Underlying some of this populist support was a broader dislike of Roosevelt and the New Deal. The NFIP had long battled public suspicions that it was too closely tied to Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. “It was too bad that you did not explode that news before the panhandling got under way for the President[‘]s Birthday,” one man told Kenny, “however the American people are at long last awakened to that fact that the National Foundation was nothing but a private affair.”25 A number of newspapers pointed out that O’Connor was “Mr. Roosevelt’s former law partner,” and began to demand accountability of “the prodigious amount of money that has been collected during the past ten years.”26 The NFIP’s close relationship with the AMA further horrified people who already disliked Fishbein. One man assured Kenny that “America needs you more than it needs the Morris Fishbein Tripe and his ilk.” “For years,” he argued, “well informed” Americans have known “that the American Medical Association, dominated by these Alien Shysters, was but a racket, it took a visitor to these shores to get that into the public press.”27 Similarly the Chicago Associate Nurses, a small group that had organized pro-Kenny rallies, argued that attacks on Kenny were efforts “to break-down Nurse morale” and were instigated by “the Communist-Atheistic combine.”28 Fishbein knew a little about this organization and, he told O’Connor privately, “I am, of course, not troubling to notice this.”29
Such responses were clearly on the fringe of American politics. They illuminate some of the darker sides of American medical populism, especially its longstanding antisemitic strain, which, ironically, was shared by the AMA and America’s leading medical schools. Although Fishbein never raised the issue publicly, antisemitism had tainted his own career making it impossible for him to ever be elected president of the AMA.
POPULAR CULTURE
The Hearst papers, which had long been critical of the medical establishment, had from the outset seen Kenny as an opportunity to stir public outrage. During March and April 1944 a 5-part series in the American Weekly, the Hearst Sunday magazine, told Kenny’s story with dramatic sentimentality. Drawing partly on the model of fighter pilot Robert Scott’s best-selling autobiography God Is My Co-Pilot and partly on Kenny’s 1943 autobiography, “God Is My Doctor” made her a courageous, religiously inspired nurse able to heal children and convert doctors and other nurses. The series compared “54 straight little bodies” without “a twisted or deformed limb” to children treated without the Kenny method “who walk with halting, tortured steps” or with “medieval contraptions of leather and steel.” Reporters had long implied that Kenny achieved her results through a combination of God and medical science, calling her successes “Kenny miracles.” Here Kenny was similarly chosen by the “Great Power” as an “instrument to ease pain and straighten little bodies and make them walk again.”30
The newspaper’s images, even more striking than the colorful prose, intermingled recent photographs of Kenny and her Institute with sketches characterizing the tragic and hopeful moments of her life. A photograph of the Institute, captioned “Monument of the Australian Back Country Nurse’s Faith in a Revolutionary Cure That Has Given Back to Hundreds of Little Victims the Ability to Walk,” was overshadowed by a sketch of angry-looking men in old fashioned collars, pointing at a young nurse looking up to the heavens with a baby in her arms, captioned “Medical Die-Hards, Refusing to Believe a Woman Could Succeed Where They Had Failed, Called Her a Quack, Charlatan—and Worse.” The story moved from Australia to the United States with Kenny looking proudly at a map on the wall of her office “studded with hundreds of red and blue pins marking the spots where there are Kenny technicians and where the treatments are being given.” A photograph of Kenny leaning over an infant, watched by the mother and a male doctor, was captioned: “Their Skepticism Wiped Out by Her Near-Miraculous Results, Doctors and Nurses Crowd Around While Sister Kenny Shows How to Re-educate Paralysis Damaged Muscles.”31
Kenny was also featured in the Wonder Women of History comic book series, although with a less evangelical edge. Kenny is first shown teaching her brother Bill muscle exercises; she then chooses the “dangerous vocation” of bush nursing and faces a paralyzed child in the bush. From this point until she comes to America in the final 2 panels she is depicted wearing a nurse’s white uniform. Amazed that her patients have recovered, her Australian mentor tells her “Sister Kenny, you’ve knocked our theories for a loop!” After World War I she finds that “few of the doctors were as willing as Dr. McConnell [sic] to fight the disease her way.” A doctor standing over a child patient whose legs are in uncomfortable-looking braces asks Kenny: “Nurse, are you trying to tell me what to do?” and another doctor comments “it seems to work but it is against scientific theory!” She is then shown shaking hands with official-looking doctors in dark suits (perhaps health officials) who promise to “publicly endorse your method.” She gradually wins over “nearly the whole medical profession—except a few conservatives” whose 1935 commission “denounce[s]” her methods. While Kenny leaves for London hoping “maybe English doctors will listen,” Australian patients begin to demand that their doctors use “the Kenny treatment in all Australian hospitals.” Later Kenny, now in a large black hat, thanks young American physicians who offer “to devote a floor of the Minneapolis General Hospital to a demonstration of your method.”
