The Brain Trust

Abstract

Basil O’Connor was among FDR’s closest circle of advisors known as “the Brain Trust” during his first term in office as U.S. President. O’Connor’s value to FDR was thus not only in his ongoing administration of the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation (and later, the March of Dimes), but in confidential advice pertaining to law, policy, and political appointments. O’Connor wrote speeches for FDR and traveled on private assignments nationally and internationally as his involvement in polio prevention developed through the 1930s. His political acumen was sharpened during the first two terms of FDR’s presidency that led to even greater collaboration between the two men during the World War II years with his appointments to the March of Dimes and American Red Cross.

Keywords

Basil O’Connor; Brain Trust; Franklin Roosevelt; New Deal; U.S.S. Houston

Political insiders during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) two terms as Governor of New York often referred to Basil O’Connor as “the eyes and ears of FDR in New York.”¹ Beyond their collaboration at the Warm Springs colony, Basil O’Connor’s knowledge of contracts, utilities, industry, and banking was of inestimable value to FDR. Based in Manhattan, O’Connor became a political intimate of Governor Roosevelt when FDR relocated to Albany in 1928. O’Connor made frequent trips to the state capital for meetings and informal gatherings and gave constant attention to both the law partnership and the financial management of Georgia Warm Springs Foundation (GWSF). With the onset of the Great Depression, FDR was unique among the nation’s governors to create an agency that brought temporary relief to the unemployed. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover’s inability to change the course of the Depression virtually assured a Democratic victory in the presidential race, and FDR declared his candidacy. This decision brought O’Connor deeper into the governor’s circle, though as an unaffiliated advisor he was quite removed from the public eye. The nucleus of men who emerged as FDR’s closest advisors on planning and policy in the race for the Democratic nomination came to be known as the “Brains Trust” or “Brain Trust.” The group provided critical guidance to Roosevelt in the months before the nomination, through the presidential contest, and into his first term as President. A few, such as Rexford Tugwell, an agricultural economist from Columbia University who became director of FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and Hugh Johnson, Bernard Baruch’s protégé who led the National Recovery Administration, had extremely high-profile roles during the first New Deal.

In his memoir The Brains Trust (1968), Rexford Tugwell acknowledged Roosevelt’s speech-writer Samuel Rosenman and Basil O’Connor as the “founders” of the illustrious Brain Trust circle, “perfect examples of devoted but undemanding friendship.”² O’Connor himself initiated contact with both Tugwell and Raymond Moley, a leading political economist and law professor at Columbia University. In his book After Seven Years (1939), Moley described how he and O’Connor then began to canvass candidates for Roosevelt to interview, rushing to Albany from Manhattan on the late afternoon train, spending an evening of intense discussion at the state capital, and dashing back on the midnight train. O’Connor’s workaholic propensity is certainly evident here, for this regime occurred on countless occasions after a full day at the law office. During interviews of potential advisors with Governor Roosevelt, O’Connor was one who intuitively knew which of the meetings were simply informative and which were “deep,” best serving Roosevelt’s purposes in the upcoming presidential race. Among these men O’Connor also borrowed a certain prestige from that of his brother, John J. O’Connor, a Republican congressman.³ O’Connor and Rosenman cautioned Tugwell and Moley in the starkest terms about Eleanor Roosevelt’s influence on FDR, and the two newcomers were left to figure this personal angle into their service as advisors. O’Connor deemed Mrs. Roosevelt “dangerously idealistic” and often resented her taking the lead about issues in their briefings and dinners together.⁴ This would later change as his experience in leadership matured. Eleanor’s relationship with O’Connor was yet to ripen and blossom, just as hers had with Louis Howe during FDR’s initial crisis with polio, for O’Connor well knew the vital role she had played in FDR’s recovery. Preparing the Governor for the coming election was the leading issue at this juncture, superseding all other considerations, even the dire economic issues of the Depression. Howe, Rosenman, and O’Connor knew as almost no one else did that all other issues were subordinate to getting Roosevelt into office, believing that “what was good for the country,” in essence, meant “what was good for Roosevelt.” These three were among the very few who could contradict and firmly say “no” to FDR because, though they were intimate advisors, they operated adjacent to the arena of politics, that is, they were not political stakeholders. Because of this, O’Connor sometimes experienced personal disconnectedness and expressed his opinions cynically, which Tugwell noticed from the first. This deportment as political insider testing the issue philosophically was contrary to the matter-of-fact realism that he endorsed and projected in his capacity as an attorney.⁵

