Polio Wars (99 page)

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.”
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This was a warning that would, unfortunately, prove all too prescient.

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.
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“Now,” announced Victor Cohn, science writer for the
Minneapolis Tribune
, “this 63-year-old gray-haired crusader … may come and go as she pleases.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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She also contacted the deans of medical schools at Columbia University and New York University but with little success.
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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.”
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In California her Hollywood friends and her status as a celebrity ensured a far more receptive response than in New York.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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“Sister has been on so many radio and Television programs lately,” her secretary noted, that one of her visitors “suggested she should be known as ‘Miss TV 1949.' ”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.