Mrs. Secretary and the Polio Epidemic
Oveta Culp Hobby, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Governor William P. Hobby examining the certificate appointing Oveta as the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. April 11, 1953. Courtesy Getty Images.
Never complain. Never explain.
OVETA CULP HOBBY
One of Oveta’s first acts as Secretary of the Health, Education, and Welfare Department (HEW) was to devise a commission to study the areas of food and drugs. The government had an enormous responsibility to maintain the safety of these items, but Oveta didn’t have the staff to accomplish what the law required her to oversee. After the commission made its report, she was able to get increased funds for the food and drug agencies and also increase the number of scientists working in these areas.1
But the biggest challenge Oveta and the whole country faced in the early 1950s was the polio epidemic. Poliomyelitis, or polio, for short, was a debilitating disease, leaving some sufferers permanently paralyzed or dead. One of the disease’s tragedies was that many sufferers were children and young adults. These patients were often doomed to live their lives inside “iron lungs,” mechanical devices that “breathed” for a person whose diaphragm muscles, which are used to control respiration, were frozen by the disease.
President Eisenhower’s cabinet—notice that Oveta Culp Hobby is the only woman present. Courtesy Corbis Images.
The race for a vaccine to prevent polio was on between two prominent research scientists, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Salk and Sabin differed in their methods for perfecting a vaccine. Salk took a tiny bit of the live polio virus and put it through a process which essentially killed the virus. He thought that injecting this “dead” virus into the human body would cause the body to produce its own antibodies, which would, in turn, fight and kill the virus. Antibodies are small “fighter” cells the body makes in response to an infection. These cells then find the “enemy,” in this case the polio virus, and destroy the virus cells. Destroying the cells would prevent a person from contracting the disease.
Sabin’s oral vaccine, on the other hand, worked in the intestinal tract to block the reproduction of the virus cells and prevent the virus from spreading throughout the body. But it would take Sabin seven more years to perfect his vaccine—it wouldn’t be until 1962 that the Sabin vaccine was considered effective.
Salk conducted the largest clinical trial in history to date, and it showed that his vaccine was both safe and effective in treating the disease. Good timing, because summer—also known as polio season—was on its way. And by all indications, 1955 was going to be a year of severe and widespread infection. All steps were taken to produce as much vaccine as possible, as quickly as possible.
Only one glitch. Because Salk’s technique had just been developed, large-scale vaccine manufacturing plants were not yet available to produce the amounts of vaccine required to make it accessible by the most vulnerable parts of the population.
Oveta, or Mrs. Secretary, as she liked to be called, and her consultants decided to have not one, but five different drug manufacturers work on producing the vaccine. This was necessary so that the millions of doses required to immunize the population would be on hand by the time polio season arrived.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower giving Dr. Jonas Salk a commendation for developing the Salk polio vaccine, as Secretary Hobby watches. Courtesy Corbis Images.
The vaccine was licensed several hours after Salk’s clinical trials report. Millions of doses from five manufacturers licensed in the United States, Canada, and Denmark proved effective, with no hazardous effects. Yet difficulties remained.
Seven of seventeen lots made by one manufacturer, Cutter Biologicals, contained live, virulent viruses. The Cutter vaccine caused 204 cases of polio in people. Of those 204, 75 percent, or 153 of the recipients, were paralyzed, and eleven died.
The Cutter incident was a tragedy. What went wrong with their inactivation procedure was not clear, and the results that followed were dramatic. Dr. Leonard Scheele, surgeon general of the United States, withdrew the Cutter vaccine from the market. The two head directors of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) stepped down, and a separate agency to ensure appropriate manufacturing standards and controls for medical compounds was created within the NIH.
Despite the tragedy of 1955, the effectiveness of the Salk vaccine was evident. In the time period 1946 to 1955, before the vaccine was distributed, the number of cases of poliomyelitis per year in the United States was 32,890, with 1,742 deaths. By contrast, after administration of the Salk vaccine, and before institution of the Sabin vaccine, the number of cases per year dropped to 5,749, with 268 deaths, despite the fact that universal coverage for all susceptible individuals had not yet been achieved. In Sweden, where only the inactivated vaccine was and is used up to the present, poliomyelitis was eliminated.2
In speaking about the polio vaccine in an interview, Oveta later said:
What we did was set up a regional system of distribution to be sure that what vaccine we had available was apportioned fairly, giving preference to the southeastern states where the incidence of polio is always higher. Then we made funds available really in the public health and public welfare for people who could not afford it. We originated the vaccine distribution program.
There were many congressional hearings on the Salk vaccine because it was a very controversial thing, as you know. And the questions would come whether it should come through public health or children’s department or through public welfare, and finally we worked it out by regions and by states and got the fastest distribution. There were many problems in that vaccine because it looked as if it were going to be a terrible polio year. Our concern was to get this vaccine out as quickly as we could. So by going by the state and regions, we could actually get this vaccine out fast. If you’d gone some cumbersome method, it might have been sitting up there six months later after the polio season was gone.3
Oveta was clearly shaken by the Cutter Biologicals vaccination incident. Calls for her resignation as secretary of HEW hit the newspapers, containing claims that she was more interested in drug manufacturers’ profits than in the health and safety of America’s children. Nothing could have been further from the truth; Oveta felt terrible that this tragedy had occurred on her watch.