Historical perceptions of the actual membership of the Brain Trust have varied. One writer maintained that the “original Brain Trust” was the foursome Basil O’Connor, Louis Howe, Steven Early, and Marvin McIntyre.⁶ However, Early and McIntyre occupied official White House posts as press secretary and presidential secretary, respectively, that is, they were not free-floating advisors like O’Connor (despite the intensive collaboration with the single focus of polio at Warm Springs). According to Tugwell, the core group originally consisted of himself, Raymond Moley, and Adolf Berle (Professor of Corporate Law at Columbia Law School) along with the stalwarts Doc O’Connor and Sam Rosenman. The publisher Robert K. Straus, Hugh Johnson (to become head of the National Recovery Administration), and manufacturer Charles Taussig were “associates.” FDR referred to the group as his “privy council” until the term “Brains Trust” was applied by a New York Times reporter. As late as 1941 journalist Raymond Clapper included O’Connor in FDR’s “unofficial cabinet,” characterizing the members as “kindred spirits, articulate men, with hair trigger minds who spark the President’s thinking.”⁷ Cognizant of their close partnership at Warm Springs, Tugwell characterized O’Connor as a brake on FDR’s adventurous proclivities in their business ventures reflecting that, “Doc’s present involvement was hard to describe. He was around a good deal; he sat in on strategy meetings, criticized, and did odd jobs when he was asked. Also he helped to keep things straight.”⁸ In Working with Roosevelt (1952), Samuel Rosenman reported that “Constant advice and assistance, and sometimes drafts of campaign speeches were furnished by Louis Howe and Basil O’Connor, who was a law partner, close friend and able and astute associate of the Governor. O’Connor worked on speeches very frequently with me, especially when Roosevelt was in New York City; he had a very effective and forceful manner of writing.”⁹

The Democratic convention of 1932 proved a critical episode in the interactive balance of the group, and the chronology of how the Roosevelt forces turned the tide of nominating votes toward FDR has been repeatedly examined. At the Chicago convention, Louis Howe’s suite in the Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue was a kind of “command post” for the Roosevelt contingent, with O’Connor’s suite adjacent. Tugwell and O’Connor labored feverishly on FDR’s acceptance speech only to have much of their writing scrapped by FDR himself as he blended in Rosenman’s version at the end of his unprecedented air journey to accept the nomination, dramatically capping the urgency of the moment. It was in this speech that Roosevelt first used the phrase “new deal”: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” After their return to New York, Tugwell asked O’Connor why FDR did not resign as governor and direct his energies solely to the presidential campaign. O’Connor’s explanation was simple: FDR was “poor.” Or, rather, as Doc elaborated, FDR was “poor for a Roosevelt,” understanding first-hand the implications of this unexpected revelation from managing the Warm Springs budget.¹⁰ Not only were his organizational skills vital, O’Connor made personal contributions to the campaign from his own finances. During the campaign, some appealed to FDR to use his influence as governor to halt “short selling” on the New York Stock Exchange. O’Connor gave explicitly contrary advice, arguing that short selling (ie, selling a security that the seller has borrowed but does not own) was relatively unimportant; instead, he advocated the temporary closing of the exchange to forestall panic as had been done in 1914.¹¹

Because he stood at the margins of the political limelight, O’Connor already had acquired the image of the “forgotten man” in the Roosevelt & O’Connor law partnership. FDR himself had used the phrase “forgotten man” in a radio address as a metaphor for the poor who needed economic assistance but were not getting it. The phrase was further popularized in the film My Man Godfrey in 1936. In fact, the Boston Evening Transcript, a month before the inauguration, depicted O’Connor in just this fashion, as “Roosevelt’s Forgotten Law Partner,” dropping a bit of hesitant speculation that he “may” be a member of a Democratic “Brain Trust.”¹² To forestall criticism of impropriety concerning FDR’s interests outside the presidency, O’Connor officially eliminated Roosevelt’s name from the partnership on July 10, 1933. FDR reluctantly agreed that this move was in their mutual interest but expressed his exasperation that he “hated the thought of terminating the fine old firm name of Roosevelt & O’Connor.”¹³ O’Connor reassured him, “You have been so perfectly fine through all these years, and I want you to know how deeply I appreciate it.”¹⁴ But if the dissolution of the law firm marked the end of an era in their relationship, O’Connor’s service to the President during the tempestuous days of economic reconstruction continued unabated in tandem with their joint efforts to expand the fight against polio. When Carter Glass declined FDR’s offer of a cabinet post as Secretary of the Treasury, FDR sought O’Connor’s help to convince the Republican industrialist William Woodin to accept the position. Jean Edward Smith remarked that “Woodin, too, was reluctant, but Basil O’Connor convinced him to take the post during an hour-and-a-half cab ride circling through Central Park.”¹⁵ Much later, O’Connor ran interference for FDR again in attempting to bring the wayward campaign manager James Farley back into the Roosevelt fold in 1940. After the first inaugural in March 1933, O’Connor himself felt impelled to publish a personal tribute to FDR in a Dartmouth newspaper, “He makes people want to work with him and for him. He fills them with a desire to do things and do them well. He impels everybody to cooperate—a tremendous personality.”¹⁶ In return, FDR discussed nominating O’Connor to the US Supreme Court, a position the latter declined ostensibly because his own law practice was far more lucrative and he preferred to avoid the actual scrimmage of political life even though drawn to other prominent leadership roles. Earlier, New York Governor Herbert H. Lehman had sought O’Connor’s appointment as Attorney General of New York with the same result.¹⁷