All these images fit nicely into Kenny’s portrayal of herself although the comic book was careful not to enter too closely into the polio wars. Thus, in the final panel, the Kenny treatment is “endorsed by the American Medical Association” and “inspired by the splendid achievements of this wonder woman, the American people show increasing determination—through the March of Dimes—to finish the magnificent work to which she has dedicated her life.” Kenny in a large hat and black jacket reaches out to a young boy while a nurse and doctor in white uniforms look on in the background.32 Here America physicians are her solid allies compared to skeptical Australian physicians who are forced by public pressure to adopt her work. The American people are offered a similar opportunity to donate to the March of Dimes as a way of supporting Kenny.
THE MARCH OF DIMES RESPONDS
The public furor over Kenny’s threat to leave forced NFIP officials to defend their organization on many fronts: the issue of O’Connor’s personal rudeness toward Kenny, whether he and the NFIP had shown poor judgment in not recognizing true innovation, and whether the NFIP practiced miserly and misguided funding priorities. If 50 percent of what was raised from March of Dimes campaigns was not returned to the local community but sent back to NFIP headquarters in New York City to be spent on education and research, donors wanted to know how it was divided up. Who were the recipients and how was their merit determined? And to what extent did NFIP’s funding priorities simply replicate those of elite medical interests?
Throughout 1944 the NFIP public relations staff was busy producing press releases, radio scripts, and responsive letters that tried to defend the NFIP and counter Kenny’s claims without being aggressive or nasty. Trying to defend American physicians without appearing craven to organized medicine was especially difficult, given the publications of critical articles and editorials on Kenny’s work in JAMA.
The effort to balance defense and offense appears in this extract of a scripted radio “interview” between O’Connor and an announcer, produced in a Louisville, Kentucky, radio station in February 1944:
ANNOUNCER: Tell us this, Mr. O’Connor. Just how does the National Foundation make these grants for scientific research?
O’CONNOR: Each request for financial assistance is carefully studied by the Medical Advisory Committees of the National Foundation, composed of 39 eminent medical authorities. These men consider the possible value of the proper work—the ability of the men who will do it. If they think the project is sound and shows some promise of helpful results, they recommend to our Board of Trustees that the necessary amount of money be granted.
ANNOUNCER: Have the scientists studyin
g the Kenny Method come to any conclusion about it, Mr. O’Connor?
