December 8, 2023 • 40 mins
Cautionary Book Club: Mollie Maggia's dentist planned to remove a painful abscess from her mouth. But to his horror, her jawbone disintegrated at his touch, crumbling and splintering until it resembled ash. Like hundreds of her colleagues, Mollie had been slowly poisoned by her work with glowing radium dust. Eight months after her first toothache, she was dead.
In the previous episode, Cautionary Tales told the story of the "Radium Girls". Their employers ignored the horrific side effects of these women's work, resorting to obfuscation and even outright lies to deny their claims that they were getting sick.
In this follow-up interview, Tim Harford sits down with Kate Moore, author of The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Tim and Kate discuss how the women banded together and worked out what was happening to them, as well as how they fought back against their powerful bosses and their monumental legacy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This is a follow up to our previous episode
about two disturbing yet quite different cases of mass radiation poisoning.
If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I suggest
you do. Last time, we heard about the Guyana incident,
(00:36):
how a highly radioactive substance was left unattended, discovered by
gray market scrap dealers, and wreaked havoc on a neighborhood
of people who had no idea what they were dealing
with and no reason that they should know. It was
a story about critical thinking, but about the brilliant, heroic
detective work of a woman who figured out the source
(00:56):
of the suffering, but alas didn't survive her encounter with it.
In the end, everyone pulled together to try to diagnose
and solve the problem. But we also heard about a
different case, one in which the risks of radiation poison
were known, or at least widely suspected, and people weren't
(01:16):
pulling together at all. Instead, powerful businessmen resorted to obfuscation, misdirection,
and outright lies, leading to the painful deaths of their employees.
And there's much much more to say about that. I'm
Tim Harford, and you're listening to a special book club
(01:37):
edition of Cautionary Tales. That second story, the story of
(02:18):
the Radium Girls, is our subject today. I am delighted
to have the opportunity to speak with Kate Moore, the
author of numerous books across a range of genres, in
particular the New York Times bestseller The Radium Girls, which
is a powerful, heartbreaking account of their experiences and their
fight for justice. Kate Moore, Welcome to caution Me Tales.
(02:42):
Thank you so much, Tim Well. I'm delighted that you
could join us. How did you first come across this story?
What inspired you to write the book? So?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I first discovered the story of the Radium Girls through
directing a play about them, and it really has been
just the most incredible, serendipitous journey. I found the play
through googling great plays for women, and the moment I
found the script, which was The Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich,
(03:11):
I fell in love with these characters. This story of
women fighting for justice, this story of heartbreak and tragedy
and yet strength and dignity and courage was just so
universal in its power, and it just connected with me
straight away, and I knew it was based on a
true story. So as I prepared for my theater production,
(03:34):
I did as much research as I could on the
Radium girls. I was really interested in their personal stories.
What were their weddings, like, how many siblings did the
girls have, what was personally important to them as they
went through this experience, And I could not find the
answers to my questions. I was absolutely stunned that this
(03:56):
incredible story that had left such a lasting legacy did
not have a book that celebrated the individual women. And
ultimately I thought, well, if no one else else has
written that book, why don't I so tell us.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
About these Well, we've described them both as girls and
as women. Yeah, there were employees in two factories working
with radium because it makes numbers on watches glow, so
it's useful. Were they girls, were they women? How old
were they?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
They were girls at the beginning of the story, because
it was mostly teenage girls who were employed in these
dial painting factories. Most of them were sort of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen years of age, but actually the record show that
some of them were as young as eleven. It was
seen as such a great job for the poor working girls,
(04:53):
as the sources have it. Then, actually the women who
were lucky enough to have jobs promoted it to their
friends and sisters and cousins, and you'd have high schoolers
coming and working in the summer holidays. People really wanted
to be a radium girl. It was a glamorous job,
quative job. It was an artistic job. One of my
favorite moments in my research for the book was looking
(05:15):
up Katherine Wolf Dunnahue in her local town directory and
it listed her name and her address and her profession
and it didn't say dial painter. It said artist radium
dial company.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Some of the earlier studios opened sort of nineteen sixteen,
nineteen seventeen, just before the First World War really begins,
And it was the First World War that really led
to a boom in the radium dial painting industry because
the women didn't just paint watches and clocks with this
glow in the dark radium paint. They would be painting
(05:50):
the instruments that would light up dashboards of automobiles, of aeroplanes,
things that were really useful in the war efforts.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
These women, in some cases, these girls, they're ingesting the radium.
It's dusting their clothes. It's on the paint brushes. They're
licking the paint rushes to get them to a fine point,
and their bodies are just absorbing more and more of
this stuff, which few people at the time realize is
so dangerous.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Exactly, and actually it's even worse than not realizing it's dangerous.
At the time, we're talking about nineteen tens nineteen twenties,
there was actually a belief that a small amount of
radium was beneficial to health. So if you went into
your local pharmacy, you could buy radium pills, radium dressings,
(06:39):
radium cosmetics to give you a brighter complexion, radium milk,
radium toothpaste. You know, there was a whole range of products.
People actually drank radium water as a health tonic, and
the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Well, it becomes slowly apparent that maybe, in fact, radium
is not a health tonic. What are the symptoms at
first of radium poisoning.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Well, Molly Maggia was one of the first to begin
her suffering. She worked with her sisters in the Orange
Plant in New Jersey, and Molly's first symptom was simply
an aching tooth. And this is what's so insidious about
the type of radiation poisoning suffered by the Radium girls.
(07:31):
It started so innocently. Grace Fryle, she had a soul back,
Katherine Donahue in Illinois, she's got a painful ankle, you know,
affecting the women in different ways and in ways that
you wouldn't immediately think, oh, I've got a fatal poisoning.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Different symptoms, and they all seem so mild.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
At first, exactly. And Molly obviously goes to the dentist
because she has this painful tooth, and he extracts it.
But then Molly finds that the next tooth starts to hurt,
and then the next tooth, and then the next, until
her dentist doesn't have to pull her teeth anymore because
they simply fall out on their own. How long does
(08:12):
this take in Molly's case, it's very rapid. She's one
of the first Radium girls to be suffering in this way,
and the dentists don't realize that actually pulling the teeth
and trying to deal with it actually accelerates her condition.