O’Connor’s own impulse to cooperate was anchored deeply in the foundation of his personal friendship with Roosevelt, apart from the formalities of official roles and duties. This is evidenced quite clearly in the relationship between the two families. O’Connor’s cordiality with Eleanor and the Roosevelt children matured slowly and incrementally, while FDR’s connection to Elvira O’Connor seemed more immediate and personal. When Elvira traveled to Warm Springs to recuperate from an illness (not polio), Roosevelt wrote to her directly, “feel free to use my cottage,” and Missy LeHand conspired with her afterward to reciprocate his generosity by furnishing it with a “hooked rug.”¹⁸ With O’Connor’s daughters Bettyann and Sheelagh, Roosevelt was decidedly avuncular. Letters from FDR to the O’Connor girls were invariably signed “Uncle Franklin” or “Your Affectionate Uncle.” When Sheelagh O’Connor expressed interest in starting a stamp collection, FDR’s immediate advice to her, based on his own long experience with this hobby, was to “specialize!”¹⁹ The two families enjoyed social visiting, but these occasions dwindled significantly during the years of the Roosevelt presidency. Invited to Bettyann’s wedding at the O’Connor home in Westhampton on July 15, 1939, the Roosevelt family’s tentative acceptance ended in regrets. Bettyann dutifully penned a letter to “Uncle Franklin” thanking him for the silver vegetable dishes with the note “wish you could be with us.”²⁰ Even during the onerous years of the war, Roosevelt rarely failed to acknowledge birthdays, rites of passage, and anniversaries. He sent personal greetings to the Sidney Culver family (nee Bettyann O’Connor) on the birth of their first son in 1941 and congratulations to Elvira on her 25th wedding anniversary with Basil.²¹ In those congratulations, FDR praised her husband to the point of portraying his own friendship with him as a kind of marriage. Elvira in turn expressed her incredulous delight that FDR could actually spare the time to write to her in his own hand (just as Allied forces were poised to invade southern Italy).²²

O’Connor’s standing with Roosevelt might easily have been compromised by the politics of his brother, John J. O’Connor, Republican chair of the Congressional Rules Committee whom FDR targeted for defeat in 1938.²³ In the muckraking column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” Drew Pearson labeled Basil O’Connor and his brother John “a worse pain in the neck” to FDR than any of his political enemies. Pearson portrayed Basil as having “his hand in lobbying deals diametrically opposed to the New Deal,” and he accused John of obstruction of several beneficial pieces of legislation as the powerful chairman of the house rules committee.²⁴ But O’Connor was not loathe to report candidly to Roosevelt about allegations made in the press about the political machinations of the O’Connor brothers, as in a 1935 note that the “O’Connor boys had sold out to Associated Gas & Electric for $25,000.”²⁵ If this family connection burdened O’Connor’s allegiance to FDR with troublesome complexities from a scandal-mongering press, it failed to deflect the two men from their common purpose.

On one occasion, the two actually took a long vacation together. Roosevelt’s affection for nautical affairs derived not only from his eight-year stint as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and his Florida houseboat travels on the Larooco as he recovered from polio, but from many seafaring experiences throughout his life. In the summer of 1938, FDR and O’Connor traveled from San Francisco through the Panama Canal and on to Washington aboard the USS Houston, visiting the Galapagos Islands along the way. A 10,000-ton heavy cruiser, the Houston was one of Roosevelt’s favorite ships of the US fleet. During World War II it became known as the “Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast” and was destroyed and sank on March 1, 1942 in the Battle of Sunda Strait in the Java Sea. En route to the east coast on this presidential junket, the Houston crossed the equator near the Galapagos Islands for a week’s visit. The New York Times reported, “Roosevelt Sees 300 Houston ‘Pollywogs’ Changed to ‘Shellbacks’ by Father Neptune,” a reference to a “crossing the line” ceremony, an obligatory rite of passage for sailors on their first time crossing the equator at sea.²⁶ After the ritual, sailors were designated “Sons of Neptune.” With O’Connor, FDR enjoyed the ceremonial hijinks on the high seas and was photographed with Neptune, the Royal Sawbones, and the motley crew. On other days he enjoyed the opportunity for deep-sea fishing and added to the catch of sailfish for the Houston. After his return to Hyde Park weeks later, FDR reminisced about this fishing adventure with a glib witticism about Washington politics regarding “burrowing,” a slang reference to a temporary political appointee who gains permanent civil service protection:

As a matter of fact, there had been so much discussion on previous trips, about the size and weight and length and species of fish, that this year I took a full-fledged scientist with me from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Dr. Waldo Schmitt, who was such a success that we decided to change the Smithsonian to “Schmittsonian.” When we started from San Diego out on the West Coast, we ran down the coast to Lower California which, as you know, belongs to Mexico. In talking to Dr. Schmitt that first day, I said: “Is there any particular thing or animal that you would like to find?” He said: “Oh, yes, I am writing a monograph. I have been on it two years, and the one thing I am searching for in these waters of Mexico and the islands of the Pacific—I want to find a burrowing shrimp.” “Well,” I said, “Dr. Schmitt, why leave Washington? Washington is overrun with them. I know that after five years.”²⁷

A month-long vacation in tropical waters was hardly Basil O’Connor’s predilection, however, especially in light of his emergent role as president of The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP). On their return, Roosevelt telegrammed Elvira O’Connor that Doc was “a bigger and better man” thanks to this fishing trip disguised as a presidential retreat. In reply, Elvira confessed that “I really don’t know of anything he’s ever done that was so good for him.”²⁸

