Polio Wars (44 page)

WORLD WAR II
invigorated the politics of disability in the United States. As able-bodied workers joined the armed services, groups such as the Disabled Persons Association of America exhorted employers to hired disabled workers. The term “crippled”—still used in charity campaigns—was replaced by “handicapped” with its implications of a dynamic, although inferior, relationship with the able-bodied world. Empowering disability-rights terms such as “crip” were far in the future, but disabled adults began to claim the rights of able-bodied adults and to resist infantilizing medical care, especially in rehabilitative institutions. In April 1943 newspaper reports that the wife of wealthy polio survivor Fred Snite, Jr. was pregnant with the couple's second child made concrete the idea that survivors—even men in iron lungs—were sexually potent.
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A survey of 45 factories by the National Association of Manufacturers a few months earlier found that 35 had hired “physically handicapped workers” including those who were blind, deaf, or disabled by polio or by the loss of a limb or an eye. Here performing a patriotic duty was mixed with the display of the disabled in a way to humiliate other workers into being more productive. Thirteen blind aircraft workers were called “pace-setters” by their employers, as “without exception, they have stimulated the sighted people around them to increased production.” Similarly, the manager of a New England machine tool factory praised 15 “deaf mutes” who were “among our most able and respected employe[e]s.”
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The link between polio and the war was made tangible by stories of young men who had “overcome” polio and joined the armed forces, the ultimate sign of manly citizenship and therapeutic success.
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The February 1944 issue of
True Comics
—where “Truth is stranger and a thousand times more thrilling than FICTION”—had a 4-page spread on the “Fight Against Infantile Paralysis” in which a young man overcomes the disabling effects of polio to become a member of the United States Army.
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The story begins as
fellow soldiers tell Philip Hawco “we can't believe you've ever had infantile paralysis! Why you're just like us!” “A few years ago,” Hawco explains, “I could hardly move. I sat in a chair all day reading books.” Avoiding controversy, the comic does not mention Hawco's specific therapy in the “special hospital” where he is treated, but his therapy is successful enough for him to be able to return “to school and play games.” Another soldier says “Gosh, Phil, I thought infantile was hopeless!” “Things have changed since the 1916 epidemic [when] … there was no central agency to which the people could turn for aid,” the narrator explains. On the third page Basil O'Connor appears, a man who “serves without pay, giving willingly of his time and his keen intellect to guide the crusade.” The following panel (11 out of 18) shows Kenny, her hands around the knee of a patient, being watched by a doctor and a nurse. Reflecting the popular link between the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) and Kenny, the narrator says: “The Foundation sponsors unending research work and new experimental methods. In 1940 it introduced the Australian nurse Sister Kenny, and her revolutionary treatment into the United States.” On the last page one panel shows a pie chart divided in half, indicating the division of NFIP funds: help for patients and providers in local communities and “special grants” to “scientists seeking the cause, prevention and cure of infantile paralysis.” The story concludes with a quote from Franklin Roosevelt as able-bodied children run over grassy hills: “While we fight the global war we must see to it that the health of our children is preserved and protected [and] … help them win their victory over disease today.”
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Here the global war abroad is on par with the war on polio at home.

