The Trials of Nina McCall by Scott W. Stern

Author:Scott W. Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

ON THE EVENING OF September 29, 1940, even as federal agents and ASHA investigators were fanning out across the country, Nina’s cousin and adopted son, Robert Day, died at the tender age of twenty. Nina and her family could not escape tragedy.

Robert had attended St. Louis schools and had barely begun his life. On September 7, 1940, he had married Glenadine Lobsinger, a young Alma woman. Almost immediately thereafter, he had come down with a “serious illness.” After three weeks of suffering, he passed. His funeral was held a few days later in Nina and Norman’s home on Washington Avenue, where Robert had lived all his life.14 Robert’s widow, Glenadine, gave birth to his son seven months later. She named the baby Robert Jr. In yet another tragic turn, Robert Jr. would die at the age of twenty-four, just weeks before his own son, Robert, was born.15

In the fall of 1940, the deceased Robert Day’s sixteen-year-old sister, Delma Mae, still lived with Nina and Norman in St. Louis. It is quite tempting to imagine Nina warning her teenaged charge to stay indoors and away from the authorities. For, all across Michigan, the American Plan was being resurrected.

Just four days after Robert’s funeral, four thousand delegates gathered in a towering, ornate Detroit hotel for the sixty-ninth annual meeting of the American Public Health Association. Among the delegates were Raymond Vonderlehr and Bascom Johnson. The theme of the meeting was STI control, and several delegates emphasized the importance of the Plan. In the most widely reported speech, a retired major general and current health official called for the adoption of a “plan, parts of which already are in effect.” This “plan” included “state and municipal health and police authorities acting under existing statutes and ordinances which in most localities authorize arrest, quarantine and treatment of prostitutes known to have venereal disease.” Such a plan, the major general announced, had been “tested during the World War.”16

A few days after the meeting ended, seventeen state and local health officials gathered in the chamber of commerce offices in Battle Creek—the town that housed Fort Custer (back in Nina’s youth, it had been known as Camp Custer). The first draftees were scheduled to arrive at the fort in just a few weeks, and already, according to one observer, a “regular city of unpainted pine buildings has been erected and stretches almost as far as you can see.” Together, the health officers drew up plans for “a rigid venereal disease control program” in Battle Creek and its environs. “The consensus of those attending,” reported one Battle Creek journalist, “was that a plan of quarantine for all women found to be infected would be the most effective attack.” State law already provided for this, they agreed.17

To ensure that the lofty goals of these meetings became reality, George Gould, the ASHA’s most youthful investigator, arrived in Michigan in mid-December. Gould was horrified to discover that various Michigan officials were planning on regulating prostitution. One state health officer, he concluded

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