Senator Smoot was severely rebuked in an editorial in the “Public Ledger” for his action in the Senate, blocking the bill to provide a pension for the widow and children of the late Dr. Joseph Goldberger, discoverer of the cause and cure of pellagra, who died a martyr to science.
The editorial entited “The Wandering Jew Who Whipped Pellagra.” read:
“For reasons that to him must seem sound and sufficient Senator Smoot blocked a pension bill that would pay to Mary Goldberger, widow of Dr. Joseph Goldberger, the sum of $125 a month. Meanwhile the Congress has voted divers and sundry pensions to the deserving widows of warriors and statesmen.
“But it has done nothing for the widow of Dr. Goldberger, the poorly paid surgeon who spent his life in the United States Public Health Service. And all he did was to lift the curse of the Red Rash and the slow death which follows this plague of the sore mouth and the gibbering insanity of pellagra from the pellagrins of the American South.
“Goldberger was a tall, thin, hawkfaced Wandering Jew who came out of New York’s East Side. In 1914 he was sent to the South to fight the Red Fire, an old, mysterious, skin disease, that was filling the graves and the insane asylums of the Cotton Belt. Pellagra was then slaying not less than 1,500 persons a year in Mississippi. These were known cases. How many went to their graves unrecorded nobody knows.
“Other States were fully as hard hit. He found numerous pellagrins among the South Carolina insane. In the Mississippi asylum at Jackson pellagra deaths averaged fifty yearly. In Georgia, at Milledgeville, conditions were equally bad. In the orphan asylums he found hundreds of little folk with the telltale “red butterfly” on their noses and their hands reddened as by a fiery sunburn.
“The South was panic-stricken by the spread of pellagra. ‘Shorgun quarantines’ were established by men who did not know any better. They could not know their dead were dying from a ‘hidden hunger’ and that the proverty-bitten millhands and cotton farmers were doomed by the very foods they are to suffer, go insane and slip finally into miserable graves.
“Goldberger fought this slow-moving Red Death in his own stoop-shouldered, keen-brained way. He was not ‘scientific.’ If he had a high-power microscope, he never unpacked it. The only laboratory he had was the plague-touched region where he wandered and worked.
“Patient persistence solved the mystery. He found the cornmeal mush, the hommy grits, the cane molasses and the salt pork of the South were the sole and actual causes of this Red Rash that melted the flesh from strong men and filled insane asylums to over-flowing. The poor people of the South were starving for proteids. That was the whole story. He checked his findings. He went into asylums and orphanages, fed milk, eggs and red meat to the stricken and saw them grow hale and whole again.
“He went further and ‘bred’ pellagra in twelve Mississippi convicts, who were promised freedom if they would live six months on white bread, corn pone, grits, sweet potatoes, salt pork, cane molasses, rice, collards and cabbage. They slowly grew weak and sick. One quit, but six of the remaining eleven developed an undoubted pellagra.
“But science doubted. This thing had been too simple and too easy. So Goldberger and his helpers and Mary Goldberger, his wife, injected themselves with pellagrin blood. Seven times did Goldberger repeat this sinister experiment upon himself. The Red Fire did not develop. Pellagra was not ‘catching.’ Clearly this pellagra was a discase of poverty diets, and could be both prevented and cured by fresh proteids, by eggs, fresh meat and fresh milk.
“He went even further. He showed that two ounces of ordinary yeast, fresh or dried, will drive away the Red Fire. He solved the mystery and found the remedy. In its way it was an epic story.
“And now Goldberger is dead and Congress is loath to pay Mary Goldberger and her three children that little $125 a month pension. Congress rarely refuses pensions to dependents of warriors or those who destroy life. Yet it is unwilling to do as much for those who save life and make it more livable.
“So it is recommended to the gentlement of the Senate that they take Paul de Kruif’s ‘The Hunger Fighters’ and read therefrom the tale of ‘Goldberger, the Soft-spoken Desperado.’ Then let them make up their minds about the pension for Mary Goldberger and her three children.”
Ten centrally located cities have been selected for preliminaries in the national oratorical contest of Young Judaea. The winner, whose prize will be a free trip to Palestine, will be chosen for the best oration on the subject of “Palestine: The Source of Jewish Life,” according to an announcement made by Samuel J. Borowsky, Executive Chairman of Young Judaea. The cities where the ten regions have their central headquarters are New York. Brooklyn, Long Island, Boston, Rochester, Philadelphia, Columbus, Chicago, St. Louis and Atlanta, Ga. The ten regional winners will be heard at the annual convention of Young Judaea.
Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, of New York, held a special service on Sunday morning, in honor of the inauguration of President Hoover.
The subject of Dr. Israel Goldstein’s sermon was “President-Elect Hoover and American Israel.”
Dr. Leo Wolman, research director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, is leading a series of round-table conferences before the students of the Jewish Institute of Religion this week on “The Problems of Labor in the United States.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
