The March of Dimes After Franklin D. Roosevelt

Abstract

With President Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, the world mourned the leader of the free world in the struggle against the totalitarianism of the Axis powers. Basil O’Connor, ever loyal to the ideals of FDR and his creation of the NFIP, continually memorialized FDR as an inspiration to continue the March of Dimes drive to eradicate polio. O’Connor served on the Roosevelt Memorial Commission and continued to lead both the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation and the NFIP in their united quest to provide patient aide and research dollars toward the cause of ending polio. In the 1950s, the NFIP funded the development of the polio vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin under March of Dimes grants, and O’Connor went on to reposition the NFIP as a leader in the field of birth defects prevention in 1958.

Keywords

Birth defects; Franklin Roosevelt; Jonas Salk; Polio vaccine; Roosevelt dime; Turnley Walker

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) sudden death in Warm Springs on April 12, 1945 left an enormous void emotionally, psychologically, and politically in the life of the nation, and this sentiment was keenly felt in the two polio foundations he had established. James Agee wrote in Time magazine, “Everywhere, to almost everyone, the news came with the force of a personal shock.”¹ Close associates and other observers regretted that FDR had been ironically cheated of seeing the conclusion of the European war only by a matter of weeks. By the fall of 1944, as the Allies recognized that the demise of the Nazi regime was only a matter of time, Roosevelt saw fit to return to Warm Springs for the traditional Founder’s Day Dinner on Thanksgiving, an event he had missed during the onerous years of military engagement. Exhausted and ailing, he had just been elected to an unprecedented fourth term as President, and this was to be his final Thanksgiving visit to Warm Springs. On November 28, he arrived at Warm Springs for the first time since 1941, travelling from the White House to the Little White House with an entourage of close confidantes that included Basil O’Connor, as it typically did. O’Connor was toastmaster at the dinner. When actress Bette Davis crashed the party and was awarded the honor of sitting next to the President, O’Connor was furious and barely tolerated her company as he was always one to shield FDR from the importunities of Hollywood celebrities.² According to FDR’s son James Roosevelt, by 1945 there were very few of “the old crowd” left, those with whom FDR really felt his most comfortable and informal, save for O’Connor and a few others; his daily affections had shifted to Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley, confidantes and cousins of the President. James Roosevelt spoke of O’Connor as a person who “knew and understood FDR with a rare sympathy and sensitivity.”³ Among his closest personal contacts (excepting his physicians) James, Bill Hassett, and Basil O’Connor realized that FDR was in serious decline. When Hassett confided to FDR’s physician Howard Bruenn in March 1945 that he felt that “the Boss was dying,” Bruenn was concerned that the truth about FDR’s carefully guarded condition would leak to the news media. Hassett admitted that the only other person who surmised the precarious condition of the President was Basil O’Connor.⁴

An extended period of rest for FDR at Bernard Baruch’s Hobcaw estate in South Carolina and then the arduous journey to the Yalta Conference to meet with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin followed in the winter of 1945. On March 8, O’Connor met with FDR to discuss Red Cross affairs. Afterward, on March 30, Roosevelt made the trip back to Warm Springs with O’Connor, who then returned to New York after Easter services. It was their final meeting. Though their responsibilities had separated them physically by enormous distances during the war, the two seemed spiritually closer than ever in the remaining few weeks of Roosevelt’s life. FDR had given Doc an autographed copy of his “D-Day Prayer” as a Christmas gift, and O’Connor returned his thanks with the fervent wish, “I do hope this New Year will be much better for the whole world—and for you in particular that wish is meant many times over.”⁵ Together on their last journey to Warm Springs FDR uncharacteristically offered some private feelings toward his friend. In a moment of nostalgic reflection he actually apologized to O’Connor for burdening him with the enormous responsibilities of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), Warm Springs, and the Red Cross. O’Connor dismissed the apology, but Roosevelt persisted with this summation: “There’s this to be said for your life, Doc. Most men just go down the middle of the street, doing their chosen work. You’ve done that with the law. But you’ve also gone down the sides—working for the advancement of an important science, and spending every spare hour you’ve got helping take care of the other fellow who’s had some trouble. It’s not a bad way to make the journey and I take back that apology.”⁶ O’Connor was prone to interpret their last moments together at Warm Springs as fraught with profound symbolism, giving him opportunities for doctrinaire reflections later on. In 1946, he reminisced: “I believe his visits to the Little White House were comforting and stabilizing experiences during his last years—the years of almost overwhelming responsibility. He could relax more completely here, and laugh more heartily here than anywhere else.” He described the stark but poignant conversation of their last meeting:

I saw him last on Easter Sunday, 1945, a few days before his death on April 12. … He looked pretty low. I said, “I know what your ambition is, and you are not going to realize it unless you do what I know you should do and know you won’t do—take 90 solid days off.” He was silent. “We’ll win the war without you,” I said. “Nothing can stop that. But we’re going to need you much more after that. I know you won’t do it, but you’re on your own. Good luck.” After a moment, he spoke quietly. “If I could only gain some weight,” he said. To me, those were his last words.⁷

O’Connor intuitively noted a “faraway look in his eyes” as he expressed it later.

On the evening of April 12, O’Connor, with scores of other journalists and news commentators, addressed the nation in a memorial broadcast over four radio networks, to mourn Roosevelt’s passing. He reminisced about the campaign to end polio that FDR and he had initiated 20 years earlier at Warm Springs. At precisely 9:27:25 pm, O’Connor went on the air before the nation; he said:

Today, in President Roosevelt’s death, the world lost its greatest human asset. The entire universe had its attention focused upon his leadership to lead it out of the wilderness of sorrow, onto the plains of at least some happiness. … He died at Warm Springs, Georgia, and I’m certain that if he’d had his choice he would have had it happen just that way. He loved Warm Springs, Georgia. There, twenty years ago, we started that great fight against infantile paralysis in which he was so interested. He was particularly interested in that fight—the fight to do good for the rest of humanity, to do good for those who need help and to bring some relief from their suffering.⁸

General George Marshall, Archbishop Francis Spellman, journalist William Shirer, and others touched on the many attributes of Roosevelt’s greatness. Shirer reminded the radio audience that “Americans cannot forget, although they did not always realize, that it was their President who was considered by Hitler as the greatest obstacle to his evil ambitions.” He talked of his recent experience in liberated France and the bond of personal friendship that so many millions had commonly felt toward FDR: “When they were liberated last summer, they felt somehow grateful to the President personally, but that was not all. Somehow, too, he represented to them the great hope of achieving lasting peace on this sorry planet.”⁹ In France, Albert Camus wrote in the resistance journal Combat:

Roosevelt seemed to us the exemplary American. … To be sure, we could not approve of all his policies. But whose policies can always be approved? His, at least, never bore the marks of greed or hatred. To the idealism that America has shown also has a place in reality he brought grandeur and efficiency. … When one man succeeds to this degree, everyone succeeds. … The greatest praise one can offer him is to say that he knew the value of life.¹⁰

The themes of friendship, goodwill, and moral rectitude echoed time and again. Albert Einstein opined, “For all people of good will Roosevelt’s death will be felt like that of an old and dear friend.”¹¹ Isaiah Berlin would reminisce much later, “his moral authority … had no parallel.”¹² Soon after a national period of mourning and Roosevelt’s interment at Hyde Park, O’Connor placed a simple, front-page tribute to the late President in the National Foundation News that concluded, “I can see that kindly face saying to every one of us, ‘Go ahead—keep up the fight—keep going.’ ”¹³

There was no question but to keep going: the March of Dimes was well afloat, though there were rough seas just ahead. Some wondered whether it would flounder and sink now that it was bereft of its founder. O’Connor, above all, ensured that never happened. The spirit and vitality of Roosevelt was evoked at every turn to advance the polio mission. On some occasions, O’Connor portrayed FDR’s single overriding quest as for a brotherhood of man, and he opposed these humanitarian ideals to the presence of “Hitlerism” still lurking in the world.¹⁴ And, as attorney for the Roosevelt family, O’Connor was also ironically bound to restrain NFIP chapters from engaging in fund-raising appeals in the name of the late President himself.¹⁵ Absent the founding father, O’Connor wrote to President Harry S. Truman in November, “For the first time in 13 years, the [March of Dimes] will get under way without the living presence of the man who mobilized the American people for war against that disease and who, during his lifetime, symbolized that fight.”¹⁶ Truman’s endorsement naturally followed: “There can be no slow-down in the fight against disease.” This pronouncement was tailor-made for the NFIP, cast as it was in the Rooseveltian framework of freedom from all disease, not only polio. The 1946 March of Dimes proliferated with references to the late President, radio spots repeatedly excerpted Roosevelt’s speeches, and the campaign bulletin boldly asserted, “This war is not yet won.”

