Race and the politics of polio: Warm Springs, Tuskegee, and the March Of Dimes

American Journal of Public Health

Volumn 97, Issue 5, 2007, Pages 784-795

  Rogers, Naomi ^a,b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

POLIOMYELITIS VACCINE;

CIVIL RIGHTS; CLINICAL TRIAL; DARIER DISEASE; DEPRESSION; HEALTH CARE; HEALTH CARE COST; HEALTH CARE FACILITY; HEALTH CARE PERSONNEL; HEALTH CARE POLICY; HEALTH PRACTITIONER; HUMAN; MORBIDITY; PATIENT CARE; POLIO SURVIVOR; POLIOMYELITIS; POLITICS; RACE DIFFERENCE; RACISM; REHABILITATION CENTER; REVIEW; SYPHILIS; ARTICLE; CAUCASIAN; ECONOMICS; ETHNOLOGY; FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT; HISTORY; NEGRO; ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT; POLICY; PUBLIC FIGURE; UNITED STATES;

AFRICAN CONTINENTAL ANCESTRY GROUP; ALABAMA; ELIGIBILITY DETERMINATION; EUROPEAN CONTINENTAL ANCESTRY GROUP; FAMOUS PERSONS; FUND RAISING; GEORGIA; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; POLIOMYELITIS; POLITICS; PUBLIC POLICY; REHABILITATION CENTERS;

EID: 34247221550     PISSN: 00900036     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2006.095406     Document Type: Review

References (147)

