Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

They called it the American Plan, and it became one of the largest and longest mass quarantines in U.S. history. The program operated more or less continuously from the 1910s through the 1940s, and in some places was enforced as late as the 1970s; laws passed under the plan were used during the 1980s and 1990s to forcibly quarantine HIV/AIDS patients. Its influence can also be traced to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the World War II–era internment camps, and helped to lay the groundwork for the current mass incarceration crisis. As I reported in a 2018 piece for the New Republic, the same Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps later used to imprison Americans of Japanese and German descent during World War II originally functioned as “concentration camps” for sex workers and other women incarcerated under its auspices. These American Plan–era laws are still on the books in multiple states.