The most enduring and tangible public symbol of FDR’s intrinsic connection to the March of Dimes was the creation of the Roosevelt dime in 1946. Appropriately, the idea for the dime originated with several teenagers of a polio club who had strong ties to an NFIP chapter, not in Georgia, but in Virginia. Many of President Roosevelt’s admirers were children with polio, and a substantial number were recovering in hospitals or aftercare centers. One of these was the DePaul Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia originally founded as the Hospital of St. Vincent de Paul in 1856, the oldest Catholic public hospital in Virginia, known today as the Bon Secours DePaul Medical Center. In 1944, in the grip of a polio epidemic that was the second largest in America to that time, the DePaul Hospital was overburdened with paralytic children needing long-term care. The Norfolk Hospital Association chapter of the NFIP had been established in 1940 to assist with polio relief, helping to ease the burden of care with services to children and families hit by polio. The De Paul Polio Club, which consisted of polio patients all under the age of 18, was organized in 1945.

The genesis of the club was typical of the time and the setting: Rosalie B. Simmons, Executive Secretary of the Norfolk Hospital Association, overheard a boy complain of boredom after days in recuperation, and she conceived the idea of stimulating the children’s recovery by forming a social activities club. The club had two purposes: to create meaningful activities for children confined to their beds all day and to help support the March of Dimes through creative activities. Every child in the ward, whether having polio or not, was enrolled in the club, and they elected their officers and drew up a constitution and by-laws. The group conducted weekly meetings, planned social entertainments, and organized March of Dimes drives. It became so successfully prominent in the hospital that two of the club’s “charter members” traveled to Richmond to organize clubs at the Richmond Medical College Hospital. The officers elected were all teens under 18 years of age: Doris Bryan, President; Richard Galloway, Vice President; Joyce Drake, Treasurer; and Richard Absalom, Secretary. Joe Brown’s Radio Gang, a Norfolk-based radio program for children, often provided live entertainment, and the youngsters were gently guided by parental chaperones into projects that blended competition and charity. One novel project sparked local publicity: the children fashioned little toy Scottie dogs from woolen yarn to support the March of Dimes. Eight of these woolen dogs, modeled after Fala, FDR’s famous Scottish Terrier, arrived on a makeshift race course in the display window of Rice’s Department Store in downtown Norfolk as a March of Dimes campaign contest. Patrons of the store placed bets on the eight numbered dogs, advancing them along a makeshift race track in the store window. First reported in the Norfolk Pilot, the “dog derby” was picked up by the Associated Press as a syndicated story, and the children were thrilled with the attention.

As the club’s activities continued through the winter of 1945, news of Allied advances in Europe filtered in to the contained world of this tiny polio community. The death of President Roosevelt on April 12 reverberated as a shock to the world, and its impact was felt in the DePaul Polio Club as well. At a regular meeting the club members agreed that a dime with FDR’s likeness would be a perfect tribute to the disabled president who founded the March of Dimes, and they passed a resolution to propose the plan to their congressman. Within the month, the club’s leaders had not only reached out to Virginia’s congressional representative Ralph H. Daughton with their idea, but followed up to establish the club’s precedence in originating the idea in the first place, suspecting and hoping that the dime would prove significant in the continuing aura of FDR’s wartime polio leadership. On November 26, Rep. Daughton introduced a bill (HR 4790) “to provide for the coinage of 10-cent pieces bearing the likeness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” and he acknowledged the role of the DePaul Polio Club and its affiliation with the Norfolk Hospital Association chapter of the NFIP. Congress acted quickly, and the first FDR dime was minted in time for release on the anniversary of FDR’s birthday, January 30, 1946. It replaced the Winged Liberty Head dime, also known as the Mercury dime, which had been in circulation since 1916. The dime was designed by John R. Sinnock though some contend that Sinnock adapted his design from the artwork of African-American sculptor Selma Hortense Burke. The National Foundation News noted the story with a photograph of the four officers of the DePaul Polio Club, and Doris Bryan and Richard Absalom signed and presented an official membership card to Basil O’Connor, making him a honorary member in good standing. The first Roosevelt dimes entered circulation in 1946 and have since been widely recognized as commemorating FDR’s relationship to the March of Dimes.¹⁷

After Roosevelt’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt asked O’Connor to organize the Roosevelt National Memorial committee to consider the creation of a permanent national memorial to FDR. He accepted the responsibility as temporary chairman of the committee but stepped down soon afterward with the apology that Roosevelt would have preferred him to focus his efforts on the NFIP, Georgia Warm Springs Foundation (GWSF), and the Red Cross.¹⁸ Perhaps he was also thinking of Roosevelt’s intense dislike of the word “memorial” and his instructions for the simple inscription on a plain block of marble about the size of his White House desk, which stands today at the National Archives in his memory. Over the summer, the committee surveyed suggestions for a memorial to the late President, canvassing the public and deliberating on ideas from declaring a national holiday to creating a monument along the lines of the Washington and Lincoln monuments. O’Connor was gratified with the many suggestions that keeping the March of Dimes alive was memorial enough since that was his own overriding personal priority. Variety echoed this sentiment with a long article that “[Showbiz] Leaders Would Continue ‘March of Dimes’ as FDR Memorial,” a half-promise that would not materialize.¹⁹ As an executor of FDR’s estate, competing duties beckoned for O’Connor. He contacted Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, pressing him to make provisions for the maintenance of FDR’s Hyde Park estate and to ensure Eleanor Roosevelt’s unrestricted access. Accordingly, Ickes sent draft legislation to both houses of Congress “to protect the Roosevelt property during nonoccupancy by the life tenants.”²⁰ FDR had drafted explicit instructions to O’Connor about the preservation (or destruction) of personal and family papers. O’Connor, of course, had already positioned himself as a loyal guardian of this documentary heritage. In 1947, he even denied access to Roosevelt’s papers to Sen. Owen Brewster, head of a Senate War Investigating Committee scrutinizing military contracts to Howard Hughes. Brewster threatened to subpoena the records; O’Connor, as executor, bluntly refused him.²¹

In the summertime doldrums of Warm Springs on August 24, 1945, O’Connor presided at a ceremony to commemorate the first day of issue of the “Little White House” postage stamp, the first of several stamps to honor Roosevelt. O’Connor’s reminiscence, Nothing Could Conquer Him, concluded, “On a beautiful Easter Sunday morning, 12 days before he died, I said goodbye to him for the last time. Here in the shadow of approaching death he was still smiling—and he left that smile here for us—nothing could conquer him!” The community of polio survivors, physiotherapists, and local folk at Warm Springs would become accustomed to O’Connor’s hagiographical delineation of FDR, and there is a strong sense that he was unconsciously reaching toward a comparison with the Savior in recalling the final Easter Sunday meeting and the immortal smile of the Founder impelling the flock toward good deeds. But if O’Connor was a disciple given to speaking of Roosevelt with a messianic tinge, he was not Saint Paul—he was a practical, hard-headed, New Deal Democrat with outsized responsibilities. Although he felt the need to decline full-time chairmanship of the National Roosevelt Memorial Committee, he placed his full support behind another memorial committee. The State of Georgia created the Franklin D. Roosevelt Warm Springs Memorial Commission in 1946 to establish the Little White House as a permanent memorial to Roosevelt; Basil O’Connor was made Honorary Chairman and remained so until his death in 1972. The language of the act creating the commission also indulged in the hagiographical excesses of the day:

Whereas, Warm Springs, his Georgia home, is inextricably woven with the life history of the immortal Franklin D. Roosevelt; whereas it was here he found health and contentment; it was here he rebuilt a shattered life which made it possible for him to write his name forever on the pages of history, as well as on the hearts of all mankind as the greatest humanitarian the world has ever seen; whereas during the days of the gravest crisis of all ages it was here he made so many decisions of world shaking importance, decisions which resulted in the victory which saved civilization from destruction; and whereas, when the final summons came it found him here at The Little White House—it is but a fitting duty that the State of Georgia should perpetuate the memory of this great man with a suitable memorial.²²