1. "Paralysis Center Set Up for Negroes," New York Times, May 22, 1939.
2. Basil O'Connor, "Education in Infantile Paralysis: An Address" (15 January 1941),
3. quoted in Edith P. Chappell and John F. Hume, "A Black Oasis: Tuskegee's Fight Against Infantile Paralysis, 1941-1975" (Tuskegee University, 1987, unpublished), copy in March of Dimes Archives, White Plains, NY, 194.
4. W. Montague Cobb, Medical Care and the Plight of the Negro (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1947), 6.
5. "Statement at the Dedication of the Infantile Paralysis Unit," Atlanta Daily Herald, February 6, 1940.
6. John W. Chenault, "Infantile Paralysis (Acute Anterior Poliomyelitis)," Journal of the National Medical Association 33 (1941): 220-26, quote 221.
7. Charles H. Bynum, "Dimes Against Death," Negro Digest 5 (1947), 82.
8. Jane S. Smith, Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 273.
9. See Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992);
10. John R. Paul, A History of Poliomyelitis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971);
11. Tony Gould, A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995);
12. Daniel J. Wilson, Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);
13. and Amy L. Fairchild, "The Polio Narratives: Dialogues with FDR," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75 (2001): 488-534.
14. But see one contemporary argument against this "central dogma" of polio epidemiology, supporting "the power of genes in determining susceptibility" (51) with questions such as "could there be something about race, something in your genes, that makes you less - or more - likely to get polio?" (48) and "apparently the poliovirus has a peculiar affection for Germanic fold and southern Europeans" (49); Richard L. Bruno, The Polio Paradox: Uncovering the Hidden History of Polio to Understand and Treat "Post-Polio Syndrome" and Chronic Fatigue (New York: Warner Books, 2002).
15. Paul H. Harmon, "The Racial Incidence of Poliomyelitis in the United States with Special Reference to the Negro," Journal of Infectious Diseases 58 (1936): 331.
16. For an important analysis of race and the history of epidemiology see Harry M. Marks, "Epidemiologists Explain Pellagra: Gender, Race and Political Economy in the Work of Edgar Sydenstricker," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58 (2003): 34-55.
17. Draper quoted this description from his 1917 text Acute Poliomyelitis in his later, more popular book Infantile Paralysis (New York: Appleton-Century, 1935), 59;
18. see also Paul, History, 161-66;
19. Gould, Summer Plague, 70-73.
20. On theories of acquired immunity during the 1910s, see Paul, History, 131-33.
21. On research projects (probably inspired by George Draper's work) funded by Rockefeller Foundation during the 1916 epidemic that included detecting "physical characteristics," see Paul, History, 152.
22. On the history of race and disability, see Douglas C. Baynton, "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History," in Paul K. Long-more and Lauri Umansky, eds., New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33-57.
23. See, for example, Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon, 1997);
24. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (London: Free Press, 1981);
25. Vanessa Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
26. and Susan M. Reverby, "More Than a Metaphor: An Overview of the Scholarship of the Study," in Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Study, ed. Susan M. Reverby (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1-11.
27. On White patients' experiences of polio care in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, see Kathryn Black, In the Shadow of Polio: A Personal and Social History (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996);
28. Thomas M. Daniel and Frederick C. Robbins, eds., Polio (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997);
29. and Edmund J. Sass with George Gottfried and Anthony Sorem, eds., Polio's Legacy: An Oral History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996).
30. Harmon, "Incidence," 333.
31. "May See Paralysis Treatment," New York Times, October 31, 1933;
32. "Peanut Oil Helps in Paralysis Cure," Washington Post, December 31, 1933;
33. "Mineral Oil Helps Cure Ailing Boys," Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1934;
34. "Cripples Beg Cure of Negro Scientist" Washington Post, January 7, 1934.
35. On Carver's polio work, see Linda O. McMurry, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 242-55;
36. and Rackham Holt, George Washington Carver: An American Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co, 1943), 299.
37. For Carver's description of the 2020 letters he had received during 1934, see Carver to Mrs Hardwick, December 16, 1934, reprinted in Gary R. Kremer, George Washington Carver: In His Own Words (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 146.
38. On Roosevelt's tactful responses to Carver, see David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66.
39. McMurry, Scientist and Symbol, 253-54;
40. "Negro Citizens to Give Ball for Roosevelt" Washington Post, January 14, 1934.
41. "Georgia" was probably added because there were other well-known warm springs linked to health resorts. On Roosevelt and Warm Springs, see Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985);
42. Dawn W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2003);
