Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Here on my desk, within easy reach of my hand lie neat, typewritten pages bearing vital statistics; the statistics available on the lives taken, the lives ruined, the lives handicapped by the disease called poliomyelitis, or, as we term it with horrible familiarity, infantile paralysis.

But a bound book of statistics, big as the Oxford Dictionary, could not bring home to me, or to you, or to anyone, the danger and deadliness, the swift enmity and the curse that is infantile paralysis as could the sight of one living, patient, crippled child.

I have seen many such children. In my youth more than one of the boys and girls with whom I played and raced and danced was one day missing from our active circle. In, I think, my later 'teens a particularly virulent epidemic raged in my part of the world, and I remember the precautions which everyone took. Merely driving from one Long Island village to another, your car would be stopped, and uniformed policemen would look in to make sure that no child under sixteen traveled with you. At another time, visiting in a Mid-Western city, I encountered another senseless manifestation of this plague, one that struck not alone at children but at grown men and women in the early prime of their lives.

When you are young you don't think much about such things. You are dreadfully sorry for those of your friends or acquaintances who are selected by some haphazard and dreadful lottery as victims. But you don't think about yourself. You are safe, what can happen to you? Youth knows that such things, such spectres as disease and death exist, but is incredibly sure that they exist only for others.

But Youth grows up.

For almost fifteen years now, that is to say ever since the birth of the eldest of my four children, the earliest newspaper intimation that our annual scourge was with us again has elicited from me an awareness of pure terror and rebellion. We speak of "necessary" evils. But one such as this cannot be necessary, it is so unfair, it is so impersonally cruel. Nothing guarantees safety for those you love, for those you try to shelter. It strikes, with an indifferent impartiality, at children in every class of society.

It is, of course, true that the well-to-do have a slight advantage. Their children do not eat and sleep and play in foulness and filth, aiders and abettors of contagion. They can see to it that their children are kept out of crowds during a danger period, and they have doctors, hospitals, serums -- all the present weapons of battle at their command. But nevertheless their children may, and do, suffer. And often weapons are of no avail.

Not far from where I lived for a decade was a teeming section, a few short blocks between the business avenue and the residential district of that neighborhood. It still exists and abounds, I daresay, with happy, dirty youngsters, pushcarts, noise, crowding and smells. Always, it seemed to me, the first report of infantile paralysis would come from that section of the city.

After the ice and snow of winter, we have spring, the harbinger of delight. But you can look at it another way, too. The dirty snow and the encrusted ice melt, the gutters run with water, the sewers are stopped or flooded -- and the children play in the drowning streets, wading into the dark water, sailing their wooden boats. And disease plays with them, invisible and waiting, a vigilant companion. And after our spring which has, somehow, become so brief, we have heat and summer, baked pavements and the hydrants providing cooling showers for the children of the poor. And, day by day, the poliomyelitis cases are reported.

So those of us who can afford to do so flee to the country with our children or send them there, away from us, to the clean country with the swift running of natural water, the salt sea, the sparkling lakes, the good air, the high mountains -- and we think we are safe. But we aren't safe. It isn't very long before we pick up a paper and read, with our hearts wrenched, that somewhere in the Adirondacks, or in upstate New York, or on the Jersey coast, or anywhere at all, the infantile menace has struck its first blow.

None of us is secure. We are permitted to take all the precautions possible -- and after that -- well, I suppose we can pray.

This National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis is a superb and heartening thing. It is a business of mercy, a beacon of hope. I am wondering why they call it for and not against, as I write? Against of course, always against. A Foundation which will be composed of brilliant minds and careful hands and plodding research, which will, one day, we believe, succeed in stamping out this disease which imperils the very heart of our country.

For the future and the salvation of the world in any country lies not in its oldsters, its politicians, its tycoons or historians, but in its children. It is always the next generation toward which we must look for hope. It is always the next generation which must fight to leave the world a little better than it found it.