Word: brandt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Magic Bullet, his first book, Professor Brandt provides a comprehensive history of venereal disease. He traces the beginnings of venereal disease hysteria to the progressive era, when the future of the Victorian-style family was being threatened by the influences of industrialization, urbanization, and a huge influx of "licentious" immigrants...
...most intriguing aspect of No Magic Bullet's is Brandt's analysis of the military's campaign against V.D. On the eve of World War I, the stereotypical macho image of men in uniform rang true; in 1917 the War Department was so alarmed by training camp reports of drunkenness and carousing with wanton women that it promised soldiers "invisible armor" to protect them against the "heated temptations" of immorality. A Commission on Training Camp Activities was created with the objective of not only cleaning up the extra-curricular activities of the soldiers but using the American military...
...campaign appealed to patriotism and manhood when hygiene warnings did not succeed. Brandt finds a contemporary speech spouting. "Any man with enough nerve and backbone to wear the uniform of the United States soldier is perfectly able to live a normal healthy life without intercourse throughout the war and afterwards." Accounts of almost 30 percent of military men with venereal disease convinced the Navy to remove all warship doorknobs as a preventive measure one war-time year...
...BRANDT'S MOST interesting discovery was that reform in the military was not sufficient insurance against licentious conduct. Although women were seen as "more of a menace than the German soldier," and prostitution was said to come hand in hand with V.D., the soldiers could not be stopped by mere moralizing. Documents from the U.S. Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board suggest that at least 15,000 prostitutes were arrested and quarantined in guarded camps surrounded by barbed wire, all in the name of making men "fit to fight...
...detention of prostitutes during World War I demonstrates the underlying theme of hostility against women in the crusade against venereal disease. Brandt points out that from the start women were either viewed as weak helpless victims or the very source of temptation and disease. Negative propaganda against women entered almost every pamphlet' and poster condemning the disease. Perhaps the most blatant is a World War II poster portraying venereal disease as a sexy woman arm in arm with Nazi soldiers thus declaring her the worst...