the soldiers may have been giving the women the STD’s or that they may have came from homosexual activities.
Further research showed that most soldiers and sailors who had STDs contracted them back in their hometown. More research showed that the woman who supposedly infected the men weren’t professional prostitutes. Federal officials pushed every state to pass a similar law to the American plan in their states. The laws would enable police officers to forcibly examine any person “reasonably suspected” of having a STD. Under the laws, they could hold a person in detention for as long as it took to render the person noninfectious. The law was gender neutral, but the actual practice of enforcing it was always targeted at women.
Support for the American plan ranged all across the country. New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia gave speeches lauding the plan; California Governor Earl Warren spearheaded the plan’s enforcement in California. Thomas Watt Gregory, the then U.S. Attorney General, sent a letter to every U.S. Attorney in the country, assuring them the law was constitutional; he also sent a letter to every U.S. district judge, urging them not to interfere with the laws enforcement. Public endorsement of the plan came from Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr, and Pat Brown. During World War II, the American Civil Liberties Union encouraged its local branches to cooperate with officials enforcing the laws.
Under the law, they locked women up with no due process. The imprisonment could range from a few days to many months. They often injected the women with mercury and forced them to ingest arsenic-based drugs. If the women misbehaved, or if they failed to show proper ladylike disposition, the women were beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinement, or even sterilized.
Under the “reasonable suspicion” standard of the law, they detained women for doing many regular everyday activities. They arrested women for sitting in a restaurant alone; changing jobs; for being out in public with a man; for walking down the street in a way male police officers found suspicious or even walking down the street with a fellow girlfriend or girlfriends.
Many women were detained if they refused to have sex with police officers or health officers. In San Francisco in the 1940s, San Francisco police officers threatened to have women vaginally examined if they didn’t consent to their sexual demands. They especially targeted women of color and immigrants with this law. Once they were detained, they were subjected to higher degrees of abuse.
About 30,000 women were detained under these laws. Despite the law’s intents, prostitutes remained readily available to military men and the rates of STDs remained quite high. Regular women, some of who were married, were detained and forced to undergo a medical examination to prove they weren’t a prostitute.
Forms of the American plan lasted until the 1970s. The Women’s liberation movement helped do away with the laws. In some states, the laws are still on the books. Some laws have been altered or amended, others absorbed into broader public-health laws. Each state still has the power to examine “reasonably suspected” people and isolate the infected ones, if health officials deem the isolation necessary.
One doesn’t have to think hard to see the ghosts of the American Plan behind the rationale of the Tuskegee experiment, Japanese internment camps, and the U.S. government’s response to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. If one looks a little harder, they can see that other bad laws and the American Plan have led to the mass incarceration system we have in place today.
There is a lot of chatter about individual freedom in America from the founding of the country and still to this day. We’ve also seen more than a few times where personal freedom of others has been set aside for the “greater public good.” Does personal freedom only matter when it’s effecting us? Shouldn’t personal freedom pertain to everyone as a whole in the U.S.? If that were the case, we would not have had the American Plan.