Not until near the end of the war, when disabled veterans became a political force, were government-funded rehabilitative services expanded as alternatives to charity “homes” and orthopedic hospitals. Ironically, the infrastructure created by New Deal programs made access to services even more difficult. As one polio survivor noted bitterly, the new “churches, libraries, colleges, post offices, courthouses, city and state federal buildings [and] … railway stations” funded by the Works Progress Administration and built in the neoclassical style, had flights of steps and stairways “which are either impossible or very difficult for people of faulty locomotion.” “I used to dream that when I grew up I'd make a lot of money … and put stout hand railings on all the steps in the world,” she declared. A magazine writer and not a millionaire, she could not see any “single good reason” why these buildings should not have ramps and railings.
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Despite a growing emphasis on older polio sufferers, the problem of “crippled children” remained prominent in public and philanthropic policy. New Deal funding for children with disabilities codified in Section V of the 1935 Social Security Act had been one of the least controversial parts of Roosevelt's expansion of government services. The Act had expanded the federal Children's Bureau and provided funds to welfare and public health divisions of state governments to survey the numbers of disabled children and the facilities for them, and then to expand those services.
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The harsh edge of living with a disability in the 1930s and 1940s was heightened by a widespread acceptance of eugenics. Americans who discriminated against the disabled made no distinction between people born with a disability and those who had become disabled through injury or illness. Mothers, fathers, doctors, and physical therapists knew—in ways disabled children slowly recognized—that physical disability was associated with the eugenically unfit who were placed outside the possibilities of a future with love, fulfillment, and economic independence. Not only were disabled children and adults
stereotyped as “defective,” but many lived in family homes dependent on the physical assistance of their relatives. Speaking from bitter experience, a nurse whose legs were paralyzed by polio appealed to all family members who agreed to help the disabled to try not to approach this task as a “grim duty.”
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The despair of the physically disabled was often hidden but well understood. When one physician who worked at the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati developed polio and was put in an iron lung he begged his fellow residents to kill him with morphine because he was convinced that if he survived he would have a “tortuous” future.
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Indeed, the disabling consequences of polio were frequently raised to explain why public funds and attention should be directed to polio rather than other diseases with high mortality but not “the grim wreckage it [polio] leaves behind.”
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In a
Washington Post
column soaked in pity, Mal Stevens, a physician and college football coach, reminded readers not to forget to “help the boy who keeps the score.” His image of this boy was the opposite of a happy, athletic American boy: “sports develops grace and stamina and strength—This disease destroys those very things.”
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Similarly, a March of Dimes radio spot asked “Have you been grumbling because you have to walk more, ride less, these days? Then think for a moment of those who cannot even walk … the children crippled by infantile paralysis.”
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Rehabilitation in the 1940s was based on 2 assumptions, one old and one new. The first was that survivors must embrace the work ethic as hard work (like exercising muscles) inevitably brought results (with the concomitant idea that lack of improvement was the patient's own fault for he or she had been lazy and not worked hard enough). The second was the idea of psychological adjustment. Rehabilitation was intended to “normalize” people with disabilities to accommodate them to society. Disabled people were expected to develop especially strong egos to cope with the prejudice and discrimination they would experience in the world outside the hospital. Such “therapy” was predicated on personal transformation, not on social, cultural, or political change.

Writing in the
Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine
, Lucy Chase Woods advised other disabled “comrades” to “hold on to whatever physical independence you have with every ounce of strength you possess.” She urged them to “release yourselves from sensitiveness” for “in the long run it matters very little how you get up from a chair! What matters is your attitude toward it.”
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Here she was asking them to ignore their anger at the pity and horror they experienced and to cope by adjusting themselves as individuals to the discriminatory, able-bodied world.

Americans associated assistive devices such as wheelchairs with old or sick people, and braces and crutches were feared symbols of social inadequacy.
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Parents sometimes removed such apparatus when their disabled children went to the movies or to church or for some other social occasion. Above all, walking, as disability activists have pointed out, was the “Holy Grail of recovery,” proof that a patient had worked hard and overcome his or her disability.

Born in the 1880s and coming of age during the eugenics era, Kenny believed that some disabling conditions made people less deserving of citizenship and respect. She
shared a prejudice against people with mental disabilities. To mock her critics, for example, she referred to facts “that can be proven to the most feeble minded lay person.”
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But she stressed the aptitude and resiliency of people with physical disabilities who were able, she believed, to combat paralysis with intelligent cooperation. Indeed, she argued, the efficacy of her work with cerebral palsy patients showed that—despite widespread assumptions—such patients were not mentally disabled. After all, she told Australian physicians in the 1930s, “imbeciles cannot be treated successfully.”
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Like all promoters of rehabilitative work, Kenny highlighted the social indignities faced by anyone visibly disabled, arguing that her work could prevent “a lifetime of disability and the humiliation of being an object of pity.”
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During the Great War she had worked with soldiers disabled by meningitis and battle wounds and since the 1920s with children disabled by polio and cerebral palsy. In her experience patients termed “incurable” could be helped to gain flexibility, muscle strength, and, sometimes, significant functional power. Her work therefore challenged some of the widely held assumptions about the rehabilitative prospects of the disabled and helped to bring patients with polio out of family back rooms and “crippled children's homes.”

Kenny's work made extraordinary transformations of paralyzed bodies routine by redefining “normality” and “deformity.” In the 1920s and 1930s orthopedic nurses had defended the use of plaster splints and casts as crucial to spare patients “the mental and physical pain of a hideous deformity.”
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But this was not how Kenny saw it. A deformed body, in her view, was a stiff, ungainly, weak body; in her work, recovery was measured by flexibility and strength, not the response of a particular muscle in a muscle test. She was proud of the number of her patients she had discharged “with a trace of restricted movement” whom she termed “fully recovered” as well as those who left the Institute “handicapped but not crippled.”
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A determined and optimistic clinician, she did not believe, as one orthopedic nurse pointed out, that “true paralysis” could be “distinguished from mental alienation until spasm of the opponent has been completely released and persistent muscle re-education given a satisfactory trial.”
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