So she started getting a saw tooth in the October
of nineteen twenty one. By the May of nineteen twenty two,
(08:35):
she has gone to her dentist to complain again about
the pains in her jaw, and the dentist reaches into
her mouth to prod at her jawbone, and he finds
that it literally splinters to his touch, and he's able
to remove Molly's jaw, not by an operation, but simply
(08:55):
by lifting it out.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
The point at which your jaw is literally falling apart.
Of course, at that moment you realize that something terrible
is wrong. But how do the women in New Jersey
start to figure out they had some kind of suffering?
In common?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Radium poisoning may take several years to show itself, even
in those mild symptoms that we first talked about. The
women may not have been dial painters anymore, but of
course they still were in contact with the sisters and
cousins and friends they had worked with, and so it
was literally the women sharing their stories, being open about
the pain that they were suffering, and realizing, as Catherine
(09:34):
Sharp put it, one of the New Jersey girls, there
is something going on with this thing. The women realized
before any of the experts did, because it took a
long time before people actually took any attention of the
fact that dozens of young women were dying in New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And once the women themselves had figured out that something
was going on, what then.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
These poor working class women had no way of proving
what had happened to them, and without that proof, they
couldn't really do anything for me. One of the shocking
things about the story is they didn't get that expert
help until the first male employee of the Radium firm died,
when Dr Lehman passed away in June nineteen twenty five,
(10:21):
which actually is three years after Molly Maggier dies. In
September nineteen twenty two, a man dies, a brilliant doctor
called Harrison Martlin steps up autopsies him. None of the
other women have been autopsied, and it's through Martland that
the women finally get the expert proof they need to
be able to take on the company. But even then
(10:44):
it's not straightforward, partly because the law is set against them.
There's a statute of limitations which says you have to
file suit within two years. It takes sometimes up to
five years or longer for radium poisoning to show itself.
And the second major block to these women's fight for
justice was that the Radium firms themselves denied responsibility, and
(11:06):
not only that, they were active in trying to cover
up this scandal and this tragedy, and for them to
admit that radium was dangerous, even in small amounts, would
mean the end of their lucrative industries. And so they
tried everything in their power to silence the truth coming
out and to silence the Radium girls as well.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
They did engage in all kinds of denial and obfuscation.
Tell us a little bit about the tactics they were using.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
When the rumors that the women were being killed by
their work surfaced, one of the first things they did
was they commissioned an independent report to look into it.
The problem came when the report came back that the
radium was the culprit, and at that point they professed
to not be able to believe what the expert has said.
(11:59):
This is an expert called doctor Cecil Drinker, who worked
with his wife Catherine Drinker on this groundbreaking report that
said a small amount of radium was to blame them.
The Radium girl's illnesses and deaths, so they hush up
this report. But they don't only do that, they decide
to commission another expert called doctor Frederick Flynn to write
(12:21):
another report, and he finds that it's not the radium,
and this is the report that gets published. The other
one the company refuses to allow the drinkers to publish,
and so it's the other report that comes out. And
this doctor, doctor Flynn, is also hired to try to
examine the Radium girls, to tell them that they're in
perfect health, despite their limps, despite their aching teeth, despite
(12:44):
the fact that some of their legs are beginning to
shorten as the radium inside them is destroying their bones.
Despite all of those things, the doctors are saying, no,
you're in perfect health. There is no reason for you
to file suit against the company. There is no reason
for you to feel worried. And of course these women
don't know how to respond to be told by an
(13:04):
expert that you're in perfect health, even if your body
is telling you that it's not. You know, the lawyers
are reading Frederick Flynn's report, so they don't want to
take on the case either, because to their minds, there
is no proven link that says the radium is hurting
the women, But it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Only the lawyers who didn't want to help the women.
After the break will find out how they were treated
by their community. I mean, one of the things that
really shocked me reading your book was not just that
(13:45):
the company hired an expert to write this report and
it was a whitewash. Okay, that's bad, but their own
community doctors wouldn't believe them and wrote off their experiences.
And that seems to partly be because the Great Depression
is approaching as we move into the nineteen thirties, they
were worried that if the women were believed, then that
(14:08):
would be the end of the factory. And if it's
the end of the factory, then a lot of people
are going to lose their jobs. That's going to be
bad for the community. And so there seems to be
this response from the community at large, for example, from
the community doctors, to hush all this up.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Absolutely. And it's hard enough that they're suffering this, it's
cruciating pain. It's hard enough that they're facing financial hardship
because of course they're having to pay out so much
money for operations for medicines. But on top of all
of that, you've got, you know, your friends and your
neighbors shunning you, criticizing you, calling you liars and fakes
(14:42):
and frauds. You know, people thought the women were trying
to take the companies for a ride. They thought the
women had just got sick, and they were trying to
claim money under false pretenses. And so the women were
really shamed for that and there was no support. So
for me, it makes their courage and their resilience and
their persistence in pursuing this case. And as you say,
(15:03):
it's the nineteen thirties, now, this is decades the women
have been fighting. It makes their determination and to hold
the companies to account even more impressive.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Do you think that if all the people working in
the Radium dial factories had been men, this would be
a different story.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
I think it would. Personally, when women say they're in pain,
when women say I think it's I think it's this,
often they are dismissed. They're called hysteric, which happened to
a lot of the Radium girls, and people disbelieve them.
I also think there is a tendency that women can
be seen as expendable. I think that definitely happened in
(15:44):
the case of the radium girls, So I do think
it would be a different story if it had been
men who had been harmed. And I think for me,
one of the most shocking things about the story is
that these radium firms not only had the dial painting
studios where the women are being taught to lippoint and
put the brushes between their lips. They're not informed of
any danger. So the women think it's fine to be
(16:06):
covered in the glowing dust and go out dancing after work.
They think it's fine to paint a silly mustache on
their face with the glowing paint. Next Door to those
dial painting studios where all of that is happening, you
have the laboratories where admittedly the men are handling large
amounts of radium, but they are protected. They are issued
(16:26):
with lead aprons, they are told to take enforced vacations
so they're not overexposed to the radiation. They handle the
radium with ivory tipped tongs, and they are warned about
the danger.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And there's also a tendency to lie to the women
about the severity of their own condition, even from people
who have the women's best interests at heart. And there's
one as really a very moving moment towards the end
of your book, where one of the heroines of the story,
(17:00):
Catherine wolf Donahue, she doesn't know she's dying, and she
covers that in really the most painful and public way possible.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I wrote that scene that you're talking about with tears
streaming down my face. And that scene takes place in
the courtroom in Ottawa, Illinois. Catherine Dunna Hue is now very,
very sick. She's got a grapefruit sized tumor on her hip.