Many politicians were vocal in their criticism of the whole vaccination process and the way Oveta and her colleagues had handled the affair. Others came to her defense. Senator Barry Goldwater wrote her on June 6, 1955:
When one leaves the sordid atmosphere of Washington and gets out into the country, where American people live and think in a free way, one finds an entirely different attitude than [what] prevails here. I mention this to you, because every place I go over the United States I find nothing but high regard and appreciation for the work that you have done in developing the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
I just want to add my thanks to those I hear expressed over the United States for the time that you have devoted, for the interest you have shown, and for the superb manner in which you have conducted your office. I hope, also, that the current rumors that you might retire to the more peaceful and more delightful atmosphere of Texas are not true, because we need you to carry on this work.4
Oveta’s close friend, Marguerite Johnston, described the incident this way:
The Salk vaccine controversy apparently waved hotter in Washington and New York than in cities most heavily plagued by polio . . . and Oveta was caught in the crossfire of Democratic leaders against Republican administration. Houston had had summer after summer of polio epidemics, and Mrs. Hobby’s children were here. The problem the vaccine posed was this: Should it be held back until all children could be inoculated simultaneously, or let out to protect as many as possible as soon as possible?
Here in Houston, where the hospitals filled annually all summer long with polio patients . . . there was no panic and no scramble. Parents wait decently for their children’s name to come up on the lists held by private pediatricians and public health clinics. I know because I had four young children at the time, and was covering medicine and the Texas Medical Center for the Post, so I can guarantee my facts from two points of view.
Marguerite Johnston continues:
From this background, Mrs. Hobby was in no way prepared for 65-year-old women hammering on doctors’ doors in New York, demanding vaccination for themselves.
There was no connection between her resignation and the Salk controversy. Governor Hobby had grown increasingly ill, and she had nominated her successor as early as February of that year. Governor then took a dangerous turn for the worse, and at that point, nothing was important to her but being with him.5
Joan Braden, Oveta’s personal assistant at the HEW, told the story this way:
Oveta never let her strength show. It was, rather, revealed. She never raised her voice, never demonstrated anger, never said, “We’ll get back at him” or “I’ll take care of her.” When she got word that her husband, Will, was dying in a Houston hospital, she put her coat on and was pausing to say goodbye to me at the office door when the Surgeon General of the United States rushed up, literally wringing his hands. “Mrs. Hobby, I think you ought to know that the Salk polio vaccine was released two days ago and I’ve just had reports that several children have died after taking it.”
Oveta made a half turn toward her desk, dropped her coat on her chair, and looked full in Dr. Scheele’s anguished face. She said quietly, “Dr. Scheele, we have met regularly at least thirty times since I took office, and thirty times I have asked you to report to me on the activities under your supervision. This is the first time you have mentioned that you intended to release the polio vaccine.”
That was all. Oveta’s husband was dying. She had to go. But as far as I know—and I think I do—she never mentioned to anyone, certainly not to the newspapers that Scheele had made a tragic mistake.
Document showing signatures of President Eisenhower’s cabinet members. Courtesy of the Oveta Culp Hobby Memorial Library, Central Texas College, Killeen, Texas.
Commendation given to Oveta Culp Hobby for her service as secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Courtesy of the Hobby family.
Joan Braden continues:
Oveta took the blame, and the blame was headline news for days. And she took the cartoons that portrayed her as someone who was making up her face while babies died, as someone who had fumbled her job while she was fumbling in her purse for her lipstick, as someone who was, well, you know, a woman.
Imperturbably, she took it. Imperturbably, she sat on top of this vast bureaucracy, over some of which she had no line of authority, the surgeon general, for example, was a presidential appointee. She stuck to her maxim with a will of iron: “Never complain, never explain.”6
Dr. Jonas Salk’s letter to Oveta Culp Hobby. 1956. Courtesy Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.
Oveta Culp Hobby’s reply to Dr. Jonas Salk’s letter. 1956. Courtesy Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.
As soon as Oveta learned that her husband was ill, she called President Eisenhower and turned in her resignation. When George M. Humphrey, the Treasury Secretary, heard the news, he exclaimed, “What? The best man in the Cabinet?”
Despite pleas for her to stay on in her post, she was steadfast. “Nothing is as important as the governor,” she declared, and headed back to Houston to her husband, her family, and her newspaper.7
Oveta Culp Hobby as the only female member of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships, Inc. November 17, 1953. Courtesy of the Oveta Culp Hobby Memorial Library, Central Texas College, Killeen, Texas.