Roosevelt had bequeathed the Little White House and its contents, as well as his nearby farm, to the NFIP; O’Connor, in turn, deeded the property to the Commission and the state of Georgia for the memorial. The Little White House, erected and inhabited by FDR since 1932, consequently reopened for visitors on October 28, 1948 although it had been an unofficial tourist attraction since Roosevelt’s death. Prior to opening, the GWSF celebrated its 20th anniversary on June 25, 1947 with speeches by O’Connor, former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and Georgia’s Governor Melvin Thompson. Morris Fishbein advised O’Connor to use “every available outlet” to publicize the event, including a dramatization of FDR’s illness and “his determination to establish the Foundation.”²³ In 1951, with a March of Dimes wishing well installed conspicuously on the grounds to collect donations, a memorial service was held at its chapel on April 12. O’Connor’s speech, “The Glory in the Limited Life,” invoked Roosevelt the disabled Commander-in-Chief as a role model for courageous leadership. O’Connor remained in charge of GWSF through the 1950s and 1960s though his role as president of the NFIP overshadowed all of his other public positions after he left the American Red Cross in 1949.

His transition from the Red Cross to concentrate solely on the NFIP coincided with the largest American polio epidemic yet experienced: 42,375 paralytic cases in 1949. The NFIP ramped up an unexpected but necessary Emergency March of Dimes in August to attempt to replenish funds depleted by a continuing load of aftercare exacerbated beyond capacity by a new epidemic. The Foundation arranged a benefit concert in memory of FDR on his birthday anniversary the following year, and O’Connor’s message on this occasion was sobering: though the NFIP had aided 80% of those affected in the recent epidemic it faced “an empty till.” The concert was a magnificent event, featuring Jean Morel conducting the Julliard Orchestra, with Marjorie Lawrence and Victor Borge as soloists and special guest Basil Rathbone who read a message of dedication from former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who wrote knowingly of Roosevelt’s disability: “His physical affliction lay heavily upon him. It was a marvel that he bore up against it through all the years of Party controversy in his own country and through the years of world storm. As I said to the House of Commons, not one man in ten millions, stricken and crippled as he was, would have attempted to plunge into a life of physical and mental exertion, of hard and ceaseless political strife. Not one in a generation would have succeeded in becoming undisputed master of the vast and tragic scene.” This profile echoed O’Connor’s triumphal perspective of Nothing Could Conquer Him to continue to rely on Roosevelt’s accomplishments to empower the March of Dimes. While the January March of Dimes campaigns of 1950 and 1951 seemed successful, O’Connor admitted again at a subsequent memorial concert for FDR in 1952 that the NFIP was $5 million in debt. Why the shortfall?

During its first 20 years, the Foundation assisted over 335,000 individuals with polio in a patient aid program that covered medical, hospital, and rehabilitation expenses. Early on, in 1942, the success of the March of Dimes was such that its revenue was greater than could be spent for research alone at that time. With Warm Springs in mind, O’Connor and the NFIP thus decided to attempt a patient aid program by allotting funds to chapters for patient aid at the local level. The basic formula for the allocation of funds provided that the local chapter kept 50% of the net proceeds of each annual March of Dimes campaign (after expenses) and sent 50% of the net to the national headquarters. This 50/50 formula was maintained through the early 1950s. With the 1949 epidemic and afterward, relief efforts combined with the cost of patient aid cases that carried over, sometimes for years, became so expensive that pooled funds at the national level were exhausted. The NFIP resorted to the aforementioned summertime emergency campaigns—the Emergency March of Dimes—to replace depleted funds in 1949 and 1954 (one was planned but called off in 1950). In this situation, with polio cases ever mounting and the Salk vaccine in development, the Foundation strongly preferred to focus on a preventative that would be more cost-effective than supporting increasing numbers of polio patients directly. By the time of the Salk polio vaccine field trial in 1954, the NFIP changed the allocation to 37.5% (chapter)/62.5% (national), which was maintained after the Salk vaccine was licensed through the period of mass vaccination programs through 1958. For a 20-year period beginning in 1942, the NFIP used this calculation to provide direct financial assistance. Individuals and families affected by polio could apply to local March of Dimes chapters for assistance, but in many cases the highly motivated chapter staff sought out polio victims when an epidemic struck. Such proactive charity was appreciated by many as the consequence of FDR’s humanitarian wisdom, not only by individuals and families but by entire communities. This, in turn, boosted the prestige of the NFIP enormously and stimulated legions of volunteers to join the fight against polio for the March of Dimes.

In the early 1940s, chapters often had the authority, provided the funds were available, to pay the entire cost of an individual’s medical and hospital care for polio, regardless of a family’s ability to pay. By 1947, with rising hospital costs and the soaring number of polio cases, the rationale was changed to a need-basis only. The Foundation began then to cover polio expenses after a family’s resources and health insurance coverage were applied. Covered polio expenses included payment for physician services, inpatient and outpatient hospital costs, the transport of polio patients (local transport to hospitals and the Military Air Transport Service, or MATS, organized through the US Air Force), home care (including nursing care), orthopedic devices, and home medical equipment. Rehabilitation expenses often involved long-term home care and carried over from year to year beyond the addition of new cases. The NFIP philosophy on patient care (1948) was: “To provide assistance to every polio victim to enable him to receive the best available medical care without a substantial reduction in his standard of living.” The Foundation claimed that it was “the only voluntary health agency in the US which conducts a nationwide program of financial assistance to patients in meeting the costs of care of a single disease.” By 1956, the March of Dimes had spent $231,000,000 to help 311,000 polio patients meet the cost of their care. The polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, understood almost universally as an essential preventative, was appreciated by O’Connor and the NFIP in light of this burgeoning case load and the long-standing commitment to aid individuals. These numbers, added to the ubiquitous March of Dimes publicity which had entered American pop culture in the form of poster children and celebrity endorsements, ensured the popularity of the Foundation well after its transition to birth defects prevention in 1958.

To fund this program was an enormous charge. Basil O’Connor is credited for having raised “more publicity-contributed money” than any individual in the 20th century, and the totals are impressive: $3,364,000 for GWSF (1934–37); $203,000,000 for the NFIP (1938–51); and $569,790,000 for the Red Cross (1945–49).²⁴ In achieving these staggering totals, O’Connor adhered adamantly to the principle that fund-raising for a single cause was more effective than “federated fund-raising” by an umbrella organization. His position on this was formulated during the birthday balls and early March of Dimes campaigns with competing pressure from community welfare chests and streamlined payroll deduction plans of some labor unions that clashed with the independence of the March of Dimes. He resented the actions of watchdog organizations such as the National Information Bureau that omitted the NFIP entirely from its “Giver’s Guide” in 1945, falsely suggesting that it might be ineffective, dishonest, or poorly organized. He had spoken out forcefully against the Gunn-Platt report on Voluntary Health Agencies in 1945 which favored consolidating and pooling public fund-raising campaigns, and his stance opposing joint solicitations or united funds supported the self-determination of NFIP fund-raising through the March of Dimes from its earliest years. To the idea that the National Health Council might be a springboard to the creation of a giant health trust he wrote, “I’m still not totally sold on the practicality of this kind of an organization. To be practical I think it must control our activities to some extent. Control to some extent can lead to total control.”²⁵ Other independent public health organizations had begun to emulate the model of the NFIP, adding to the growing complexities of the fund-raising environment. O’Connor even sought out a consultant for advice on the federated fund-raising headache. In 1949, the NFIP retained the firm of Robert Keith Leavitt of Scarsdale, New York for studies of independent versus federated fund-raising, and O’Connor mailed out Leavitt’s book, Common Sense about Fund Raising, as a gift of enlightened propaganda to all and sundry to proselytize his position. His antagonism toward joint fund-raising was firmly rooted in his original conception of the March of Dimes as a voluntary organization based on the ideal of participatory democracy for a single cause. In his view, any united appeal weakened the impulse of volunteering for a mission in which one truly believed. Very often, the inefficiencies of federated fund-raising (and not the March of Dimes or its mission) were the sole subject of his speeches before service, religious, and community organizations as the competitive threat of federated fund-raising simmered through the early 1950s in the financially precarious period of the most devastating epidemics. For the lay public the Foundation even produced a primer in the form of a brochure explaining its position: “A Separate March of Dimes Is the Best Way to Lick Polio.”