Basil O’Connor was a facilitator, fixer, factotum, and master fund-raiser, but first of all he was a shrewd attorney whose métier was international in reach and whose services to Roosevelt were varied in the extreme. His value to Roosevelt “accelerated uniformly” without letup over the course of FDR’s presidency, culminating in high-profile positions as the head of the NFIP and American Red Cross. The range of his talents was prodigious, and he brought to the table advice on the political import of corporate affairs, personal recommendations on ambassadorial and New Deal agency appointments, and legal analyses of Roosevelt’s personal estate, insurance, and taxes. With the outbreak of war his advice to Roosevelt ranged over a host of strategic issues such as navigation, shipping, trade routes during wartime, war-risk insurance, hoarding, stock values, and oil reserves. In 1939, O’Connor became one of the first trustees of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Inc., leading the efforts to raise money and erect a building to house the president’s library and vast collection of papers and memorabilia. This was the first presidential library in the system now administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) of the United States. After the death of Sara Roosevelt, FDR’s mother, O’Connor took charge of the appraisal and sale of the Roosevelt family town house at 47–49 East 65th Street in Manhattan (where FDR began his recovery from polio in October 1921), and when FDR’s trusted secretary Missy LeHand suffered a stroke in 1941, FDR asked O’Connor to revise his will, with plans to bequeath to Missy half of his estate. O’Connor was adamantly opposed to an alteration that would remove the Roosevelt children as beneficiaries from the will, and he said so, forcefully. An argument ensued between them, but in the end O’Connor demurred, and the President got what he wanted. Afterward, O’Connor, FDR’s son James Roosevelt, and Henry T. Hackett, an attorney in Poughkeepsie, New York became the executors and trustees of the FDR estate.²⁹

From the moment he became Governor of New York, O’Connor savored political cartoons about FDR. He clipped and collected these newspaper cartoons religiously through the four terms of Roosevelt’s presidency, always curious about how “the boss” was praised by his admirers or pilloried by his detractors in order to gauge the public mood. Like Roosevelt, O’Connor was indeed a collector, and his other notable collection was a portrait gallery of signed photographs of Dartmouth alumni, colleagues at the bar, and professional men from business and academia that he had met over the years. He began to build this collection around the time Roosevelt became governor and initially referred to it as his “rogue’s gallery of those who have been close to the governor.” He displayed the photos with admiration and pride in his law office.³⁰ He never hesitated to request an autographed portrait, and his “Gallery of Distinguished Gentlemen” included photographs of the leaders of Warm Springs and the Brain Trust, New Deal appointees, and politicos of every stripe. American lawyer and statesman Elihu Root, whom O’Connor much admired, responded to a photo request in 1934: “I am ashamed to give anyone the last photograph taken of me, which is now 10 years ago. It is sailing under false pretenses.” Another poked fun at O’Connor: “I am flattered by your request for a signed photograph but the first question is whether this is for exhibition purposes (where, of course, it should be) or for the reserve file. Just how often do you change them on the walls; is the arrangement copyrighted; do you make the arrangement with an eye to the probability of unfair competition, libel by reason of undue proximity to someone less handsome, and who makes the selection?” Dr. Michael Hoke needled him, “I feel very much flattered by your request for my photograph. You must be going to chase the rats away.”³¹ Hoke’s political wit was not lost on O’Connor, and his own witty banter with FDR is a private measure of their close camaraderie. On one occasion he teased Roosevelt about how the press seemed to exaggerate his influence over both the President and the Secretary of State: “Just in case you should read how successfully I influenced you and Secretary Hull to make a $30,000,000 loan to China—I really didn’t! It’s just another retainer I never received!” O’Connor had been singled out as one of four attorneys that had pressured Roosevelt and Hull to approve a $30 million loan to China that resulted in little more than a briefly newsworthy law suit. O’Connor’s affection was constant, and yet his importunate pleas to FDR could be downright shrill: “Please, please, do not send [my speech] to your hackers to perform an OOPHORECTOMY on it. I just couldn’t stand that!” His demands to Missy LeHand or to Grace Tully to squeeze in a last-minute appointment with the President sometimes bristled with impatience: “Tell him it’s about nothing. I’ve given up trying to solve problems. There are too many of them!”³² Yet on one of the darkest days of the war in 1942, with the Allies beleaguered on all fronts and the nation consumed by the constant shock of dismal news, O’Connor felt free to vent his bile about the war rationing policies of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and so tossed off this limerick in a letter to his dear friend in the White House:

There was a lady of fashion

Who had a terrific passion;

As she jumped into bed

She casually said,

“Here’s one thing that Ickes can’t ration.”³³

This surely brought forth a generous chuckle from the President. William Hassett, who became FDR’s correspondence secretary in 1944, considered Basil O’Connor to be one of FDR’s “closest friends and business associates.”³⁴ A lasting indication of this is evidenced in one of the most treasured portraits in O’Connor’s “rogue’s gallery.” Dated October 7, 1933 it features the composite portraits of President Roosevelt, Louis Howe, Stephen Early, and Marvin McIntyre in a single panel—four men at the supreme echelon of power in the White House. O’Connor had actually plagued Missy with requests to help him acquire this photo. Inscribed to “Doc” and autographed by each of the four, FDR’s culminating inscription to his friend Daniel Basil O’Connor includes him without question in their intimate company: “To D.B.O’C., fifth wheel, from the other four wheels.”³⁵

