Contemporary Authors

• The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2018

1. The trials of Nina McCall : sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison "promiscuous" women LCCN 2017037776 Type of material Book Personal name Stern, Scott W., 1993- author. Main title The trials of Nina McCall : sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison "promiscuous" women / Scott W. Stern. Published/Produced Boston : Beacon Press, [2018] Projected pub date 1805 Description pages cm ISBN 9780807042755 (hardcover)

• Amazon -

  Scott W. Stern is a graduate of Yale University, with a BA and MA in American Studies, summa cum laude. His thesis, on the American Plan, won Yale’s Norman Holmes Pearson Prize. A native of Pittsburgh, Stern is continuing his studies at Yale Law School.

• The Hollywood Reporter - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/trials-nina-mccall-works-producer-cathy-schulman-1016734

  'Trials of Nina McCall' in the Works With Producer Cathy Schulman (Exclusive)
  9:00 AM PDT 6/27/2017 by Rebecca Ford
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  Courtesy PMK/BNC
  Cathy Schulman

  The adaptation of Scott W. Stern's upcoming book centers on the true story of the incarceration of thousands of American women accused of carrying and spreading STIs.
  Scott W. Stern's The Trials of Nina McCall, the true story of one of the largest mass quarantines in U.S. history and the women who fought against it, is being adapted into a film.
  Cathy Schulman’s Welle Entertainment has acquired the film rights to Stern's upcoming nonfiction book, which is scheduled for publication in the spring of 2018 by Beacon Press.
  The story is based on the American Plan, a program that empowered local law enforcement and health officials to incarcerate and “treat” tens of thousands of girls and young women suspected of carrying STIs (sexually transmitted infections) and spreading them among American soldiers throughout both World Wars, all without due process. The film will follow one heroic young woman who was arrested and imprisoned under the plan but who refused to stay silent and decided to fight back.
  Stern has been researching and writing The Trials of Nina McCall for six years. The idea began as an undergraduate research paper at Yale and eventually became his senior thesis, which won Yale’s Norman Holmes Pearson Prize. He will attend Yale Law School in the fall. Schulman is also an alum of Yale.
  Schulman, who won an Oscar for 2004's Crash, has often backed female-driven stories, including recent hits Bad Moms and Edge of Seventeen starring Hailee Steinfeld. The producer, who launched Welle Entertainement in February, also serves as president of Women in Film. Welle Entertainment, which will both develop and produce films, is a co-venture with Primary Wave Entertainment.
  The deal was made on behalf of Riverside Literary Agency by Hotchkiss and Associates.

Stern, Scott W.: THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL

Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stern, Scott W. THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-8070-4275-5
Historical survey of an early-20th-century initiative to control "promiscuous" women through forced quarantines.
In the 1910s, citing venereal disease as one of the largest culprits of military disability, the U.S. government created what was called the American Plan, which resulted in thousands of women being incarcerated for their perceived contraction and transmission of sexually transmitted infections. Stern adapts his prizewinning Yale University graduate thesis on the subject for general readers. The result is a dramatic re-enactment of the plight of these involuntarily quarantined women, personified through the life of Nina McCall, a teenager who was targeted by health officials as a disease carrier (she was declared "slightly infected" with gonorrhea) and coerced into admitting herself into a women's detention hospital. Bolstered by the advent of neoregulationism, whereby health officials--not police--would filter, outlaw, and imprison women for disease and suspected prostitution, officials held the mass-arrested women for months on often sketchy evidence. Eventually, after simmering resentment turned to sheer outrage, a resistance movement began to develop, and dozens of women escaped, rioted, enacted hunger strikes, or set fire to their facilities in protest. According to Stern's meticulous research, others, including McCall, took the legal route and sued government officials for the torturous and barbaric "curative" treatments they had endured in the detention facilities. Using letters, diaries, articles, and archival records, the author intricately re-creates McCall's world and brings much-needed attention to the struggle of these persecuted women and their fight for justice. The author spotlights McCall's trial testimony, where she became a radical voice against female oppression and abuse and an inspiration to others. The book's academic tone is direct, informative, exacting, and well-suited for the grim subject matter it addresses, and it puts a face on the treacherous, sexist injustices committed by a misguided government.
A powerful report on a relevant women's movement deservedly brought to light over a century after it occurred.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Stern, Scott W.: THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700308/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=76ef7507. Accessed 30 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700308

The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan To Imprison "Promiscuous" Women. By: Kati, Rebekah, Library Journal, 03630277, 5/1/2018, Vol. 143, Issue 8

Section:
reviews: books
Stern, Scott W. The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan To Imprison "Promiscuous" Women.

Beacon. May 2018. 356p. notes. index. ISBN 9780807042755. $28.95; ebk. ISBN 9780807042762. SOC SCI

Scholar Stern, expanding upon his thesis research, recounts the "American Plan," a World War I—era mass incarceration movement in which women suspected of being infected with syphilis or gonorrhea were forced to undergo gynecological examinations, then incarcerated and subjected to harsh, ineffective treatments. The story is told through the eyes of Nina McCall, who was imprisoned under the plan and afterward sued her captors. Although the focus is on Nina's experience, Stern weaves in accounts of other women across the United States. Notably, he shows how prisoners and former advocates resisted the plan. They were fighting against formidable odds, as many prominent figures of the day, including Franklin Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Fiorello LaGuardia supported the program. Stern does not shy away from the horror of the plan and emphasizes the sexism and racism inherent in its execution, tracing its development through World War II up to the 1970s and lingering impacts today. VERDICT A chilling look at a sadly relevant period in American history. Highly recommended for readers interested in women's studies and public health.

