Why was polio so prominent in the Great Depression?

Answer 1

Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States during most years of the Great Depression, was a victim of poliomyelitis. The stock market crashed in 1929, during the Hoover administration; Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, took the oath of office in 1933, and was president through 1945, when he died in office. The Great Depression lasted until the early 1940s. FDR was. therefore, the major political figure during the depression years. And FDR was a victim of polio (called at that time "infantile paralysis"). Although there have been publications detailing the ways in which the press hid FDR's affliction and handicap from the public, my family, my friends, and I knew quite well that he had had the illness: to us it was widespread public knowledge. Movie newsreels showed FDR in his Warm Springs retreat, swimming for exercise, to relieve the symptoms of polio. News reports raved about the popular but controversial treatment of polio's aftereffects, devised by Sister Elizabeth Kinney, who had caught FDR's attention and whose treatment approach he adopted and advocated. The fear of polio affected the public's mindset fiercely: children were forbidden to swim in public pools, in still-water lakes, or even in the ocean. (FDR had contracted the disease in an ocean swim.) "Polio" was the fear in those days equivalent to the fear of child molesting these days: people saw it lurking everywhere. One positive effect of that fear and ofthe intense, long-standing publicity was the successful drive to find a vaccination against poliomyelitis.