43. Theo Lippman Jr., The Squire of Warm Springs: F.D.R. in Georgia, 1924-1945 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1977);
44. and Turnley Walker, Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1953).
45. See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), 42;
46. Wilson, Living with Polio, 75-76.
47. Arthur Carpenter, "Special Report to Trustees: Georgia Warm Springs Foundation," March 1, 1933, President's Secretary's File, Subject: Warm Springs: 1933, Box 170, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
48. Reinette Lovewell Donnelly, "Playing Polio at Warm Springs," Polio Chronicle 1 (1932): n.p.
49. On Roosevelt's personal efforts to give "Aunt Sarah" an "old-age security" pension, see Walker, Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story, 260-261.
50. See David L. Sills, The Volunteers: Means and End in a National Organization (Glencoe, HI: Free Press, 1957), 42-43;
51. Paul, History, 305-307;
52. Lippman, Squire of Warm Springs, 203-204.
53. See George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All But the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1969), 4-16;
54. and Lippman, Squire of Warm Springs, 64-67, 187-198.
55. Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Way to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
56. "Affront to Negro Laid to New Deal," New York Times, November 1, 1936.
57. "Colored Help Warm Springs; Can't Get Aid," Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1936;
58. "Application of Race Lad to Warm Springs Signal for Buck Passing," Chicago Defender, October 24, 1936.
59. See also "Warm Springs Bars Negro Boy," New York Sun, October 14, 1936;
60. and Walter White to Eleanor Roosevelt October 20, 1936, both quoted in Chappell and Hume, "A Black Oasis," 34-37.
61. George W. Holbert, "Reply to Mr. Ickes," Chicago Tritons July 15, 1936.
62. C.E. Irwin, "[Report on] Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, Warm Springs, Georgia," October 20, 1936, President's Secretary's File, Subject: Warm Springs: 1936, Box 170, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
63. Jesse O. Thomas to Mrs Roosevelt [abstr], January 25, 1938, President's Personal File 76, Warm Springs, Georgia, 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
64. Cobb, Medical Care and the Plight of the Negro, 20;
65. see also "Voices From the Past: Medical Progress and African Americans," American Journal of Public Health 92 (2002): 191-94.
66. Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln : Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983);
67. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race;
68. Darlene Clark Hine, "Black Professionals and Race Conscious-ness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement 1890-1950," Journal of American History 89 (2003): 1279-94.
69. Harmon, "The Racial Incidence of Poliomyelitis," 331.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 332-36.
72. Ibid., 333.
73. Ibid., 336. After the 1936 polio epidemic in Chicago, the governor of Illinois set up a new division for handicapped children with Harmon as its first director.
74. McMurry, Scientist and Symbol, 253;
75. James Saxon Childers, "A Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse," American Magazine (1932),
76. reprinted in Reader's Digest 30 (1937): 5-9;
77. and see "Ex-Slave Aids Paralytics," New York Times, July 20, 1937
78. Basil O'Connor to My Dear Mr President March 3, 1937, President's Secretary's File, Subject: Warm Springs: 1937, Box 171, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
79. "Memorandum of replies re question of a cottage for negroes at Warm Springs," [enclosed with] O'Connor to My Dear Mr President March 3, 1937.
80. "Memorandum: Poliomyelitis, in relation to white and colored populations in U.S.," Leroy W. Hubbard to Basil O'Connor, March 9, 1937, [enclosed in] Basil O'Connor to Dear Mr President March 10, 1937, President's Secretary's File, Subject: Warm Springs: 1937, Box 171, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
81. O'Connor to My Dear Mr President March 3, 1937.
82. "Memorandum of replies."
83. Henry Hooper to Dear Mr O'Connor, May 8, 1937, President's Personal File 76, Warm Springs, Georgia, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
84. "Memorandum of replies."
85. O'Connor to My Dear Mr President, May 11, 1937.
86. Hooper to O'Connor, May 8, 1937.
87. James Hale Porter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt August 3, 1937 [letter reprinted] in "What The People Say," Chicago Defender, August 14, 1937.
88. "Urges Nation Use Dr. Carver in Infantile Paralysis Fight" Chicago Defender, September 25, 1937.
89. "We Donated, But They Left Us Out" Chicago Defender, August 7, 1937
90. Franklin D. Roosevelt "Foreword," Annual Report of Georgia Warm Springs Foundation 1940, Disability History Museum, http://disabilirymuseum.org/lib/docs/2168.htm (accessed January 31, 2007).
91. Walcott, "Tuskegee Institute Infantile Paralysis Center," 14;
92. "Dr J. S. Brookens, AME Editor, Dies On Train," Chicago Defender, September 22, 1951;
93. "Roosevelt to See Noted Dr. Carver on Tuskegee Visit," Birmingham Age-Herald, March 30, 1939.
94. For the broader picture on Black medical leaders and philanthropic funding, see P. Preston Reynolds, "Dr Louis T. Wright and the NAACP: Pioneers in Hospital Racial Integration," American fournal of Public Health 90 (2000): 883-87;
95. W.Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, 1900-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2002);
