“THE MOST FEARED DISEASE”

In summer 1916, the United States experienced its first major outbreak of polio, a viral disease that mainly affected children, leaving survivors with paralysis and wasted limbs. Concentrated around New York City, the outbreak would claim 27,000 lives before running its course. As historian David Oshinsky noted, polio was

the most feared disease of the middle part of the 20th century. It was a children's disease; there was no prevention; there was no cure; every child everywhere was at risk. And what this really meant was that parents were absolutely frantic. And what they tried to do was to protect their children the best way they could. (Dentzer 2005)

Anxiety surrounding the disease led to demand for public policies to combat the outbreak along with private behaviors to avoid contraction. With the cause of the disease shrouded in mystery, the public initially blamed Italian immigrants for the 1916 outbreak, focusing on their hygiene. Anxious parents cautioned their children not go swimming in pools or lakes (Youngdahl 2012). Armed police patrolled roads and rails around New York to ensure that travelers could prove their children were polio-free (Oshinsky 2006, 20–22).

In the wake of these disease outbreaks, politicians advocated public health policies to protect the public from polio. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who himself was afflicted with the disease, launched a campaign against polio through the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The campaign, more commonly known as the March of Dimes, called for citizens to send their dimes directly to the president. In 1938, that effort would yield more than two and half million dimes in addition to bills and checks. Such was the popular nature of the fight against polio that politicians of both parties sought to be associated with it. For example, in 1954, Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon was famously photographed pumping gas in a fundraising effort for the fight, “Fill ’Er Up for Polio” (Oshinsky 2006). In 1955, those efforts bore fruit, and a vaccine was created that was rolled out nationwide by the Eisenhower administration to rid the United States of this deadly disease.