Fighting the Crippler

While the metaphors of military mobilization were as central to the organization and funding of cancer research as they had been to the fight against polio, analysis of the two campaigns also reveals interesting differences. The critical years for the establishment of the March of Dimes were during World War II; the organization was founded in 1938 and managed to raise increasing amounts of money throughout the war. (In like manner, with the lay activist takeover of the leadership of the ACS, public campaigns raised millions of dollars, increasing each year through the 1940s.) There is a sense in which the rhetoric of the NFIP was the rhetoric of war; the obvious enemy was polio, which crippled American children at the same time as American soldiers were being maimed and killed in Europe and the Pacific. Perhaps even more significant than any symbolic resemblance between the campaigns against the Axis forces and against polio was the fact that both efforts shared the same spokesperson, Franklin Roosevelt. In a public letter in 1944, Basil O'Connor, President of the NFIP, wrote Roosevelt that only "unremitting research will provide the key which will unlock the door to victory over infantile paralysis." Roosevelt's response, written in the closing year of World War II and only four months before his death, called for the deployment of all-out research:

We face formidable enemies at home and abroad.... Victory is achieved only at great cost -- but victory is imperative on all fronts. Not until we have removed the shadow of the Crippler from the future of every child can we furl the flags of battle and still the trumpets of attack. The fight against infantile paralysis is a fight to the finish, and the terms are unconditional surrender [178-179].

Creager, Angela N. H. The Life of a Virus : Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965. University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN: 0226120252.