She has lost most of her teeth, her mouth is
constantly seeping pass so she's having to dab her mouth
(17:36):
with a patent handkerchief. And she's been carried to the
courtroom because she cannot walk anymore, and her bones are
so fragile from the radium that she can almost barely
be carried. It's a large undertaking in order even to
get her there. But Catherine is determined to have her
day in court, and so she's sitting in this room
(17:59):
in the courthouse and one of her doctors is on
the stand and is being grilled about her prognosis, and
he is asked directly, what are her chances? You know,
how long does she have left? What is the situation here?
And he hesitates before answering because he knows that Catherine
(18:23):
doesn't know, and she is sitting right there in the courtroom,
and he glances over at her, and in that glance,
and in that hesitation, tells Catherine all she needs to
know that she is not going to make it. She
knows she is not going to be there for her children,
her two young children, they are going to grow up
(18:44):
without a mother. And she lets out this shriek, this scream,
and clapses to the floor, and her husband rushes to her,
and her friend Pearl rushes to her, and they carry
her out. And the doctor's warned that if Catherine continues
(19:07):
with the case, if she continues to give evidence, it's
very likely to end in her death. They say that
the risk is too great, but when Catherine recovers, she insists.
She says, even if I cannot get to the courtroom,
the court can come to me. And the following day,
the court comes to her house at five twenty East
(19:28):
Superior Street, and they crowd into her front room and
Catherine is laid out on the sofa with a blanket
over her, and even though her voice is almost gone,
even though she is in incredible pain and incredible emotional
pain at having just been told that she is going
to die from this, she uses the last vestiges of
(19:49):
energy that she has to give her evidence. And she
does it for herself, and she does it for her
friends and her family, and she does it for all
the other workers out there who may be hurt if
she doesn't continue with this fight.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
There's an incredibly moving scene. You kind of love and
hate her lawyer at that moment because you realize he's
engineered this. He knows this is going to happen, and
it's all good for the cause, but it's just excruciating
for her.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The other thing that I could not believe as I
was reading was that the company then kept on appealing
because they realized if they were able to hold it
up long enough, she'd just die, and then they didn't
have to pay anything because she'd be dead.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Catherine dies in the end the day after, you know,
one of those appeals has been filed, so she wins
her case, but they appeal it, and when she learns
of that, the strength just went and she passed away
at home.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
So at first, these women were being rejected by their employers,
they were being rejected to some extent by their own community.
Nobody seemed to believe them. But then they did have
some champions. They did have people who came to fight
alongside them.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
I really admire the fact that it's other women who
championed them. Given we're talking about a time, as you say,
one hundred years ago, nineteen tens, nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties,
it was still rare to have women in public roles.
So one of those champions was a person called Katherine Wiley.
(21:32):
She was the executive secretary of the Consumers League, which
fought for better working conditions for women, and she finds
out about the story when a health officer who's been
dealing with the case. She said, people were just hushing
it up and brushing it under the carpet. You need
to keep after them to ensure that something will be done.
(21:54):
And Katherine Wiley was the best person that could have
been reached out to. And she immediately interviewed the radium
girls who were suffering at that time, and she met
a woman called Marguerite Carlo who was actually the first
girl to file suit. At that point, Marguerite was very
near death. She was suffering extremely and Catherine Wiley said,
(22:17):
having met Marguerite, I cannot rest until I have done
something to ensure that this never happens again. She was
the kind of woman that just kept knocking on the doors,
kept getting the meetings, kept niggling at the company president
to say, you've got to release the drinker report, what's
happening with it? And she was just tenacious in ensuring
(22:40):
that ultimately the truth came out.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And this was partly campaigning for changes in the law
because one of the astonishing things is what the Radium
Nile Company and the other radium companies were doing was
not actually illegal. There was no protection for workers from poisoning.
And if it's a slow burning condition, if it takes
more than two years to become a parent, that doesn't
count high there's a statute of limitations. So this isn't
just all the company needed to behave better. It was
(23:05):
also a case that the whole system needed to change.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Absolutely from Wiley very quickly got the law changed so
that something called radium necrosis became a compensable disease under
New Jersey law, but radium necrosis only referred to the
jaws disintegrating. It didn't impact on the cancers that the
women later received. There wasn't to do with the anemia
(23:28):
that killed many of them. It wasn't to do with
the fracturing bones that they were suffering. And so Catherine
Wiley had a sheep at a pretty easy time getting
that first law through, and it was because no one
really could claim on it. You had to be really
smart in how you were drafting these laws so that
(23:48):
actually people could be held accountable. But she realized her
mistake and then she fought again to get radium poisoning,
which would cover everything on the statute books. But tellingly,
that fight took her much longer. It wasn't until the
nineteen thirties that she succeeded in getting that law changed.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
And I want to talk briefly about Alice Hamilton. I
know she's not a central figure in this story, but
she is a fixture in caution me tale. She's a
bit of a legend, is well. She was the country's
leading expert on lead poisoning, and she told Thomas Midgley,
who was the inventor of CFC's and of adding lead
(24:26):
to gasoline. She told him not to do it, and
she tried to get him to stop and tried to
get that regulated. But she also has this role in
the radium story as well, doesn't she.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That's right. Not only did the radium firms cover up
the Drinker report, but they actually told the Department of Labor,
who had started investigating all these deaths, they said the
Drinker report had proved that actually it wasn't radium. So
they totally lied about the results. And because they were
refusing to let Drinker published, there was no way to
(24:58):
refute that. And Alice Hamilton was central in essentially ferreting
out that truth that the company had lied. Drinker obviously
was absolutely furious when he found out that the company
had done that. Catherine Drinker called Arthur Reader, the company president,
a real villain for having done that. So Alice Hamilton
(25:18):
was involved in that way and helping Raymond Berry, the
new Jersey lawyer, with the cases as well, assisting him
in whatever way she could to ensure that the medical
and technical information that he needed was there so that
he could really do his best work in representing the
women in court.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
We'll find out about lawyer Raymond Berry and the man
who represented the women involved in a horrifyingly similar case
in Ottawa. After the break, we're back and I'm talking
(25:57):
to Kate Moore, author of Radium Girls. So tell me
about the two lawyers who were central to these two cases,
Raymond Berry and Lend Grossman. They're quite striking characters, very.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Much so it was a pleasure to write them in
the book. A smile comes to my face as I'm
thinking about them, very different characters. I have to say,
Raymond Berry was the first lawyer to tackle the radium
cases because he was working in New Jersey. The New
Jersey women were working during the First World War. The
Ottawa studio didn't open until nineteen twenty two, so everything
(26:30):
that's happening in New Jersey is happening about five years
ahead of what's happening in Ottawa. And it's one of
those really frustrating things about looking back at these stories
from history and thinking, if it had to happen that
the Radium Girls had to get hurt before we realized
that a small amount of radium was dangerous, it should
only have happened to one group of women, and actually
(26:52):
because of the lies. Because of the lack of communication
and publication and promotion in those days, it took much
longer for the truth to out and it led to
the suffering of many, many more women in New Jersey.
