Polio Wars (62 page)

Here were the elements of the 1945 campaign: a selfish philanthropy (the NFIP) supported by public donations unwilling to extend its money and reputation behind important new work, an antagonistic AMA hiding behind false claims of scientific standards, prejudiced physicians suspicious of an assertive and confident woman who was a nurse and not a physician, and potentially important new knowledge about polio left unexplored. Members of the public responded just the way the KF hoped. “The stand that the Foundation, and you as its Director, has taken amazed and disgusted me,” a Bloomfield, New Jersey, man told O'Connor. Unless the NFIP “recognizes and aids Sister Kenny it will receive no more contributions from me or my friends who have children.”
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Efforts by the NFIP's national office to tell a different story were mostly unsuccessful. In an internal memo about the
Cosmopolitan
article marked “Not For Publication,” the director of NFIP's publicity staff reflected that advising parents to rush their sick child to the Institute was “completely impractical,” for it assumed that the Kenny method was available only in Minneapolis. There was no medical boycott; her Institute's grant application had been “referred to the National Research Council for advice” and been rejected as the Institute “had neither staff nor equipment to carry on such research.” As for the confusion around her methods, Kenny “has advanced certain theories … not in conformity with known facts of normal body function and the pathological picture found in poliomyelitis.”
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A public statement signed by Gudakunst argued further that there had never been an “orthodox” method. Long “before Miss Kenny came to this country,” he argued, physical therapy was widely used as a method of treatment in many diseases. While physicians now used what is good in the Kenny method, they did not accept Kenny's theories about “the cause and the relative importance of symptoms of the disease,” for Kenny had no specific knowledge of physiology, histology, or pathology and thus “her speculations” although “interesting … are not in conformity with the facts.”
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Thus, physicians and other thoughtful professionals used therapies based on science and not speculation; the Institute's request for research funds was rejected for fair, scientific reasons; and Kenny's theories had to be separated from her therapies. These became the NFIP's talking points, but they were not successful at derailing the KF's campaign.

FIGURE 5.2
“Sock Polio” fundraising container for the Kenny Foundation's first national campaign, 1945, featuring Bing Crosby, the campaign's spokesman; author's possession.

The “Sock Polio” campaign attracted former NFIP volunteers who brought with them civic influence. In Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, the campaign was supported by a local mayor.
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In Montana the editor of a local paper who had been “a [NFIP] friend of many years” agreed to direct the KF drive.
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Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis, agreed to act as one of 3 co-chairs of the Minnesota KF mayors committee, and urged other mayors to declare December 8 Kenny Day.
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Even more influential was Chester LaRoche, a wealthy advertising executive married to Rosalind Russell's sister Clara. Head of the board of directors of Young and Rubicam, an influential advertising agency in New York, LaRoche was an enthusiastic KF organizer. He identified men who had “allowed their name to be used [by the NFIP] because of President Roosevelt's personal interest” but were now turning to the Kenny campaign. Some, such as aviation entrepreneur Harold Talbott, were quiet allies, unable to join the KF's New York committee formally as the result of their business connections with physicians. But, LaRoche assured Marvin Kline, “we have some of the best people on our committee for … no drive of this sort in New York seems very important unless it is promoted by people who are well known socially.”
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At first the NFIP urged its chapter officials to turn a blind eye. In Arizona, for example, after the Kenny people announced that there was only one nurse in the state capable of treating patients with the Kenny method, the NFIP's director of organization told the Arizona chairman to keep quiet and not “start any newspaper arguments.”
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But in most cases following this advice proved impossible. In fact, some NFIP officers actively tried to contain the 1945 campaign. “I am in hopes that I can stop the drive entirely in Oakland” as “it has been stopped in several other counties,” one California organizer announced.
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Local NFIP organizers said frequently that that the Kenny method was already used to treat every acute patient with polio in their community. Nonetheless, they complained, they had to field many questions from “certain quarters where we have some very good friends.”
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One sticky point was explaining why the Institute's $840,000 grant proposal had been rejected. Another was the “duplication” of polio fundraising campaigns.
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Dallas was now “pretty well covered with colorful [pro-Kenny] placards” put up by the Texas KF state chairman, a wealthy oil man who had sent his daughter to the Institute 2 years before. Working in such a pro-Kenny environment was not easy, a local NFIP official
reflected. “They have a perfect right to put it on. Kenny has done a wonderful work. We have no feud on with her drive.” But, she commented to the New York headquarters, even if the KF “get[s] a little money … we aren't worried—we're a little powerful ourselves—now ain't we?”
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NFIP officials tried to convince the public that the KF was allied with profit-seeking promoters instead of civic-minded volunteers but this was a difficult argument to make for, despite its image as a voluntary organization, the NFIP had a paid organizational staff and its own publicity department. Nevertheless, angry NFIP organizers such as Arthur Reynolds of Minnesota consistently warned the New York office about the KF's considerable promotional expenses and urged the head office to publicize them.
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According to the Portland Better Business Bureau Inc., the KF's new public relations firm ran a percentage drive campaign whereby the firm was paid a set amount (estimated in 1945 to be $48,000) and additional commissions, based on the funds raised. The Bureau also noted that members of Bing Crosby's family were involved in the campaign, although it did not state whether they were paid.
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Influential newspapers backed the KF campaign, especially the Hearst Corporation. In northern California there was “terrific pressure” from the Hearst interests to convince the NFIP's chapter treasurer to accept the chairmanship of the KF's northern California campaign.
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In Los Angeles, despite the local NFIP chapter's studious avoidance of any controversy about Kenny or her treatment, “the flamboyant sensationalism of the stories in the Hearst press” had led many people to “labor under the delusion that Elizabeth Kenny has been persecuted.”
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A number of other influential papers also turned to the Kenny cause. The Hamilton County NFIP chapter in Cincinnati had already lost “one or two of our very best workers” to the Kenny campaign, along with the support of the city editor of “our largest daily paper.”
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In northwestern Minnesota, one mayor took the position of KF county chair, and the editor of a weekly paper resigned from the NFIP local board and devoted most of his paper to the KF campaign.
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The mixture of charity, religion, and politics was another quagmire. Although KF publicity pointed out that “In Australia, Chief Nurses Are Called Sister,” the notion of this as a Catholic crusade remained potent.
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Working amidst the New York Protestant elite O'Connor had been able to rely on his connections with Roosevelt to open doors for him despite his Irish Catholic background, and many Catholic Democrats had helped to reelect Roosevelt and had supported the New Deal and the NFIP. But by 1945 new alliances between Catholics and Republicans presaged a movement away from the Democratic Party that would alter national politics a decade or so later. Crosby had always been a staunch supporter of the Republican Party.
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Now a few influential Catholics tried vainly to pressure him not to work with the KF. An industrialist who headed Chicago's Cook County NFIP chapter assured O'Connor that he would talk to Bishop Bernard Shiel to “get the Bishop's disapproval of this ill-advised effort of Crosby and Sister Kenny.”
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This effort failed; Crosby continued to be the KF's campaign chairman, adding respectability to Catholicism and Republican politics.

