Polio Wars

by Rogers, Naomi

  On April 12 1945 Franklin Roosevelt died at his Little White House in Warm Springs. His death shocked the nation and refigured the politics of polio. Polio lost its presidential patron and briefly medical politics seemed petty and irrelevant. When Kenny sent the Detroit Free Press a long response to Fishbein’s comments she found the controversy was no longer considered news. Pooler replied that he and his editor were grateful to have her reply but “the death of President Roosevelt has altered things.” Perhaps, he suggested weakly, there could now be a “reconciliation between the National Foundation and the Elizabeth Kenny Institute.”204

  After Roosevelt’s death the attention of Congress shifted. Kenny’s attack on the AMA had initially spurred Congressman Arnold Sabath, an Illinois Democrat who chaired the House Rules Committee, to say that he would invite her to appear before his committee, for he had “long been aware that some members of the medical profession are extremely high-handed.”205 But when Kenny returned to Washington in early May Sabath explained that the Rules Committee did not want to break its precedent of allowing only House members to testify before it and, in any case, Congress had no jurisdiction in a “private medical fight.”206 Flexibly, Congressman O’Toole now requested a national institute to be built in Washington devoted to the study, treatment, and research of polio and similar diseases as a postwar memorial for Roosevelt, but this project also died.207 Disappointed at not being allowed to speak to Congress, Kenny told the sympathetic Times-Herald that “I want America to help me spread my methods for the good of children everywhere.”208 She did participate in the press coverage of Roosevelt’s funeral ceremonies and was thanked by the owner of ABC’s Blue Network for her efforts “at this tragic time” when “the public was groping, I believe, not only for a government leadership, but for spiritual guidance [from those] … who had been in close contact with the President.”209

  Denied the platform of a Congressional hearing, Kenny took her message to the Illinois legislature in Springfield. An enthusiastic group of nurses from local hospitals met Kenny at the train and arranged for her to lay a wreath on Lincoln’s tomb, following “the custom of all distinguished visitors here.” Springfield’s mayor, at the nurses’ urging, provided a motorcycle police escort and several state cars to take the delegation from the train to the tomb and then to the state house.210

  To the state legislators Kenny spoke forcibly about the “organized boycott” by NFIP officials and Fishbein who had both denied her “the facilities for research into the further presentation I have to make of which they are entirely ignorant.” She mocked Fishbein’s statement in the Detroit Free Press that he was trying “to save the American people from exploitation” by noting that her technical film had not exploited anyone. She also tried to step away from the personality politics that had led O’Connor to refuse to meet with her or answer her calls and telegrams. It was not true, she told legislators, that “I was annoyed because I was denied funds by the foundation [for] … I, personally, have never made any request for funds”; it was the Institute’s medical committee and the board of directors who had requested funds and were refused. Nor, she argued, had she “emerged from the Australian bushland with some unknown and untried idea.” Instead, she stressed her familiarity with Australian medical journals and her clinical experience in Australian hospitals. Her care of “spastic” patients had occasioned a certain amount of publicity, she admitted, but she proudly claimed that experience for “I was not experimenting with these children” and “the reports of my work with this very sad disease are, to a degree, most encouraging.”211

  Horrified to see that the AMA report and the NFIP’s grant rejection were reported in Australian newspapers, Kenny organized a letter to be written to Sir Owen Dixon, Australia’s ambassador to the United States.212 Pohl and 2 other Minneapolis physicians assured Dixon that despite the publicity around the AMA report, most American doctors “are in accord with her views [which are] … now quite generally accepted throughout America and applied wherever possible.” Publicized excerpts from the AMA report in Australian newspapers may have created “an impression … that casts doubt upon the personal integrity of Miss Kenny as well as her success in America.” In fact the AMA committee had spent only 2 and half days with Kenny and made little effort to examine patients or records. As physicians who had watched her work carefully Pohl and his colleagues were certain that “she has made a great contribution to the knowledge of infantile paralysis” and helped to open “new pathways of thought … in dealing with other neuromuscular disorders.” Medical resistance remained, but that was not surprising for “old ideas firmly rooted in tradition” did not “fall easily.”213

  “SOCK POLIO WITH DOLLARS:” THE VICIOUS 1945 KF CAMPAIGN

  As the new Kenny Foundation (KF) began to organize its first national campaign, previously silent Americans found an opportunity to express their dislike of changes in American society they linked to Roosevelt and the New Deal. Social welfare programs established in the 1930s were increasingly seen as Democratic-inspired, anti-American socialism rather than necessary for a nation fighting the Depression and then the Axis powers. In postwar America a new kind of populism emerged, combining strains of anticommunism, antifederalism, antisemitism, and antimedical orthodoxy. The KF also benefited from a group of right-wing Catholics, including Hollywood studio executives, actors, and directors, who had felt constrained from expressing pro-Republican sentiments during the 1930s and now saw Kenny’s cause as a way of articulating this antagonism.

