Polio Wars (61 page)

To reinforce and broaden such populist support Kenny made it clear that when she spoke of “organized opposition” she was referring to the leading officials of the AMA, not the nation's “hundreds of fine and conscientious doctors.”
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She urged her supporters to pressure their local congressmen to set up a special committee to investigate her claims “in the interests of humanity,” assuring reporters she would consider as a command any suggestion from Roosevelt that she remain in the United States.
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She heightened the populist outrage by hinting that she would reveal contents of potentially explosive telegrams between herself and O'Connor to such a committee. Some of her supporters who had gained access to the telegrams were unwilling to wait for the formation of a congressional committee. The “All American Christian Auxiliary” of the Chicago Nurses Committee, which Fishbein had identified as an eccentric antisemitic group, urged the public to write to their congressmen and senators “demanding a full congressional investigation into the problems of Sister Elizabeth Kenny.” The group quoted a telegram from O'Connor that was supposedly written during the Argentina fiasco in which he had defended his actions in withdrawing NFIP support for the 2 Kenny technicians. The telegram supposedly read “I have given you HELL and you have paid for it in your Health.”
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It was at this moment that Fishbein chose to break his silence on Kenny. The idea that
JAMA
had suppressed any scientific evidence about the Kenny methods was, he told the national press, a “preposterous untruth.”
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He gave a lengthy interview to James Pooler of the
Detroit Free Press
who was writing an investigatory series on the Kenny controversy. Pooler's first 3 articles, NFIP staff had noted, had been rather pro-Kenny, but Fishbein knew what he was doing.
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In April 1945 Pooler presented Fishbein as a sympathetic character, bemused by the uproar around his efforts to uphold scientific standards. Seated in his office, Fishbein “had the air of a man who would be glad to put his head sadly between his hands.” “We have leaned over backward to give her every break, but we also must save the American people from exploitation,” he explained, for “when people insist they are the only one who can teach something, the doctor is wary.” As the “voice” of organized medicine and the editor of
JAMA
he presented himself as a judicious assessor of other experts' views. The critical orthopedic report published in
JAMA
had been an “honest appraisal from top men in their field”; neurologist Stanley Cobb and most other “nerve-muscle doctors” agreed that her theories were “physiological nonsense.” In a calculated breach of secrecy Fishbein quoted from the NRC committee's 21-page study that had concluded that the Institute did not have adequate laboratory resources or competent enough staff to handle a research program. To show his own clinical objectivity, Fishbein agreed that her methods lessened pain and psychological fright in the early stages of polio and were therefore “scientific and valuable.” But his attack slid easily to Kenny's character as he drew a picture of an old-fashioned and inflexible nurse from the Australian bush who refused to deviate from her “ritual of treatment.” At one point, he claimed, she had insisted on using hand wringers to prepare hot packs and refused to use electric wringers. Nor could she adapt herself to scientific confirmation. “It is part of the scientific method that facts shall be published and interpretations based on fact shall be subject to analysis and criticism,” Fishbein reminded newspaper readers, yet Kenny “doesn't consent to either analysis or criticism.”
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Of course Fishbein's own well-publicized attacks on any critic of the AMA's policies suggested that he did not apply this process to medical politics. This denigrating picture of a nurse resisting modern technologies was reinforced by
Time
later that month. Kenny's forthright disposition and her insistence that doctors accept her theories, which “many experts say lack proof,” according to
Time
, had “earned her the nicknames ‘The Duchess' and ‘Madam Queen.' ”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 girl standing, her hands in the air, crutches at her feet.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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