Basil O’Connor was the critical “fifth wheel” among Roosevelt’s daily advisors, the one with the most staying power and breadth of latitude well beyond any of the limited configurations of the Brain Trust, however one might enumerate their company. O’Connor’s assistance to FDR as an unofficial “advisor without portfolio” presaged the role he would assume when the NFIP was established, for despite the ostensibly nonpartisan aims of the new foundation as an autonomous domestic organization whose mission was to defeat polio, its early maneuvering for local support across the nation and globally required knowledge of local issues as well as the diplomatic finesse that a person like O’Connor might provide. Together, FDR and O’Connor positioned the NFIP in its earliest years as an American institution aligned with the New Deal that functioned in the international arena with a role in diplomacy and aid beyond the specific focus on polio. Even as O’Connor was building an infrastructure of volunteers and creating his medical committees he was helping in some cases to guide the NFIP as an instrument of projecting American power overseas as needed by President Roosevelt. His assignments were not as romantically dashing as, say, those of Harry Hopkins in his wartime flights to Great Britain and the Soviet Union to help secure a wartime alignment of the Allies. Yet from the founding of the NFIP in 1938 to the conclusion of his term with the American Red Cross in 1949, O’Connor used his positions to introject elements of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in Latin America and as far afield as the Philippine Islands, even after FDR’s death in 1945.

One stark example was Argentina. In 1943, the Argentine Department of Health solicited aid from the NFIP to help combat a polio epidemic, and after O’Connor had consulted with Roosevelt, the Foundation dispatched Mary Kenny (Sister Elizabeth Kenny’s daughter) and Rutherford John, an orthopedist from Philadelphia, to Buenos Aires to provide technical support. Argentina had not severed ties with either Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, and after a military coup during the polio team’s visit, the NFIP reconsidered the initial plan and withdrew its support entirely. This precipitated the anger of Sister Kenny herself, leading to a falling out with O’Connor and the NFIP, whose relationship was already argumentative. Years later, in 1956, the NFIP would again intervene in Argentina at the request of the US State Department. The citizens of Buenos Aires were frantic: schools were closed, parents held day-long vigils for paralyzed children at hospitals, and many people scrubbed sidewalks and streets or whitewashed porches and buildings in desperation. Besides the tangible medical aid and advice provided by the NFIP, both the State Department and O’Connor considered it a unique opportunity for the United States to improve relations between the two countries. But there were earlier situations that were complicated by the existence of Birthday Ball Committees and certified chapters of the NFIP that existed in far-flung extraterritorial settings that thrust the NFIP into the international arena.³⁶

The chapter system of the NFIP devolved logically and practically from the local organization of president’s birthday balls by groups of citizens in the 1930s. Beginning in 1939, with the creation of the first NFIP chapter in Coshocton, Ohio, any group of volunteers in any community could affiliate with the NFIP by creating a county chapter. The rules were simple, and certification by NFIP headquarters in New York was a must. A group of citizens, usually consisting of a community business leader, physician or public health official, and/or any combination of housewives, mechanics, bankers, journalists, or persons concerned, could apply to the NFIP to become certified as an official chapter. The popularity of the March of Dimes campaigns (see Chapter 5: The March of Dimes in World War II) boosted the formation of these local units enormously in the early 1940s; within 2 years, by February 1942, there were 2,232 county chapters, and within a decade there were over 3,100 chapters, all involved in fund-raising, epidemic relief, polio education, and patient aid. But besides the evident fertility of NFIP chapters springing up across the nation, local chapters were also created far beyond the national boundaries of the United States in extraterritorial annexations and protectorates, namely in Alaska and Hawaii (not to become states until 1959) as well as in the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippine Islands, and Puerto Rico. March of Dimes activity also occurred on Guam and Okinawa, and chapters were proposed for these islands but never materialized. The history of these extraterritorial chapters provides a glimpse of O’Connor’s involvement in international affairs as an element of his ongoing and unofficial advisory role in the Roosevelt administration. While local chapters in the continental US retained a level of local autonomy though coordinated through the NFIP headquarters in New York, it was O’Connor himself who oversaw the particular situations of March of Dimes activities on foreign soil and remained available to dictate or modify policy when the need arose. At that time (1938–44), his operational flexibility lay still within the orbit of FDR’s closest advisors who became semiautonomous independent agents on ad hoc missions.