O’CONNOR: Yes, they have. The University of Minnesota studied the Kenny Method under grants from the National Foundation … Treatment of cases by the Kenny Method during the early stages of infantile paralysis seemed to lessen the duration of the disease and increase the chances of recovery without crippling after-effects … There are some cases that can’t be helped, at the present time, by any known method of treatment—the Kenny Method or any other … It’s for these cases particularly that our research program to find out how to prevent the disease and even better methods of treatment must go on.33
In this description of research and clinical progress, the public relations staff was able to turn the story away from Kenny’s threatened departure and toward the positive achievements of the NFIP. The Story of the Kenny Method, a new pamphlet, similarly explained the role the NFIP “played and is playing … in evaluating this technique and in making it available to every infantile paralysis victim.” It enumerated the ways public donations had helped to expand the Kenny method: they had provided over 15 tons of wool, hundreds of washing machines and wringers, and the training of 900 people at the University of Minnesota who had graduated “with the approval and certification of Sister Kenny.” Kenny’s treatment, which the NFIP “wholeheartedly espoused,” represented “an important step forward in our treatment of this disease.”34 The pamphlet painted a distinctive picture: a flexible, responsive philanthropy eager to hear from even those outside the medical establishment and to use their insights to help paralyzed American children.
Kenny’s work and ideas had been taken seriously by the NFIP from the outset, NFIP publicity assured the American public. In fact, she had “never requested financial support from the National Foundation without receiving it.” NFIP publicity introduced a new element in this narrative. “As a matter of fact,” it claimed, “we had been interested in her work before her visit.” In 1938 the NFIP had given a grant to physicians at the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis “to examine her work.”35 The idea that a polio philanthropy and American physicians were already aware of Kenny’s methods before she had even arrived made Kenny less a visitor bringing unique information than a promoter of methods already under study by American polio experts.
However, NFIP publicity made clear, Kenny was not a scientist. Treatment and diagnosis, explained a pro-NFIP editorial in the Hartford Courant, were “two separate and distinct factors.”36 Unlike Kenny, the NFIP could draw on expert advisors who could recognize who was a scientifically trained expert and who was not. Her demand that the Institute in Minneapolis become the only center for teaching the Kenny method was, thus, misguided and “not sound,” and perhaps even a sign of proprietary promotion. A professional philanthropy such as the NFIP had a breadth of knowledge about Americans’ national health needs and therefore “knew that the task of teaching the number of technicians needed to serve the whole country was too great for any one school.” Indeed, the aim of the NFIP was to ensure “that the Kenny method eventually becomes part of the regular curriculum of every medical and physical therapy school, thereby removing the need for a Kenny Institute anywhere.”37 Both Kenny and the public needed to understand that skepticism and constant reevaluation were not personal attacks but part of the proper scientific process. The NFIP therefore regretted the “unprecedented publicity” given to Kenny’s work, which had led to “exaggeration” and “in the minds of many a miraculous cure.”38
NFIP officials could see that Kenny’s accusations could easily move into an attack on money wrongly or corruptly spent, dollars and dimes that had been donated by ordinary Americans, including children. In a break from the secrecy it had practiced to date, the foundation began to argue that its mechanism for giving grants was both democratic and meritocratic. In a radio speech in March 1944 O’Connor explained “how we make financial grants for scientific research.” No single individual made the decision, for not even the president of the NFIP or his medical director “could have at their command the necessary knowledge or sufficient wisdom to pass upon the broad research program called for by this program.” Instead, a medical advisory committee was made up of “eminent men—all volunteers” including “orthopedic surgeons, pediatricians, neurologists, physiologists, internists, laboratory workers and specialists in medical education.” These advisors considered the many applications carefully, weighing “the merits of the problem, the capabilities of the investigator, [and] the integrity of the institution.”39