"Stern, Scott W.: THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700308/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=76ef7507. Accessed 30 June 2018.

• Quiet Fury Books
  http://quietfurybooks.com/bookreview-the-trials-of-nina-mccall-by-scott-w-stern/
  Word count: 917

  April 30, 2018
  #BookReview: THE TRIALS OF NINA McCALL by Scott W. Stern

  The nearly forgotten story of the American Plan, one of the largest and longest-lasting mass quarantines in American history, told through the lens of one young woman’s story.
  In 1918, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, Nina McCall was told to report to the local health officer to be examined for sexually transmitted infections. Confused and humiliated, Nina did as she was told, and the health officer performed a hasty (and invasive) examination and quickly diagnosed her with gonorrhea. Though Nina insisted she could not possibly have an STI, she was coerced into committing herself to the Bay City Detention Hospital, a facility where she would spend almost three miserable months subjected to hard labor, exploitation, and painful injections of mercury.
  Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the twentieth century. The government locked up tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls–usually without due process–simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just “promiscuous.”
  This discriminatory program, dubbed the “American Plan,” lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness, while laying the foundation for the modern system of women’s prisons. In some places, vestiges of the Plan lingered into the 1960s and 1970s, and the laws that undergirded it remain on the books to this day.
  Scott Stern tells the story of this almost forgotten program through the life of Nina McCall. Her story provides crucial insight into the lives of countless other women incarcerated under the American Plan. Stern demonstrates the pain and shame felt by these women and details the multitude of mortifications they endured, both during and after their internment. Yet thousands of incarcerated women rioted, fought back against their oppressors, or burned their detention facilities to the ground; they jumped out of windows or leapt from moving trains or scaled barbed-wire fences in order to escape. And, as Nina McCall did, they sued their captors. In an age of renewed activism surrounding harassment, health care, prisons, women’s rights, and the power of the state, this virtually lost chapter of our history is vital reading.
  Release Date: May 15, 2018
  Amazon / Amazon UK / Amazon CA

  My Review
  I’m sitting here trying to come up with the right words to express my thoughts. They won’t come. I think I’m still in shock. What I can immediately tell you is don’t hesitate; read this book.
  Scott Stern is a talented writer. His style is narrative nonfiction, similar to Erik Larson’s writing. He puts us in the moment, with all the emotions of the people involved and the turmoil surrounding the events. I felt it all happening and saw it playing out.
  “Fifty-four girls were sterilized and eight unsexed, one of the last being a girl nine years old,” McCarthy announced to days later.
  The research is impeccable. Stern clearly put his heart and soul, along with an immense amount of time and energy, into writing this book.
  And now the content, which is where words fail me. How had I never heard of the American Plan? How could my own country, the supposed “land of the free”, randomly pluck women off the streets, force them to submit to gynecological exams, and lock them away without even a basic court hearing? I am appalled that, not only did this happen, but it went on for decades. I am shocked at the absolute media silence surrounding inhumane treatment.
  Fosdick decided to request funds to construct detention houses for infected women. Inside these detention houses, of which Maude Miner’s Waverley House was an early prototype, women could be held while authorities examined them for STIs and inspected their social and sexual backgrounds.
  Within the pages of this book, we see misogyny at its core, at a time when government and police forces were very much male-dominated. We see how fear drives racism and bigotry. We see how war provides cover for all sorts of atrocious behavior, right here within our own borders, perpetrated by those in power upon those who are powerless.
  In Kansas, blacks were 3 percent of the population but made up nearly a third of women locked up under the American Plan; furthermore, nearly all of them were working class – servants, domestics, and the like, with little access to education.
  I cannot properly express the impact this book had on me. Scott Stern gave us the gift of unearthing all the dirty secrets and laying them out for us to see. I hope everyone will pick up a copy of this book and give Nina McCall, and all the women like her, the courtesy of acknowledging what was done to them under the guise of the so-called American Plan.
  Hegarty noted that waitressing was a profession “marked” for suspicion: “For example, out of 709 women arrested in a two-month period in the Southwest, more than 600 were waitresses.” When authorities saw Mrs. A dining alone, they apparently suspected that she was waiting for a man – and that was enough “reasonable suspicion” to upend her life.
  *I received an advance copy from the publisher, via Amazon Vine, in exchange for my honest review.*

  Thanks for reading. 🙂

• New Republic
  https://newrepublic.com/article/148493/forgotten-war-women
  Word count: 2128

  A Forgotten War on Women
  Scott W. Stern’s book documents a decades-long program to incarcerate “promiscuous” women.
  By Kim Kelly
  May 22, 2018
  In 1917, as World War I raged across the Atlantic, American government officials launched a program aimed at protecting newly-arrived army recruits from acquiring sexually-transmitted infections. It was assumed at that point that female sex workers and other “promiscuous” women were the primary carriers for STIs, and that the only way to keep America’s troops safe from the twin scourges of gonorrhea and syphilis was to limit their potential contact with these women. To this end, police and health officers gained the power to arrest and perform crude physical examinations on anyone (though the people they arrested were almost always women) they “reasonably suspected” of carrying an STI. Federal, state, and local officials were given free rein to enforce the state and national laws passed in the program’s wake, chief among which was the 1918 Chamberlain-Kahn Act.

  THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL: SEX, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE DECADES-LONG GOVERNMENT PLAN TO IMPRISON “PROMISCUOUS” WOMEN by Scott W. SternBeacon Press, 368 pp., $28.95
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  As Scott Wasserman Stern details in his new book The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women, if a woman was found to be sick, she was sent to a “detention hospital” (or to jail) until she was deemed cured or “reformed.” Some of those who tested negative for disease were incarcerated anyway, because their alleged promiscuity was deemed a threat to soldiers’ moral hygiene. A disproportionate number of those arrested were women of color and working class women; black women were often kept segregated from white women and jailed in subpar facilities, and, alongside other women of color, were subject to racist violence in addition to sexual assaults. Some were sterilized against their will, or without their knowledge.
  Sex workers were the prime targets, but so was any woman deemed “suspicious”—which at that time could mean anything from being seen in the company of a soldier to eating alone in a restaurant. As the program became more firmly rooted within the legal system, with undercover agents from ASHA (American Social Hygiene Association) acting as its enforcers, a stark reality became apparent: Any woman, at any time, could legally be arrested, sexually assaulted, and hauled off to jail with no trial, no lawyer, and no idea when she’d be released. Those who were imprisoned in detention hospitals were subjected to involuntary medical examinations, inhumane living conditions, and treatments for gonorrhea and syphilis. Unfortunately, at that point, the most common “cure” for these diseases was a strict regimen of continuous doses of mercury and arsenic, toxic chemicals which poisoned these women’s bodies while doing absolutely nothing to cure their ills.
  In 1918, 1,121 people in Michigan were “hospitalized at the expense of the state” because the authorities believed they had STIs. 49 were men; 1,072 were women, and one of them was a 19-year-old, impoverished white woman named Nina McCall. She was arrested, forcibly examined by a local health officer named Dr. Carney, deemed infected with gonorrhea and then syphilis, pumped full of arsenic, and imprisoned at the dilapidated Bay City Detention Hospital for three months. Like so many others, she found the courage to fight back. But instead of staging a prison riot or burning down the “reformatories,” as some of her incarcerated sisters did, Nina did something perhaps even more audacious for a working-class woman of her time. She took her tormentors to court.

  In The Trials of Nina McCall, Stern situates Nina’s trials within the genesis of this program, tracing it from the early days of World War I through postwar progressivism, its reinvigoration at the outbreak of World War II, and throughout the civil rights era, as these laws continued to be enforced in some locales well into the 1970s. It ultimately became one of the largest-scale and longest-lasting mass quarantines in American history, though remains forgotten to an astonishing extent. It was named “the American Plan” (which is, confusingly, also the name of a plan that employers formulated in the 1930s to exploit the First Red Scare, deeming unions “anti-American.”)
  There are survivors of this Plan’s state-sponsored sexual violence still alive today, and various forms of these original laws remain on the books in multiple states, having never been fully repealed. Nina McCall’s story might have stayed buried if Stern had skipped class the day in 2011 when one of his professors at Yale offhandedly mentioned that, “There were even concentration camps in this country for prostitutes.” That phrase rattled around in Stern’s mind, and he decided to find out more. The end result is this meticulously researched, utterly damning work that lays out just what measures the United States government took to control women’s sexuality and autonomy—and how perfectly happy local officials and law enforcement were to go along with it.
  Many of those in the medical community who opposed it did so solely because they rejected the idea of associating healthcare with federal government; to them, the Plan reeked of socialism.
  In its heyday, the Plan found supporters not only from conservatives but also from a number of liberal luminaries, from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller Jr. (who bankrolled the program for decades) to California governor Pat Brown, a fondly-remembered Democrat who made his bones pursuing San Francisco “abortion queen” Inez Burns. They and other supporters took a pseudo-progressive stance, emphasizing about the importance of sex education, community services, and transparency about STIs; they saw themselves as the protectors of at-risk young women, and praised the razing of red-light districts while keeping mum on the plight of the women incarcerated across the country. Many of those in the medical community who opposed it did so solely because they rejected the idea of associating healthcare with federal government; to them, the Plan reeked of socialism.
  There were women, like radical suffragist Edith Houghton Hooker and activist Katharine Bushnell, who campaigned against the Plan, advocating for its abolition on grounds of sexism and gross injustice. They found their efforts countered by reformists who were fine with the idea of locking up sex workers and “bad girls,” but who wanted to ensure that no innocents were swept up by mistake. Even the ACLU praised the Plan, only changing its tune in 1944 after a Northern California ACLU director named Ernest Besig took exception to San Francisco’s policy of holding all suspected women for 72 hours while they were examined.
  Nina McCall’s wasn’t a particularly special case, and even her fight for justice wasn’t altogether unheard of. Nina stood out to Stern, both because of her sheer audacity and because the Michigan state archives happened to have kept detailed records of her case. In 1921, she took her case against those who had wronged her all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court and won. The court decided that Carney had erred in his treatment of her, because he had no reasonable grounds for suspicion that she had been infected; but that if he had, his actions would have been perfectly acceptable. Her victory proved bittersweet: The ruling—known as Rock v. Carney—went on to provide the justification for decades more abuses. The ASHA used it to bolster the right “of the health officer to quarantine persons suffering with the venereal disease in an infectious state who constitute a menace to the public health.”