In Alaska, a Committee for the Celebration of the President’s Birthday operated for 3 years to 1941, when 18 people held a birthday ball at Mt. McKinley National Park. Two small NFIP chapters had been established, but Peter J. A. Cusack (NFIP Executive Secretary) advised the creation of a chapter covering the entire territory of Alaska to “absorb the two small Chapters now in existence.”³⁷ O’Connor contacted the Governor of the Territory of Alaska in Juneau, Ernest Gruening, to take on the position of NFIP “state” chairperson to form a single territory chapter to absorb the two already created. O’Connor gave his standard pitch to Gruening: “The primary purpose of the Territorial Chapter would be to render financial aid to victims of infantile paralysis who cannot pay for the necessary treatment. It would also assist the community in the event of an epidemic and carry out the Foundation’s educational program in its area.” But with the advent of war in the Pacific theater Gruening balked. He replied to O’Connor on June 5, just after Japanese forces had attacked Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island in the Aleutian chain and pleaded that “almost all energies in the Territory at this time are being expended in the war effort.” He noted that polio was almost nonexistent in Alaska, a total of only 30 cases from 1933 to 1947. This changed slightly after the war when Gruening became a chapter chairperson, and O’Connor maintained personal contact with him through the mid-1950s since his jurisdiction was extraterritorial, requiring the personal administration of the NFIP head.³⁸

A similar state of affairs held in Hawaii, but in this case the war was the dominant issue as it would be in the Philippine Islands, Okinawa, and Guam. The NFIP chapter of the County of Hawaii created in 1939 tended to a few mild cases of polio until the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, reorienting all activities to a permanent war footing to respond to the emergency. By 1943, the chapter had resumed a semblance of normal functioning. B. J. McMorrow, Chapter Chairperson and Acting Health Officer of Hawaii, told O’Connor, “Due to the tenseness and unusual conditions existing on this Island in the months following the beginning of the war, no effort was made to conduct the affairs of the Hawaii Island Chapter of the National Foundation in a routine and normal manner. … No organized fund-raising campaigns have been carried on since 1941. The Chapter, however, has not been inactive as it has paid for the transportation to Honolulu for treatment of children crippled through infantile paralysis and has distributed educational literature.”³⁹ O’Connor applauded McMorrow’s efforts in resuscitating the chapter in the wake of Pearl Harbor and regretted the wartime transfer of most of its officer personnel. He reminded McMorrow that the reorganized chapter should remain “nonsectarian and nonpolitical.”⁴⁰ By 1945, there were two chapters, the Hilo chapter on Hawaii and the Honolulu chapter on Oahu. After the war, NFIP territorial representative Carolyn Patterson (nee Kingdon) coordinated NFIP activities across the broad stretch of the Pacific from her post in Honolulu. She turned down a request to develop a chapter on Okinawa in 1954 “since the Ryukyu Islands are considered foreign territory and the United States has jurisdiction only insofar as administration is concerned.” A “March of Music” program had raised almost $25,000, mainly from US staff stationed there after the war. A similar situation obtained on Guam, which was then classified as an “unincorporated territory,” ceded to the United States by Spain in 1898. Kingdon reported that the Guamanians were largely in favor of a local chapter of the NFIP but strictly to keep hold of the March of Dimes money contributed by armed forces personnel who had raised $38,000 in the 1953 March of Dimes. In any event, US military personnel and citizens based on Guam, Hawaii, and Okinawa had the same status with regard to polio care financed by the NFIP. On occasion, the NFIP paid for polio care even on Guam.⁴¹

The situation in the Commonwealth of the Philippines was entirely different, for an active unit had been created in Manila on May 31, 1939, a year after Roosevelt founded the NFIP. By Administrative Order No. 96 issued by Manuel L. Quezon, President of the Philippines, styled “Creating President Roosevelt’s Poliomyelitis Committee,” it was acknowledged that the birthday balls for President Roosevelt “to control and combat infantile paralysis” had been held annually since 1935, and that the committee would thereafter manage the funds collected in these balls for the “National Committee” in the United States. The order stipulated that 50% of the funds would be retained locally in keeping with NFIP practice. However, the work of the committee was conflated with another mission: tuberculosis control. President Quezon had suffered from tuberculosis from the 1920s; and after the Philippines fell to the Japanese in 1941, he formed a government in exile in the United States and ultimately died in the tuberculosis cure cottages of Saranac Lake, NY in 1944. Just as O’Connor would refuse to compromise NFIP policy on federated fund-raising later in the 1940s, mixing the purposes of these two health problems in a single fund-raising effort seemed bound to cause difficulties. When Keith Morgan heard about the Philippine committee, he immediately wired O’Connor, anticipating his disapproval. Inevitably, O’Connor tried to turn the situation around by sending the Filipinos application materials to organize a proper NFIP chapter since the committee “has never been formally chartered by this foundation.” However, the American community in the Philippines who might engage in March of Dimes activities was comparatively small, and both O’Connor and Morgan realized the cooperation of the two governments over this issue and others was vitally important in the developing situation of the Pacific, especially since the commonwealth government also celebrated President Quezon’s birthday to raise funds to fight tuberculosis.⁴²

