Polio Wars

by Rogers, Naomi

  Not surprisingly, the KF Board rejected Kenny’s effort to reimagine polio philanthropic politics. Her friend Henry Haverstock responded in March 1950 with complimentary bromides about her “tremendous constitution” and “the colossal task which you have performed, going hither and yon all over the world,” all hints that it was time to retire. He did not agree that the KF needed a special medical council, and he warned of the dangers of fundraising campaigns not directed by the KF’s national headquarters, lest “everybody who wants to run some racket on the strength of your reputation—race tracks, boxing benefits, all sorts of promotions—will feel free to go ahead and the work will disintegrate.”161 This was a warning that would, unfortunately, prove all too prescient.

  HOPEFUL SIGNS

  Amid these setbacks were signs that the American public saw Kenny as a treasured figure. In February 1950 Congress passed a bill authorizing Kenny visa-free passage across the borders of the United States. She became the first noncitizen to be honored in this way since General Lafayette.162 “Now,” announced Victor Cohn, science writer for the Minneapolis Tribune, “this 63-year-old gray-haired crusader … may come and go as she pleases.”163 The visa was approved a few weeks after a Gallup Poll asking “What woman living today in any part of the world, that you have heard or read about, do you admire the most?” had ranked Kenny second, after former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had led polls like this for most of the previous decade.164 Another poll of over 200 women journalists conducted by Pageant Magazine rated Kenny as one of the nation’s most influential women and praised “her courage against odds, her humanitarianism, and [her efforts at] … dramatizing the problem of polio and helping to solve it.”165 A special ceremony to highlight the Pageant awards was held at the temporary United Nations headquarters and featured Kenny, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Emily Post, Dorothy Thompson, and others. In her “My Day” column the former First Lady noted that Kenny had “captured the imagination of a great many people because of her humanitarian work and her strong convictions,” a careful distancing of Roosevelt’s own unspoken views from those of the American public.166

  The most promising sign during this period was the opening of a West Coast Kenny center in El Monte, California. Mrs. Ruth Kerr, a successful businesswoman who ran the Kerr Glass Company, offered Kenny the 15-acre facility in March 1950.167 Run by the Pacific Coast Rescue Society, which financed institutions for disabled children in Oregon and California, the Ruth Home for Wayward Girls had been used since 1930 to treat and rehabilitate girls with “venereal problems,” but that work was ending due to the advent of antibiotics. Kerr’s offer was spurred, she explained to Kenny, by the institution’s directors and staff who had “watched with great interest your very splendid work” and believed “thoroughly in your splendid program.”168

  The Ruth Home was formally opened as the Sister Kenny Polio Hospital in August 1950, after Kenny carefully organized her allies around the state in order to avoid another Centralia disaster. She met with the president of the Los Angeles County Medical Society, the state’s public health director, and the director of the state’s Bureau of Crippled Children, and showed them “evidence concerning the value of the work.” The agencies gave the new Kenny center formal approval, thus ensuring good relations with local physicians and with local NFIP chapters. Kenny also convinced “several highly qualified doctors,” including orthopedist Harvey Billig, to serve on the center’s new medical board, and filled the board of directors with allies such as Rosalind Russell and executives of local corporations.169

  At the opening ceremony Kenny spoke briefly about research from “a dozen different medical institutions around the world” that had confirmed that polio was “systemic” and thus proved “the concept for which I have been working to obtain recognition during the past 40 years.” The Los Angeles Times accompanied this story with a typical picture of Kenny flanked by Russell, a nurse, and a child patient in a hospital bed. Although all her written reports in this period mentioned her delight at this new opportunity, the photo suggested signs of strain. Despite her familiar large black hat, corsage, and circle pin, Kenny was not at ease: she looked toward but not into the camera, her neck held stiffly, her mouth tight, a contrast to a relaxed and smiling Russell in a smart suit and hat.170 An indication that some of her California friends recognized her growing physical infirmity came when she was presented with the keys to her own cottage on the El Monte site a few months later. “You’ve traveled constantly for the last 30 years and lived out of suitcases,” the hospital’s board chairman declared. “Put your belongings in this cottage and live here as much as you can … your cottage will always be waiting for you.”171 Kenny loved both her special cottage and the El Monte hospital, which, she believed, provided Kenny treatment the way she thought it should be given.172

