Telethons: spectacle, disability and the business of charity

The first ‘television marathon’ fundraising event was broadcast in April 1949 on behalf of the Damon Runyan cancer fund. In the years that followed, the ‘telethon’ became an established cultural phenomenon in the United States, led by charities such as the National Society for Crippled Children and Adults (renamed the National Easter Seals Society in 1979). Arguably the most famous of these broadcasts was the annual fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, hosted for many years by the comedian Jerry Lewis, which reached an audience of 100 million viewers at the peak of its popularity. Telethons raised millions of dollars on behalf of people with disabilities, raising public awareness of disability and funding valuable equipment and research. However, this process was selective, making some disabled people more visible than others. Telethons routinely presented disabled children and adults as infantilised, passive ‘victims’ in need of philanthropic assistance, and also underscored the medical model’s emphasis on ‘cure’ and overcoming.

In Telethons: Spectacle, Disability and the Business of Charity, Paul K. Longmore presents a deeply researched and nuanced history of the rise and fall of the American telethon. While the charity model of disability is well known in Disability Studies, this book provides one of the most extensive treatments of the ways in which philanthropy has affected responses to disability in the modern era yet published, and uses the cultural phenomenon of the telethon as a vantage point for exploring broader currents in American history. While the telethon belongs to the late twentieth century, the philanthropic approach to welfare, and the sentimental view of impairment that it presented, had much deeper roots. Longmore takes the long view on these themes, tracing them back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The result is a book that contextualises the telethon within broader cultural models of disability and charity, giving it a wider significance.

Telethons reflected, and were a product of, inequalities in the American health and welfare systems. In contrast to the state-sponsored healthcare systems of Western Europe and Canada, they promoted an ideology of private charity and voluntary aid as the ‘American way’ of welfare, helping to individualise need as a problem best addressed through private generosity rather than public investment. As well as encouraging viewers to donate, telethons promoted a corporate model of beneficence, via sponsorship deals, that served the aims of commerce as much as providing for the ‘needy’. Involvement in charity fundraising smoothed over public cynicism of business leaders as the image of the disabled child was co-opted by company bosses as a means of showing their caring side and support for family values. For the wider public, telethon donations were a ‘collective rite designed to enable Americans to demonstrate to themselves that they still belonged to a moral community’ (64), at a time when social change caused anxieties about the erosion of neighbourly ties. Giving was never simply altruistic – donation to help the ‘less fortunate’ built on a centuries-old tradition of almsgiving as a way for benefactors to assert their status through acts of ‘conspicuous contribution’, as well as providing a means for social and moral redemption.

To succeed in their fundraising, telethons presented suffering as a spectacle. In a particularly insightful chapter exploring the emotions of charity, Longmore shows how telethon portrayals of people with disabilities were rooted in eighteenth and nineteenth-century cultures of sentiment, in which the observation of the sufferings of characters such as Dickens’s Tiny Tim acted as a tool of emotional growth in others. In telethons, disabled children and adults were presented in ways which reassured the public that their sympathy towards them was deserved. Critical to this process were three variables: how someone had come to be disabled; how they had dealt with their difficulties; and whether that person’s other traits made them worthy of support. Although fundraising provided much-needed money for medical research and the provision of technologies that would benefit disabled people in their everyday lives, telethons often placed emphasis on the unrealistic goal of ‘cure’. Wheelchairs or ventilators might improve someone’s quality of life, but they were portrayed as a living death – rising up from the wheelchair and walking became the chief expression of overcoming for ‘Jerry’s Kids’ and other telethon subjects. Disabled children were the principal beneficiaries of telethons. Donors were invited to invest in children’s future potential, ‘cruelly’ held back by disease or disability. Telethons promoted idealised and sentimental images of the disabled ‘poster child’, while emphasising that disability was a financial and emotional burden on families.

From the 1970s, activists began to campaign against telethons and their negative portrayal of disability. Campaigners were labelled as ungrateful or ‘embittered’. Although they continued to emphasise overcoming, telethons gradually changed. Particularly after the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, telethons began to portray disabled people in more realistic ways, showing them at work for example. By the 1990s the heyday of telethons had passed, and this cultural institution was in decline. Longmore ends his book with a challenge, not for telethon producers but for the disability activists who challenged their harmful stereotyping. While Longmore is critical of the medical model of ‘cure’ or overcoming, he nevertheless calls for disability activists to explore ‘disability experience in its totality’, in a way that acknowledges the significance of health care services to the lives of many people with disabilities. Telethons ends rather abruptly, its Conclusion cut short by the author’s unexpected death in 2010. Nevertheless, this insightful, provocative and thoroughly researched book is a fitting legacy to one of the founding fathers of Disability History. The book provides a model for thinking about disability historically, showing how it not only sheds light on those conventionally written out of mainstream histories, but also opens a window on broader social, economic and political developments.

David M. Turner
Department of History, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
[email protected]
© 2017 David M. Turner
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1321241