Francis B. Sayre, US High Commissioner to the Philippine Islands, then wired O’Connor for advice. He admitted that though American participation in President Quezon’s celebration for tuberculosis was “none too great,” the NFIP should accept the cross-participation of Americans and Filipinos in each other’s events. He cautioned, however, that pressing for the organization of NFIP chapter “may not be desirable.” The problems of distance, lack of equipment, and minimal funds militated against insisting on the creation of a formal chapter. Although O’Connor still preferred an NFIP chapter he admitted the situation was awkward because FDR permitted the use of his birthday in return for funds raised for NFIP [emphasis added].⁴³ Sayre’s radio address of January 28, 1940 honored Roosevelt, hailing him as a man who “in spite of the handicap of a shattering disease, refused to surrender to disaster.”⁴⁴ But a larger disaster was just on the horizon: the Philippine Islands fell to the Japanese invasion that brought America into the war. Although the NFIP chapter of the Philippines was organized on March 18, 1941, it collapsed and remained completely inoperative during the course of the war.⁴⁵

The Panama Canal Zone presented a less momentous problem, one of financial management. The Canal Zone was an unorganized territory, controlled by the United States from 1903 to 1979. American citizens residing there organized birthday balls from the mid-1930s, and a movement to form an NFIP chapter stirred in 1941 with the advent of the March of Dimes. Yet the Canal Zone Committee for the Celebration of the President’s Birthday asked the NFIP to exempt the zone from consideration as a potential chapter because it was “strictly a military-government reservation.” Richard D. Moore, Executive Chairman of the committee met with O’Connor, Morgan, and D. Walker Wear soon after the Pearl Harbor attack to present his position, and O’Connor agreed to block any formal plans to create a chapter due to “national defense problems faced at the time.”⁴⁶ But neither the war nor his decision prevented Americans living in the Canal Zone to curtail their birthday ball hoopla or to cease sending revenue to the NFIP. After the celebration in 1942, Glen E. Edgerton, Governor of the Panama Canal Zone, wrote to Keith Morgan to suggest that local monies be placed in trust as a contingency fund. Edgerton kept to his word and remitted $7,000 to be held in safekeeping by the NFIP, and O’Connor created “The NFIP, Inc. Panama Canal Zone Account,” a special trust fund at the Bank of New York.⁴⁷ The Canal Zone revenue was not inconsiderable: $12,101 in 1942 and $35,469 in 1943, a sum then invested in war bonds. By 1948, local interest in forming a Canal Zone chapter had not died down but since the American community consisted primarily of government employees and their families, the NFIP preferred to keep to an unofficial committee since it was already “accomplishing what they are supposed to do,” that is, to raise money each year. From 1939 to 1950, the committee raised $222,000 for the March of Dimes. In 1955, the NFIP ensured that the Salk polio vaccine was made available to all children residing in the Panama Canal Zone.⁴⁸

By contrast with Panama, the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico all had organized NFIP chapters. The Puerto Rico chapter was the most intractable of all. In 1939, Roosevelt appointed Admiral William D. Leahy as Governor of the Territory of Puerto Rico as an administrator of the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, succeeding Leahy’s two-year stint as Chief of Naval Operations from 1937. Leahy was sent in to replace Governor Blanton Winship, whose repressive policies led to widespread social unrest. Leahy’s assignment was short lived, a mere 15 months, as FDR redirected the admiral’s diplomatic expertise toward a more volatile situation as the US Ambassador to France during the formation of the Vichy government in an attempt to subvert its collaboration with Nazi Germany. Even that proved a relatively brief assignment, as Roosevelt soon recalled Leahy to serve as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to help FDR “run the war.” In Puerto Rico, however, Leahy helped to establish American military bases on the island and initiated several public works projects. In keeping with the ostensible American move toward the benevolence of local development, Admiral Leahy’s wife, the former Louise Tennant Harrington, was recognized as the “Honorary President” of the local chapter of the NFIP for the Territory of Puerto Rico. This was a safe but fairly prominent way to motivate public opinion in the direction of the charitable tendencies of Rooseveltian statecraft channeled through the influence of Basil O’Connor and the NFIP.⁴⁹ President Roosevelt appointed Rexford Tugwell to be Governor of Puerto Rico in 1941. As the last appointed American governor he served for the duration of the war, avidly supporting Puerto Rican self-government despite local calls for his removal in 1942. Tugwell, one of the key architects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, was no stranger to controversy, and his relationship with O’Connor had remained intact from their formative experiences at the core of the Brain Trust a decade earlier.