  After Nina faded from public view, her reputation restored, she married a young man named Norman, settled in Saginaw, Michigan, and tried to get on with things. In 1949, she and Norman moved to Bay City, the site of her incarceration and torture; there are no records to illuminate her feelings on the matter, but there they stayed, until she fell ill with a brain tumor and moved into a nursing home in 1957. Her three children had all died young; ultimately, at the age of 56, so did she.

  After weathering decades of political turmoil and changing public sentiment, the American Plan ultimately lost steam in its most public form. Evolving attitudes towards sex, venereal disease, and women’s rights signaled a kind of death knell for this cruel dragnet, and several high-profile cases—including feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, who was arrested at the age of 18 when she attended an anti-war demonstration outside the United Nations building in New York City—helped hasten its retreat. After being strip-searched and forcibly examined by two male doctors, she bled for days afterwards. Around the same time, civil rights activists in Birmingham feared being subjected to the same kind of examinations at the hands of the police, and the Black Panthers in Sacramento risked forced “V.D. examinations” as part of a police harassment campaign.
  Like Nina, Dworkin fought back, and attracted considerable media attention that led to an increased spotlight on the conditions women prisoners faced in New York City’s jails, and the eventual closure of the clinic at which she’d been assaulted. Pioneering sex workers’ rights organization COYOTE—led by local activist and former sex worker Margo St. James—took up the battle in San Francisco, and their efforts, in concert with those of ACLU lawyer Deborah Hinkley, resulted in a California Court of Appeals ruling that Oakland police would have to enforce the quarantine equally, regardless of the arrestee’s gender—which led to a sharp downtick in prostitution arrests. Similar battles played out across the nation, and by the mid-70s, the Plan—while not totally defeated—rested in tatters. In 1972, ASHA ceased its undercover surveillance and harassment of sex workers, instead pivoting towards more public-facing awareness campaigns and focusing on herpes, instead of syphilis or gonorrhea.
  The ideas at the heart of the program have, however, proved remarkably resilient. Its tendrils of influence crept into the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Japanese internment camps, and the responses to the AIDS epidemic, and helped to lay the groundwork for the current mass incarceration crisis. As Stern has uncovered, the same Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps that were later used to imprison Americans of Japanese and German descent, prisoners of war, and conscientious objectors during World War II originally functioned as “concentration camps” for women incarcerated under the American Plan.
  Women are still arrested on false pretenses, simply for how they look or present, or for carrying condoms in their purses.
  None of the three federal laws passed in 1917, 1918, and 1919 have ever been struck down in appeals court or repealed; they remain on the books in various forms today, and the toxic attitudes they enabled continue to impact women in America today. As late as 1976, authorities in Salt Lake City, Utah threatened the arrest and “forced treatment of suspected carriers of a strain of venereal disease that is resistant to penicillin treatment,” while police in California’s Monterey County required sex workers to submit to mandatory STI clinics, under threat of incarceration and forcible examination. In 1982, the mayor of Atlantic City floated the idea of quarantining sex workers in the name of “cleaning up” the boardwalk. When public officials detained a number of HIV-positive individuals in the 1980s and 1990s (many of them sex workers), the ghost of the American Plan reared its head once more; one court decision from 1990 directly cited a 1919 case that declared the quarantine of a woman infected with gonorrhea a “reasonable and proper” action. Everything old is new again.
  The truths revealed in this book are truly shocking, and even more so because they are so little known. The culture of silence that has impacted sex workers for so long has finally begun to dissipate, but potent dangers remain. More than 200,000 women are currently incarcerated, and represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population; up to 70 percent of women behind bars are or have been involved in the commercial sex industry. Women are still arrested on false pretenses, simply for how they look or present, or for carrying condoms in their purses; sex workers—particularly those who are trans women of color—are extremely vulnerable to police brutality and criminal justice abuses. Women like Nina McCall, Margo St. James, and Inez Burns fought against a system that saw them as less than human. One hopes the fact that more authors are now working to tell those stories means that more people will fight back.