  Southern California remained a center of Kenny enthusiasm, but such support was not easily transferable. Buoyed by the El Monte success Kenny contacted a senior official at New York State’s department of health, and offered to meet with representatives to discuss her knowledge of polio that would be “most valuable” to “the citizens of the state” and to demonstrate her work at the New York State Rehabilitation Hospital in West Haverstraw. Unlike the officials in California, however, the New York official dismissed her curtly. Kenny protested weakly that her work was “a service to the medical profession” and that the Lancet had stated she was “correct in both pathology and therapy.” But the doors of this hospital remained closed, reflecting a wider sense among New York health officials that they had embraced as much of Kenny’s work as they wanted.173 She also contacted the deans of medical schools at Columbia University and New York University but with little success.174 She continued to call press conferences in New York, and demand that KF organizers ensure that the major newspapers were represented, but one organizer later reflected, reporters would ask “what have you got that’s new?” and it became “harder and harder to get them out for her.”175 In California her Hollywood friends and her status as a celebrity ensured a far more receptive response than in New York.

  COLD WAR CELEBRITY POLITICS

  Conscious of the need to demonstrate civic responsibility, nascent commercial television networks in the late 1940s used their studios to host charitable fundraising drives. These drives, known by 1949 as telethons, became a familiar fixture as celebrities from stage, screen, radio, and television appeared on the small screen to ask for donations. The first 2 major telethons centered on specific diseases, a focus that proved popular for many decades. In May 1949 comedian Milton Berle hosted a 16-hour effort on NBC that raised $100,000 for the Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund, and in November a 14-hour drive raised money for the United Cerebral Palsy fund.176

  The KF turned to its celebrity friends to host similar shows. Only a month after the first cerebral palsy telethon, the Dumont Television Network presented a 5-hour program hosted by comedian Morey Amsterdam to raise money for the KF; a gala KF benefit at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., which drew top names from Washington society, was televised the following year.177 Television enabled the KF to display its respectability and national prominence, especially as former KF campaign chair Bing Crosby had scaled back his involvement to participating in fundraising golf tournaments.

  Kenny was as comfortable with this new medium as she had been with radio and newsreels.178 She appeared on NBC’s Vanity Fair program and as a guest on the Bigelow Show on KTVV, where the “famed mentalist” Joseph Dunninger tried to guess her thoughts while he was encased in a lead vault.179 New York society commentator Ed Sullivan, who had publicly castigated O’Connor for his refusal to fund Kenny a few years earlier, invited her to be a guest on his television show “Toast of the Town.” After her appearance spurred donations, which Sullivan and his producers sent on to Kenny, she thanked him saying “your life must be very satisfactory to comfort the sick and amuse the healthy.”180 “Sister has been on so many radio and Television programs lat
ely,” her secretary noted, that one of her visitors “suggested she should be known as ‘Miss TV 1949.’ ”181

  The highlight of Kenny’s TV work was as the featured guest on “Meet the Press” on October 1 1950. “Meet the Press” had begun as a radio show in 1945 and was broadcast on television since 1947; American journalists and the public considered it the nation’s feistiest news program. It had already won a Peabody award, and had attracted guests such as California governor and future chief justice Earl Warren, President Harry Truman, and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The format of “Meet the Press” was to invite a public figure without a script or prepared statements to face a panel of reporters to discuss contemporary issues. Journalist Martha Rountree, the program’s moderator and co-producer who was memorably summed up by Mrs. William Randolph Hearst as “a diesel engine under a lace handkerchief,” was a Kenny supporter and arranged that the show featuring Kenny would accept donations to the KF.182