In this story of scientific progress, skeptical clinicians, just like laboratory scientists, worked cautiously to test therapeutic techniques. Their scientific integrity enabled them to remain deaf to sentimental calls for “quick cures” to stem the cries of children in pain and meant they could not ignore the possibility that many patients might have recovered spontaneously. Thus, various “qualified institutions” funded by the NFIP, including centers in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, and New York, continued the process of evaluation.40 A place like the Kenny Institute, which practiced a single therapy provided by a single group of clinicians, was not, NFIP officials stated, an appropriate location for such clinical research, for “best results” to improve polio care had to take place “in well organized medical centers where advantage can be taken of the manifold specialties that are concerned.”41 And, The Story of the Kenny Method argued, therapy was only a stop-gap measure for, to achieve the “final and complete conquest of infantile paralysis,” the NFIP “will not be content with any method of treatment … no matter how good.” True victory over polio had to come from the laboratory. The NFIP, the pamphlet declared, “will continue to carry on the most ambitious research program ever marshaled against any disease, until it is able to cure and prevent the disease and thus eliminate entirely the necessity of any after-treatment.”42
Despite these defensive maneuvers, the relationship between the NFIP and some of its prominent donors began to falter. Hollywood celebrities, for example, recognized the dangers of tangling with a popular figure like Kenny whose accusations of discrimination and medical elitism were gaining public credence. Singer and comedian Eddie Cantor, who had long been associated with Roosevelt’s polio charities and had just produced a movie for RKO, notified O’Connor “strictly off the record” that he had been asked by RKO “to help Sister Kenny.” Uncertain of the right reply, Cantor assured him he would not do anything “that would interfere with our own drive for the Foundation.”43 Former silent picture star Mary Pickford, now a Hollywood producer, also wrote to O’Connor, warning that as national chair of the NFIP’s Women’s Division, she was “deeply concerned” that Kenny’s attacks on the NFIP were tainting the reputation of the charity she and her Hollywood friends publicly represented and “doing the Foundation irreparable injury.” On a recent hospital tour Pickford had noticed the Kenny method in use everywhere, yet other members of the Women’s Division had told her that the NFIP refused to fund the Kenny Institute. Further, she reminded O’Connor of a cocktail party they had both attended at the Waldorf where “Dr. Fishbein was very outspoken in his criticism of [Kenny].”44 Peter Cusack phoned Pickford and sent her “material containing accurate information regarding the Kenny Method and its relationship to the National Foundation,” which, he assured her, would provide “an entirely different picture from the one presented in certain [Hearst] newspapers.” Pickford’s letter also spurred the NFIP’s New York office to realize that sending copies of The Story of the Kenny Method to every NFIP chapter chairman was not enough. Men might function as a chapter’s titular head but women were often its backbone and brains, and also frequently from well-connected families. The NFIP began to make sure they received NFIP publicity directly.45
The network of Kenny supporters included some influential people. In the third week of February, for example, W. C. Higginbotham, a Dallas railroad company director whose son Harry had been treated at the Institute, wrote to all the NFI
P trustees. The recent March of Dimes campaign, Higginbotham pointed out, had “capitalized in many ways on the hard won fame and prestige of Sister Kenny.” He argued the NFIP “should give Sister Kenny anything she asks” and that “the public who sustain it [the NFIP] should certainly be advised of the reasons she is being denied assistance.”46 The trustees who replied to Higginbotham were equally prominent. Automobile magnate Henry Ford and William Clayton, Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of commerce, told Higginbotham they had “complete confidence in Mr. O’Connor.”47 Railroad owner Frederick Adams noted that he was a trustee of many organizations and knew “none that has been administered by its heads more unselfishly or with more scrupulous regard for its great responsibilities to the public.” “In the Foundation,” Adams reminded Higginbotham, executive to executive, “we are used to projects and budgets, and I fear Sister Kenny is not.”48
Higginbotham had little influence outside Texas, but James Ford Bell was a different story. Bell was the founder of General Mills, chairman of its board, and the only NFIP trustee living in Minneapolis.49 Kenny’s local supporters and especially the women, Bell warned O’Connor in March 1944, saw him as “a target of dissatisfaction.” They had “generously contributed to the work of the Institute” and were now “unreasonable and unreasoning,” but “you cannot argue with sentimental women.” While Bell admitted that Kenny “has a difficult personality” and “her demands and attitude are extremely hard to cope with,” he did not believe that the NFIP had been “over generous” to her or properly recognized that “the treatments she offers have done good.” In any case, the polio wars were leading to “a rising tide of unfavorable sentiment developing toward the Foundation, which is most unfortunate and undesirable.”50
Polio Wars Page 39