• Times Literary Supplement
  https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/bad-blood-eugenics/
  Word count: 3176

  SOCIAL STUDIESJULY 17, 2018
  Patricia J. Williams on the history of eugenics in the Progressive Age

  A second book, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, surveillance, and the decades-long government plan to imprison “promiscuous” women by Scott W. Stern, looks at the same set of laws during more or less the same time frame, but through the particular experience of Nina McCall, one of many white working-class teenagers swept up by the state of Michigan’s over-zealous morality police, and whose life was upended by the ensuing nightmare. Suspected of having venereal disease seemingly for no reason other than her having been observed unaccompanied on a trip to the Post Office, McCall was, in 1918, detained for months without any semblance of due process. She lost her job and her reputation and became estranged from her family. Her vagina was probed endlessly and her body injected with mercury and arsenic, all in the name of “cure”. The relentless prodding of “suspected” young women was not accompanied by anything like scientific rigour, consistency of observation, accuracy of record-keeping, or coherence of diagnosis. McCall, once forcibly tested, was arrested based on a supposed diagnosis of syphilis, but ended up being given anti-gonorrhoeal medications. What makes McCall unusual among the many tens of thousands of American girls also targeted is that she sued the state. It took two years for her to be partially vindicated by the Michigan Supreme Court, which recognized her right to a trial, and even so her small victory did not slow the ideological diffusion of the American Plan for moral purge. (Tellingly, the court only ruled that McCall’s detainment was unlawful because the grounds for suspecting her of infection were a little too weak.) McCall’s story is captivating as pure biography, but it is all the more remarkable documentarily: it stands as one of the few formal challenges to these laws, and one of the very few whose heart-wrenching traces were captured in a trial record.

  The American Plan (not to be confused with the anti-union movement of the same name) was a programme designed to control sexually transmitted disease. It was different from the earlier French Plan instituted by Napoleon, which sought to confine prostitution by semi-legalizing it. Known as “regulationism”, the French system required sex workers to register, submit to regular genital inspections, and confine their activities to particular (red light) districts. In contrast, the American Plan never completely bought the idea of prostitution as something that could or ought to be regulated; true to its more Puritan legacy, the US set about trying to eliminate “immorality” by outlawing it. Unsurprisingly, therefore, public governance tended to treat prostitution not merely as a moral failure but as a criminal act. “Waywardness” in a woman was deemed not only a product of socialization, but reflective of innate mental deficits associated with “imbecility” or “feeblemindedness”. Anti-corruption squads composed of police, sheriffs, social workers and religious leaders, combed the streets of cities and small towns, detaining women and girls en masse and conducting crude genital probes. And it did not necessarily matter whether these “tests” resulted in diagnosis of any sort, for the conduct of these righteous teams was itself often corrupted by greed, reputational gossip, and stereotype: black and immigrant women were presumed to be looser in their conduct. Poor women could be labelled promiscuous if they merely seemed so to a detention officer. A neighbour with a grudge could call the vice squad. In addition, police received bonuses in line with the number of arrests and detentions, and policies could be touted as “successful” based on volume alone. Although the Reagan revolution is remembered for its racialized nomination of “welfare queens” and “the undeserving poor”, these too are concepts that date back to the Progressive Era.

  The cruelties as well as the efficiencies underwriting this system were at least partly the legacy of practices endured by slaves in the South and indentured servants in the urban North. During nineteenth-century slave auctions women, and men, were often stripped for display, their genitals publicly inspected for signs of disease, their personalities rated for docility and passive obedience. And, given popular medical theories of the time that African and “inferior” breeds were impervious to the normal limits of pain, the bodies of black slave women and Irish immigrants disproportionately served as the experimental playground for doctors perfecting early gynaecological methods and surgical sterilization. (Those looking for detailed accounts of this might turn to Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on black Americans from colonial times to the present, 2006, and Deidre Cooper Owens’s Medical Bondage:Race, gender, and the origin of American gynecology, 2017.)

  During the Progressive Era a new kind of bureaucratic order began to have appeal. The passion for too-neat typologies advanced by some natural historians and scientists – “Conceive for a moment”, Louis Agassiz wrote in a letter in 1863, “the difference it would make in future ages . . . if instead of the manly population descended from cognate nations, the United States should hereafter be inhabited by the effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood . . . . I shudder at the consequences” – became crossed with the pleasing pseudo-mathematical balance sheets of actuarialism. In 1906, the Race Betterment Foundation was established in Battle Creek, Michigan, by John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of the corn flake and a tireless polemicist for the “purity of the gene pool”. An advocate of sexual abstinence, he campaigned against masturbation as well as racial miscegenation. His foundation became an influential force in advancing theories about the evils of sex unless it were seed sown in the “proper” advancement of racial hygiene and superior “pedigree”. His foundation sponsored many of the eugenic fairs and congresses that flourished during this period, including Fitter Family and Better Baby competitions. Around the same time, the biologist Charles Davenport founded the American Breeder’s Association, whose mission was to spread the alarm about “the menace to society of inferior blood”. Davenport, who supported ster­ili­zation of “unfit” human “stock” as well as restrictions on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, went on to establish the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, which became the enduring centre of the American eugenics movement. (Over the past half-century, the laboratory has distanced itself from those origins, becoming better known as the intellectual home of Barbara McClintock, James Watson, Francis Crick, Carol Greider and others, and for their work in molecular genetics, cancer research and the discovery of telomeres. Nevertheless, the archives of the American Eugenics Movement are still housed there, and may be studied at eugenicsarchive.org.) Davenport also believed, Ladd-Taylor points out, that Mendel’s theory of inheritance in simple organisms such as pea plants could be flatly applied to traits in human populations. He thought, wrongly, that a complex range of conditions – in those days, labelled variously as idiocy, imbecility, defectiveness and degeneracy – resulted from a single trait that could be reliably predicted by dominant and recessive patterns of transmission. This mistake was used to justify sterilization, institutionalization and segregation of “fertile feebleminded” women during childbearing years.