  Bing Crosby was a superstar in 1940s America. A crooner with a golden voice and a jaunty smile, he sang with Frank Sinatra, acted with Ingrid Bergman, was a straight man to comic Bob Hope, and owned golf courses, racing tracks, and radio stations. He was also a prominent Irish Catholic family man with a squeaky clean public persona.214 Thus, when the KF announced in July 1945 that Crosby would be its first national chair for its “Sock Polio” campaign, it was a stunning coup.215 The NFIP had pioneered the modern celebrity fundraiser, using Hollywood singers and actors in dramatic and sentimental short films and radio programs as part of its March of Dimes events. With chapters around the country headed by prominent professionals and business leaders, and with Women’s Divisions headed, frequently, by their wives, the NFIP was a popular Hollywood charity.216 As recently as January 1945, Crosby along with Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra had been featured on “America Salutes the President’s Birthday,” an NFIP-sponsored show that was part of its March of Dimes campaign and was broadcast on the 4 national radio networks.217 Yet now Crosby was bringing his celebrity power to a fledging philanthropy whose figurehead spoke frequently against the NFIP. Crosby’s decision to act as the KF campaign chairman put a powerful imprint of Hollywood approval on Kenny’s work and its fundraising arm. It also reflected Kenny’s growing prominence in Hollywood circles as well as a shared connection among Catholics in a society in which anti-Irish-Catholic jokes were as prevalent as antisemitic and racist ones.218 The ambiguity of Kenny’s title “Sister” also helped, as NFIP officials admitted, for “a lot of good, warm-hearted Catholics all over the country associate her with their church.”219 During the 1945 campaign an editorial cartoon in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner showed Crosby dressed as a priest with his hand outstretched next to an older-looking Kenny in a long white veil that made her look like a nun.220

  The 1945 KF campaign was nationwide with no holds barred. In its first national fundraising effort, the KF turned to proven tactics from the NFIP and the National Tuberculosis Association, using bright orange Kenny Cans to collect money, miniature boxing gloves to “Sock Polio,” and fundraising stamps featuring Kenny and a happy child.221 Relying on the winning combination of fear and hope, the campaign centered on children at risk for “deformities” and the amazing results Kenny’s methods had achieved in Minnesota and elsewhere. Instead of a pathetic crippled child there was a healed, able-bodied child; in one poster the slogan “They Shall Walk” was next to the image of a young gi
rl standing, her hands in the air, crutches at her feet.222 And now there was a satisfying villain: the undemocratic, elitist, and disgruntled medical establishment, embodied in such professional groups as the NFIP and the AMA whose leaders were denying communities access to Kenny care and denying Kenny herself proper respect for her innovative work. The campaign tried to turn public outrage already visible from the bitter polio wars into public good will and generosity.

  The KF campaign opened with an article in the Hearst family magazine Cosmopolitan in October 1945. In a sign of the breakdown of censorship, staff writer Harry Brundidge had not consulted the NFIP before writing his article.223 Illustrated with a somber full-page photograph of Kenny in a scalloped black dress and leaf-shaped pin, Brundidge began with a quotation from a friend saying that if his child had polio “I’d rush her to Sister Kenny. Ethics, American Medical Association, sanction or no.” Brundidge described Kenny facing veiled hints and a hostile reception from physicians, reactions that “recall[ed] … the martyrdom of other scientific pathfinders and discoverers.” In a harsh description of her first meeting in New York O’Connor told her “nobody is interested in your theories. You had better return to Australia.” The instigation of a boycott against her by O’Connor and Fishbein was inexplicable, according to Kenny, “unless it is that I have no M.D. behind my name.” Mocking the idea that scientific discoveries require modern, well-equipped buildings, Brundidge quoted Kenny saying “I wonder if Dr. Fishbein knows the building that yielded the evidence that revolutionized the concept of this disease was a small bark-roofed hut in the Australian bush.”224 Bing Crosby then sent out a fundraising letter “Are You Going My Way?” (referring to his recent Oscar-award-winning movie) to remind potential donors of the need for money to train Kenny technicians. The KF, Crosby noted, “receives no financial assistance from any other National Infantile Paralysis Foundation.”225

  Here were the elements of the 1945 campaign: a selfish philanthropy (the NFIP) supported by public donations unwilling to extend its money and reputation behind important new work, an antagonistic AMA hiding behind false claims of scientific standards, prejudiced physicians suspicious of an assertive and confident woman who was a nurse and not a physician, and potentially important new knowledge about polio left unexplored. Members of the public responded just the way the KF hoped. “The stand that the Foundation, and you as its Director, has taken amazed and disgusted me,” a Bloomfield, New Jersey, man told O’Connor. Unless the NFIP “recognizes and aids Sister Kenny it will receive no more contributions from me or my friends who have children.”226

