Tuskegee: The Forty-Year Experiment

Dr. Walter Edmondson draws blood from one of the participants in the Tuskegee study. Photo: U.S. National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Thursday series on conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.

What was alleged: For years, the story sounded too dark to believe — that the United States government had run an experiment on Black men in Alabama, watching a disease eat them alive for forty years while pretending to treat them. And a harder version you still hear: that the government gave those men syphilis on purpose.

What was true: The first part. All of it, and it is worse in the plain telling than in the embellished one. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began a study in Macon County, Alabama, enrolling 600 Black men — 399 who had syphilis and 201 who did not. The men, most of them poor sharecroppers, were told they were being treated for "bad blood." They were given free exams, hot meals, and burial insurance. What they were not given was the truth: they were never told they had syphilis, never asked for informed consent, and never treated. The real treatment they received was aspirin and iron tonic. The point of the study was to watch what untreated syphilis does to a man, start to finish.

One person connected those men to the study for nearly its whole life: Eunice Rivers, a Black nurse from Macon County who recruited them, drove them to their exams, kept track of them year after year, and became the face the men trusted. She was a local woman doing what the doctors told her was helping her community. The study ran on that trust. It could not have lasted forty years without it.

The second part — that the government infected them — is not true, and it matters to say so. The men already had the disease. What the government did was lie to them about it and then stand guard over the lie for forty years. That needs no exaggeration. It is enough.

The part that removes every excuse: By the mid-1940s, penicillin had become the standard cure for syphilis. The study did not end. The men were not treated. Worse, the researchers worked to make sure nobody else treated them either. When some of the men were drafted during World War II, the Public Health Service intervened with the draft board so the Army wouldn't treat them — a cure anywhere was a threat to the experiment. Year after year, through administration after administration, people in authority reviewed this study and let it continue. As late as 1969, officials sat down at the CDC, looked the study over, and decided to keep it running. It was not hidden in a locked drawer, either. Results were published in medical journals, out in the open, more than a dozen times. The system saw it, in print, and shrugged.

By the time it ended, 28 of the men had died of syphilis itself and 100 more of related complications. At least 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.

How it came out: Not from inside the conscience of the agencies running it. A Public Health Service employee named Peter Buxtun raised objections internally for years, starting in 1966, and got nowhere. So he took the story to a reporter. On July 25, 1972, Associated Press reporter Jean Heller published the exposé, and the outrage was immediate. The study was shut down that November. A federal panel concluded it had been "ethically unjustified" — about the mildest words available for it. A class-action suit brought by attorney Fred Gray ended in a settlement of about $10 million and lifetime medical benefits for the survivors and their families. Congress passed the National Research Act in 1974, which is why research on human beings now requires informed consent and review boards. Those safeguards exist because Tuskegee proved what happens without them.

And the apology? It took another twenty-five years. On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton stood in the White House, with the last survivors in the room, and said the words plainly: "The United States government did something that was wrong — deeply, profoundly, morally wrong."

Here's what I keep coming back to with Tuskegee. Watergate took two reporters and a couple of years. This one sat in published journals for four decades while the men it was killing buried each other with the insurance they'd been given instead of medicine. If somebody in 1950 had said, "The government is letting those men die on purpose, for science," he'd have been called a conspiracy theorist, and the polite world would have moved on.

Somebody did say it, eventually. His name was Peter Buxtun, and he had to leave the building and find a newspaper before anyone would listen.

That's the pattern in this whole series, and Tuskegee may be its hardest proof: the theory isn't crazy just because the truth is.

Next Thursday: MKUltra — the mind-control program the CIA tried to burn out of existence.