When the court cases are coming up, the women tried
desperately to find a lawyer. Everyone is saying no until
(27:12):
Raymond Berry. He was a very young lawyer, not even
in his thirties yet he had baby face, good looks,
blue eyes, blonde hair, are a very very smart man,
and his brilliance was in tackling the statute of limitations question,
which was why the women kept getting knocked back by
many other attorneys. They just couldn't figure out because the
(27:36):
law said you had to file suit within two years.
This is now sort of nineteen twenty five, that we're
talking seven years, eight years since the women have been
hurt at their workplace. No one else can figure it out,
but Raymond Berry does.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Sort's the trick. So there are the kind of true
tricks to it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Really, the women could not file suit until they had
that proof, the medical, scientific proof that it was the
radium that had hurt them. One trick is that because
the radium firm had covered up the Drinker report. They
shouldn't be allowed to who rely on the delay caused
by their cover up.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Well, morally absolutely, I'm just surprised that legally that works,
but apparently it does completely.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
And then the other twist that he put on it,
which I think is really smart, is that you're supposed
to file suit within two years of the point of injury.
What has happened to Catherine and to Grace and all
the other women is that they've ingested the radium through
lip pointing. And radium is what's called a bone seeker,
so it's a bit like calcium in that way. We
know when we drink a glass of milk calcium, and
(28:40):
the milk goes into our bones makes them nice and strong.
When the radium girls ingested the radium, it also settles
in their bones. But there once it has settled, it's
emanating its immense radioactivity. And this is why the jaw
bones are splintering. The women's legs are spontaneously fracturing and
(29:02):
shortening because the radium is inside their body and it
is hurting them constantly because it's constantly emanating radioactivity. And
the legal argument therefore is the women are still being
injured because the radio is inside them. It is hurting
them anew with every second, and so they can file
(29:24):
suit because the point of injury is still occurring.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Clever very tell us about Lead Grossman, the lawyer who
was paid in shoes, see exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Leonard Grossman Senior was again a very special man. He
was dynamic, you know, a real showman in the courtroom.
He really knew what he was doing. In that regard.
He fought for the underdog, as you say, if people
couldn't pay him, he sometimes accepted payment in shoes, you know,
if that was all they had going, he would fight
for them. And the case of the Radium girls, he
(29:58):
did it pro bono and it was hours and hours
and hours of his time. And he kept fighting even
after Catherine Donahue died. He kept fighting for years because
it was the right thing to do. He was a
man who always did the right thing.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
But he did the right thing in the most flamboyant
way he did.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah, he was the kind of man that wore sort
of you know, spat shoes. And he was a larger
than life character, a large man in himself, and he
just had that energy and that presence.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
And he deployed that brutally. Sometimes we've alluded to the
moment where Katherine wil Tonahue discovers in court that she
is going to die. Leonard Grossman knew that would happen.
Presumably that whole exchange was something he had rehearsed in
his mind, I imagine, because he knew it would be
a winning moment.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, and I'm sure Lenna Grossman was aware of the optics,
shall we say, of Catherine lying on her sofa close
to death, and everyone crowded around her dining table taking
the evidence. He had the media there crowded into that
front room taking pictures of Catherine lying on the sofa
of her friend Charlotte Purcell, with her dress pinned up
(31:09):
because her arm has been amputated because of the radium poisoning.
All the women there sitting in a row, showing physically
viscerally what they have suffered. And Leonard Grossman, I'm sure
was aware of the power of those images in reaching
the public, in reaching the judge, hoping to achieve the
(31:30):
verdict that he was going for.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, Grossman was very clever there, very much. So I
was really struck by the bravery and the tenacity of
the women, but also of their solidarity and their sense
of wider purpose. They weren't just doing this for themselves.
They were very conscious of their families, husband's children, and
the wider community that what had happened to them couldn't
(31:54):
be allowed to happen again.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
That's absolutely right. I think it's one of the amazing
things about their story, actually, the altruism with which they
fought for justice, because there wasn't any hope for the
Radium girls who had got sick, and yet they fought on.
And in fact, one of my favorite quotations in the
book comes from Grace Fryer, one of the New Jersey girls,
who was instrumental in making sure that the court case happened.
(32:19):
She was single minded in ensuring that they would get
an attorney. You know, she tried lawyer after lawyer after lawyer.
Grace was incredibly smart. She ended up working for a
bank after she had been in the dial painting studios,
and she used every bit of her brain's channeled on
this case to make it happen. She was the daughter
(32:40):
of a union delegate, and I think that passion for
politics and that understanding of workers' rights and that this
was wrong. Really drove Grace. When she was asked about
filing suit while she was doing it, she said, it
is not for myself that I care. I am thinking
more of the hundreds of other girls to whom this
(33:02):
may serve as an example for me. That really sums
up the power of what they did and what they achieved.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So what did they achieve? Did they get conversation for
themselves within their own lives. What's the legacy of this
case within their own lifetimes?
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Some of them achieved a small measure of justice, shall
we say, Partly that was court case judgment that went
for them. Partly it was compensation to help them with
their medical bills. But the money was really never enough.
And by the end, it wasn't about the money. It
was about the moral victory and it was about the
scientific proof. The legacy therefore goes beyond what they achieved
(33:43):
in their own lives, and it impacts many different areas
of society and our world. On a legal front, they
changed workers compensation laws. They made it so that it
was illegal to poison your employees. So there were lots
of gains that they made in that regard. And theirs
(34:04):
was one of the first cases in which an employer
was held responsible for the health of their employees. They
have an incredible legacy in terms of the science of
this story. No one had ever been poisoned in this
way before. And actually, the Radium girls were studied for
decades because scientists appreciated that their bodies held unique knowledge
(34:28):
for the world about what radiation does to the human body.
