In California, to Huenkens’s chagrin, Kenny was fully in control of the Citizens Polio Research League. It had a number of vocal women members including its president Mrs. Sonja Betts, and Rosalind Russell agreed to be its “patroness.”117 The league began planning a Sister Kenny Hospital to be affiliated with the Southern chapter of the California KF. It also circulated petitions asking Congress to create a federal research foundation to study polio, implying that only government-directed research into polio could be unbiased.118 The implications of this populist ideology were not lost on NFIP officials. In a private phone conversation, Van Riper told Huenkens that he was sure this new league was a kind of “Kenny Foundation No. 2,” reflecting Kenny’s resentment at the shifting power relations at the Institute and in the KF.119
The San Fernando Sun became the mouthpiece of the new California movement. It began to publish provocative letters claiming that Kenny had been prevented from presenting the results of her polio research at the Congressional hearings “because of pressure from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, members of Congress and/or the medical profession.” Herbert Avedon, the paper’s editor, sent open letters to local politicians, the NFIP’s national office, and Kenny herself arguing that “if any group, official, unofficial, charitable, social, medical or any other sort, actively works to prevent such information from being made known or even investigated, we believe the people ought to know.”120 Congressman Harry Sheppard, a Democrat representing northern Los Angeles, assured Avedon and his readers that the hearing had been courteous; the NFIP’s executive director Joseph Savage wrote a careful and defensive reply; and Kenny sent an 8-page letter defending Congress and attacking the NFIP.121 Kenny’s argument that her work could not achieve its best results when it was modified was reiterated in a letter the Sun published from a patient who had been recently discharged from the Los Angeles County General Hospital and could now “only walk a little.” Had he been given “the best treatment available,” he wondered. He had been reading about the Citizens Polio Research League and also heard a discussion on the radio. “If what they say is true, then I may be crippled for the rest of my life merely because I was not treated by the Kenny method.”122
In December 1948 Sonja Betts and other league representatives went to Jersey City to attend a 1-day conference. Seeking to reach over the head of the NFIP and the AMA by focusing on national organizations with clout over the nation’s health and welfare institutions as well as scientific research, Kenny and her allies had invited representatives of the Federal Security Agency and the Public Health Service along with Bernard Baruch and John D. Rockefeller. The league received “courteous replies” from Baruch and Rockefeller, regretting that they could not attend.123 Representatives from the 2 federal agencies did attend along with a number of physicians and physical therapists.
Kenny loved this new forum. She urged the league to demand that findings of the research that had shown that polio was a disturbance in peripheral structures be published and made available to all American voters. This research, she promised, would “result in the rewriting of the medical books of today.”124 Foreign delegates, she told the Jersey City audience, had been “disappointed” at the way she was treated at the recent international conference. She quoted the sympathetic remarks of a Spanish participant that she had been “thwarted and frustrated while at the conference … unable to answer questions, [and] given no recognition.” Thousands of American children and adults with polio, she warned, would “become needlessly deformed and crippled” because they were not being treated with her methods in its entirety. She showed Public Health Service and Federal Security Agency patients as evidence of the danger of such modified treatment. Every 6 months she had tried to present scientific reports on the Kenny concept to the NFIP in “a friendly conference with representatives of all bodies interested in this particular disease,” but she had been consistently rejected. Along with a heated discussion of Roland Berg’s recent book Polio and Its Problems Kenny quoted Alfred Deacon, who had said his patients treated with her methods were “ten times better.” She also announced triumphantly that a new affiliation with the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, and the Institute was “now in the process of culmination.”125
The Jersey City meeting was described by the New York Times and in a private note by an NFIP official who estimated that there were only 22 people in attendance, including Philip Stimson, Marvin Stevens, another 5 doctors, young women who were probably physical therapists, several press representatives, and a photographer. In the meeting’s hostile environment, Stimson’s mild protests that the NFIP had indeed authorized money to pay for Kenny and her technicians had been ignored.126