  Kenny was interviewed by 4 men: Edward Folliard of the Washington Post, Robert Riggs of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Frank McNaughton of Time Magazine, and Lawrence Spivak, the former editor of American Mercury and the show’s other co-producer.183 Although Rountree introduced Kenny as “one of the most controversial figures in medical history,” the journalists treated her with jovial respect, raising familiar issues to which Kenny could give well-rehearsed answers that showed her more as a celebrity emeritus than a figure of current controversy. Asked why she did not submit “case studies” to physicians or medical journals she first said “That is not my job to do. That is [for] the medical director of my work,” and then described detailed reports by Pohl, Laruelle, and Deacon. She attacked the NFIP’s efforts to undermine her work and thereby “debar the patient from getting the very best,” but she did agree that the KF and the NFIP should amalgamate, adding “I have been trying to get together with the National Foundation for ten years and haven’t succeeded.” Asked what kind of control she would want, Kenny replied “I’d like to be assured of the money that was collected in my name, for my work, that it was used for the purpose for which it was collected.” The tone of the interview turned when Lawrence Spivak said provocatively that “a great many people who say they know you [say] that you are a very difficult person. Are you?” Unfazed, Kenny replied: “I am most difficult in anything that concerns the health and well-being of the children of America and the children of the world. I’d like to wipe every one off the face of the earth that stands in the way of their future health and happiness.” Spivak said: “You must be able to do it when you get that look in your eye.” In her effort to turn the discussion away from Kenny’s character, Rountree commented archly that she was “sure the viewers of the program can ask Mr. Spivak the same question,” and Spivak agreed “I am a very difficult person, too, Sister.”184

  This interview was a highpoint for Kenny, an opportunity to air familiar grievances in a reputable forum. Officials at the NFIP New York headquarters feared it might gain her views greater respectability and debated whether to continue their policy of not engaging in public debates with her. In internal memos the staff agreed that it would be unwise to take her on. “I don’t think in the public’s mind you can ever win an argument with a gray-haired, old lady, no matter what facts we presented,” one official argued, for “the American public sides with the under-dog, which Miss Kenny has been shrewd enough to play upon.”185 The NFIP continued its policy of silence, but Kenny’s fierce voice defending the children of the world reminded the public of her clinical skills and her humanitarian motivations.

  By 1950 the NFIP had moved away from trying to decide which kind of polio therapy worked better than another. Indeed, the polio research it funded now centered on virology. With Harry Weaver as director of research the NFIP had begun organizing small conferences where laboratory researchers and clinicians could exchange ideas away from the bright lights of the media. The introduction of its poster child program, featuring young children in braces or struggling to rise from a wheelchair, highlighted the concrete, disabling effects of polio, rather than the ameliorating promise of physical therapy or orthopedic surgery. NFIP publicity featured male laboratory scientists in white coats to epitomize progress; in comparison, Kenny, a nurse and therapeutic innovator, seemed irrelevant and old-fashioned. Thus, NFIP publicist Roland Berg warned reporters not to compare the Kenny concept of polio with orthodox medical ideas. The medical viewpoint was not a concept “but a fact based on sufficient scientific evidence.” In contrast, “Miss Kenny’s concept of the disease is truly a ‘concept’—a belief without any factual foundation as yet.”186 It was simply a fantasy, unlikely to lead to mastery over polio or to be useful in rethinking the way the polio virus caused paralysis or how it could be halted.

  COLD WAR GLOBAL FEMINISM

  The “Meet the Press” interview presented Kenny to a national audience just as she decided to return to live in Australia. Before leaving she positioned herself as a Cold War celebrity who could call on the support of a network of women, a version of global feminism that was emerging as part of a wider debate around women’s role in global governance.

  Women volunteers, whose power the NFIP had overlooked at its peril, could, Kenny believed, stand against corrupt and inept officials and misguided and unresponsive physicians. Long aware of the power of women as patrons and supporters, Kenny had basked in the gratitude of mothers, the camaraderie of her Kenny technicians, the loyalty and self-sacrifice of her secretaries and assistants, the glamorous attention of her Hollywood friends, and the admiration of members of women’s clubs and other civic groups. Women allies in hospital auxiliaries, welfare agencies, and charities had provided her with an entry into medical and political circles. Margaret Webber, the first sponsor of her teaching in Minneapolis, remained a friend and patron. Ruth Kerr, the philanthropic businesswoman, was the driving force behind the transformation of the El Monte Ruth Home into a Kenny center. Marianna Vetterova had opened doors for Dorothy Curtis in Czechoslovakia, and physician Ethel Calhoun had made sure that the Pontiac infectious disease hospital and its local NFIP chapter stayed committed to Kenny’s methods.

