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chapter four LIFTING THE SHADOW FROM THE LAND 1941–1945 The people can raze this shadow from the land, from their homes, if the people learn, if they fight syphilis. FIGHT SYPHILIS, 1942 In peacetime, [venereal disease] lurks like a spider in a dark corner. It rends like a tiger when war comes over the horizon. surgeon general thomas parran, 1941 P rostitution is just like any other business,” a city official in Washington, D.C., noted with dismay. “It goes where the cash is.” During the late 1930s much of the cash came from the unattached young men who had flooded into the nation’s capital in the wake of the New Deal. In 1940 the introduction of Selective Service, a peacetime draft, brought a second wave of cash as soldiers and sailors flocked to the city. Within a year it was official: Washington , D.C., home of the federal government and the Public Health Service, had the highest syphilis rates of any city in the nation. Worse yet, prostitutes, eager to accommodate the needs of the market, had begun lowering their prices so that enlisted men could afford their services.1 As war threatened, public health officials’ concerns escalated. Screening for Selective Service revealed that alarmingly high rates of venereal disease still plagued the nation. What would happen when war began and these men migrated from their home towns to military bases? Would women who left their homes to work in essential war industries become involved in prostitution or, as one North Carolinian newspaper called it, the “girl racket”?2 And would the “girl racket” cause a spike in rates of venereal disease and illegitimate pregnancies? The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, followed by the United States’ entry into war against Germany, Italy, and Japan, radically altered the federal government’s own smaller war on venereal disease and sexual ignorance. In the wake of the war, federally funded sex education programs, both those directed by the Public Health Service and those implemented by other federal institutions , reached record numbers of Americans. In 1941 and then again in 1944, the introduction of new drugs further transformed sex education. Not content to rest on their laurels, federal public health officials used both the introduction of sulfa drugs and penicillin as well as aggressive government initiatives to protect Americans from venereal disease as a foundation for innovative approaches to the control of venereal disease and even illegitimate pregnancies during the postwar period. By the mid-1950s, with rates of venereal diseases declining , the often-repeated claim that these diseases could be “licked” no longer seemed an idle boast. Finally, syphilis and gonorrhea could be relegated to the dust-heap of history.3 When the war began, few Public Health Service officers were optimistic about the government’s ability to control venereal disease or to limit illegitimate pregnancies. The issue of “military camps and vamps,” as one news magazine gleefully called it, had been a serious problem during World War I, and federal officials feared a repeat of this earlier problem. Well aware that chastity and fidelity were typically war’s first casualties, congressional legislators, military leaders, and the PHS developed plans to control venereal disease and limit illegitimate pregnancies even before the war began. In 1940 the Senate Committee on Military Affairs held hearings to investigate the causes of these problems . The draft, one witness earnestly explained, “takes boys shortly out of high school, boys who all their lives have been taught to respect women . . . and places them in situations where the absence of normal contact with girls induces a mass lust.” Naturally, red-light districts sprang up to cater to this lust. Extensive educational programs and “counter-attractions”—ping-pong, movies, athletics , and a variety of other wholesome activities—were required. But even as they advocated such measures, federal officials knew that a broader and more comprehensive plan was needed.4 In 1940 the military, the Public Health Service, and the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), a private organization, agreed to cooperate in creating a plan “to defend the armed and industrial forces from venereal disease.”5 Titled the Eight-Point Agreement, this plan called for an expansion of the Service ’s existing campaign to control venereal diseases. Working together, the Army, Navy, Public Health Service, and ASHA developed and implemented aggressive measures to track the spread of venereal disease, to encourage the in72 Condom Nation [3.133.141.6...

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