As a Yale University freshman seven years ago, Scott Stern of Squirrel Hill was like most of his classmates in his Media and Medicine in Modern America course: a little bleary during the morning lecture, still settling in during September to the Ivy League rigors lying ahead.
His senses and curiosity quickly awoke when his professor referred to the United States’ version a century ago of its own “concentration camps,” ones used in America’s case to detain and quarantine women suspected of transmitting sexual diseases. For days, weeks or months at a time, tens of thousands of suspected prostitutes and others deemed to be loose women of questionable moral character were rounded up and locked away, without due process.
The detentions included invasive, forced gynecological examinations of females as young as their early teens and painful, ineffective treatments for gonorrhea and syphilis in the pre-penicillin era. They were most widely used during World War I and World War II — especially against minorities and low-status whites — supposedly to serve national security interests by protecting the health of soldiers and sailors before they were shipped abroad.
Like most Americans alive today — young or old — Mr. Stern had never heard of this government-approved oppression of the female gender, which was known for decades as the “American Plan.” He had many questions: How could that have been allowed? How extensive was it? How long did it go on? Did anyone question or fight it?
The 2011 Allderdice High School graduate’s exhausting search for answers during the rest of his Yale education and beyond culminates in next week’s release by Beacon Press of “The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison ‘Promiscuous’ Women.”
The book by Mr. Stern, now a 25-year-old first-year Yale law student, is rich in both historical research and storytelling. It has attracted enough early attention that it has already secured a film rights option from veteran Hollywood producer Cathy Schulman. Mr. Stern, meanwhile, will kick off a book tour by speaking at Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Oakland Tuesday evening as part of the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures series.
In a phone interview, Mr. Stern said he expects at the lecture to see many friends of his and of his parents, Howard Stern and Rhonda Wasserman, who are, respectively, faculty members of Carlow University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. But he also looks forward to sharing information publicly about a long-obscured, surprising and scandalous part of U.S. history that he initially couldn’t even find a Wikipedia article about — though he’s preparing one now himself.
“This is niche history, but I think it has broader implications,” he said. “A lot of historians have written about elements of this ... but no one has really looked extensively at this specific program, and looked at it nationally, and tried to focus the story from the ground up.”
Mr. Stern dedicated time to the American Plan throughout his pursuit of both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in American studies from Yale, writing numerous papers about it as part of coursework. During free time, including independent studies stints, he traveled the country for research, often with his father. He postponed law school for two years to complete the book, which started as a 1,000-page manuscript he had to whittle with help of editors.
The Nina McCall of the title was an 18-year-old, small-town girl in Michigan in 1918, one of those locked up for three months based on allegations merely that she had engaged in pre-marital sex, which she denied. When the government doctor examining her reported his belief she had gonorrhea, she called him a liar. It didn’t matter. She would later sue over her treatment, unsuccessfully.
“This was all very sexist, in that any woman who might be promiscuous could be deemed a threat to national security, and it was a way of policing women at a time when women were getting formal education and starting to vote for the first time,” Mr. Stern said. “From early on, it became clear to those running the American Plan that the majority of women they were locking up were not really prostitutes,” but it didn’t matter to them.
Despite his age, the book is not the first foray into book publishing for the aspiring environmental lawyer. When he was still in high school, his longtime interest in origami was recognized by Tuttle Publishing by putting out his book, “Outside the Box Origami: A New Generation of Extraordinary Folds.”
Scott Stern was an Allderdice senior when he had his first book published on origami: http://www.post-gazette.com/life/lifestyle/2011/04/10/Allderdice-senior-s-love-of-origami-leads-to-a-how-to-book-on-the-subject/stories/201104100309
This new story of the forgotten American Plan is a little different from that, but it fits with a personal penchant for finding long-term projects to work on that may be different from the experiences and knowledge of others.
“There’s something cool about knowing more about something than pretty much anyone else in the world,” he said, though he’d be happy to see his book clue a lot of others in as well.
Mr. Stern’s lecture at 6 p.m. Tuesday is free and open to the public, with advance registration requested through the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures website.
Gary Rotstein: grotstein@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1255.
First Published: May 9, 2018, 1:00 p.m.