  Kenny’s supporters in women’s clubs and rural women’s groups immersed her more deeply in conservative politics. In 1949 Kenny spoke to 40,000 members of the Farm Women’s Bureau in Lansing, Michigan and was heartened by the decision of the women of the Minnesota branch who appointed 5 members to meet with NFIP state chairmen to warn them to stop their opposition to KF drives. The Minnesota women also endorsed a state program for improving care for the mentally ill, blood tests before marriage, and to “clean up” movies, radio programs, literature, and comic books to help “correct” juvenile delinquency.187 Such measures essentialized women’s roles as wives, mothers, and daughters, and were intended to show women how to put their concern for the health of children and family ahead of parochial political loyalties. Many of these allies, as Kenny reminded the KF board, provided her with large donations that she turned over to the KF.188

  The emerging role of women as global activists reflected a vision of the atomic age, which blurred distinctions between the public world of the battlefield and the private world of family and community. These women claimed a special role as global mediators, using words like friendship, a kind of gender-neutral equivalent to the “brotherhood of man.” This version of global feminism was imbued with fervor but it could also frighten the unwary. In September 1950, for example, when Mrs. Henry Dodge, head of the Westchester county KF branch, paid for a plane to scatter 100,000 leaflets, some residents wondered if communists were distributing “subversive propaganda.”189

  Kenny eagerly embraced the concept of women as healers rather than destroyers. “Future humanitarian advancement must come from women,” she declared during a visit to California in 1949, for “men are too busy talking wars and atomic bombs,” a pithy comment that was reprinted widely.190 At the Pageant Magazine award ceremony, Kenny announced that the women of the world had a gr
eat opportunity to work for peace “even in these difficult times.” Her own efforts to expand her work across the globe, she declared, had established such a link. Thinking of her recent visit with Dorothy Curtis a few months earlier, she declared that when the “hundreds of little Czech children…grow up, they will remember that [an] … American girl went to their county” to teach therapists in “Moravia, Bohemia, [and] Slovakia how to let them walk again.”191 Implicit was the hope that her work could have a missionary effect, leading children on the other side of the Iron Curtain to see her work as another reason to reject their communist rulers.

  Most of Kenny’s new allies were conservative women. In New York she worked with wealthy patrons like Mona and Belle Fox, sisters of William Fox of Twentieth Century Fox Studios, and with the New York KF Women’s Committee whose members included Ellen Tuck Astor, the former wife of John Jacob Astor IV. These women’s social influence led Kenny to hope that her work could be maintained and her legacy assured through this kind of elite, informal female network. With funds from the 1949 Knickerbocker Ball and a series of fundraising luncheons, the Committee raised enough money to open the city’s first outpatient Kenny clinic on Park Avenue in 1950.192 Kenny and the Women’s Committee saw this as a first step toward another major Kenny clinic. But KF officials disagreed. Relations between the Committee and Rex Williams, the salaried executive director of the KF’s Eastern Division, disintegrated when he asked the Committee to pool the money they had collected with the KF’s general New York fund. Deeply incensed at this request and arguing the Committee could be accused by the public of obtaining money “under false pretenses,” Mrs. Edward Douglas Madden, the chair of the Committee who had raised funds from “members of the leading families of New York,” resigned.193 Using the model of Southern California, Kenny tried to heal the rupture by telling this “group of responsible citizens” to form a new board that she would personally charter. She knew that the Minneapolis board would dislike her acting like the sole KF executive, but, she haughtily informed KF officials, “it is my desire that the women of the world shall take a personal interest in this project,” and as this New York group had been initiated “by me” she was confident that, unlike the “efforts of organizing secretaries and medical directors,” it would not fail.194 Kenny was no feminist, but she recognized that women could be more enthusiastic and perhaps also more reliable allies than men such as Rex Williams who were salaried officials. Her reliance on this older model of philanthropy based on wealthy women volunteers seemed to KF officials ill-suited to the modern postwar world of professional fundraising. Henry Haverstock and Marvin Kline thus informed her that the KF Board “had no intention of disposing of the services of Mr. Williams.”195