This article argues that reformers’ racial nativism, belief in the power of eugenics to improve society, and desire to restrict US citizenship to certain racial groups contributed to reproductive and eugenic curriculum used by early public-school sex education programs. It utilizes newspaper accounts and archival records from the headquarters of the American Social Hygiene Association, Committee of Fourteen, United Neighborhood Houses, and Child Study Association in New York City to answer several crucial questions: What dangers did each organization attribute to adolescent sexuality and reproduction? How did each envision its role in societal improvement and in the sex education movement? What did these reform organizations consider as the ideal relationship between the home, school, and society? While the existing scholarship explains how each of these organizations fit into the larger historical context of progressive reform, examining them separately downplays the degree to which ideas about race, reproduction, immigration, and US citizenship circulated among reformers, especially as leaders of these groups worked across organizational lines to promote sex education.

In January 1918, Congress began public hearings on the American war effort in World War I due to widespread reports of gross inefficiency and incompetence within the War Department. In particular, unhealthy conditions and the outbreak of disease at hastily constructed training camps led to the deaths of thousands of newly drafted soldiers and prompted a public outcry. The criticism was led by Democratic Senator George Chamberlain, and the adversarial response of Secretary of War Newton Baker and President Wilson established a cleavage between the legislative and the executive branches during the last year of World War I that carried over into the postwar period. Furthermore, it highlights tensions within the progressive movement, as the use of expanded federal authority led some progressive Democrats to emphasize loyalty to the Wilson administration, while others continued to emphasize reform and governmental transparency.