Neither Chester LaRoche nor Mal Stevens was comfortable with the Citizens Polio Research League or the heights to which it inspired Kenny. Such publicity, LaRoche warned Kenny, “hurts our efforts” as it seemed to emphasize “that the medical profession is not with us.” “Let’s not get people feeling that we are fighting,” he urged her, but have everyone know “that the Kenny treatment is accepted all over the country.”127 Unrepentant, Kenny claimed she had been trying “to get known to the public that the doctors are with us” and the NFIP is “against us.” As for any impact on the KF’s campaign, “your drive shall be a failure until the truth is known.”128
Stevens was even more disturbed than La Roche. He felt Kenny’s speech, which had been widely reported, “spreads salt on old wounds and opens new ones.” He told LaRoche that he doubted whether the Mayo Clinic “would condone this statement of affiliation.” While it was true that the Mayo Clinic taught Kenny technicians as part of their regular physical therapy course, that was “a far cry from being a medical tie-up” with the Institute. Stevens agreed that Kenny’s clinical observations “have been and are of great value,” but noted that a number of people, including doctors, had warned him that she “should not be the spokesman on medical matters or on the foundation’s plans for expansion unless she is so instructed to be by the medical board or the foundation.”129
Learning of these remarks Kenny disagreed vehemently, replying that the New York Times version of her speech in Jersey City had given “great satisfaction to Doctor Huenkens who especially asked me had I seen it.” In a confusing effort to combat Stevens’ metaphor she added that “if the truth rubs salt on old wounds and opens new ones, the more salty the old wound becomes and the more numerous the new ones become, the better for humanity.” As for relations with the Mayo Clinic, she had received a letter from Melvin Henderson “congratulating me on the fact that a great burden had been removed from my shoulders and exhorting me to take life much easier.” She did not, she protested, aspire to be a spokesman on medical matters other than on those that were “still unknown to the medical world to a great extent, such as my own contribution.” In any case, she noted to LaRoche, Stevens was not proving himself a particularly good proponent of her work. He had ignored a suggestion by the head of New Jersey’s Crippled Children’s Association that “all doctors in the state should be presented with my findings.” He had also excused himself from a meeting with a physician from the Children’s Bureau who had come to visit Jersey City, and had ignored an offer by the New York Academy of Medicine to show her technical film.130
As Van Riper shrewdly recognized, even in her own Institute Kenny was being pushed to the side. Never easy to work with, she had lost much of her patience and tact without Mary Kenny’s watchful eye. She pretended to a heroic humility, telling audiences in London “I am of no consequence … It is only my great gift—my work—which matters,” but she was annoyed when her contribution to American medicine was called the Kenny method instead of “an entirely new concept of the disease.”131 Her suspicions of conspiracy also deepened after she returned from one of her European trips in 1947 and discovered that her technical film “had been cast aside” by Institute officials, a pamphlet she had prepared for parents during the 1946 epidemic had not been distributed, and he
r gray book Physical Medicine was not mentioned in any of the KF reference lists.132 Worse, she learned in early 1948 that a script writer from Hollywood had been employed without her knowledge to write a script about her methods. All these were efforts, she warned, “to eliminate my name.”133
Kenny believed correctly that these policies were the work of William O’Neil, the KF’s new director of information services. O’Neil saw his role as reestablishing relations with local physicians and the medical school and ending “wild promotion schemes.” He contacted Fishbein and got him to agree to publish a leading article by John Pohl on the early diagnosis of polio in JAMA.134 He defended the Hollywood script project by arguing that “the public is anxious to know just what training is in back of a Kenny technician.” Kenny relied on technical films but she wanted only her cinematic vision, which combined clinical evidence and theoretical explanation. The public, she told O’Neil, was “not anxious to know anything about the training [but was] … only interested in the end results of treatment.”135 Worried that O’Neil was making alliances with her own medical supporters she warned Pohl that O’Neil was boasting “about being able to twist you around his little finger.”136 She sent a series of annoyed letters to the KF board and finally called Kline from New York and said she was “not going to come back to Minneapolis as long as that man is there.” O’Neil was fired in April 1948.137
Kenny continued to seek additional celebrity testimonials. She met President Truman’s daughter Margaret who had expressed interest in the Citizen’s League and asked her to become the League’s “national patroness” (a request Truman gracefully ignored).138 Kenny enthusiastically allied herself with William Fox, owner of the Fox theater chain, and his daughters Mona and Belle, who had become Kenny supporters.139 She graciously accepted effusive praise from English suffragist Christabel Pankhurst who described her as “our modern Florence Nightingale as well as great medical pioneer.” Pankhurst wanted to know Kenny’s view of “the actual cause of Poliomyelitis” and described her own theory of “a poisonous element in pools and ponds.”140 Kenny did not respond.