In this context, it is important to recall the direct aid to communities besides personal aid that might have been beyond the scope of personal appreciation by individual recipients. From the outset the NFIP had organized systematic epidemic relief in concert with public health authorities involving the dispatch of physicians, nurses, and epidemiologists to affected areas, with medical equipment and supplies, to cope with local polio epidemics. It had supported the helping professions intrinsically involved with aftercare: nursing, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. Above all, NFIP research grants covered not only research on polio but also on virology and basic science and resulted in funding the work of five Nobel Prize–winning scientists in the 1950s: John Enders, Frederick Robbins, Thomas Weller, Max Delbruck, and James Watson. The accomplishments of these (and other) Nobel Prize winners under NFIP grants have been reviewed in ample detail elsewhere. To facilitate communications among scientists and to pool the developing knowledge about polio as rapidly as possible, O’Connor also established the International Poliomyelitis Congress, which held international conferences on polio at 3-year intervals beginning in 1948. Aided by grants from the NFIP, the Congress went on to hold international conferences on birth defects after the NFIP changed its mission in 1958. O’Connor’s international perspective on disease prevention, undoubtedly influenced by his work with the Red Cross, is fully evident in the methodical planning of the coordination of scientific knowledge about polio to stimulate further a holistic attack on polio in the most comprehensive Euro-American arena. The congresses also exposed Basil O’Connor’s lavish hospitality to an even wider renown, for the affairs, at least initially, involved scientific presentation mixed with both high ceremony and organized socializing after-hours by conference attendees and their spouses, symbolic gifts (engraved coasters and presentation medals for foreign delegates), and associated cultural education. The NFIP scheduled the first conferences in New York City (1948); Copenhagen, Denmark (1951); and Rome, Italy (1954) in the context of the developing drive by NFIP-funded researchers to reach the ultimate solution to polio through an effective vaccine. This came in 1954 with the killed-virus polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh.²⁶

The 1954 field trial to test the effectiveness of the Salk polio vaccine has been touted as the largest peacetime mobilization of volunteers in American history. It was an unprecedented clinical trial conducted in a human population, and surely one never to be repeated again in a human population at the direction of a private nonprofit organization. With the Salk field trial, the work of the NFIP culminated after 16 years of intensive efforts in funding research to find a means to eradicate polio. Initiated, organized, and funded by the NFIP, the field trial was guided and evaluated by the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center at the University of Michigan established at the request of the NFIP as an impartial, independent organization. The trial involved the participation of more than 1,800,000 schoolchildren, and it confirmed the effectiveness of a vaccine that ultimately reduced the incidence of polio by 96% when put in use from 1955 to 1961. On April 12, 1955 Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr., Director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center, issued a public announcement at the University of Michigan that the Salk vaccine was “safe, effective, and potent.” The announcement generated front-page news headlines in the United States and around the world, with massive and spontaneous public jubilation that the vaccine would prove to be a preventative for infectious poliomyelitis. On the same day, Oveta Culp Hobby, US Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, licensed six manufacturers to produce the Salk vaccine for general use. What is overlooked and deserving future study is the subsequent effort by the NFIP simply to get all Americans vaccinated. From its advocacy for the Poliomyelitis Vaccination Assistance Act (PL 84–377) before Congress in 1955 to authorize $30 million for grants-in-aid to the states for purchase of vaccine to the many local vaccination clinics and “polio prevention days” in the years up to the licensing of the Sabin vaccine in 1962, NFIP staff patiently endured a second battle against political snarls, public apathy, and in some cases the resurgence of polio. The NFIP public education campaign to stop polio with vaccine continued unabated from the licensing of the Salk vaccine through the time that the Foundation prepared for its new mission. As with Hollywood support during the war, the top celebrities of the day stepped up to the plate to urge the public to get vaccinated; these included Elvis Presley (“You Can’t Rock ‘n Roll with Polio”) and Marilyn Monroe (“Get Your Polio Shots Now and Play Safe”).

The field trial occurred at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, just after the Korean conflict, in the mire of McCarthy-era political paranoia, and during the same year that saw the US Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education that began the tortuous path to the desegregation of public schools. To the credit of the NFIP and its many volunteer collaborators, the field trial ensured the inclusion of African-American children as well as those of other races and ethnicities, abetting the recent Supreme Court decision to remove the barriers of race in the burgeoning movement toward civil rights. Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and later to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court himself, supported the NFIP and its vaccination message in a photo opportunity receiving his polio shot (along with his family) in 1957. The vociferous publicity over the benefit of Jonas Salk’s vaccine counteracted, to some small degree, the fearsome image of postwar science with its hydrogen bombs and apocalyptic scenarios. The field trial announcement occurred, to the day, on the 10th anniversary of FDR’s death, and some accused O’Connor of grandstanding, using the anniversary as a political symbol. O’Connor denied that the date was deliberately selected to coincide with this anniversary (and it was not), but the significance of the date in bringing FDR again to the forefront was lost on no one. The letters of gratitude and congratulations that poured into Jonas Salk after the announcement, along with a mountain of unsolicited gifts, ranged from the monumental to the absurd. O’Connor, too, received a flood of private congratulations, largely letters from friends and associates who recalled FDR’s personal struggle to defeat polio. One suggested that April 12 be named a national holiday, and others chastised the news media for its lapses in forgetting to mention FDR, lamenting that “there was no adequate statement or showing of feeling for the founder of the National Foundation” or his “sustained leadership” in the fight to defeat polio. William Hassett complimented O’Connor “how fitting it was to make it on the tenth anniversary” of FDR’s passing, commenting wistfully, “The circle of friends who knew and loved FDR as you did, is drawing in. That is another reason why I cherish your friendship the more as the years pass.” Everett Clinchy, recently of the National Conference of Christians and Jews but now of the World Brotherhood in the 1950s, made this personal appeal to Doc: “Now you should turn your machinery to developing a vaccine against bigotry in the world. We’d love to have your help.” A former Red Cross associate admitted, “I will never forget what a tough guy you sometimes were to work with, but also I will never forget the energy, and effort, and personal devotion you have given to bettering the welfare of so much of our population.” “A message from the American Cancer Society was definitive: ‘This country will have been a better place because you have lived.’”

The history of the vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin as an American success story has been revisited from several different perspectives, but in the thick of the organized fight to end polio, Basil O’Connor’s own participation was made frighteningly personal: his own family was stricken by polio. O’Connor’s daughter, Bettyann Culver, contracted polio in 1950, famously reporting to her father, “Daddy, I’ve gotten some of your disease.” O’Connor elaborated on her experience in a Look Magazine article that featured a photo of Bettyann with her parents and FDR (supported by a cane) in 1931.²⁷ O’Connor’s nephew, Dr. Harrison O’Connor, had also been stricken, and recovered, from the disease. Bettyann spent a period of convalescence at Warm Springs under the care of Dr. Robert Bennett. By this time, O’Connor was as familiar with polio as one might conceivably be, and this personal tragedy simply augmented his determination to see its elimination. When Walter Winchell had the audacity to suggest on national radio just prior to the field trial that the Salk vaccine was contaminated with poliovirus, O’Connor went apoplectic that a journalist who built his reputation on gossip and sensationalism might foil the NFIP’s careful planning. He was so incensed that he rebutted Winchell on national television, speaking not only as the chief of the NFIP but as a parent to parents in order to allay fears that the Salk vaccine would be anything but helpful. He surely smiled at the suggestion offered in one of the congratulatory letters received after the field trial announcement that he should “send Walter Winchell a nice fat crow.”²⁸ O’Connor was also profiled in Good Housekeeping magazine in July 1953 in an article by Alice Beaton, “A Friend, and Partner.” His daughter’s experience with polio received slight attention in favor of portraying the now famous partnership that had launched the fight against polio: Roosevelt and O’Connor. Beaton portrayed O’Connor a hard-headed businessman rather than a sentimental humanitarian, quoting him saying, “Polio is a phase of the nation’s business—and for adequate fund raising to provide care and research, it required a business set-up that was nation-wide.”²⁹ Helen Hayes was also quoted, preferring to emphasize O’Connor’s life of volunteerism.