  In 1911, John D. Rockefeller, Jr created the Bureau of Social Hygiene to counter (largely baseless) public fears of “white slavery”. In the name of science, he funded a laboratory in the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, dedicated to eugenic propositions. Women “adrift” could be rounded up, quarantined and subjected to tests not only designed to ferret out venereal disease, but to sort the subjects by IQ, degree of “degenerate” disposition, and purported educability in the arts of housekeeping. Those deemed “incorrigible” or “feebleminded” might face life imprisonment; those deemed more responsive to supervised intervention and schedules of reform might eventually be hired out as domestic servants, seamstresses, or laundresses. There were institutional distinctions among homes for the feeble-minded, detention centres, reformatories and jails. Meanwhile, the application of Mendelianism to human reproduction soon became overlaid with statistical modelling. In 1877, the prison reformer Richard Dugdale had done a study entitled “The Jukes: A study in crime, pauperism, disease and heredity”, covering seven generations of “debauchery” and “degeneracy” among a rural family living in upstate New York. In 1915, this report was rewritten by Arthur H. Estabrook, who was funded by the Eugenics Record Office to foreground the role of pure heredity. This latter version made the Jukes iconic in the public imagination, Ladd-Taylor says, as “an inbreeding rural family too lazy to look for work and living in a hovel [and who] epitomized the supposed innate unfitness of poor ‘white trash’”. While Dugdale himself had urged that improved social environment was central to “fixing” such people, the practical impact of Estabrook’s take was more sinister: it frightened the public sufficiently to spawn a movement that placed great emphasis on heritability of moral and mental weakness. Fixing the Poor clearly documents how this led to broad justifications for sterilization programmes.

  Under the American Plan, degeneracy was also a matter of youth, aesthetic appearance and “obvious” abnormality. Children as young as eleven, including those who had been abused or the victims of incest, could be carelessly labelled “incorrigible” if they looked “slovenly”, and quarantined or scheduled for tubal ligation. And as Susan Schweik has shown in her masterly study The Ugly Laws: Disability in public (2010), many states were also passing ordinances during the Progressive Era limiting the ability of people deemed unpleasant-looking to move about in public without licences. The limping, burnt, or blind, polio sufferers, those with shrivelled limbs, conspicuous birthmarks or speech impediments – all might be banned not only from begging but from conspicuous “display” of themselves in public. Appearance alone became a measure of how much these subjects might be able to seek employment, pursue a career, appeal to human empathy, or ask for alms. This exacting scrutiny, the measurement of brows, of jaw, of width of noses and distance between eyes, became a literal blood sport, a phrenology of racial and class supremacy. Meanwhile, the capacious label of “feebleminded” increasingly led to diminutions of respect for the personhood of those so branded. They became the to-be-controlled, incapable of “real” or human feeling, future-less yet “insatiably” needy. Both Fixing the Poor and The Trials of Nina McCall are filled with quotes from legislators, lawyers, doctors and religious crusaders that compare victims caught in this system to “vegetables”, empty vessels and the walking dead. As Stern points out, and Ladd-Taylor would agree, “feeblemindedness was more than just a mental condition; it was an indicator of morality”. Thus, it was linked inextricably to the undermining of “our civilization”.

  Yet the seeming haphazardness of cate­g­or­ization disguises the degree to which the American Plan was indeed a plan: and one of its features was precisely decentralization. As Nina McCall’s story illustrates, it was a system encouraged by the federal government, but whose administration was pretty much left to individual states, where standards were both varied and incoherently pursued. Thus, overall statistics remain difficult to gather. Local administrators were granted wide discretion, making it hard to hold any given person or locality accountable for mistreatment or even death.

  The goal of suppressing the fecundity of the “unfit” was further enabled by increasingly survivable forms of surgical sterilization. The first eugenic sterilization law was proposed in Michigan in 1897, and the first passed in Indiana in 1907. The Eugenics Record Office produced a Model Law that was enacted by a number of states, and by around 1918, American physicians had, according to Stern, started to see sterilization “as the most effective way of combating race degeneracy”. In 1927, that Model Law, as enacted by the state of Virginia, was tested before the Supreme Court, by the claim of Carrie Buck, an eighteen-year-old girl being held as “incorrigible” at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Buck protested against involuntary sterilization on the grounds that it violated equal protection laws as well as her right to bodily integrity. She lost. In an infamous opinion (cited years later by Nazi doctors in their defence statements at the Nuremberg trials), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough” (Buck vs Bell, 1927). For years after the ruling, the numbers of forced salpingectomies – by which the Fallopian tubes are entirely removed – climbed, while the standards of review fell. And in 1941, a new federal agency was created, the Social Protection Division. Its mission, Stern explains, was to “persuade local officials to enforce their own laws” to stamp out social disease. In 1946, Dwight Eisenhower, while Chief of Army Staff, endorsed a federal bill (ultimately not passed) that would have extended quarantine and prosecutions under the American Plan, further lowering the standard by replacing the words “infected persons” with persons “reasonably suspected of being infected”.