Soon after the appointment of Admiral Leahy, Basil O’Connor and Keith Morgan broached the topic of establishing an NFIP chapter in Puerto Rico with Ana Maria Valdes de Iriarte, the wife of Senator Celestino Iriarte Miro, a ranking member of the Senate of Puerto Rico associated with the Republican Union party and the Alianza Puertorriquena, a unity party that had dissolved in 1932. Mrs. Iriarte became “City Chairman” of the new chapter, and she led a marginally successful March of Dimes campaign in 1940 in San Juan. Her credibility with the NFIP was not to last very long, however. Mrs. Iriarte was a Republic Union partisan who loved to play at politics.⁵⁰ Once the Puerto Rico chapter had reserved a fund for polio cases, O’Connor approved transfer of $4,000 from the chapter to the Commissioner of Health to maintain four beds in the Convalescent Home for Crippled Children for one year under the direction of George L. Kraft, MD of the Department of Health.⁵¹ Mrs. Iriarte redirected the funds to a Presbyterian Hospital Medical facility known as Clinica Pereira Leal where her husband Senator Iriarte was Director with a substantial financial interest. Polio cases fell under the care of Peter E. Sabatelle, MD, an orthopedic surgeon and prominent member of the NFIP chapter, and Leon Sheplen, MD, who had been trained in convalescent care at Warm Springs. NFIP Director of Chapters Peter Stone approved the request, but came to question it when he learned that the four beds were for general cases, despite a waiting list of 350 polio cases. Stone demanded a complete reevaluation of the case which rankled Mrs. Iriarte, who protested to the chapter committee, citing the many contracts that Clinica Pereira Leal had with the Work Projects Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Federal Land Bank, Farm Security Administration, Naval Base, Teachers Association, Union Puertorriquena, and National City Bank.⁵² Dr. Sheplen complained of her “Machiavellian machinations” and “sleight of hand.” He admitted to Stone, “I have never seen such gangster politics,” as Mrs Iriarte overruled the committee’s recommendation to ask NFIP for a final decision. As a result, the chapter nearly dissolved even as Dr. Sheplen concluded in a formal study that polio was “an endemic disease of proportionally large incidence in Puerto Rico” with 341 cases under 2 years of age in the past two years.⁵³

The chapter became mired in the dissension of competing views over the affair, and Governor Tugwell intervened. He requested the Puerto Rico Commissioner of Education, Jose M. Gallardo, to take charge of the birthday ball campaign in 1944 since Mrs. Iriarte was away on an extended visit to the United States. When Gallardo attempted to reorganize the chapter, Mrs. Iriarte returned and called her own meeting after the 1944 birthday ball, fired the treasurer, and replaced her with her own choice. She objected to Gallardo’s choice of secretary because of her political affiliations, stating with temerity, “I feel that we should not mix party labels with the eradication of infantile paralysis.” Gallardo, Tugwell, and O’Connor conferred over the best course of action. O’Connor appointed Tugwell himself to head the annual March of Dimes campaign, but with no authority over the chapter. The contretemps fizzled out in the petty pandemonium of legal action brought by Mrs. Iriarte over the control of chapter records, and though she resumed her position as head of the chapter, its accomplishments paled in the face of the energy she expended in her personal enmity toward Tugwell. Dr. Sheplen reported in 1946 “that the National Foundation chapter … is and has been ineffective in providing medical care for polio cases and uncooperative with the Crippled Children’s Commission,” rendering care to only five patients in the past five years. He blamed “local politics for much of the difficulty.”⁵⁴

Despite its rocky beginning, the Puerto Rico chapter turned around to become the only extraterritorial chapter to continue into the 21st century (Alaska and Hawaii eventually developed state chapters). Basil O’Connor’s international activities were propelled far beyond his management of the NFIP with his appointment to lead the American Red Cross in 1944 (see Chapter 7: Basil O’Connor and the American Red Cross). He continued to train his attention on the medical and public health politics of Latin America, particularly Mexico and Cuba, even as his post at the Red Cross redirected his international activity toward Europe in the massive war relief programs beginning in 1944 and 1945. In 1942, the Finlay Institute of the Americas (Carlos Finlay Institute) in Havana, Cuba named him President of its Executive Council. He and his friend and advisor Morris Fishbein traveled to Havana in January 1942 in an American delegation for a ceremony to launch the Institute. He and his four American associates were installed as Commanders of the Order of Finlay by Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, and O’Connor had a private consultation with Batista afterward, bringing FDR’s warm greetings of friendship. The Institute was created to foster science research and education in the Caribbean region, in honor of Carlos Finlay, a Cuba physician who first theorized that the mosquito is the disease vector for yellow fever.⁵⁵

The NFIP was a domestic organization with a broad international outlook, as is the contemporary March of Dimes. During the polio era the Foundation was unsparing when calls for assistance arrived from neighboring countries and overseas. The first of these came from Canada in 1941, and Medical Director Donald Gudakunst traveled to Winnipeg to provide advice on a polio epidemic then raging in the province of Manitoba. In the aftermath of World War II, even as polio epidemics in the United States consumed the financial resources of the NFIP, it responded to polio emergencies in Belgium (1945), Germany (1947), Iceland (1949), Mexico (1951), Argentina (1956), the Marshall Islands (1958), and Japan (1960) among other nations of Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa. The NFIP arranged the shipment of iron lungs and medical equipment, dispatched teams of epidemiological investigators and medical advisors, and offered supplies of gamma globulin and, by the late 1950s, polio vaccine. By the time the Salk vaccine was declared effective in 1955, the NFIP was seen as the world leader in the fight against polio. After the mission change to birth defects prevention the Foundation assisted in the development of the International Clearinghouse for Birth Defects Surveillance and Research at the First Working Conference for Birth Defects Monitoring in Helsinki, Finland and was instrumental in founding the World Alliance of Organizations for the Prevention of Birth Defects in 1994 with the assistance of several European health organizations. The March of Dimes Office of Global Programs was created in 1998. All of these are elements of the legacy of Basil O’Connor and the internationalism of his perspective within the Roosevelt administration beginning with his role as a member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust.