“It has long been recognized that ‘It pays to Advertise.’ We are convinced that it also pays to protest,” he wrote in the Star. “Guided by our favorite axiom, ‘to permit an error to go unchallenged is to participate in it,’ THE STAR attacks any and all false statements about leprosy appearing in the press or magazines whenever they are brought to our attention, and with uncanny inevitability we hear about such statements. Sometimes our letters of protest are ignored, sometimes we get a polite brush-off, but in most cases the offending parties, after learning the truth, are willing to correct the error which they unwittingly expressed.”
His early target was the word leper. Stein wanted to banish the word from the English language, and it was a frequent subject of editorials in the Star. He also took on the Catholic Church, which had an ancient custom of holding a “leper Mass” in which an afflicted person took part in his own funeral before being banished from his community.
To our minds, this ceremony is about the cruelest of practices that could ever be perpetrated in the name of religion. We can only contrast such a treatment with that of the Divine Savior, who healed the ten sufferers and left no instructions that they ever be treated in any other manner. We feel that the Church, both ancient and modern, has done more to keep the stigma of leprosy alive in the public mind than any other force. We admit, however, that they have done lots of good. Foreign missionaries are doing wonderful work among the half-civilized and starving victims of leprosy in other lands, ministering in a noble and heroic way to their needs, both spiritual and physical. But on the other hand, they are still influenced by the superstitions of the Dark Ages as related to our social status. We are still outcasts in their minds, and they still continue to hold the Leper Mass over us, though in a somewhat modified form. For the unfortunate victim, it is tragic indeed that leprosy, of the many loathsome diseases, should get mention in the Bible as a special sign of the Almighty’s disfavor.
The blunt criticism offended some, but Stein was able to deftly navigate the system in which he was stuck and remain friendly with those he attacked in print. The chaplain at Carville, who had taken offense to the editorial about the “leper Mass,” still supported Stein’s very basic point that equating leprosy with sin was incorrect and discriminatory. Writing to publications that circulated among priests, such as the American Ecclesiastical Review, Father Abbot Paul warned his fellow pastors about unfairly linking the disease with sin.
Some preachers are apt to stress in detail the supposed horrors of the disease. In an effort to castigate prevailing vices, they may be tempted to draw a parallel between sin and sickness, in connection with leprosy. But, unlike some other diseases, leprosy is not caused by indecent and unclean living. In our hospital we have saints as well as sinners and they were saints before they contracted the disease.
One of Stein’s most useful characteristics was his tenacious letter writing. He fired off hundreds—maybe thousands—of responses to newspaper and magazine editors and television and radio station managers who had printed or broadcast dusty, damaging myths about leprosy, or used the loaded word leper as a pejorative. He also often wrote to corporations using the word in advertising campaigns. He published in the Star an open letter to the makers of Absorbine Junior, which had launched a national advertising campaign that had as its slogan: “Don’t be a locker-room leper!” Speaking for the citizens of Carville, he wrote, “We do not spread obnoxious infections such as those afflicted with athlete’s foot may do.”
Stein’s letters were often stern but inviting. Learn about the disease, he’d write, so you can help us educate the public. Come visit Carville, he’d write, so you can erase the stigma. He had science on his side. Studies were showing that leprosy was not nearly as contagious as previously thought. Research showed that 95 percent of the US population was naturally immune to the disease. No doctor or nurse or nun or visitor to Carville had ever caught leprosy from a patient.
But even through the late 1940s, Stein consistently heard stories of Hansen’s victims being stigmatized and ostracized. A few weeks before Joey’s arrival, a Christian minister and head of a church on the West Coast showed up at the hospital with an incredible story of being run out of town.
Rev. C. E. Olmstead had a biopsy on a suspicious lesion on his right ankle. His dermatologist told him he had Hansen’s disease. Worse, the doctor said he had informed the Los Angeles Board of Public Health, which gave Olmstead less than twenty-four hours to be out of his home and on his way to Carville for treatment. If he was found at home after noon the following day, he was told, he would be arrested and would be confined to L.A. County Hospital for six to eight months without treatment until they could get him approved for travel to Carville. Floored, the reverend sought urgent care for his elderly and blind mother, packed as quickly as possible, and left with his wife for Carville. On arrival, he learned that Los Angeles public health officials had quarantined his house and posted placards outside saying it was a dangerous place to enter. The minister was irate, but there was little he could do.
Stein gave him two columns in the Star to vent his frustrations.
“In a day of understanding, when they know Hansen’s disease is far less infectious than tuberculosis which is never quarantined, I cannot see any but political considerations for the treatment I was given,” Olmstead wrote. “Had I been given a week to settle my personal and church affairs, and get mother taken care of, I could now live here with a free mind. The community in which I lived, as well as the church in which I served as a minister could have been adequately informed so there would have been no paralysis or fear or suspicion. As it is, both are scared. One person tells another, the story gets more terrible with every telling. I am ruined in the community, except for those who know me well enough to believe that in spite of everything they can see, the quick departure and quarantine, there is still another side to the story, that one who has always been honorable could not be such a public menace as I have been labeled.”
Stein’s diligence earned him friends in the mainstream press, and they often took him up on his invitation to visit the hospital. Humanizing leprosy victims would go a long way toward edging greater America toward empathy. Then maybe, just maybe, patients like Reverend Olmstead—even Stanley Stein himself—wouldn’t have to live out their lives confined behind rolls of barbed wire like prisoners. The only way Stein would see freedom was if he won the war against ignorance.
And that’s where Joey came in. A humble heroine of one war already. A spy who saved hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives. A beautiful, nonthreatening young woman who loved watching ballet, writing poetry, and listening to classical music. And she just happened to have Hansen’s disease. Stein refused to call it leprosy. The power of her story was no secret to those who understood the plight of the patients at Carville.
“I believe if anything significant is ever to be done for Lepers, it will have to be during the lifetime of Joey,” wrote a man named George Doody, from Minnesota, who spent four years in a tuberculosis hospital and started a fund drive after reading Joey’s story. “For if there was ever a story that would capture the imagination of the people of world, it would be the life of the Leper Heroine at Carville.”
Stein saw her as their token, their spokesperson, a symbol to the world at large that Hansen’s disease victims were humans, good and decent people. More than three hundred patients who, like Stein, had been captured and misunderstood and locked away behind fences and out of the conscience of Americans were now hopeful that Joey could bridge the divide, could make people understand.
They’d already adopted an anthem that represented this attitude: the Cole Porter song “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Stanley Stein had first heard of Joey three years before, in 1945, when Father Luis Torralba wrote of her plight to Marie Dachauer and Dachauer sent the letter to Father Abbot Paul at Carville. The chaplain turned the letter over to Stein, and he published it in the Star. Stein and other patients and citizens waged wa
r on Joey’s behalf, writing to officials who would eventually grant her permission to enter the United States, to come to Carville.
Now here she was, a woman rejected by her own community, commanding the spotlight. The patients were happy to see her. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were following her story in the newspapers. And Stanley Stein was plotting his next move to bring a better understanding of leprosy to the world.
As soon as she answered all her letters and returned all her phone calls, Stein inducted Joey into the Star staff. She was a fine typist, and she wrote excellent, lucid English. She seemed delighted to belong to the team that was putting out the newsletter she’d been reading at Novaliches for several years. While the circulation was fewer than ten thousand copies a month, Stein was mailing them to people all over the world, to leper colonies, hospitals, libraries.
What pleased him most was that Joey arrived carrying a typewriter.
42
FALLEN
BURLINGAME, Cal., December 4, 1949 (AP)-Major General George F. Moore, commander of Corregidor Fortress in the long Japanese siege, was found dead near a lonely mountain road last night, a bullet through his head and his service pistol in his hand.
The 62-year-old Texan and his wife, Lucille, had lived here since his retirement last August, after 40 years in the Army. Police Patrolman George Kurrell, who found the body, said a note was found near the general’s hand. The note was addressed to General Moore’s wife.
43
CONTROVERSY
A thousand years of misunderstanding is a formidable opponent, but Stanley Stein and his staff at the Star were up for the challenge. The man who had by then lost most of his eyesight to leprosy needed a massive Madison Avenue–style campaign to root out the misconceptions about leprosy. He staged his attack on several fronts. First, now that he had Joey and the Hornbostels and the celebrity they brought into Carville, he could leverage that goodwill for better media attention. And sure enough, on July 19, 1948, shortly after Joey’s arrival, a story in Time magazine introduced Americans to Carville.
When the Americans landed on Leyte, Joey gallantly took advantage of the Japs’ dread of lepers to carry out her spying. Under the Japs’ noses, she mapped the fortifications along the waterfront and the location of aircraft batteries along Dewey Boulevard. If she was stopped, she just pointed to her blotched face. Using her drawings, US planes from Mindoro blasted the batteries to smithereens. Her disease made her almost indifferent to her personal safety. When the guerrillas discovered a freshly sown minefield in the area where the 37th Division was scheduled to attack Manila, they picked Joey to get the information through. They taped the map to her back, told her to make her last confession, and sent her off. For 56 miles Joey trudged through Jap encampments and check points. Several times she was stopped, dismissed after a perfunctory search. She delivered the map safely.
The piece generated more than four thousand letters to the editor of Time. Joey’s celebrity, under the circumstances, was unprecedented. An editorial in the Fort Worth Star Telegram praised Attorney General Tom Clark for waving the immigration laws to let Joey into the Carville hospital and proved itself to be among progressive newspapers by concluding: “Mrs. Guerrero will be doing the nation—and mankind—another service if her cause helps to dispel some popular misconceptions about leprosy that have hampered proper treatment of the disease and have caused those afflicted with it to be subjected to unnecessary suffering.” Following that, a crew from a national CBS radio and television broadcast called We, the People arrived and recorded interviews with Joey, the Hornbostels, Stanley Stein, and Dr. Frederick Andrew Johansen, also known as Dr. Jo, the longtime medical director at the leprosarium.