  The fear of poor, dissolute and particularly of mulatta women who might “pass” as white and contaminate “pure” blood lines by infecting white men, meanwhile, became a quieter form of institutional disciplining. The Trials of Nina McCall documents efforts, during the First World War, to regulate and repress not only brothels near army bases, but to stop white soldiers from visiting black neighbourhoods as a way of preventing them from having any contact at all with black women, deemed “inevitably” promiscuous. And during the Second World War, the American Plan was applied in ways that reveal gross racial disparities. Prostitution was assumed if a white woman was merely in the presence of a black man, or, in one case, because she had been “seen repeatedly in a restaurant favored by Filipinos”. Indeed, while the data cited in both books primarily concern the mistreatment of white girls and women, the majority of women negatively affected by the American Plan were women of colour – particularly black, Chinese and indigenous. Those women’s fates are less well documented, but there are clear con­nections among perceptions of white female fragility, black contagion and the need for intervention. As the Surgeon General, Thomas Parran, opined in the 1940s, it is not the black person’s “fault” that syphilis is

  biologically different in [the Negro] than in the white; that his blood vessels are particularly susceptible so that late syphilis brings with it crippling circulatory diseases, cuts his working usefulness in half, and makes him [an] unemployable burden upon the community in the last years of his shortened life. It is through no fault of hers that the colored woman remains infectious two and one-half times as long as the white woman.

  Stern reminds readers that even as these words were being uttered, the US was still conducting the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis study of 1932–72, in which the “natural” progress of syphilis in the bodies of 622 disenfranchised black men in Alabama was observed by the United States Public Health Service, with all treatment withheld even after penicillin was discovered. The men were told only that they had “bad blood”. (To add insult to injury, they were offered free burial insurance in exchange for participation.) Civil rights debates, too, often reverted to discussions of the sexual risks of integration, says Stern: “After the 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education, an organization called Separate Schools denounced the black community as ‘a vast reservoir of infectious venereal diseases’ . . . . When black female citizens in Birmingham, Alabama, tried to register to vote, they were sometimes asked if they had STIs”.

  Come 1963, there were official records of 63,678 sterilizations having been performed under the US sterilization laws, although actual, unrecorded numbers are likely to have been far higher. By this time the use of penicillin was changing much, if not everything. The last vestiges of federal co-ordination for the American Plan melted away, leaving individual states as the unguided, inconsistent and sometimes extreme enforcers of social values; in addition, the nascent women’s movement began to challenge norms of sexual morality. Still, both Stern and Ladd-Taylor cite instances where the invocation of the American Plan persisted until the 1970s, as in Salt Lake City, Denver, or Fresno. Significantly, Stern tells how Andrea Dworkin, then a college student, was arrested during an anti-war protest in 1965. Dworkin, who would go on to become one of the best-known feminist writers and anti-pornography advocates in the world, was taken to New York City’s Women’s House of Detention where her experience echoed Nina McCall’s testimony so many years before: “In addition to the many strip searches by hand that police and nurses made into my vagina and anus, I was brutalized by two male doctors who gave me an internal examination, the first one I had ever had. They pretty much tore me up inside with a steel speculum and had themselves a fine time verbally tormenting me as well . . . . I began to bleed right after”. Stern notes that Dworkin “would continue to bleed for days after. When her family doctor examined her, the doctor burst into tears”.

  These books are impossible to read without a confused sense of both hindsight and dreadful foreboding. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the danger . . . is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilit­arian terms”. That superfluity renders people disposable, mere things – “creating creatures who are alive in fact, but dead in law”, as the essayist Colin Dayan has described it. The weight of what no one wants, the extinction of those never given voice, is quietly buried in what Arendt thought of as “holes of oblivion”.

  We Americans live in the present tense after all – everything is sui generis, everything popped up overnight by virtue of individual choice and choice alone. But there are echoes of the American Plan everywhere. The Sentencing Project, a public-interest research body, notes that the numbers of imprisoned women rose 646 per cent between 1980 and 2010 – 1.5 times the rate of men’s incarcer­ation during the same period. Fixing the Poor ends with a warning that “child welfare and criminal justice systems have emerged as leading instruments of eugenics control in the twenty-first century in part because they are easily reconciled with religious qualms about abortion, sterilization and reprogenic technologies”. Now as a century ago, we encourage “affluent Americans to have children, while deterring childbearing and childrearing by low-income women and single mothers, especially women with dis­abilities, drug addicts, and poor women of color”. The Trials of Nina McCall also ends on a haunting note: “Each of the laws that enabled the American Plan – those laws passed at general federal behest in 1917, 1918 and 1919 – remains on the books, in some form, to this day. Not one of them has ever been struck down by an appeals court”.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/books/review/scott-stern-trials-of-nina-mccall.html
  Word count: 1180

  The ‘Social Hygiene’ Campaign That Sent Thousands of American Women to Jail

  By Cynthia Gorney
  July 31, 2018

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  THE TRIALS OF NINA McCALL
  Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades- Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women
  By Scott W. Stern
  356 pp. Beacon Press. $28.95.