Oveta reported, “We had to stop the manufacture of the Salk vaccine, take it off the market for a while, put it back on the shelf because 14 children died from it, had some allergy to it . . . That to me was the most heartbreaking thing of all.”8
Oveta was sorely missed in Washington. Her replacement, Secretary Folsom, at his first cabinet meeting, said, “Everybody is going to be awfully disappointed whenever they look down to this end of the table again.” Later in the same meeting, a heated discussion took place in which several expletives were uttered. At the end of the meeting, President Eisenhower said, “If this is the kind of cabinet meeting we are going to have without Oveta, I am going to get her right back here.”9
When she was in Washington, Mrs. Hobby was called “the most important woman in the country” in a newspaper feature. Asked for a comment about the story, Governor Hobby replied, “Well, I’ve known that for many years, and I knew some day the rest of the country would find it out.”10
The timing of her resignation and her husband’s quick return to health upon her arrival back in Houston suggest that she took a large part of the blame on herself, although Oveta never publicly admitted that her resignation had been due to the failure of the Cutter vaccine and resultant deaths and illnesses.
In her defense, she had been following the recommendations of the doctors and scientists in her employ as to the safety of the vaccine. Perhaps she naively trusted their interpretations of the data. But the vaccine was released without her knowledge, and she was unprepared for the crisis that followed. Because the vaccine-manufacturing technique itself was in the process of being developed, the quality control and fail-safe methods used on present-day vaccines were not yet in place.
Some of Oveta Culp Hobby’s Accomplishments as Secretary of HEW
• Congress authorized $182 million to expand the federal-state-local hospital building program.
• Congress authorized $150 million to build more chronic disease hospitals, nursing homes, diagnostic and treatment centers, and medical rehabilitation.
• Organized the first White House Conference on Education.
• Proposed a three-year emergency plan to build $7 billion worth of schools.
• Oversaw the release and distribution of the Salk vaccine to prevent polio.
• Ten million people added Social Security coverage during her last year in office.
. . .
Murry Snyder, Assistant Press Secretary to President Eisenhower, July 13, 1955 The White House
Remarks by the President and Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby in the Conference Room after the President accepted the resignation of Mrs. Hobby as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
THE PRESIDENT:
Well, Oveta, this is a sad day for the Administration. My mind goes back to the day I first met you in London—in 1942 I suppose it was when you came over there as head of the WAC Corps—something entirely new in my experience. But you were the first one that sold it to me, and I must say it proved itself, under your leadership, to be one of the finest organizations that the Army has ever had.
In these last two years—two years and a half—your talents have again been devoted to the service of your country, and most effectively. And I would think I could express the feeling of the Cabinet toward you by quoting the Secretary of the Treasury—I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. The other day in my office, shortly after you had told me that you would have to go, I said to him that we were going to lose you. And his eyes popped open and he said, “What? The best man in the Cabinet?”
That is the feeling that the whole Cabinet has towards you. I assure you that none of us will forget your wise counsel, your calm confidence in the face of every kind of difficulty, your concern for people everywhere, the warm heart you brought to your job as well as your talents. We are just distressed to lose you, but the best wishes of the entire Executive Department—indeed, I think of the Congress and all Washington that knows you, will go with you as you go back, and we will be very hopeful that you will have many fine, happy years there from here on.
MRS. HOBBY’S REPLY:
Thank you very much, Mr. President. Mr. President, during the past 31 months, I have had the most singular opportunity. I have had an opportunity to serve with you, to serve a man whose entire life has been devoted to the people of the United States. I have had the most unfailing support and leadership from you in trying to develop sound programs for the American people in the field of health, education, and welfare. And as I look back over the 31 months, Mr. President, when you came to this Office, and realize what has transpired in those 31 months, I am a very, very happy citizen.
In those 31 months we have moved away from the shadow of war; we have moved into the greatest prosperity this country has ever known, with more people working, greater wages, and being able to buy more of the good things of life.
And now perhaps we stand in the area of widest peace, and perhaps on the threshold of a universal peace. When I think of what has been accomplished in your thirty-one months, I feel humble and grateful to have had a part in it. When I think of the people of the United States who have had their pensions and their social security protected by a stable dollar, Mr. President—the smallest variation in the purchasing power of the dollar in 42 years—the time we have kept records; when I think of the millions of people that have been given an opportunity under social security and the hundreds of thousands that will be given an opportunity under vocational rehabilitation, and when I think of the millions of people that will benefit from your wise policies in education—in letting the people of this country think through their own education problems and bringing them up here—I feel particularly blessed.
Now, Mr. President, as you go to Geneva for all of us, I believe that everyone of us will be praying that there, in that meeting, the first step will be taken toward a truly universal peace. And I for one, Mr. President, have never had such a privilege. I know this country would have been blessed at any time to have had your leadership, but in these critical years in world affairs, I truly feel that God had His hand on the United States in the kind of leadership you have given us.
THE PRESIDENT:
Oveta, if I had known that you felt like that, I never would have accepted your letter of resignation. Mrs. Secretary, I can still say that, thank you very much.
MRS. HOBBY:
Thank you, sir.