In November 1948 the celebrity photographer Yousuf Karsh produced a new portrait of Kenny titled “Polio-Fighting Australian Nurse.” It was published in the family magazine Coronet just in time for the 1948 KF campaign.141 It was a full length black-and-white picture of Kenny, arms outstretched, wearing no jewelry or hat. She is dressed in black with a white cape around her shoulders. The light shines on her hands, her lined face, and her strong shoulders. It is a portrait of a woman who has struggled, but—bereft of laboratory instruments or patients—it is not a picture of a scientific researcher or even a clinician. In contrast, Karsh’s later depiction of Jonas Salk placed him with a child patient and a syringe.142
Kenny’s distinctive personality was widely used to explain why working with her was so difficult. Newsweek noted her “stubborn will and sharp tongue” and her “bitterly undiplomatic … dealings with American physicians” who had “resisted taking peremptory orders from a nurse with no formal medical training.” “She has,” the magazine continued, “ ‘resigned,’ flounced out of hospital wards and executives offices—and later reconsidered her resignation.”143 Albert Deutsch agreed that Kenny was “a strong-willed stubborn woman, given to exaggerating the importance of her work, just as her enemies tend to minimize it.”144 Van Riper said privately that at any meeting “called by her or her representatives … she will make her claims just as she always has in the past, and if intelligent questions are asked or if she is crossed in any way, you are subjected to humiliation and ridicule.”145 He repeated this argument to explain to donors why the NFIP refused to fund additional efforts to evaluate Kenny’s work. “It is unlikely that any evaluation would satisfy Miss Kenny or her staunch supporters,” he explained to one woman; “I think we must realize that nothing less than a complete and total surrender to Miss Kenny will ever satisfy her or anyone who supports her.”146 Around this time Kenny learned that O’Connor was describing her as an “Amazon,” a term which both she and O’Connor found denigrating, implying inappropriate independence and defiance of gender norms.147
WHEN FOUNDATIONS FIGHT
Kenny’s claim to scientific discovery did not sway the organizers of the First International Poliomyelitis Conference. But it certainly enhanced her celebrity status. A few months after the international conference, Gallup pollsters asked the American public: “What woman, living today in our part of the world that you have heard or read about do you admire the most?” The top 3 women listed were first Eleanor Roosevelt, then Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and third Sister Kenny.148
The NFIP’s public image was buffeted by the polio wars and the Congressional hearings. Although O’Connor made a point of sending major donors social science research to confirm his argument that voluntary health agencies were vital to American democracy, doubts lingered. In private memos, John Rockefeller III’s advisors argued that he should not support the NFIP as it was “well-heeled” and did not “disclose its financial situation to the public.” The NFIP, they warned him, also “overdramatizes” its case and raises massive funds for a disease compared to “diseases of far greater importance in terms of their incidence and toll.”149 Virologist Thomas Rivers, a member of the NFIP’s scientific advisory committee, told Rockefeller quietly that he agreed that “there are other fields of medicine that need your help more urgently.”150
In Consumer Reports science journalist Harold Aaron agreed that the NFIP—“one of the world’s richest and most powerful voluntary health organizations”—was misdirecting public resources to a single disease that was far less significant in the public’s health than the NFIP’s scare campaigns claimed. In 1948, for example, the NFIP had spent $17,0000,000, while Congress had given the Children’s Bureau only $7,500,000 for the care of all types of disabled children. Yet according to statistics gathered by the Crippled Children bureaus at least as many children in 1948 were disabled by cerebral palsy as by polio (about 175,000 for each), and many had other neglected diseases with major disabling effects including diabetes (35,000), epilepsy (200,000), and rheumatic heart disease (500,000).151 Progress in the treatment of polio was also harmed by fights between the KF and the NFIP, Aaron suggested, especially fights over “the controversial figure of Sister Elizabeth Kenny.” The NFIP and the KF competed with each other “in the promotion of research methods of treatment, and provision of medical facilities.” The battle was based on “fundamental differences of opinion as to proper treatment of a disease which stubbornly resists the development of vaccines for its prevention and drugs for its control.” Parents of patients would “continue to suffer from the doubts raised in their minds by claims and counterclaims.” In Aaron’s assessment the NFIP had not given Kenny “an adequate opportunity to make further contributions” and had also denied her supporters any part of the “abundant harvest of the annual March of Dimes.” Fights over “matters of prestige, antagonisms and jealousies, personal as well as professional,” had, he believed, led the NFIP to withdraw its national support of Kenny’s program and had widened the breach between the 2 groups.152
Aaron also pointed to conflicts between the NFIP’s national office and its state and local chapters, almost 3,000 across the country. Too often chapters were run by lay citizens who might be excellent fundraisers but who often lacked other experience in health activities. “In the opinion of medical consultants,” Aaron reported, the national officers of the NFIP did not “hold sufficient authority over the various state and local chapters to assure conformity to high medical standards.”153 The NFIP’s national office had tried in vain to set up rules about paying only for treatment carried out at a facility recognized by a state’s crippled children’s commission. Although the Federal Security Agency directed these commissions and set federal guidelines, state politics always played a part in influencing those institutions deemed “appropriate.” With 2,800 local chapters, O’Connor admitted to one potential donor, the NFIP �
��cannot expect perfection” in following national policy.154
Indeed, the KF was able to highlight and exploit idiosyncrasies of individual NFIP chapters. KF officers claimed that the NFIP did not pay for Kenny treatment, but that was only partly true. NFIP chapters usually paid for all polio treatment—whether “Kenny” or not—as long as it was approved by a physician. There were many anecdotes about bigoted local NFIP officials who pressured families to go to a doctor who did not use Kenny’s methods: in Buffalo, a family was told by a local official that he would pay their unpaid balance only if they agreed to have a particular doctor examine their son; another family quoted an official who told the parents “how much good the March of Dimes was doing and that the Sister Kenny group was no good at all.”155 Making the distinction between care provided by Kenny technicians and general hospital care the KF argued that while the NFIP paid for hospitalization, it did not fund Kenny treatment of any patient. No patients with polio at the Jersey City clinic, according to the KF, had ever had their bill paid by the NFIP. As a result, the KF claimed, the new foundation was forced to divert funds earmarked for training Kenny technicians and research to absorb these hospitalization costs.156 Other incidents demonstrated that chapters were interpreting NFIP propaganda for their own purposes. A woman from Manhattan Beach, California, spent 5 months as a patient in the Minneapolis Institute, but California NFIP officials refused to pay any part of the Institute’s bill, telling her family “they didn’t have any money to spend on ‘experimental treatment.’ ”157
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