  One October morning in 1918, an 18-year-old named Nina McCall walked out of the post office in St. Louis, Mich., where she lived with her widowed mother. Waiting for her on the sidewalk was the town’s deputy sheriff, who ordered her to report to the local health officer for a medical exam. Why he singled out McCall we may never know, but the exam left her bleeding, traumatized and outraged. When the officer declared her to be infected with gonorrhea, McCall protested that she had never been intimate with a man. At which point, as Scott Stern writes in his impressively researched book, “The Trials of Nina McCall,” the doctor “turned on her and thundered, with all the authority of his position and his gender, ‘Young lady, do you mean to call me a liar?’”

  Stern’s is the first book-length account of the “American Plan,” a government-sponsored “social hygiene” campaign under which thousands of American women between the early years of the 20th century and the 1960s were forced to undergo gynecological exams, quarantine and detention, all in the name of protecting the country’s citizens from sexually transmitted infections. Stern was a freshman in a lecture course at Yale when his professor mentioned that government efforts to combat sexually transmitted disease had included confining prostitutes to concentration camps. As Stern recounts, he stopped taking notes and turned to Google: “I typed in ‘concentration camps for prostitutes.’ Nothing. I went to Wikipedia and entered the same search. Nothing. This was strange.”

  Stern, now a law student at Yale, went on to spend years examining records, including administrative notes, century-old news stories and social workers’ field reports. The book he eventually pieced together, which in earlier form earned him an undergraduate thesis award, is startling, disturbing and terrifically readable. Using McCall’s saga as a narrative spine, Stern chronicles the nationwide network of laws and policies targeting prostitutes and any other woman whose alleged sexual activity made her a potential carrier of venereal disease.
  No proof that a woman was selling sex for pay was required in order to haul her in for testing. Local police and health officials targeted women who in their view acted too flirtatious, enjoyed themselves too much around soldiers or simply worked as waitresses. In one Louisiana town near an Army installation, a woman was forcibly examined because she’d been spotted dining in a restaurant alone. Women of color were rounded up in especially high numbers; Stern cites officials who “enthusiastically warned that nonwhite women were less moral, intent on infecting soldiers and that blacks in particular were a ‘syphilis soaked race.’”
  On paper, the laws of the American Plan were gender-neutral, applicable to “any person reasonably suspected by the health officer of being infected with any of the said diseases.” In practice, the laws targeted women, and those judged to be infected were quarantined in jails, converted hospitals and former brothels fitted out with barbed wire-topped walls. Breakouts and rebellions were common: In Los Angeles, women hacked through a fence with a stolen butcher knife; in Seattle, they tied up the guards in sheets and busted through plate glass. “In one wing of the horribly overcrowded Louisville jail,” Stern writes, “quarantined women staged a riot about once a week.”

  American authorities didn’t invent the blame-loose-women approach to stamping out venereal disease; they imported it from Europe. In 19th-century Paris, Stern reports, under what was known as the French Plan, prostitutes were made to bare their genitals before health inspectors. Those found to be infected could be jailed and compelled to undergo mercury injections, then the standard, if mostly ineffective, treatment for venereal disease. (“Throbbing pain, kidney damage, inflammation or ulceration of the mouth and terrible skin rashes” were typical side effects, Stern writes.)

  It wasn’t until the 1940s that doctors understood that penicillin could knock out syphilis and gonorrhea. When Nina McCall was quarantined in 1918 — bullied into three months inside a Michigan “detention hospital” — she was injected with the toxins then still in fashion: mercury and, Stern surmises, remedies based on arsenic. Her teeth loosened. Her hair started falling out. She pleaded to go home. She insisted she’d been falsely suspected of consorting with “soldier boys”; Stern found evidence suggesting that she may never have had a sexually transmitted infection.
  We know all this now because after McCall was finally allowed to leave, she was sought out by a woman of means who hated the American Plan, had heard about her case and proposed that McCall sue the government for damages. Stern presents an intriguing cast of characters and ratchets up the tension as McCall’s lawsuit materializes: Her benefactress is a Christian Scientist opposed to government-mandated medical treatment; two of the lawyers on either side are bitterly combative rivals. The trial transcripts supply fine courtroom drama, but the story doesn’t end there. McCall lost her case, and Scott relates both her troubled adulthood and the fascinating debates over the American Plan that continued to roil for decades, both inside and outside the legal system.

  “The Trials of Nina McCall” is a consistently surprising page-turner, and at times I found myself wishing Stern had lingered over particular details. He notes that some of the laws that made up the American Plan are still on the books today; it’s the interpretation of these laws that has changed, beginning in the 1960s, amid increasing litigation and evolving sexual mores. What kinds of public mandates are justifiable in combating contagious disease? Is involuntary quarantine ever acceptable? I would have welcomed Stern’s views on such questions. Even so, his book is a brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in state control over women’s bodies and behavior — at times with the complicity of medical authorities. It should come as no surprise, but appalls nonetheless, to learn that more than one government enforcer of the American Plan also played a key role in the notorious Tuskegee syphilis study, in which infected black men were deliberately denied treatment and left to sicken and die. Unchecked power over those who have little, Stern warns, is a peril that should keep us on high alert today.

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  Cynthia Gorney, a professor emerita at the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars.”

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