The 1945 campaign led many NFIP volunteers to express their dissatisfaction with the NFIP's national policy, especially O'Connor's argument that any effort at conciliation would be used by Kenny “as the basis for further damaging newspaper attacks.”
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Some volunteers went further. “I can't help but feel, however, that a lot more could have been done in the National office” to block the KF, wrote one organizer.
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The New York office rang with telephone calls from various county chairmen seeking the correct, satisfying response to local defectors.
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A few suggested that the national office come up with “a settlement that would meet the minimum needs of the Institute and eliminate the necessity of a campaign.” “You are already spending considerable money” on training nurses and doctors in the Kenny methods, one Michigan official pointed out, suggesting the NFIP take “this money and a little more … [and] buy off the other group.”
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The NFIP was a popular charity in Hollywood. It had a sound reputation and caring for victims for polio was unquestionably a worthy cause. The short movies that the NFIP produced for each March of Dimes campaign were frequently tied in with current Hollywood productions.
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The NFIP relied on the cooperation of cinema owners to show their trailers and allow ushers to carry March of Dimes cans down the aisles. Indeed, during the war years O'Connor had turned to Roosevelt to add some presidential pressure when cinema owners protested that there were too many requests for fundraising and that communities resented donations that were “sent out of the state for charities elsewhere.”
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With Crosby as the KF campaign's chair, the link between the NFIP and Hollywood was breaking down. “Crosby can really do a job with his radio show, movie contacts, etc.,” the head of NFIP's Public Relations noted in an internal memo in July 1945.
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“If Sister Kenny is successful in securing the co-operation of the theatres in making an audience collection, it will kill our audience collection next January,” warned the head of Ohio's state chapter.
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The efforts of NFIP officials to dampen the effect of Crosby's efforts and the possible defection of other Hollywood figures began with a
Motion Picture Herald
article that claimed that 85 percent of March of Dimes funds had been used for Kenny treatment during 1944–1945. These funds had been used to train over 1,000 physicians, nurses, and physical therapists in the Kenny technique at the University of Minnesota and many professionals who had studied the method at other teaching centers set up by the NFIP.
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The NFIP's national office sent a copy of this article to Nicholas Schenck, the head of the Loews theater chain.
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Behind the scenes a California official appealed to Joseph Schenck, Nicholas's brother and the head of Twentieth Century Fox, to urge him and other studio owners “who have done so much for us” to help discourage Crosby's efforts.
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Bing Crosby did indeed ask theatre owners to show pro-Kenny trailers. “The Motion Picture Industry has always been deeply concerned with the plight of the victims of this dread disease,” he reminded the California industry's board of governors, and he believed Nicholas Schenck would agree that “due consideration and help be given Sister Kenny to carry on her great work.”
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This message, NFIP organizers feared, would be reinforced by the KF's good relationship with William Hearst. Nicholas Schenck, a Los Angeles NFIP official warned, “is close to Mr. Hearst and every once in a while goes to San Simeon [Hearst's California retreat].”
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Many officials were aware of the fragility of the link between the NFIP, the press, and the movie industry, which had previously been so strong. “Perhaps you could contact Walter Winchell,” one California official suggested, as “his friendship with our late President … may be instrumental in discouraging the Sister Kenny drive.”
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Meanwhile newspapers reported the celebrities Crosby had attracted who were signing on as division chairmen: singer Guy Lombardo, band leader Harry James, Frank Garnetts of Garnetts Newspapers, Thomas J. White, publisher of the
Chicago Herald-American
, sports writer and author Damon Runyon, and RKO movie star Johnnie Weissmuller.
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