President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the United States through the Great Depression and the Second World War, winning four consecutive elections despite the fact that he was believed to have suffered from polio, aka infantile paralysis. His reliance on wheelchairs and other assistance to get around was something that his opponents thought would make him unelectable, and it is true that he carefully orchestrated his public image to downplay his physical impairment. Nevertheless, FDR provided an outspoken and ardent voice for the support of national efforts to research, treat, and eradicate the disease.
Starting in 1934, in his first term as President, FDR began fundraising for the Warm Springs Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, where he had been receiving his treatments for polio. His clout raised public awareness and interest in combating the disease. These efforts were multiplied enormously by the creation of the March of Dimes in 1937, where “a little change from big people will mean a big change in little people,” as a saying went. When the most powerful leader in America focused on polio as a major health concern, people responded.
Ten years after FDR died of a stroke in 1945, the funding provided by the president’s galvanizing efforts led to the successful creation of the Salk polio vaccine. Americans ubiquitiously embraced the cutting-edge of scientific progress and mass immunizations followed. Polio has now been eradicated in the United States and only survives in relatively small numbers, albeit among the poorest places of the world.
Source(s): _Milwaukee Independent_, posted by _The Converaation_, May 22, 2020, “The President’s Crusade: Remembering When FDR Made the Eradication of Polio His Personal Business,” by Thomas Doherty. Siddhartha Mukherjee, _The Emperor of All Maladies_, Scribner 2011, pp. 94-95.