  Efforts by the NFIP’s national office to tell a different story were mostly unsuccessful. In an internal memo about the Cosmopolitan article marked “Not For Publication,” the director of NFIP’s publicity staff reflected that advising parents to rush their sick child to the Institute was “completely impractical,” for it assumed that the Kenny method was available only in Minneapolis. There was no medical boycott; her Institute’s grant application had been “referred to the National Research Council for advice” and been rejected as the Institute “had neither staff nor equipment to carry on such research.” As for the confusion around her methods, Kenny “has advanced certain theories … not in conformity with known facts of normal body function and the pathological picture found in poliomyelitis.”227 A public statement signed by Gudakunst argued further that there had never been an “orthodox” method. Long “before Miss Kenny came to this country,” he argued, physical therapy was widely used as a method of treatment in many diseases. While physicians now used what is good in the Kenny method, they did not accept Kenny’s theories about “the cause and the relative importance of symptoms of the disease,” for Kenny had no specific knowledge of physiology, histology, or pathology and thus “her speculations” although “interesting … are not in conformity with the facts.”228 Thus, physicians and other thoughtful professionals used therapies based on science and not speculation; the Institute’s request for research funds was rejected for fair, scientific reasons; and Kenny’s theories had to be separated from her therapies. These became the NFIP’s talking points, but they were not successful at derailing the KF’s campaign.

  FIGURE 5.2 “Sock Polio” fundraising container for the Kenny Foundation’s first national campaign, 1945, featuring Bing Crosby, the campaign’s spokesman; author’s possession.

  The “Sock Polio” campaign attracted former NFIP volunteers who brought with them civic influence. In Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, the campaign was supported by a local mayor.229 In Montana the editor of a local paper who had been “a [NFIP] friend of many years” agreed to direct the KF drive.230 Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis, agreed to act as one of 3 co-chairs of the Minnesota KF mayors committee, and urged other mayors to declare December 8 Kenny Day.231 Even more influential was Chester LaRoche, a wealthy advertising executive married to Rosalind Russell’s sister Clara. Head of the board of directors of Young and Rubicam, an influential advertising agency in New York, LaRoche was an enthusiastic KF organizer. He identified men who had “allowed their name to be used [by the NFIP] because of President Roosevelt’s personal interest” but were now turning to the Kenny campaign. Some, such as aviation entrepreneur Harold Talbott, were quiet allies, unable to join the KF’s New York committee formally as the result of their business connections with physicians. But, LaRoche assured Marvin Kline, “we have some of the best people on our committee for … no drive of this sort in New York seems very important unless it is promoted by people who are well known socially.”232

  At first the NFIP urged its chapter officials to turn a blind eye. In Arizona, for example, after the Kenny people announced that there was only one nurse in the state capable of treating patients with the Kenny method, the NFIP’s director of organization told the Arizona chairman to keep quiet and not “start any newspaper arguments.”233 But in most cases following this advice proved impossible. In fact, some NFIP officers actively tried to contain the 1945 campaign. “I am in hopes that I can stop the drive entirely in Oakland” as “it has been stopped in several other counties,” one California organizer announced.234 Local NFIP organizers said frequently that that the Kenny method was already used to treat every acute patient with polio in their community. Nonetheless, they complained, they had to field many questions from “certain quarters where we have some very good friends.”235 One sticky point was explaining why the Institute’s $840,000 grant proposal had been rejected. Another was the “duplication” of polio fundraising campaigns.236 Dallas was now “pretty well covered with colorful [pro-Kenny] placards” put up by the Texas KF state chairman, a wealthy oil man who had sent his daughter to the Institute 2 years before. Working in such a pro-Kenny environment was not easy, a local NFIP official reflected. “They have a perfect right to put it on. Kenny has done a wonderful work. We have no feud on with her drive.” But, she commented to the New York headquarters, even if the KF “get[s] a little money … we aren’t worried—we’re a little powerful ourselves—now ain’t we?”237

  NFIP officials tried to convince the public that the KF was allied with profit-seeking promoters instead of civic-minded volunteers but this was a difficult argument to make for, despite its image as a voluntary organization, the NFIP had a paid organizational staff and its own publicity department. Nevertheless, angry NFIP organizers such as Arthur Reynolds of Minnesota consistently warned the New York office about the KF’s considerable promotional expenses and urged the head office to publicize them.238 According to the Portland Better Business Bureau Inc., the KF’s new public relations firm ran a percentage drive campaign whereby the firm was paid a set amount (estimated in 1945 to be $48,000) and additional commissions, based on the funds raised. The Bureau also noted that members of Bing Crosby’s family were involved in the campaign, although it did not state whether they were paid.239