‘Trials’ chronicles un-American Plan

at best, deadly at worst. Until penicillin attained widespread use, in the 1940s, treatment usually involved repeated injections of mercury or arsenic.

Mr. Stern shows how the Plan, ostensibly about public health, became a law-enforcement cudgel, one aimed at “loose women,” disproportionate numbers of whom were working-class or of color. Hardly any men were arrested under the Plan.

Most of these women are lost to history. Mr. Stern learned of Nina McCall only because she fought back. Detained at 18, Ms. McCall (who was white) was told she had gonorrhea. She protested that she was a virgin. Her arrest and days spent in a “detention hospital” stigmatized her, and she struggled to find work and a husband.

Nina McCall sued the government, with limited success. Most of what Mr. Stern knows of her story comes from court transcripts. That makes it difficult to build a whole book around her, and Mr. Stern’s essentially bigpicture account of the Plan sometimes gets a bit dry.

However, he does a fine job linking the American Plan to pure greed (states paid cities to administer it) and even to the U.S. government’s infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Mr. Stern also documents contemporaneous criticism — whose sources ranged from women’s rights advocates to such unlikely bedfellows as journalist H.L. Mencken and the Industrial Workers of the World — and some detainees’ own rebellions, including ingenious escapes.

And Mr. Stern notes that all American Plan laws remain on the books — tools close at hand for some future oppressor.