Turnley Walker’s memoir, Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story (1953) proved the first in a series of books and films that permitted a glimpse at the personal hardship of FDR’s polio disability and his association with Basil O’Connor. Walker’s own convalescence at Warm Springs stimulated an intense admiration for its founder, and O’Connor praised Walker’s book as “the first detailed history of the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.”³⁰ This was not surprising since not only O’Connor but his Dartmouth friend Henry Urion along with Grace Tully, Dorothy Ducas, Margaret Suckley, and Frances Perkins advised Walker in his research. In a foreword, Eleanor Roosevelt stressed that the book “caught the feeling of the Warm Springs community.” In an unpublished memoir, “Polio Diary,” Walker described the claustrophobia of lying in bed at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan just as the cornerstone for the United Nations is set into place, fantasizing a visit from President Truman. He wistfully reflects, “There used to be a President who knew something about Polio, but he is no longer with us.” Walker’s wife then appears with a letter that gives them both hope for recovery and for the future:

She reads it to you, and gratefulness at what it says made you weep together. There is an organization called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis … Oh yes, you had heard of it … something called the March of Dimes to which you gave a few dollars every year … but the important aspects of it have escaped your attention.

The letter says that you are not to worry if you do not have the money to pay for your treatments. The letter says that the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis will stand behind you, taking care of all your medical and hospital expenses if need be, until you are able to go to work again.

Until you are able to work again, the letter says. It lets you know that you were not lost forever, but only out of circulation for a while because of a dreadful accident. … After she is gone, you can still see her smiling, and you see that the letter means precisely what it says. This Foundation has suddenly become a personal and powerful friend of yours.

Someday, you decide, the full story of the Foundation’s work will be told so truly and so clearly that knowledge of it will join the traditions of the country, which are passed on in simple language from one generation to the next. Now you think of the personal kindnesses of the Foundation people you have met.

And, with these people you think of a man as yet unknown to you, the close friend of President Roosevelt in whose name the Foundation was begun, the man who made secondary a distinguished personal career, to encompass with his mind and heart the whole fight against this terrible disease—Basil O’Connor, who directs the entire activity, without thought of recompense, personalizing the amazing generosity of the organization.³¹

The cloying emotionalism of Walker’s characterization seems passé today, but O’Connor gladly suffered even such maudlin adulation as this whenever his name was conjoined to Roosevelt’s. When news broke in October 1953 that a polio vaccine was in development, Walker wrote promptly to his agent that “Basil O’Connor is the real hero of this accomplishment. He is the man who took the largely emotional concept of FDR and shaped it into the most remarkable, and effective, organization of its kind in the history of the world.”³² But what exactly was the “emotional concept of FDR”? In building the NFIP, O’Connor had parlayed the story of a fallen aristocrat’s rise from polio paralysis to become the catalytic force behind a voluntary organization, itself a mirror of democracy. In so doing he united faith in and of ordinary people (volunteers) to the noble aspirations of progress in medical science (knowledge) via a simple common denominator of exchange (the dime). As myth-maker, O’Connor translated the image of Roosevelt’s struggle into identification with a cause in which all of humankind would be beneficiary. The NFIP radically transposed the story of Roosevelt’s disability into the visual imagery of the poster child as a symbol of hope and an appeal for funds: Walker recognized this implicitly as an instance of emotional branding, a strategy implicit in NFIP publicity that had proven enormously successful. Following the release of his book, Walker appealed to O’Connor to endorse retrospective treatments of his personal story. He even contemplated a movie version of Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story casting O’Connor as the central character and despite the Roosevelt family’s commitment as advisors for a concurrent movie production of Dore Schary Sunrise Over Campobello. In that film, Louis Howe took center stage as FDR’s loyal lieutenant, and Greer Garson, whose March of Dimes appeal in The Miracle of Hickory (1944) was a special moment in NFIP filmmaking, played Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1964, Walker wrote again to O’Connor to pitch a concept for a book that would tell the story of the Foundation’s birth defects mission as one analogous to polio. O’Connor looked favorably on the movie idea (though nothing came of it), but his reaction to the proposed book was lost in his own workaholic lifestyle: he was simply too busy.

As a witness to decisions of world historical importance from the perspective of the White House and his own executive positions, O’Connor had a keen sense of the management of historiography (despite Dorothy Ducas’ claim that he was inept at “selling himself”). As Jonas Salk’s vaccine loomed as the answer to polio, O’Connor made plans to preserve the history of the NFIP in meticulous detail in hopeful anticipation of the vaccine triumph. Early in 1953, he retained Hackemann & Associates, a management consulting organization based in Madison, Wisconsin to direct a project documenting the history of the NFIP. Louis Hackemann, president of the firm, had researched a history of the Red Cross authorized by O’Connor; in his opinion, the field trial had been “a significant contribution to the social history of the world.”³³ With Hackemann, the NFIP established a temporary “Historical Division” of writers to produce a professional history of the Foundation. He and his assistant Ruth Walrad conducted interviews of the essential players associated with GWSF and NFIP, and their writers reviewed documents in the NFIP records center to produce the multivolume History of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1957. The team of writers included Christopher Lasch, who rose to prominence as a historian and social critic with his best-seller, The Culture of Narcissism (1979). The final document in this historical project was the compilation of a series of monographs on every phase of the work of the NFIP totaling almost 3,000 pages. NFIP Executive Director Raymond Barrows and Dorothy Ducas were liaisons to Hackemann for the duration of the project. Barrows and O’Connor expected that an “eminent historical writer” would be located to condense the massive document into a publishable form, but after a fruitless search a writer never materialized.³⁴

One of the researchers on the project was Adam Lunoe, an NFIP public relations staffer who had convalesced at Warm Springs and helped Turnley Walker with research on another book, Rise Up and Walk. Lunoe revealed to Barrows that in working with Walker, the two had “uncovered great quantities of documents” about O’Connor and Warm Springs. Walker had tape-recorded many interviews with people key to the polio story. Of the recordings then still in Walker’s possession, Lunoe estimated the extent of the interviews in excess of one million words, and he asked permission of Barrows to tap into this source by visiting Walker in California. He next sent a request to O’Connor himself: “This is to ask your permission for me to examine the F[ranklin]–B[asil] file housed in a closet in your office on the 30th floor. I understand that this file contains correspondence and other material between you and President Roosevelt through the years of your association, including basic material dealing with Warm Springs affairs as well as [the NFIP].”³⁵ Lunoe’s request fell on O’Connor’s utterly deaf ears, for the most revelatory communications between O’Connor and FDR were at stake, and Barrows took the matter up in a letter to Hackemann:

Mr. O’Connor was adamant about Lunoe’s [not] going into correspondence contained in his personal file from F.D.R. and others, also because of this I refused to make available to Adam another file of correspondence between F.D.R. and Mr. O’Connor on the belief, after inquiry, that these files do not have any specific bearing on the development of Warm Springs or the NFIP.³⁶

Hackemann tiptoed around this issue of access and confidentiality in the matter of O’Connor’s personal correspondence, confiding to Barrows that lay people underestimate the importance of source documents in writing history. He explained that O’Connor had once helped him pry loose a set of records from a Red Cross executive in writing the Red Cross history. O’Connor, on the other hand, was not about to reveal the intimacies of his privileged relationship with FDR, though Hackemann ultimately gained access to some portion of the O’Connor & Farber legal records as well as Walker’s sequestered documents. The latter included “the precious book owned by Warm Springs coverning [sic] the drive for funds for Georgia Hall” and a “scurrilous” account about FDR’s death.³⁷ The Historical Division had planned to interview the participants in the 1954 field trial, but this crucial episode failed to appear in the history. Hackemann tapped historian Philip Jordan of the University of Minnesota to convert the inelegant but overwhelming NFIP history into a marketable book, but O’Connor expressed skepticism since “Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. does not know [Jordan].”³⁸ Hackemann and O’Connor preferred Schlesinger himself (notable historians Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager, and Richard Shryock were also considered) but he was immersed in his own monumental study of the New Deal, The Age of Roosevelt (in which he pegged O’Connor as a “shrewd, salty Irishman”).³⁹ Hackemann & Associates completed the final draft of the History of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1957 to little fanfare, eclipsed by the reorientation of the NFIP toward its new birth defects mission. The study remains a monumental but unwieldy institutional history, one that never found a publisher, and both the “Franklin–Basil File” and the Turnley Walker “archive” remain unaccounted for.

