‘FUN FACT’ ABOUT CHARLES A. FLEMING (A THREAD): He promoted a program to incarcerate a bunch of women for having venereal disease 
In 1918, Fleming was playing a leadership role in WA's program for the "American Plan" (CW: let's be clear, sexual assault/rape), the massive forced testing of women suspected of having STDs and their incarceration to ostensibly protect the public (especially soldiers) from STDs.
There's an excellent new book out by @ScottWStern, the first full-length monograph on the American Plan: The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women.
@ScottWStern I asked Scott Stern about Spokane's role in the American Plan, and he noted that the Women's Industrial Home was established in Medical Lake, with federal funds, to serve as a "reformatory" for women who were rounded up and found to have venereal disease.
@ScottWStern “To the chagrin of federal and state public health officials, Governor Louis Hart successfully opposed an additional appropriation of $121,000 for state venereal disease control work in 1921, and the Women’s Industrial Home was closed by summer of 1922.”
@ScottWStern ^ from Nancy Rockafellar's 1990 dissertation, via Scott Stern
@ScottWStern The story of the American Plan is a story of abuse, trauma, and misogyny at the hands of the state and medical establishment, but also of women's resistance. Scott does a great job of showing how women fought back against these oppressive practices.
@ScottWStern It's also important to understand that while this program went on for decades, it was at its height in wartime. Women with STDs were characterized as a threat to the troops, and therefore to national security/strength.
@ScottWStern As Spokane's Charles Fleming was headed to Seattle to promote a plan to incarcerate women with the "social disease," there was also massive repression going on against radical activists, immigrants, and workers.
@ScottWStern That same year, criticism of World War One was criminalized. Mobs of returning soldiers, whipped up into a reactionary nationalist fervor, attacked socialist meeting halls in Spokane and Seattle.
@ScottWStern The following year saw the Seattle General Strike and the Palmer Raids. (See thread on #SamCrane)
@ScottWStern DOROTHY DAY - A SUBTHREAD ~ Not a Spokane story, but I want to offer some comments on how Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was impacted by the #AmericanPlan and #PalmerRaids, according to a passage in her The Long Loneliness that is not much commented upon:
@ScottWStern Around 1919, Dorothy Day had returned to Chicago from a trip to Europe, after having burned out and quit her intense job at a hospital during the war 1/
@ScottWStern As she reconnected and befriended Communists and anarchists, Day also befriended a troubled young woman struggling with drug addiction and suicidality. The woman needed a place to stay, so Day helped her get connected to the IWW, who gave her a room in their "flop house" 2/
@ScottWStern (This was still before Day converted to Catholicism and co-founded the Catholic Worker...that was later, during the Great Depression. Not that she didn't have Communist friends later, etc.; she visited Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in prison, etc.) 3/
@ScottWStern ANYWAY, one evening Day was staying with her troubled friend, named Mae, at the IWW flop house, when it was raided in the #PalmerRaids. 4/
@ScottWStern "...that night detectives raided the I.W.W. hotel as a disorderly house and arrested all they found there. Many of the men who were old radicals and had gone through persecution on the West Coast made their escape out of fire escapes and over roofs" 5/
@ScottWStern "but Mae and I, not knowing what was happening, were awakened by a pounding on the door and the voice of the police" 6/
@ScottWStern By labeling the IWW flop house a "disorderly house," I presume the police were able to take political action against this IWW center on the pretext of claiming prostitution was going on there 7/
@ScottWStern It's clear from the way Day talks about staying at the IWW house, being arrested, and what followed, that she was traumatized by this experience, is ashamed and blames herself, even though she did nothing wrong 8/
@ScottWStern "It was not a place for women," for example, Day says of the IWW house. "I had opened the door in fear and trembling and had been forced to dress practically in the presence of two detectives, leering." 9/
@ScottWStern Dorothy Day and Mae were led out by police. She describes feeling exposed, labeled, discusses the "shame and humiliation" of being arrested on prostitution charges. 10/
@ScottWStern In spite of this "shame and humiliation," a conflicted Day writes in her memoir about this also as an experience of solidarity with workers. While she writes, "I was a victim of my own imprudence," she speaks in the same breath of being judged for standing on picket lines. 11/
@ScottWStern As she discusses her feeling of shame at her arrest, she also remembers the words of Eugene Debs: "While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." 12/
@ScottWStern Day and Mae were placed in a cell with a large number of young women sex workers, who tried to cheer up Day on her "first arrest" and comforted a lost child who also got thrown into the cell. (The "good guys" in this story are clearly the sex workers, not the police, keep up) /13
@ScottWStern Throughout this process, Day was very frightened about what would happen, and she clearly knew about the #AmericanPlan and was worried she would be detained and subjected to brutal treatment based on allegations of having an STD. 14/
@ScottWStern "The girls prepared me for what would happen. We would be taken to a doctor's office where we would be examined for venereal diseases. Then, if we did not give bond in the court, we would be sent for thirty days to Lawndale Hospital as a period of quarantine..." 15/
@ScottWStern "until we were brought to trial again. So far we had been offered no opportunity to call a lawyer or a friend, and we were certainly judged as guilty before we were tried." 16/
@ScottWStern By sheer chance (!) Day encounters a friend on her way to court who promises to find her a lawyer. 17/
@ScottWStern Still without a lawyer, "Mae and I were sent not to Lawndale as we dreaded, but to the city jail." Notice that Day is *relieved* to be sent to regular jail, not detained under the #AmericanPlan. 18/
@ScottWStern "I could get away, but what of the others? I could get away, paying no penalty, because of my friends, my background, my education, my privilege. I suffered but was not part of it. I put it from me. It was too much for me." 19/
@ScottWStern "I think that for a long time one is stunned by such experiences. They seem to be quickly forgotten, but they leave a scar that is never removed." 20/20
