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This Week in History

January 24 — 30, 1945.

In the Midst of a Raging World War, FDR Calls for an All-Out Attack on Polio

On the occasion of President Franklin Roosevelt's birthday on January 30, it became traditional for him to address the "Birthday Balls" which were held to raise money for the fight against infantile paralysis. On his birthday in 1945, however, Roosevelt had already left the country on his way to the Yalta Conference. But because the fight against polio was a crucial one, Roosevelt's wife Eleanor read his speech over the hookup to the balls.

There had been a major polio epidemic in America in 1944, with the dreaded disease hitting over 18,000 children and adults. Unlike the situation in earlier epidemics, especially the major one of 1916, this time the medical infrastructure was in place to ensure a high survival rate as well as follow-up therapy for those who suffered crippling side effects. But there was still no cure, and no vaccine against the highly communicable disease.

Roosevelt's efforts, first through the Warm Springs Foundation, and then through the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, had been able to ensure adequate care for victims of polio. He had also succeeded in making Americans aware that with a major effort, they could contribute to finding a vaccine or a cure. Defeating polio had become a national project, and in 1945, the Foundation grossed over $18 million.

The success of the fundraising stemmed in part from an idea of comedian Eddie Cantor. Roosevelt had asked him to think about how the Foundation could get a million men to contribute a dollar a year. Instead, Cantor suggested that people be asked to mail dimes to the White House, calling it the "March of Dimes" against polio. Answering the call that was sent out every year in the weeks before the birthday balls, Americans sent millions of dimes to the White House; so many, in fact, that the President's assistants, his children, and many other staffers had to assist the mailroom in opening the letters.

When Roosevelt's 1945 Birthday Ball address was broadcast, there were significant medical developments on the horizon. In 1948, microbiologist John Franklin Enders and his colleagues Frederick Robbins and Thomas Weller were able to grow a virus in a medium of living cells. This was a major breakthrough in virology, because up to that time, it had only been possible to grow viruses in living chicken embryos, a process which could produce only a very small number of viruses for research purposes. Growing viruses in cell tissue had been tried before, but after a few days, the material had always been ruined by the growth of bacteria.

Enders was Chief of Research in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston, and his research group was attempting to find a cure for mumps. He realized that adding the new antibiotic penicillin to the nutrient mixture would suppress the growth of bacteria, and when the experiment succeeded, his research group turned its attention to the polio virus. The virus was successfully grown in tissue scraps, proving that sufficient quantity of the virus could be produced for research on producing a vaccine.

In 1949, Dr. Jonas Salk was chosen by the Infantile Paralysis Foundation to lead their research, and he used the culture method discovered by Enders. In 1952, the nation suffered the worst polio epidemic in its history, with almost 58,000 recorded cases. The research on developing a vaccine was pressed forward by the Foundation, which took out a large loan to supplement its income. By 1954, nationwide field trials of the Salk vaccine were in full swing, involving almost 2 million children in 44 states, who were called the "Polio Pioneers." Exactly ten years after Roosevelt's death, on April 12, 1955, the Foundation announced that the Salk vaccine was effective and safe, and mass inoculations began.

In 1945, this wonderful outcome was still ten years in the future, but Roosevelt was very aware that the fight against polio and the fight against the Nazis, with their evil view of the crippled and retarded as "lives not worthy to be lived," were just different aspects of the overall battle for human dignity. He made it clear that night in his address to the Birthday Balls: "I am sorry that wartime circumstances make it impossible for me to talk with you personally tonight on my birthday. I have asked Mrs. Roosevelt to read this brief message on my behalf to the many millions of Americans who contribute to the fight against infantile paralysis.

"This year, if I had a birthday cake, there would be 63 candles on it. But the years they represent seem very few to me tonight because your great generosity has made this day a testament to youth—a promise to our children that the bright tomorrow for which we fight throughout the world will not be dimmed by the shadow of infantile paralysis at home.

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