Like many convalescents and physiotherapists who thrived in the environment that FDR had nurtured at Warm Springs, Basil O’Connor found more there than his life’s calling—he also found romance. After the death of his wife Elvira of coronary thrombosis in 1955, O’Connor married Hazel Stephens (nee Royall) on June 12, 1957. Born in Panama City, Florida in 1913, Hazel was a physical therapist and Director of Functional Physical Therapy at GWSF. She had joined the therapy center as Director of Recreation in 1943 and had coauthored the only known eyewitness account of Warm Springs on the day of Roosevelt’s death. Her writing was later published in The Georgia Historical Quarterly in 1991. O’Connor had developed an especially warm relationship with Hazel and had corresponded with her formally as early as 1953, awarding her a $1,500 “travelship” through the NFIP to attend the first congress of the World Confederation for Physical Therapy in New York.⁴⁰ In working together with O’Connor to improve physical therapy services at Warm Springs, Hazel had developed a cordial relationship with Jonas Salk, who served as best man at the O’Connor wedding in 1957. Edward R. Murrow interviewed the two newlyweds on his television program Person to Person later that year, and Hazel soon assumed an active role in the NFIP. Their marriage endured through to O’Connor’s death though it was fraught with the incessant demands of his commitment to the March of Dimes at a time of internal change. Hazel O’Connor also saw her husband through the tragedy of the early deaths of both his daughters; in 1961, Bettyann Culver succumbed to cancer; her sister Sheelagh died from an attack of pneumonia 5 years later. Hazel collaborated with Elaine Whitelaw to organize volunteer leaders for Mothers Marches and naturally stepped forward as “Mrs. Basil O’Connor”—a high-profile ambassador for the Foundation on formal occasions, such as the Second International Conference on Congenital Malformations in New York City in 1963. Hazel was awed by Doc’s perfectionism and tickled by his sense of humor, which admittedly was not evident to everyone. As his spouse, she interpreted his persona as bifurcated by tenderness and authoritarianism: “I don’t think he ever intended to frighten anybody, but no one would ever have been afraid of him if they had known him because he was the softest guy in the world actually, but he was a very sophisticated, honest, caring man.” In an interview in 1986, she revealed a story about Basil O’Connor’s compassionate qualities involving the rescue of two homeless waifs that few would ever expect to deduce from his standoffish superiority:

[W]hen he was at Dartmouth, one of his classmates for whom he had great respect became the individual who was responsible for Catholic Charities in New York City. In this position he came across these two boys who lived under the Brooklyn Bridge, and I think there were about eight or ten children, but these two and one other child were the only ones that didn’t have TB. Doc gave them jobs after school. Both boys, Dick and Bill Donovan, came to his law office every afternoon after school, and he trained them himself. They both stayed with him until they died—one with the law office and one was with the National Foundation [in charge of the mail room]. … I want you to know that that boy actually worshipped Doc. I think if Doc had told him to shoot me, he would have … he was so devoted to him. I remember him telling me how Doc had trained him. Little minute things were just as important as the great big things. The water in the carafe on his desk, every pencil sharpened, and a white carnation for his lapel.⁴¹

During the 1950s, O’Connor had warmed to a close and special relationship with Jonas Salk, a grantee of the NFIP. Today, such an intricate personal relationship between grantor and grantee might suggest a conflict of interest or at least a dangerous compromise to the ethical factors in grants administration. But this was not the case. Hazel O’Connor stated that “the relationship between the two bridged a time in Jonas’ life that might have been very difficult for him otherwise,” believing that her husband’s encouragement in the face of hostile criticism gave Dr. Salk a vital shot of confidence.⁴² Some have likened the O’Connor/Salk partnership to a “father–son” relationship, in which they shared the lofty ideals of science in the service of humanity later realized in the creation of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 1960. O’Connor was well versed in the humanities and always reserved the right to question science from the perspective of law and morality. He believed fully in the philosophical exploration of the value of science in civilization to achieve a better society. For O’Connor, the idea of the Salk Institute extended the goal of “freedom from disease” onto a new institution, and though there was a falling off in the warmth of their relationship after the Salk Institute was founded, their collaboration recapitulated in a small way the kind of partnership that O’Connor had achieved with Roosevelt in the days of building the center at Warm Springs.

The polio vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin under NFIP grants effectively ended the polio epidemics in the United States. Polio cases diminished to only a handful by the early 1960s, and complete eradication was announced in 1979. The NFIP memorialized the coming end of polio in 1958 by celebrating its 20th anniversary, unveiling a “Polio Hall of Fame” at Warm Springs with busts created by the sculptor Edmond Amateis. The busts represented the scientists whose research breakthroughs led directly to the understanding and defeat of polio; there were only two nonmedical honorees: FDR and Basil O’Connor. David Bodian, John Paul, Albert Sabin, Thomas Rivers, Jonas Salk, and others attended the ceremony. Eleanor Roosevelt was there to represent her deceased husband. But with the public celebration of the defeat of polio, the NFIP had also reached a turning point: on July 22, 1958 O’Connor held a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria to announce the launch of an “Expanded Program” against disease, specifically arthritis, birth defects, and virus diseases. Heralding a vision that the NFIP might become a “flexible force” in the field of public health, the mission change occurred at a time of declining revenue, and institutional difficulties ensued as March of Dimes volunteers balked or failed to understand the necessity for change. O’Connor, Joseph Nee, Charles Massey, and their staffs began to address the massive organizational change with intensive reeducation into a completely different mission. The mission transformation had actually been years in the making, and O’Connor had placed his long-time associate from the Red Cross, Melvin Glasser, in charge of spearheading the change in 1953. The studies undertaken by Glasser included two comprehensive public opinion surveys by the American Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Poll) and the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University (see Chapter 1: Introduction: The March of Dimes and Historiography). Both surveys validated the recognition of “March of Dimes” as a brand with excellent name recognition and integrity, helping to provide a framework for decisions about the new mission. In this process, O’Connor asked George Gallup personally to focus on two questions: “What does Roosevelt mean to you?” and “What … does Roosevelt stand for?” Most respondents answered that he was a “friend of the poor,” and about 14% described him as “a leader in the fight against infantile paralysis.”⁴³ While these survey questions may have satisfied O’Connor’s undying curiosity about the public perception of the NFIP founder more than a decade after his death, it also illustrated that such questions were becoming increasingly irrelevant.

In 1957, the New York Academy of Sciences elected O’Connor as a “gold member” for his “outstanding scientific achievement and promotion of science.” The following year he received the Albert Lasker Scientific Award of the American Public Health Association, the first layperson to do so. He held a conspicuous position as President of the National Health Council during 1957–58, and with the defeat of polio and transformation of the March of Dimes he became something of an elder statesman in the field of public health. Ever the speech-maker, though never a charismatic speaker, O’Connor quietly assumed this role to weigh in on subjects beyond the fields of medicine and public health. He extolled the importance of education in “The Future of Leadership,” claiming that his early education led him to the two key friendships of his life: with FDR and Jonas Salk. Upon receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Roosevelt University (Chicago, IL) in 1964 he recapitulated this theme in “The Heightened Requirements of Leadership.”⁴⁴ At his most irascible, he lectured March of Dimes staffers in pre-campaign meetings on “Government by Elite Vigilantes,” lamenting a new era of watchdog agencies like the National Information Bureau that he believed set intrusive standards in evaluating nonprofit foundations. O’Connor characterized the development of oversight agencies as a threat by “small pressure groups” to the “American way of life” and in particular questioned the role of the Rockefeller Foundation as the “keeper of the conscience” of organizations like the March of Dimes. O’Connor was wont to rail against conformity, regimentation, and the domination of bureaucracy, popular targets that became more popular as the turmoil of the 1960s escalated. As the influence of governmental agencies such as the National Institutes of Health became more pervasive, O’Connor tended to castigate the NIH as an example of a “perilous partnership” between science and government, an insidious development leading the bureaucratic drift away from volunteerism. His pronouncements made headlines and generated controversy, for he never withheld criticism when he felt it was deserved.

