THE LONG AMERICAN PLAN: THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST VENEREAL DISEASE AND ITS CARRIERS

Abstract

The American Plan was a collection of laws and practices under which federal, state, and local government officials arrested and examined any woman whom they reasonably suspected of having venereal disease. If that woman tested positive, she was placed in isolation for an indeterminate sentence until she was cured or rendered noninfectious. Because there were few effective treatments for syphilis or gonorrhea during this time, women were sometimes held for months, even years, until an official decided that enough was enough. Often, the woman received few or none of the protections of due process. Tens of thousands of women were arrested and treated in this manner. No historian has ever traced the American Plan, as such, beyond the 1920s. The few who have written about it usually stop their coverage shortly after World War I, often with a vague statement that it likely extended into the very immediate future; as one historian wrote, “the work continued in many cases on the state and local level throughout the 1920s.” Anything after the mid-1920s is typically treated as a different program. In this Article, I propose a radical extension of the timeline of the American Plan—beyond the 1920s and for the half century that followed. I demonstrate that the government machinery and legislation undergirding the Plan extended it beyond its traditional Progressive Era confines. My findings suggest that we should view the American Plan less as a limited public health response to World War I and more as a system of laws, a collection of enforcement procedures, and an attitude toward women and disease that continued for much of the twentieth century. By understanding the Plan through this lens, its true scope and staying power become clear. Though there are distinctions between the early American Plan and its later manifestations, it is important to understand it as a single, continuous campaign to police female mobility and sexuality. Only by fully understanding such continuities, rather than seeing the past as distant and unconnected to the present, can we be informed participants in ongoing debates over public health and state power. Only by grasping this continuity can we fully understand campaigns in our own time that operate in the shadow of the American Plan: the movement to quarantine HIV/AIDS patients is the philosophical and judicial successor to the American Plan.