Dr. George Walker, a colonel in the Army Medical Corps, published a report in 1922 about venereal disease and sexuality during World War I. In it, Walker raised the specter of dangerous “French” influences on the more than four million men who had served their country during the war. Among these was the spread of what he called “sex abnormalities,” what we today would call oral sex. Walker feared that these new sexual activities gained popularity among the less-experienced or less-adventurous American doughboys, causing “a subtle state of demoralization that is far more dangerous to society as it is at present constructed … than mere immorality could ever be.”2 It seemed many American soldiers during World War I received plenty of sex education. But what were they learning and from whom? World War I marked a high point in the history of sex education, as the military took an active role in teaching it for the increased health, efficiency, and morality of its soldiers.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans were feeling the concomitant pressures of two major social and ideological impulses: imperialism abroad and Progressivism at home. The two often contradicted one another in their beliefs and realities. Many Progressives feared that a large American empire might distract policy makers from problems at home or add new problems to an already overtaxed society.3 In 1900, after defeating the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, the United States entered into a long occupation of the Philippine Islands, a new American protectorate. The imperialistic militarism exhibited by such actions aroused the anger of anti-imperialists at home. Muckraking exposés highlighted the contradictions inherent in American imperialism. Some factions of Progressives and anti-imperialists alike considered the Philippine incursion a violation of American ideals. They complained that American “civilization,” through the influence of the American military presence, degraded rather than uplifted the native population.

The reaction stateside to action abroad signaled a substantial change in American attitudes toward military life, prostitution, and the role of the government in moral protection.