Polio Wars (100 page)

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 great 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

In December 1950 Kenny said a series of farewells. In Minneapolis the mayor gave her the city's distinguished service award, and she tearfully thanked him and city aldermen for the beautiful home that had been “a haven of refuge” in “your beautiful city” for “ten very happy years.” She also thanked the KF Board members “for their splendid help … unbiased attitude and generous nature.”
¹⁹⁶
“Wherever I am,” she told New York reporters a few days later, “the American flag shall fly over my home.” “My mission has been accomplished,” she declared, with a touch of hyperbole, and she was returning “to my headquarters in Australia.” Now, “the women of the world will take this matter up and support and further this great cause.” “Of course,” she added with her typical spark, “they will need help from the men.”
¹⁹⁷

Behind the scenes, however, Kenny was neither sentimental nor content. In a heated conversation with Marvin Kline, preserved by a transcript, she said she had been “very, very disappointed” to find students at the Institute with almost no knowledge of her work. Her teaching was falling away and being replaced with “a lot of innovations that are of no value.” She had heard that Huenkens had even said she was “mentally unbalanced,” and she threatened to “take my name off this place” if Huenkens remained head of the Institute, warning “it will be very difficult to get money when I am not here.”
¹⁹⁸

After her meeting with Kline, she wrote a fiery letter to the KF Board's new chairman, Minneapolis businessman George Crosby, warning that the KF needed a “thorough reorganization.” Angry at being more and more marginalized by the KF board, she began to construct an unusually personalized defense, as she reflected on the reason many of the Minnesota “gentlemen” had initially joined the KF Board: her care of their children. Henry Haverstock Sr. “would still be carrying his son about in his arms, instead of seeing him an independent, useful citizen, happily married.” Donald Dayton “would be looking at a very distressed young boy handicapped like his little wardmate … instead of a robust young footballer.” Crosby himself “would be bothered about the readjustment of spinal supports on one or more of his three very delightful children, instead of watching them growing [in] health and strength and beauty.”
¹⁹⁹
But simply recalling clinical successes felt unsatisfying, like signs of an earlier golden era, which was, she feared, disappearing.

Kenny moved to a house in Toowoomba on the edge of the Darling Downs in southeastern Queensland where she had first worked as a bush nurse. Set “amongst the hills I love so well,” her large picture windows gave “the most gorgeous panoramic view in the World, and I think I am qualified to say the World, for I have seen most of it.” But despite this beauty and tranquility she missed “the girls at the old Institute, and my home at 24-46 Park Avenue.”
²⁰⁰
Although she had said she was retiring, her celebrity reputation followed her, and she was asked, she claimed, to open hospitals and agricultural shows, receive debutants, patronize fashion parades, and even stand for Parliament. While she let it be known that she did not intend to take any part in public functions, she continued to promote her work. She hired a secretary, began writing another autobiography called
My Battle and Victory
, and made recordings on a special machine of “certain phases of my work, which are not clearly understood up-to-date.” One Queensland reporter described her seated with her secretary at a table “strewn with documents and correspondence,”
and the
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune
featured “Sister Kenny At Home in Australia” with photographs of Kenny with her secretary Betty Brennan in the garden of her Australian home on the summit of the Toowoomba range, gathering letters sent her from many countries each morning, and tape-recording polio lectures as part of her daily routine.
²⁰¹

Henry Haverstock wrote hoping she was “having a good rest and not worrying too much about affairs over [here].”
²⁰²
But Haverstock knew better. Kenny continued to fight the same battles: trying to compel the Minneapolis Board to cooperate with other KF centers and to encourage those centers she felt best embodied her vision. She continued to play politics from afar, and distance made her memory sharper not fonder. Money and corruption were constantly on her mind, turning her memories of earlier days into horrific tales of conspiracy. For months when she was first in Minneapolis she had been “on the bread line,” she reminded Haverstock, yet “when the National Foundation attempted to buy me … I refused to be bought.” KF official Henry Von Morpurgo had tried to gain her support with the offer of $30,000 and a house in San Francisco, she went on, but “I informed him there was not enough money in the whole of the United State of America to buy me.”
²⁰³

To try to force the KF to adopt her own vision of polio philanthropy Kenny began to envision an International League of Universal Sisterhood, which would be organized on a volunteer basis and therefore “be non-political, non-racial, and non-sectarian.”
²⁰⁴
In an article published in the
Woman's Home Companion
she urged readers to organize a Sisterhood of Service that would “show the world that democracy has more to offer than atomic bombs.” Prejudice, she warned, had harmed the expansion of her work. The medical profession “regards each new claim, each new discovery, with a skeptical eye,” an attitude, she admitted, that was “healthy in many respects” for it “sifts out much quackery.” But her work had been blocked by “the often unfeigned hostility on the part of stiff-necked doctors who could not believe that any important contribution to medical science could possibly be made by a member of the lowly nursing profession.” She assured American readers (perhaps too emphatically) that she had left with no sense of frustration or bitterness in her heart but “with a feeling of peace and contentment, the feeling that comes with a sense of accomplishment, of a mission fulfilled.” She now forgave “those who set up obstacles along the path of help” and was passing the torch on “to the women of America and of the world, bound together by the universal love of children.” In dramatic vignettes she used later for her second autobiography Kenny described Rita, a child she had saved, who became strong, grateful, and altruistic enough to return to the Institute as a nurse's aide to help patients during Minnesota's 1946 epidemic.
²⁰⁵
Four photographs accompanied this article: the famous 1943 image of Kenny with Roosevelt and O'Connor; a universalized picture of Kenny dressed in black next to a patient watched by nurses and technicians wearing white; a recent picture of Kenny with Rosalind Russell; and, as a reference to her continuing power as a fundraiser, a picture of her at a KF campaign drive in a black hat, black dress, and corsage along with the TV star Faye Emerson.
²⁰⁶

Kenny sought to appeal to American women by combining gender, science, and healing, but this combination of attributes was rapidly becoming out of sync with the modern scientific medicine of the early 1950s. Jonas Salk, a young married man with medical training and scientific skills working in a laboratory, was about to become the nation's ideal scientific hero. The idea of an older woman, fighting bravely for the life and health of children, while frustrated by a lack of clinical and institutional support, was losing its cultural force in North America and elsewhere.