96. Hine, "Black Professionals and Race Consciousness," 1279-94;
97. and E. H. Beardsley, "Making Separate, Equal: Black Physicians and the Problems of Medical Segregation in the Pre-World War II South," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57(1983): 382-396.
98. "Roosevelt Thrilled by Tuskegee Choir";
99. "President Meets Dr. Carver, Tuskegee Wizard," Pittsburgh Courier, April 8, 1939.
100. Chappell and Hume, "A Black Oasis," 42.
101. "Statement at the Dedication of the Infantile Paralysis Unit";
102. "Infantile Paralysis to Be Treated Here," Atlanta Daily Herald February 6, 1940.
103. O'Connor, "Education in Infantile Paralysis," 196-97;
104. see also O'Connor's address quoted in "New Polio Center to Aid Negro Paralysis Victims," Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, June 25, 1939.
105. O'Connor "Education in Infantile Paralysis," 194, 195;
106. see also "'Do Ye Also Unto Them,'" Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City), January 18, 1941.
107. Chenault "Infantile Paralysis," 221.
108. See also Chenault's speech at the ground breaking ceremony for the Tuskegee Center in January 1940, on "recent surveys" which showed "no appreciable variation between the white and Negro races";
109. "Infantile Paralysis Center Launched at Tuskegee," Birmingham (Alabama) News, January 12, 1940.
110. "Negro Polio Victims Gets Foundation Aid," New York Times, December 21, 1945.
111. Charles H. Bynum, "Dimes Against Death," Negro Digest 5 (1947), 82.
112. "Negro Polio Victims Aided in All States," New York Times, December 18, 1946;
113. "Negro Groups Aided by Polio Foundation," New York Times, January 9, 1949.
114. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14.
115. "$329.03 Is Raised in Atlanta Polio Drive," Atlanta Daily World, February 7, 1941;
116. "Disease Knows No Color Line," (Baltimore) Afro-American, January 1, 1949.
117. Catherine Worthingham, "Professional Education and Poliomyelitis," Journal of the National Medical Association 43 (1951): 24.
118. "Says Warm Springs Treats Negro Polio Victims Now, Atlanta Daily Herald September 8, 1945;
119. "Warm Springs Treats Negro Polio Victims," Chicago Defender, September 8, 1945.
120. Robert Darr, "The Deep South Speaks," Louisiana Weekly, January 18, 1947;
121. "Polio Grants Made to Train Negroes," New York Times, September 26, 1947;
122. "Marching Against Polio," Atlanta Daily World, January 14, 1948. The 1947 poster girl "Negro child Rita Reed" was a 5-year-old polio patient from Blue Island, IL; Joe Willie Brown was a poster boy for the 1948 campaign.
123. Wilma Rudolph, Wilma (New York, NY: Signet Books, 1977),
124. cited in Wilson, Living with Polio, 146.
125. "Tuskegee to Hold Polio Conference," New York Times, November 26, 1950.
126. "Negro Leaders' Contribution in Field of Health Praised by Basil O'Connor, President of National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis," Globe and Independent (Nashville), December 1, 1950;
127. "O'Connor Praises Contribution of Negro Leaders to Health," Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser, November 28, 1950.
128. Kimberly Ferren Carter, "Trumpets of Attack: Collaborative Efforts between Nursing and Philanthropies to Care for the Child Crippled with Polio 1930 to 1959," Public Health Nursing 18 (2001): 254-61.
129. "Polio Strikes Negroes 1st in Louisiana," Washington Post, August 21, 1951.
130. Harry Weaver to Thomas Francis, December 6, 1946; Francis to Weaver, December 10, 1946; quoted in Oshinsky, Polio, 66-67
131. "Salk Vaccine Effectiveness Is Tribute to Cooperation," (Baltimore) Afro-American, April 23, 1955;
132. R.W. Brown and J. H. Henderson, "The Mass Production and Distribution of HeLa cells at the Tuskegee Institute, 1953-55," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 38 (1983): 413-431.
133. Enoc P. Waters, "Salk Vaccine Is Triumph of Racial Cooperation," Chicago Defender, April 23, 1955.
134. Bea Wright in McCutcheon Transcript quoted in Smith, Patenting the Sun (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 273.
135. Charles H. Bynum, "Upholding a Pledge," Opportunity 24 (1946): 22.
136. After outrage at their poor treatment these patients were removed to a general hospital in Atlanta; "Don't Say We Didn't Tell You," Chicago Defender, April 5, 1947;
137. "Polio Grants Made to Train Negroes," New York Times, September 26, 1947;
138. Gould, Summer Plague, 189-191; Photo Album, Box 3, photos 909 and G418, Georgia Warm Springs Foundation Record, March of Dimes Archives;
139. and see Elaine M. Strauss, In My Heart I'm Still Dancing (New Rochelle, NY: self published, 1979), 90-91,
140. cited in Fairchild "The Polio Narratives," 531, fn. 211.
141. P. Preston Reynolds, "Hospitals and Civil Rights, 1945-1963: The Case of Simkins v Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital," Annals of Internal Medicine 126 (1997): 898-906.
142. Hine, "Black Professionals and Race Consciousness," 1294;
143. and see Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves,
144. and P. Preston Reynolds, "Professional and Hospital Discrimination and the US Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit 1956-1967," American Journal of Public Health 94 (2004): 710-720.
145. "Race Bias Stops Mahalia Jackson," Chicago Defender, January 19, 1957.
146. Chappell and Hume, "A Black Oasis."
147. On the dynamics of civil rights and clinical visibility, see Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2001).