“With two feminine celebrities as patients—Gertrude and Joey—Carville never had so many chances to appear on radio and television,” Stein wrote later. “In fact, at one point Dr. Jo refused to appear on any more shows because Washington might think that the [Medical Officer in Charge] had turned into a mic hog and lens louse. He insisted on clearing all requests with [Public Health Services] headquarters.”
Beyond using celebrity to bring positive attention to Carville, Stein would push back against every slight, every inaccuracy. He received a note in his office at the Star in August 1948. One of his many far-flung correspondents had clipped and sent a letter to the editor that had run a few days before in the Washington Evening Star, the capital’s paper of record, from a writer with the pseudonym M.M.C.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE STAR: Can’t Americans express their feelings of gratitude, appreciation, and humanity without having recourse to a foolish and dangerous stunt?
Undoubtedly, the gallant little Philippine leper lady, Joey Guerrero, is deserving of our best considerations, but did we show our appreciation of her either wisely or well when we brought her over 10,000 miles by public transportation from the Philippines to the leprosarium at Carville, La.?
Hers is an “advanced case” of leprosy, according to the health officer of San Francisco and, according to him, will require many years of treatment. Such an extended and strenuous journey must have been a great strain on the patient. And what about the dozens of people who were exposed to her “advanced case” of leprosy en route? The germs of the disease are numerous in the mucus secretions. Joey’s sneeze, Joey’s cough would spread a shower around.
Why in the name of all that is reasonable should we bring a foreign person into this country possibly to afflict some of our own citizens with a dread disease of ancient heritage, the cure of which is very long at best, and doubtful and unreliable at worst? When will we outgrow such maudlin sentimentality?
There are many fine leprosariums in the Philippines and throughout the Pacific area equipped with the most modern facilities, and using the same advanced techniques and treatments as are used at Carville.
Would it not have been more useful to greater numbers of other sufferers if, in Joey’s name, and dedicated to her for her assistance to our cause during the War, we had raised funds, and contributed it to these institutions, thus enabling them to be of more service to more patients? I think we could have raised many thousands of dollars which, together with the thousands expended for Joey’s transportation to this country would have added very substantially to the alleviation of leprosy in the Philippines.
Attorney General Clark deserves the censure of the Nation for aiding and abetting this bizarre performance. Congress would do well to inquire into his reasons for giving special permission for this outrageous undertaking—outrageous for both patient and public.
Stein called the writer of the first letter out in his own spare and brutal way, this time using Joey’s story to enhance his argument.
In this enlightened day and age the ignorance and inaccuracy contained in this letter are shocking to all of us, scientists and patients, who know through research and experience, the exact facts re leprosy. Apropos Mrs. Josefina Guerrero, M.M.C.’s principal concern was that the dozens of people exposed to “Joey” en route from the Philippines might contract the disease from her sneeze or cough.
The mode of transmission of leprosy is unknown, but according to a recent statement by Dr. H. Windsor Wade, President of the International Leprosy Association and Medical Director of the Leonard Wood Memorial (The American Leprosy Foundation): “Actual observations do not support the once prevalent idea that the nasal mucous membrane is the usual portal of entry,” (of the leprosy bacilli).
M.M.C. criticizes severely Attorney General Clark, for giving special permission to Joey to enter this country, even going so far as to suggest a Congressional investigation.
For M.M.C.’s correct information Attorney General Clark noted in his announcement that the United States Public Health Service, which cooperated with the Department of Justice in investigating Joey’s case had advised him that, “the chances of infection from the disease were negligible.”
The U.S. P.H.S. does not base its statement on antiquated ideas or superstitions, but on years
of scientific research and practical experience here at Carville.
It may interest, it will certainly instruct, M.M.C. to know that in the 54 years this hospital has cared for patients suffering from leprosy not one of the medical and nursing personnel, or employees, has ever contracted the disease. Visitors are admitted freely from 7 AM to 9 PM and are not required to take any special precautions. They mingle freely with the patients. In fact authorities are convinced that the average adult, even in endemic areas, has a natural immunity to leprosy. Further no scientist in more than 145 recorded cases has been able to infect himself or other human volunteers by attempted inoculation of the germ.
M.M.C.’s cruel and untrue letter has caused a great deal of pain to gallant little Joey Guerrero. Surely after all she did during the war for our boys, the risk of life she endured so many times, she does not deserve such misunderstanding and ingratitude as is shown in M.M.C.’s somewhat silly letter. If M.M.C. has any of the real courage of his or her convictions, such, for instance as our little Joey has shown, why not sign his or her name to the letter instead of hiding behind initials.
A man who met Joey at Tala wrote a rebuttal as well, taking the writer to task for his inaccuracies, pointing out that the transmission of Hansen’s disease from one person to another is remotely communicable, “so remote that none of the American soldiers she fed during the occupation, that she led past minefields into the Battle of Manila, and those she carried, wounded, off the battlefield has been known to have contracted the disease,” wrote Robert L. Zeigler. “As far as Joey is concerned, she deserves every consideration of a grateful nation for her contribution to saving the lives of our sons, and the opportunity to regain her health, nebulous as the prospects may seem.”
The Leper Spy Page 17