Hallmarks of Community Concern: Greeting Cards as Body Education for Children with Polio

Widespread memory of polio in the twentieth-century US has been dominated by the public fear of the disease, the mass charity mobilized by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP, later renamed the March of Dimes) beginning in the late 1930s, and the medical triumph represented by the Salk vaccine, which dramatically decreased polio rates in the US by the early 1960s. Historians have taken up approaches to the history of polio which challenge or flesh out these tenets—the challenge to medical authority and existing public health practices that polio presented, the memories of a wide range of polio survivors and their responses to medical treatment and disablement—but material culture angles have been largely eschewed. As Katherine Ott has pointed out, objects are useful to a study of disability history because they evoke the person who used them in a way that traditional documents often fail to do. My project uses material culture to build upon recent patient-centered histories of polio at midcentury and highlights the expectations faced by the most famous survivors of the disease: children. I focus on greeting cards received by polio survivors and the scrapbooks in which many of them are collected, and supplement these with other correspondence, oral history projects, and memoirs to trace child and adolescent experiences of disability and identity in the 1940s. These cards were read, used, and saved within family scrapbooks, and many are preserved in an eclectic variety of repositories around the country. Scrapbooks which document correspondence received during hospitalization or rehabilitation of a child with polio hold cards not only from family or friends but from acquaintances or even strangers. These cards taught their recipients not just that they were loved and prized by their families but that they were of wider community interest stoked by the NFIP. Moreover, the cards delivered messages about race, gender, and expected ability which taught lessons about what language, activities, and interests were appropriate for different sorts of bodies. Their material design made their messages all the more enticing, as many cards featured tactile or interactive elements to appeal to a child's interest— riddles, stories, complicated unfolding features, or removable or openable parts. This poster argues that these greeting cards served as a unique method of transmission of knowledge and expectation from family, friends, and community members to children with polio-related disabilities during the height of public attention to the disease, and suggests that these children had a diverse array of responses to such expectations. Visual and interactive reproductions of archival materials play a central role in the execution of this poster.