O’Connor continued to guard the Roosevelt legacy within the March of Dimes and without. When the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Foundation was established in 1959, O’Connor complained to its chairman General Omar Bradley about its appropriating the image of the Roosevelt dime in an AFL-CIO fund-raising advertisement for cancer. Coveting his brand and pointing out the irony of using a “dime” for labor’s “march” against cancer O’Connor insisted, “The words ‘March of Dimes’ have been used by [the NFIP] for at least 20 years … identified by the public with The National Foundation. … At the very worst, I am afraid your fine organization might be subjected to the criticism that it is deliberately attempting to infringe on a campaign whose genesis is historically known and whose theme has become a household word.” Neither was he reluctant to suggest that Mrs. Roosevelt herself might experience embarrassment that the March of Dimes would be harmed by this “infringement.”⁴⁵ O’Connor chaired the FDR Memorial Committee for the Benefit of the NFIP to celebrate FDR’s birthday in 1957 with a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria and a 60-minute dramatic tribute to FDR.⁴⁶ Ten years later, this kind of tribute reached its last gasp when the March of Dimes created the Franklin D. Roosevelt Award. For 3 years, the award was presented to honor a person who “most exemplifies the ideals of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The award recipients were President Lyndon Johnson (1967), Ambassador Averell Harriman (1968), and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey (1969), which reveals more about O’Connor’s alignment with the Democratic Party than the merits of the individuals selected. After a year’s hiatus, I. W. Abel, President of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), was the intended recipient in 1971, but the award was canceled and collapsed into obscurity.⁴⁷

Basil O’Connor led the March of Dimes into a new era, with a new mission that brought genetics and perinatology into sharp focus to penetrate the mysteries of birth defects, yet he grew increasingly out of touch with the encompassing political realities of the 1960s. One symptom of his detachment was a public controversy with Albert Sabin that unraveled in the press over the licensing of the Sabin polio vaccine; another was the revelation that he had begun to draw a salary from the Foundation that cast unneeded and unwarranted suspicions about his own decades of volunteering. Yet another was his response to a hostage situation at the Tuskegee Institute in 1968. O’Connor had been the Chairman of the Board of the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) from 1946, forging ties with the black community through his friendship with Tuskegee President Luther Foster and through the outreach of the African-American civil rights leader Charles Bynum for the March of Dimes. O’Connor’s commitment to financing nursing education and polio-related programs at Tuskegee remained strong for over two decades, and since his days with the National Conference of Christians and Jews he periodically addressed civil rights issues very pointedly, as in his speech After Desegregation, What? On this occasion, in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he declined to cancel a board meeting at Tuskegee despite the turmoil that racked the nation over Rev. King’s murder. When Tuskegee students then threatened to hold hostage the entire board of trustees, the tense situation was diffused by Luther Foster and Melvin Glasser but not before O’Connor had naively suggested that the students simply leave the premises and place their grievances in writing instead. Such a forceful challenge to authority by militant students was completely outside his framework of understanding, yet once back in New York he promptly responded to their grievances, saying that Tuskegee must “render near-miraculous services in these times of gravity for our entire nation.”⁴⁸ O’Connor’s evolution from the reluctant humanitarian advising Roosevelt to steer away from Warm Springs to become an international figure in public health who had energized philanthropy seemed oddly frozen in the mindset of the New Deal. Yet even toward the end of his tenure as President of the March of Dimes, he sought to rise above what his own instincts seemed to hold back regarding supplications to the federal government, as when he pressured Senator Charles Percy to support the Neighborhood Health Center Act in 1968:

Our deep concern with the delivery of health services stems from a conviction that birth defects, prematurity, and other forms of reproductive wastage are associated to a significant degree with deficits in the social organization of medical care, primarily with the failure of a large proportion of pregnant women to obtain early and adequate ante partum care.⁴⁹

The language in this appeal (“reproductive wastage”) is a Rooseveltian throwback to polio, but the message expresses the holistic approach to maternal health toward which the March of Dimes was evolving in its steps toward a thoughtful agenda of advocacy. Basil O’Connor will be forever identified with the NFIP program against polio, but here we find him advocating for the health of women and infants to broaden the base of support for prenatal care, especially for low-income women. Under O’Connor’s direction the Foundation had begun to establish birth defects treatment and evaluation centers in hospitals throughout the nation in the 1960s. However, in its annual report of 1972 titled “Maternal and Infant Health,” the March of Dimes announced explicitly that it would broaden this program on birth defects prevention to include “our support of nationwide efforts to organize effective, regionalized intensive care for the high-risk pregnant woman, her fetus, and her critically ill newborn, or, in short, perinatal care.” The “architect in the fight against polio” had inched his way toward a vision of healthy pregnancy, newborn intensive care, and prematurity prevention that has characterized the March of Dimes ever since. But just when Virginia Apgar convened the Committee on Perinatal Health in 1972 that formulated the landmark Toward Improving the Outcome of Pregnancy, Basil O’Connor passed from the scene.

Envoi

James Roosevelt once remarked that of the many historians who had portrayed FDR’s closest associates during his presidency, all of them were “notably silent” about Basil O’Connor. He remembered the two as both friends and partners, characterizing the March of Dimes as a living legacy of their friendship. Recalling the Depression-era song, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” he claimed, “I always date the end of the depression by the call of The National Foundation to give a dime to the March of Dimes to rectify the inequalities between men created by disease.”⁵⁰ Historians have been remarkably silent about Basil O’Connor, but that neglect is partly due to O’Connor’s own closely-guarded habits. A recent biography of Louis Howe is titled FDR’s Shadow, a characterization fully congruent with Howe’s personal mission as political coach who seemed never to leave FDR’s side. But if Howe was FDR’s shadow, Basil O’Connor was his forgotten man. Rexford Tugwell claimed that Howe regarded O’Connor with disdain, perhaps because in the centripetal movement of O’Connor’s haughty independence he tended to loom as almost as large as Roosevelt’s own good self. O’Connor’s allegiance was indefatigable, for of all of Roosevelt’s associates, including the memoirists who looked back with affection and nostalgia over their years with FDR, Basil O’Connor was the single person (aside from Eleanor Roosevelt) who elevated the personal goals of FDR to further accomplishments after his death. O’Connor tenaciously stayed the course with Roosevelt, and he did so in Roosevelt’s name: every publication and item of correspondence issued by the March of Dimes and all of its chapters proudly bore the words “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Founder” until O’Connor’s demise. The NFIP had eradicated a single disease, poliomyelitis; but in doing so, it “dramatized the idea of treating a person with a crippling disability so that he may be a self-sufficient member of society rather than an invalid who depends upon others.”⁵¹ Together, what Roosevelt and O’Connor had accomplished was to change the perception of illness and disability by creating an environment for successful recovery and reintegration into society at Warm Springs and by empowering the effective coordination of financial, scientific, and medical resources for the general fight against disease and the promotion of public health through the March of Dimes.

Basil O’Connor died in Phoenix, Arizona on March 9, 1972 as he prepared to attend a March of Dimes grant meeting. Joseph Nee succeeded him as president, reorganized the March of Dimes board, and the Foundation began to embrace the perspective of perinatology for which O’Connor, Joseph Nee, and Charles Massey had set the groundwork in the 1960s. The obituaries that followed presented the usual encomia amid the casual swipes at O’Connor’s idiosyncrasies. The Montgomery Advertiser called him a “master fund-raiser” but countered this with mention of his “excessive pride.” The Orlando Sentinel equivocated by calling him a “gifted beggar.” Proud of its distinguished alumnus, the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine described O’Connor as “a colorful figure, said by some to be the greatest fund-raiser ever.” President Richard Nixon and former President Harry Truman sent condolence telegrams to Hazel O’Connor, and in a eulogy delivered at Rockefeller University on March 13, 1972 Jonas Salk said of O’Connor, “he became an institution.”⁵² This simple observation was the most fitting and insightful tribute of all, for despite the claims of “excessive pride,” Basil O’Connor had sublimated his intense ambitions in an institution that had not only made America polio conscious but had eliminated the disease outright. In a sense, the NFIP under O’Connor had indeed become a “flexible force,” but not quite as he had envisioned. In any case, it had altered the way Americans approached disease, advancing fields of endeavor that ranged from virology and physical therapy to philanthropy, civil rights, and disability rights. Basil O’Connor was a self-made man, “only one remove from servitude” as he was wont to say, and when he first set out with Franklin Roosevelt to defeat polio, all he had going for him, in the words of sports journalist Bob Considine, was “a yellow legal pad, a telephone, and a superb knowledge of the business and financial community.”⁵³ But his potential unfolded in capabilities and circumstances richer than Considine’s soundbite might allow, and his strategic friendship with FDR was the central factor in his life. As with FDR, some found in O’Connor an admixture of “saint and scoundrel.” But a scoundrel is a “mean, immoral, or wicked person,” and O’Connor was never that. Jonas Salk, perhaps closer than anyone to O’Connor in the struggles of his later years, reflected that Basil O’Connor “was different from anybody else in the crowd. … He had it within his power to cause almost anything to happen.”⁵⁴

