Hygiene and modern medicine are concepts that progressives surveil and mandate. This mission has the historic potential to violate the Fourth Amendment protections [mandatory AIDS tests: Love v. Superior Court California (1991-2)]. Basic bodily autonomy is permanently impacted by progressive mandates like typhus vaccination programs of the WWII period. The coordination of national policy toward disease, bureaucratized by the CDC, started with vaccine programs.

There appear to be two different types of mission during the first decade of the CDC following WWII. One is the eradication of malaria. The other is the study and control of venereal disease. These two different missions manifested different mandates (authority) and methods of surveillance.

Dr. Vonderlehr [pictured above] and the VD docs researched a morally shaded phenomenon. This afforded different ethics. These ethics were compounded by metropolitan preconceptions about expertise, race and class that prevailed during the period in medicine and beyond. This is a progressive version of T. Frank's liberalism, "...they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning."

The CDC public health agency was founded by Dr. Mountin with $10m from the Federal Government in 1946. It's first directors came from the WWII era Malaria Control in War Areas unit based in Atlanta. The first two directors were from the MCWA: Dr. Hollis (44-6) and Dr. Williams (42-3). The fourth director, Dr. Andrews (52-3), was also part of the American malaria eradication movement. Today the agency celebrates a method of "disease surveillance...the cornerstone of CDC's mission" started with a universal mandate to end malaria.

This federal mandate has historical ramifications in places like Atlanta and Panama. Progressive triumphs benefit subaltern populations but ultimately serve empire in conquered places. Federal surveillance and mandate of southern populations for tropical disease further compromise the individual liberty of second class citizens. This has universal economic positives which include the public health of Southern labor. This is an economic compromise that is structurally unequal.

Dr. Vonderlehr directed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study from (1932-'43). He was the third director of the CDC from ('47-'51). The fifth director, Dr. Bauer ('53-'6), studied venereal disease starting in Chicago before leading the CDC. The VD docs study disease transmitted through vectors with more obvious moral dimensions that amplify race, gender and professional separations than the tropical disease docs. This economic morality is different in the urban center, national frontier and imperial periphery.

In capitalism funding is a concern in addition to universal surveillance and imperial mandate. Progressives that mandate hygiene without first funding it are creating a new contradiction within the structural inequality inherited from settler colonialism, industrial capitalism and global empire. Without universal coverage--free of moral or economic considerations--the surveillance and mandate of medicine in America is embedded with structural inequality typical of America's developing capitalist economy.

One alternative is the Gilded Age/Progressive Era tradition of Chicago based syphilis Doctor Ben Reitman (aka. King of the Hoboes). Reitman was an early contemporary of Dr. Bauer (and late free lover of Emma Goldman) who was a radical participatory clinician. Dr. Reitman's work was translated through the University of Chicago as urban sociology by Dr. Nels Anderson.

The anarchist ethics of Dr. Reitman's approach are understandably lost by the post-WWII CDC regime based in Atlanta. The historical roots of the agency--universal mandate and surveillance of unequal class relations (staffed by Wall Street, authorized by Washington and credentialed by the university)--predict this amnesia.