There were departments set up that studied them. The women
came voluntarily to submit to medical tests, blood tests, sex rays,
bone marrow investigations, and so on. They had everything done,
and they came out ruistically to give that knowledge to
the world because they hoped it would help. They hoped
(34:50):
no one else would suffer as they did. Radium girls
were exhumed from the graves in these studies so that
women that had died in the past their bodies gave
up the secrets so that the world and scientists could
learn from them about what radiation does. And in fact,
they are still using the girls bodies to learn now.
(35:11):
I've actually been contacted by scientists from NASA and they're
using the data on the Radium girls to try to
determine what might happen to astronauts bodies, for example, on
the journey to Mars. What might space radiation do to them?
How might it affect them? And so the Radium Girls
are still having a legacy and they're still helping us
(35:33):
today learn more about radiation. And I'd say there's also
a final element to their legacy, which is specifically workplace
safety in nuclear industries. Thanks to the Radium Girls, they
did discover that even a small amount of radiation is harmful.
And it happened just in time for the Second World
(35:56):
War and the race to build the atomic bomb. And
the scientist who was in charge of the Manhattan Project
literally wrote in his diary that as he was walking
through the labs, he sort of had a vision of
the Ghost Girls, as the Radium Girls were known. He
remembered what had happened to them. He only knew what
would happened to them because of the women's tenacity in
(36:16):
making their court cases front page news. And he said,
I don't want anyone on the Manhattan Project to suffer
as they did, so he insisted that they conduct experiments
to find out about the biomedical properties of the uranium
and the plutonium they were using. They were found to
be biomedically very similar to radium, and therefore the workers
(36:38):
on the Manhattan Project were protected, and therefore everyone today
working in nuclear industries is protected because of the Radium Girls.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
There's a more disheartening legacy as well. I mean, the
first deaths were in the nineteen twenties, the court cases
were often in the nineteen thirties. Katherine Wilf Donohue died
in the nineteen thirties, but as late as the nineteen
seventies you describe people in those communities denying the experiences
of these women. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Because scientists were studying the women for decades. They would
go and interview people in Ottawa, Illinois, and the interviews
they conducted, even in the nineteen seventies had those community
members saying so and so was never very healthy to
begin with. I don't think it was radium poisoning. You know,
she always had one foot in the grave. They were
denying it even in the nineteen seventies. And I think
(37:30):
one of the lessons of the Radium Girl's story is
that history can repeat itself if we're not vigilant, and
we know that similar stories are happening even today, and
so it's about being aware of that, and it's about
tackling injustices and lies when we see them, and knowing
(37:54):
that it may take years, but if you're patient and
you persevere, the truth will out.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
We always promise our listeners a lesson in every cautionary tale,
and I think you've just given us the lion to
think about. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I think the only thing I'd like to add is
about the girls themselves, which was always my mission and
my motive in writing The Radium Girls. It was about
celebrating the women Grace Fryer, Katherine Wolf, Danny Hughe, Molly Maggia,
these incredible women and for me, actually, I think the
(38:35):
biggest lesson of all that we can learn from The
Radium Girls is that no matter how small you may
feel or how powerless, you can make a difference. Because
that's what these women did as a sisterhood. They banded together,
they fought for what they believed in, and they stood
up for themselves and they made every second count.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Kate More, thank you so much for talking to cause
me tales. Thank you so much for inviting me. I've
been speaking with Kate Moore. She is the New York
Times best selling author of The Radium Girls, which of
course is available wherever you get good books. She has
(39:22):
written many other books, and most recently the critically acclaimed
The Woman They Could Not Silence. Cautionary Tales is written
by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by
Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design
and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah
(39:44):
Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of
Ben Crowe, Melanie Gushridge, Stella Harford, Jamma Saunders and rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Dital Mollard, John Schnaz,
Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is
(40:07):
a production of Pushkin in Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor
Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends,
and if you want to hear the show ad free,
sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page. It's
Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm. Slash plus
Pushkin. This is a follow up to our previous episode
about two disturbing yet quite different cases of mass radiation poisoning.
If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I suggest
you do. Last time, we heard about the Guyana incident,
(00:36):
how a highly radioactive substance was left unattended, discovered by
gray market scrap dealers, and wreaked havoc on a neighborhood
of people who had no idea what they were dealing
with and no reason that they should know. It was
a story about critical thinking, but about the brilliant, heroic
detective work of a woman who figured out the source
(00:56):
of the suffering, but alas didn't survive her encounter with it.
In the end, everyone pulled together to try to diagnose
and solve the problem. But we also heard about a
different case, one in which the risks of radiation poison
were known, or at least widely suspected, and people weren't
(01:16):
pulling together at all. Instead, powerful businessmen resorted to obfuscation, misdirection,
and outright lies, leading to the painful deaths of their employees.
And there's much much more to say about that. I'm
Tim Harford, and you're listening to a special book club
(01:37):
edition of Cautionary Tales. That second story, the story of
(02:18):
the Radium Girls, is our subject today. I am delighted
to have the opportunity to speak with Kate Moore, the
author of numerous books across a range of genres, in
particular the New York Times bestseller The Radium Girls, which
is a powerful, heartbreaking account of their experiences and their
fight for justice. Kate Moore, Welcome to caution Me Tales.
(02:42):
Thank you so much, Tim Well. I'm delighted that you
could join us. How did you first come across this story?
What inspired you to write the book? So?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I first discovered the story of the Radium Girls through
directing a play about them, and it really has been
just the most incredible, serendipitous journey. I found the play
through googling great plays for women, and the moment I
found the script, which was The Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich,
(03:11):
I fell in love with these characters. This story of
women fighting for justice, this story of heartbreak and tragedy
and yet strength and dignity and courage was just so
universal in its power, and it just connected with me
straight away, and I knew it was based on a
true story. So as I prepared for my theater production,
(03:34):
I did as much research as I could on the
Radium girls. I was really interested in their personal stories.
