|
|
When Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921, at age thirty-nine,
it inspired his interest in medical philanthropy. When he heard about
the therapeutic value of the thermal mineral baths at Warm Springs,
Georgia, Roosevelt went there and ended up buying the site and creating
a foundation in 1927. He persuaded his friend and New York City law
partner Basil O’Connor to run it.
After Roosevelt became president in 1933, O’Connor co-coordinated
Birthday Balls that took place on Roosevelt’s birthday each January
and raised money for the care of polio patients. These were so successful
that in 1938 they were merged into a nationwide organization, the National
Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March
of Dimes. |
“Once you’ve spent two years trying
to wiggle one toe, everything is in proportion.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1945 |
Left: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Basil O’Connor Courtesy
of March of Dimes
Right: Roosevelt sitting poolside at Warm Springs, Georgia, 1924 Courtesy
of Ed Jackson, Carl Vinson Institute of Government
|
“For a generation, Warm Springs was a community
of the handicapped. A permanent population of polios came to live at
the Foundation or nearby. Many of these people worked at the Foundation
as officials, staff people, and teachers…. New polios saw the
old polios as persons with a paralysis pattern similar to their own,
living a normal life, functioning as productive human beings. The value
of such an example was enormous.”
—Hugh G. Gallagher, 1998 |
Sheet music for the President’s Birthday Ball, composed by Irving Berlin,
1942
|
“We can never forget that special union
of the paradise island set up by master Roosevelt and his merry crew
who invented joy on earth for those of us fortunate enough to get out
of the claws of the doctors in the small grey hospitals around the
country and into that wonder.”
—Lorenzo Wilson Milam, 1984 |
In 1939, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis supplied funding for a center at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where black patients could go for treatment. They were not admitted to Warm Springs. Courtesy of March of Dimes
