Medical Treatment or Crusade against Vice?

"Captives Taken in Weekend Drive against City's White Slave Traffic" declared the headlines of the Baltimore Sun on May 17, 1937. The newspaper reported:

Striking at Baltimore's white slave traffic, thirty-five Federal agents, commanded by J. Edgar Hoover, chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, swept down on ten alleged haunts of vice here late Saturday night and early yesterday morning, taking forty-seven persons into custody. . . . Mr. Hoover said the crusade will continue "until Baltimore is completely cleaned up."^[29]

The raids generated great excitement and controversy in Baltimore, magnified when local prostitutes implicated a number of high-level police officers and at least one state senator in Baltimore's "white slave trade." ^{[ 30]} The local newspapers delighted in the revelations of an organized racket, reporting on Baltimore as a now-famous center of vice and iniquity. As a result of a succession of titillating revelations, the Baltimore police force was discredited and Hoover was admired for his resolute action.

State Senator Raymond E. Kennedy seized the political opportunity and accused the city health department and the police department of implicitly condoning vice. He demanded that all prostitutes being treated in city clinics be immediately incarcerated. Meanwhile, a grand jury investigation of Baltimore's "haunts of vice" had been organized, and Parran was called to appear as a witness. On his arrival in Baltimore, however, Parran pulled a public relations coup for the health department. He managed to turn the public fervor away from prostitution, and toward a medical program for venereal disease control. He announced a state survey of venereal diseases, suggested that Baltimore follow the successful Swedish model of disease control, including the provision of free drugs, and he declared to enthusiastic mass meetings that Maryland would take the lead in the fight against "social diseases."^[31]

Public interest in Parran's speeches was so great that when city budget officials refused a health department request for an extra $21,000 to combat syphilis, their action was publicly denounced as "incredible." Even Senator Raymond Kennedy now joined in the popular demand for adequate medical services, and Mayor Howard Jackson was forced to agree to an increased health department budget. As Kennedy declared: "There has been more discussion of syphilis in the last ninety days than in the twenty years before."^[32]

In 1938, when the American Society for Social Hygiene complained that prostitution still flourished in Baltimore, the local press had lost interest in exposés of vice, and no local politician emerged to carry a crusade. When "National Social Hygiene Day" was announced for February 2, 1938, Commissioner Williams decided to celebrate it in Baltimore, but changed its name to "Syphilis Control Day." Obviously, the change in name was significant: Not only did the new name recognize the word "syphilis" as acceptable public discourse, it also associated Baltimore's program with the biomedical approach to disease, and distanced it from the traditional focus of the social hygienists on vice, pros-

titution, and morality.^[33] Thanks to citywide publicity and political pressure on Mayor Jackson, Williams was able greatly to expand his budget and open the Druid Hill Health Center for black patients in west Baltimore—the first time that adequate public health facilities had been available in that area of the city.^[34]

The city health department now tackled the problem of syphilis in industry. At the time, industrial workers were being fired (or never hired in the first place) if they were found to have positive blood tests for syphilis. Employers fired infected workers on the grounds that they were more likely to be involved in industrial accidents and would thus increase the costs of workmen's compensation and insurance premiums. The health department started to provide free laboratory blood tests for industrial workers; they kept the test results confidential and referred those infected for appropriate treatment. The health department followed individual workers to make sure they were receiving treatment but—at least in theory—no worker who accepted treatment could be fired. The fact that no guarantee of confidentiality was made for workers refusing treatment meant that syphilis treatment was essentially made compulsory for industrial workers participating in the plan.^[35]

Baltimore's industrial employers were gradually persuaded of the plan's value; by 1940 eight industries with eighty-five hundred workers were participating. Some industries, however, still insisted on their right to fire infected workers—and many of the physicians to whom workers were referred had little idea how to treat syphilis. Despite these problems, the "Baltimore Plan" for industry was said to be relatively successful in treating syphilis while protecting workers' jobs.^[36]