What were their weddings, like, how many siblings did the
girls have, what was personally important to them as they
went through this experience, And I could not find the
answers to my questions. I was absolutely stunned that this
(03:56):
incredible story that had left such a lasting legacy did
not have a book that celebrated the individual women. And
ultimately I thought, well, if no one else else has
written that book, why don't I so tell us.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
About these Well, we've described them both as girls and
as women. Yeah, there were employees in two factories working
with radium because it makes numbers on watches glow, so
it's useful. Were they girls, were they women? How old
were they?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
They were girls at the beginning of the story, because
it was mostly teenage girls who were employed in these
dial painting factories. Most of them were sort of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen years of age, but actually the record show that
some of them were as young as eleven. It was
seen as such a great job for the poor working girls,
(04:53):
as the sources have it. Then, actually the women who
were lucky enough to have jobs promoted it to their
friends and sisters and cousins, and you'd have high schoolers
coming and working in the summer holidays. People really wanted
to be a radium girl. It was a glamorous job,
quative job. It was an artistic job. One of my
favorite moments in my research for the book was looking
(05:15):
up Katherine Wolf Dunnahue in her local town directory and
it listed her name and her address and her profession
and it didn't say dial painter. It said artist radium
dial company.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Some of the earlier studios opened sort of nineteen sixteen,
nineteen seventeen, just before the First World War really begins,
And it was the First World War that really led
to a boom in the radium dial painting industry because
the women didn't just paint watches and clocks with this
glow in the dark radium paint. They would be painting
(05:50):
the instruments that would light up dashboards of automobiles, of aeroplanes,
things that were really useful in the war efforts.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
These women, in some cases, these girls, they're ingesting the radium.
It's dusting their clothes. It's on the paint brushes. They're
licking the paint rushes to get them to a fine point,
and their bodies are just absorbing more and more of
this stuff, which few people at the time realize is
so dangerous.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Exactly, and actually it's even worse than not realizing it's dangerous.
At the time, we're talking about nineteen tens nineteen twenties,
there was actually a belief that a small amount of
radium was beneficial to health. So if you went into
your local pharmacy, you could buy radium pills, radium dressings,
(06:39):
radium cosmetics to give you a brighter complexion, radium milk,
radium toothpaste. You know, there was a whole range of products.
People actually drank radium water as a health tonic, and
the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Well, it becomes slowly apparent that maybe, in fact, radium
is not a health tonic. What are the symptoms at
first of radium poisoning.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Well, Molly Maggia was one of the first to begin
her suffering. She worked with her sisters in the Orange
Plant in New Jersey, and Molly's first symptom was simply
an aching tooth. And this is what's so insidious about
the type of radiation poisoning suffered by the Radium girls.
(07:31):
It started so innocently. Grace Fryle, she had a soul back,
Katherine Donahue in Illinois, she's got a painful ankle, you know,
affecting the women in different ways and in ways that
you wouldn't immediately think, oh, I've got a fatal poisoning.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Different symptoms, and they all seem so mild.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
At first, exactly. And Molly obviously goes to the dentist
because she has this painful tooth, and he extracts it.
But then Molly finds that the next tooth starts to hurt,
and then the next tooth, and then the next, until
her dentist doesn't have to pull her teeth anymore because
they simply fall out on their own. How long does
(08:12):
this take in Molly's case, it's very rapid. She's one
of the first Radium girls to be suffering in this way,
and the dentists don't realize that actually pulling the teeth
and trying to deal with it actually accelerates her condition.
So she started getting a saw tooth in the October
of nineteen twenty one. By the May of nineteen twenty two,
(08:35):
she has gone to her dentist to complain again about
the pains in her jaw, and the dentist reaches into
her mouth to prod at her jawbone, and he finds
that it literally splinters to his touch, and he's able
to remove Molly's jaw, not by an operation, but simply
(08:55):
by lifting it out.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
The point at which your jaw is literally falling apart.
Of course, at that moment you realize that something terrible
is wrong. But how do the women in New Jersey
start to figure out they had some kind of suffering?
In common?
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Radium poisoning may take several years to show itself, even
in those mild symptoms that we first talked about. The
women may not have been dial painters anymore, but of
course they still were in contact with the sisters and
cousins and friends they had worked with, and so it
was literally the women sharing their stories, being open about
the pain that they were suffering, and realizing, as Catherine
(09:34):
Sharp put it, one of the New Jersey girls, there
is something going on with this thing. The women realized
before any of the experts did, because it took a
long time before people actually took any attention of the
fact that dozens of young women were dying in New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And once the women themselves had figured out that something
was going on, what then.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
These poor working class women had no way of proving
what had happened to them, and without that proof, they
couldn't really do anything for me. One of the shocking
things about the story is they didn't get that expert
help until the first male employee of the Radium firm died,
when Dr Lehman passed away in June nineteen twenty five,
(10:21):
which actually is three years after Molly Maggier dies. In
September nineteen twenty two, a man dies, a brilliant doctor
called Harrison Martlin steps up autopsies him. None of the
other women have been autopsied, and it's through Martland that
the women finally get the expert proof they need to
be able to take on the company. But even then
(10:44):
it's not straightforward, partly because the law is set against them.
There's a statute of limitations which says you have to
file suit within two years. It takes sometimes up to
five years or longer for radium poisoning to show itself.
And the second major block to these women's fight for
justice was that the Radium firms themselves denied responsibility, and
(11:06):
not only that, they were active in trying to cover
up this scandal and this tragedy, and for them to
admit that radium was dangerous, even in small amounts, would
mean the end of their lucrative industries. And so they
tried everything in their power to silence the truth coming
out and to silence the Radium girls as well.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
They did engage in all kinds of denial and obfuscation.
Tell us a little bit about the tactics they were using.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
When the rumors that the women were being killed by
their work surfaced, one of the first things they did
was they commissioned an independent report to look into it.
The problem came when the report came back that the
radium was the culprit, and at that point they professed
to not be able to believe what the expert has said.
(11:59):
This is an expert called doctor Cecil Drinker, who worked
with his wife Catherine Drinker on this groundbreaking report that
said a small amount of radium was to blame them.
The Radium girl's illnesses and deaths, so they hush up
this report. But they don't only do that, they decide
to commission another expert called doctor Frederick Flynn to write
(12:21):
another report, and he finds that it's not the radium,
and this is the report that gets published. The other
one the company refuses to allow the drinkers to publish,
and so it's the other report that comes out. And
this doctor, doctor Flynn, is also hired to try to
examine the Radium girls, to tell them that they're in
perfect health, despite their limps, despite their aching teeth, despite
(12:44):
the fact that some of their legs are beginning to
shorten as the radium inside them is destroying their bones.