As for FDR, his presidential legacy is assured. One of the most revered figures in American politics, he has been reviled as a “traitor to his class” and idolized as “the savior of Western civilization.” For neither Franklin nor Eleanor Roosevelt will there ever be a definitive summing up. Without question, FDR was the most famous “polio” of modern time. In his work at Warm Springs, he was described as “a builder” and called “prophetic.” The impact of polio and life-changing disability on his political career will continue to command our curiosity and study. Eleanor Roosevelt was once asked, “Do you think your husband’s illness has affected your husband’s mentality?” She replied, “I am glad that question was asked. The answer is Yes. Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.”⁵⁵ This generalization now seems obvious but insufficient. After his personal letters were published in 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt felt free to reflect a bit more on her husband’s suppression of his own emotions in the aftermath of polio: “As he came gradually to realize that he was not going to get any better, he faced great bitterness, I am sure, though he never mentioned it. The only thing that stands out in my mind as evidence of how he suffered when he finally knew that he would never walk again, was the fact that I never heard him mention golf from the day he was taken ill until the end of his life. That game epitomized to him the ability to be out of doors and to enjoy the use of his body. Though he learned to bear it, I am afraid it was always a tragedy.”⁵⁶

Labor Secretary Frances Perkins felt that polio had sobered FDR, hardening his personal and political resolve, while Rexford Tugwell recognized his singular resolution as so completely fundamental to his character that not even paralysis could alter or extinguish it. He said, “I concluded that there had been no sudden conversion [after polio] and no change of character.”⁵⁷ In evaluating Roosevelt, the personal, the public, and the political are so inextricably intertwined that it now seems almost inconceivable to disassociate the paralysis of economic depression from the paralysis of polio in the context of his biography. The self-created persona of “Doc Roosevelt” was refracted in the towering influence of his exemplary image as the four-term president who had seen the nation through depression and war. Basil O’Connor conflated these interpretations of character and magnified them all the more in consecrating the Roosevelt mythos in the service of the NFIP. Yet remembrance of the twin facts of Roosevelt’s disability and his world-changing accomplishments did not require a Basil O’Connor to articulate them, for these are a common heritage. As Mario Cuomo stated of FDR in his keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention, “He lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees.”⁵⁸

More than a half century earlier, FDR himself had delivered a ringing speech at the Democratic National Convention. On June 28, 1928 in Houston, Texas FDR spoke before the assembled delegates to nominate Al Smith for President, the second such speech for Smith (the first, the “Happy Warrior” speech, occurred in 1924) that signaled quite clearly that Roosevelt was not defeated by polio and was still very much in the political game. The New York Times reported it as “A High-Bred Speech,” lauding FDR as “a gentleman speaking to gentlemen” in characterizing Smith as a fair-minded and cultivated leader. Endorsing the intellectual and moral fitness of Smith for the presidency, FDR’s language was remarkable for its soaring eloquence in describing the human qualities necessary for the office of President. Roosevelt orated:

It is that quality of soul which makes a man loved by little children, by dumb animals; that quality of soul which makes him a strong help to all those in sorrow or in trouble; that quality which makes him not merely admired but loved by all the people—the quality of sympathetic understanding of the human heart, of real interest in one’s fellowmen. Instinctively he senses the popular need because he himself has lived through the hardship, the labor and the sacrifice which must be endured by every man of heroic mold who struggles up to eminence from obscurity and low estate. Between him and the people is that subtle bond which makes him their champion and makes them enthusiastically trust him with their loyalty and their love.⁵⁹

Save for mentioning the “low estate” of Al Smith’s origins, Roosevelt might have been describing his own “quality of soul.” It was something he instinctively understood.

In 2003, the Journal of Medical Biography published an article “What was the cause of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralytic illness?” entertaining the possibility that FDR suffered from, not poliomyelitis, but Guillain–Barré syndrome.^60,61 This article and a spate of books that have speculated on FDR’s illnesses reveal the endless fascination with the medical condition of presidents, and in particular this President who had managed to disguise his disability in public life so to eventually defeat the disease that caused it. Despite the tantalizing speculation about FDR and Guillain–Barré syndrome, it remains impossible to make a corrective diagnosis retrospectively with any meaningful certainty absent a living patient. That Roosevelt believed his paralysis was due to polio, that he founded the organization that ultimately eradicated the disease, and that he remains one of the emblematic figures in the history of polio are alone sufficient to consign competing probabilities to a footnote rather than giving them undue prominence. In this regard it is noteworthy that the NFIP did not fail to consider Guillain–Barré syndrome in its program on polio patient aid. The NFIP’s position on patients with Guillain–Barré syndrome who applied for aid was to allow its chapters to decide individually to award financial support to such patients based upon local factors rather than to develop a global policy. Basil O’Connor’s medical directors judged this position as prudent and fair, especially since applicants with Guillain–Barré syndrome were very infrequent and thus not a burden to the Foundation.

After the O’Connor era the March of Dimes continued to memorialize FDR in celebratory events from time to time, as it did in 1982 with its “FDR Centennial Ball,” a black-tie affair to re-create a 1930s birthday ball in a centennial observance of FDR’s birth. James Roosevelt, then a board member of the March of Dimes, was chairman of the event. He remained a “goodwill ambassador” for the Foundation for many years, having maintained close ties with Basil O’Connor.⁶² The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial dedicated in Washington, DC in 1997 became a temporary battleground for disability rights activists who wanted FDR’s disability unmasked for all time. The controversy over how best to represent his disability—and the very fact that it should be represented at all—has helped to hone our understanding about the political history of disability. By contrast with the monumental architecture of the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the Basil O’Connor Nature Trail at the Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation is diminutive, obscure, and barely noticeable. The March of Dimes, however, has honored his memory since the year of his death with the Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award. This grant award program was designed specifically to support promising research of young scientific investigators who are typically less able to obtain funding for innovative research at the beginning of their careers. Over the years, grants in this program have covered research in fields including pediatrics, obstetrics, neurobiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, biology, and genetics.

Charles Massey, who worked directly with O’Connor for over two decades, characterized the Roosevelt/O’Connor relationship in this fashion:

Basil O’Connor was a pragmatic visionary. When FDR asked him to set up a foundation he had no qualms about using FDR’s influence to get it done. I’ve always wondered how much of the credit for his success belonged to him and how much was attributable to the power of “that man in the White House.” From the very outset the Foundation enjoyed tremendous support from Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Was that because of O’Connor’s brilliance, or, was it, as some have suggested, because Hollywood catered to the President of the United States for its own reasons? Some cynics have speculated that the movie industry was simply concerned about anti-trust laws at that time and anxious to protect its turf. Whether that was the case I don’t know, but I do know that Hollywood played a very big role in the Foundation’s early success. As another case in point, the Foundation’s first board of trustees was comprised of prestigious members drawn from the very top business and banking circles in the nation. They were willing to serve for only one reason. They were asked by FDR. In those days, at the bottom of every piece of the Foundation’s literature were the words, “Franklin D. Roosevelt, Founder.” I doubt that anyone knows whether the emphasis on FDR came from O’Connor’s fertile mind or from the public relations specialists he hired. In truth it is difficult to fathom the relationship that existed between O’Connor and Roosevelt.⁶³

Whether we can adequately plumb the imponderables of this fascinating partnership is left to our understanding of the documentary record and the contemporary momentum of the institutions that Roosevelt and O’Connor themselves created. Behind this realization lay the spirit of Warm Springs and the effervescence of the March of Dimes, and the two men—friends and partners—who were most responsible for formulating their vision and realizing their success.