Despite all of those things, the doctors are saying, no,
you're in perfect health. There is no reason for you
to file suit against the company. There is no reason
for you to feel worried. And of course these women
don't know how to respond to be told by an
(13:04):
expert that you're in perfect health, even if your body
is telling you that it's not. You know, the lawyers
are reading Frederick Flynn's report, so they don't want to
take on the case either, because to their minds, there
is no proven link that says the radium is hurting
the women, But it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Only the lawyers who didn't want to help the women.
After the break will find out how they were treated
by their community. I mean, one of the things that
really shocked me reading your book was not just that
(13:45):
the company hired an expert to write this report and
it was a whitewash. Okay, that's bad, but their own
community doctors wouldn't believe them and wrote off their experiences.
And that seems to partly be because the Great Depression
is approaching as we move into the nineteen thirties, they
were worried that if the women were believed, then that
(14:08):
would be the end of the factory. And if it's
the end of the factory, then a lot of people
are going to lose their jobs. That's going to be
bad for the community. And so there seems to be
this response from the community at large, for example, from
the community doctors, to hush all this up.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Absolutely. And it's hard enough that they're suffering this, it's
cruciating pain. It's hard enough that they're facing financial hardship
because of course they're having to pay out so much
money for operations for medicines. But on top of all
of that, you've got, you know, your friends and your
neighbors shunning you, criticizing you, calling you liars and fakes
(14:42):
and frauds. You know, people thought the women were trying
to take the companies for a ride. They thought the
women had just got sick, and they were trying to
claim money under false pretenses. And so the women were
really shamed for that and there was no support. So
for me, it makes their courage and their resilience and
their persistence in pursuing this case. And as you say,
(15:03):
it's the nineteen thirties, now, this is decades the women
have been fighting. It makes their determination and to hold
the companies to account even more impressive.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Do you think that if all the people working in
the Radium dial factories had been men, this would be
a different story.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
I think it would. Personally, when women say they're in pain,
when women say I think it's I think it's this,
often they are dismissed. They're called hysteric, which happened to
a lot of the Radium girls, and people disbelieve them.
I also think there is a tendency that women can
be seen as expendable. I think that definitely happened in
(15:44):
the case of the radium girls, So I do think
it would be a different story if it had been
men who had been harmed. And I think for me,
one of the most shocking things about the story is
that these radium firms not only had the dial painting
studios where the women are being taught to lippoint and
put the brushes between their lips. They're not informed of
any danger. So the women think it's fine to be
(16:06):
covered in the glowing dust and go out dancing after work.
They think it's fine to paint a silly mustache on
their face with the glowing paint. Next Door to those
dial painting studios where all of that is happening, you
have the laboratories where admittedly the men are handling large
amounts of radium, but they are protected. They are issued
(16:26):
with lead aprons, they are told to take enforced vacations
so they're not overexposed to the radiation. They handle the
radium with ivory tipped tongs, and they are warned about
the danger.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And there's also a tendency to lie to the women
about the severity of their own condition, even from people
who have the women's best interests at heart. And there's
one as really a very moving moment towards the end
of your book, where one of the heroines of the story,
(17:00):
Catherine wolf Donahue, she doesn't know she's dying, and she
covers that in really the most painful and public way possible.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
I wrote that scene that you're talking about with tears
streaming down my face. And that scene takes place in
the courtroom in Ottawa, Illinois. Catherine Dunna Hue is now very,
very sick. She's got a grapefruit sized tumor on her hip.
She has lost most of her teeth, her mouth is
constantly seeping pass so she's having to dab her mouth
(17:36):
with a patent handkerchief. And she's been carried to the
courtroom because she cannot walk anymore, and her bones are
so fragile from the radium that she can almost barely
be carried. It's a large undertaking in order even to
get her there. But Catherine is determined to have her
day in court, and so she's sitting in this room
(17:59):
in the courthouse and one of her doctors is on
the stand and is being grilled about her prognosis, and
he is asked directly, what are her chances? You know,
how long does she have left? What is the situation here?
And he hesitates before answering because he knows that Catherine
(18:23):
doesn't know, and she is sitting right there in the courtroom,
and he glances over at her, and in that glance,
and in that hesitation, tells Catherine all she needs to
know that she is not going to make it. She
knows she is not going to be there for her children,
her two young children, they are going to grow up
(18:44):
without a mother. And she lets out this shriek, this scream,
and clapses to the floor, and her husband rushes to her,
and her friend Pearl rushes to her, and they carry
her out. And the doctor's warned that if Catherine continues
(19:07):
with the case, if she continues to give evidence, it's
very likely to end in her death. They say that
the risk is too great, but when Catherine recovers, she insists.
She says, even if I cannot get to the courtroom,
the court can come to me. And the following day,
the court comes to her house at five twenty East
(19:28):
Superior Street, and they crowd into her front room and
Catherine is laid out on the sofa with a blanket
over her, and even though her voice is almost gone,
even though she is in incredible pain and incredible emotional
pain at having just been told that she is going
to die from this, she uses the last vestiges of
(19:49):
energy that she has to give her evidence. And she
does it for herself, and she does it for her
friends and her family, and she does it for all
the other workers out there who may be hurt if
she doesn't continue with this fight.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
There's an incredibly moving scene. You kind of love and
hate her lawyer at that moment because you realize he's
engineered this. He knows this is going to happen, and
it's all good for the cause, but it's just excruciating
for her.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The other thing that I could not believe as I
was reading was that the company then kept on appealing
because they realized if they were able to hold it
up long enough, she'd just die, and then they didn't
have to pay anything because she'd be dead.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Catherine dies in the end the day after, you know,
one of those appeals has been filed, so she wins
her case, but they appeal it, and when she learns
of that, the strength just went and she passed away
at home.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
So at first, these women were being rejected by their employers,
they were being rejected to some extent by their own community.
Nobody seemed to believe them. But then they did have
some champions. They did have people who came to fight
alongside them.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
I really admire the fact that it's other women who
championed them. Given we're talking about a time, as you say,
one hundred years ago, nineteen tens, nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties,
it was still rare to have women in public roles.
So one of those champions was a person called Katherine Wiley.
(21:32):
She was the executive secretary of the Consumers League, which
fought for better working conditions for women, and she finds
out about the story when a health officer who's been
dealing with the case. She said, people were just hushing
it up and brushing it under the carpet. You need
to keep after them to ensure that something will be done.
(21:54):
And Katherine Wiley was the best person that could have
been reached out to. And she immediately interviewed the radium
girls who were suffering at that time, and she met
a woman called Marguerite Carlo who was actually the first
girl to file suit. At that point, Marguerite was very
near death. She was suffering extremely and Catherine Wiley said,
(22:17):
having met Marguerite, I cannot rest until I have done
something to ensure that this never happens again. She was
the kind of woman that just kept knocking on the doors,
kept getting the meetings, kept niggling at the company president
to say, you've got to release the drinker report, what's
happening with it? And she was just tenacious in ensuring
(22:40):
that ultimately the truth came out.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
And this was partly campaigning for changes in the law
because one of the astonishing things is what the Radium
Nile Company and the other radium companies were doing was
not actually illegal. There was no protection for workers from poisoning.
And if it's a slow burning condition, if it takes
more than two years to become a parent, that doesn't
count high there's a statute of limitations. So this isn't
just all the company needed to behave better. It was
(23:05):
also a case that the whole system needed to change.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Absolutely from Wiley very quickly got the law changed so
that something called radium necrosis became a compensable disease under
New Jersey law, but radium necrosis only referred to the
jaws disintegrating. It didn't impact on the cancers that the
women later received. There wasn't to do with the anemia
(23:28):
that killed many of them. It wasn't to do with
the fracturing bones that they were suffering. And so Catherine
Wiley had a sheep at a pretty easy time getting
that first law through, and it was because no one
really could claim on it. You had to be really
smart in how you were drafting these laws so that
(23:48):
actually people could be held accountable. But she realized her
mistake and then she fought again to get radium poisoning,
which would cover everything on the statute books. But tellingly,
that fight took her much longer. It wasn't until the
nineteen thirties that she succeeded in getting that law changed.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
And I want to talk briefly about Alice Hamilton. I
know she's not a central figure in this story, but
she is a fixture in caution me tale. She's a
bit of a legend, is well. She was the country's
leading expert on lead poisoning, and she told Thomas Midgley,
who was the inventor of CFC's and of adding lead
(24:26):
to gasoline. She told him not to do it, and
she tried to get him to stop and tried to
get that regulated. But she also has this role in
the radium story as well, doesn't she.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
That's right. Not only did the radium firms cover up
the Drinker report, but they actually told the Department of Labor,
who had started investigating all these deaths, they said the
Drinker report had proved that actually it wasn't radium. So
they totally lied about the results. And because they were
refusing to let Drinker published, there was no way to
(24:58):
refute that. And Alice Hamilton was central in essentially ferreting
out that truth that the company had lied. Drinker obviously
was absolutely furious when he found out that the company
had done that. Catherine Drinker called Arthur Reader, the company president,
a real villain for having done that. So Alice Hamilton
(25:18):
was involved in that way and helping Raymond Berry, the
new Jersey lawyer, with the cases as well, assisting him
in whatever way she could to ensure that the medical
and technical information that he needed was there so that
he could really do his best work in representing the
women in court.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
We'll find out about lawyer Raymond Berry and the man
who represented the women involved in a horrifyingly similar case
in Ottawa. After the break, we're back and I'm talking
(25:57):
to Kate Moore, author of Radium Girls. So tell me
about the two lawyers who were central to these two cases,
Raymond Berry and Lend Grossman. They're quite striking characters, very.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Much so it was a pleasure to write them in
the book. A smile comes to my face as I'm
thinking about them, very different characters. I have to say,
Raymond Berry was the first lawyer to tackle the radium
cases because he was working in New Jersey. The New
Jersey women were working during the First World War. The
Ottawa studio didn't open until nineteen twenty two, so everything
(26:30):
that's happening in New Jersey is happening about five years
ahead of what's happening in Ottawa. And it's one of
those really frustrating things about looking back at these stories
from history and thinking, if it had to happen that
the Radium Girls had to get hurt before we realized
that a small amount of radium was dangerous, it should
only have happened to one group of women, and actually
(26:52):
because of the lies. Because of the lack of communication
and publication and promotion in those days, it took much
longer for the truth to out and it led to
the suffering of many, many more women in New Jersey.
When the court cases are coming up, the women tried
desperately to find a lawyer. Everyone is saying no until
(27:12):
Raymond Berry. He was a very young lawyer, not even
in his thirties yet he had baby face, good looks,
blue eyes, blonde hair, are a very very smart man,
and his brilliance was in tackling the statute of limitations question,
which was why the women kept getting knocked back by
many other attorneys. They just couldn't figure out because the
(27:36):
law said you had to file suit within two years.
This is now sort of nineteen twenty five, that we're
talking seven years, eight years since the women have been
hurt at their workplace. No one else can figure it out,
but Raymond Berry does.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Sort's the trick. So there are the kind of true
tricks to it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Really, the women could not file suit until they had
that proof, the medical, scientific proof that it was the
radium that had hurt them. One trick is that because
the radium firm had covered up the Drinker report. They
shouldn't be allowed to who rely on the delay caused
by their cover up.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Well, morally absolutely, I'm just surprised that legally that works,
but apparently it does completely.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
And then the other twist that he put on it,
which I think is really smart, is that you're supposed
to file suit within two years of the point of injury.
What has happened to Catherine and to Grace and all
the other women is that they've ingested the radium through
lip pointing. And radium is what's called a bone seeker,
so it's a bit like calcium in that way. We
know when we drink a glass of milk calcium, and
(28:40):
the milk goes into our bones makes them nice and strong.
When the radium girls ingested the radium, it also settles
in their bones. But there once it has settled, it's
emanating its immense radioactivity. And this is why the jaw
bones are splintering. The women's legs are spontaneously fracturing and
(29:02):
shortening because the radium is inside their body and it
is hurting them constantly because it's constantly emanating radioactivity. And
the legal argument therefore is the women are still being
injured because the radio is inside them. It is hurting
them anew with every second, and so they can file
(29:24):
suit because the point of injury is still occurring.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Clever very tell us about Lead Grossman, the lawyer who
was paid in shoes, see exactly.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Leonard Grossman Senior was again a very special man. He
was dynamic, you know, a real showman in the courtroom.
He really knew what he was doing. In that regard.
He fought for the underdog, as you say, if people
couldn't pay him, he sometimes accepted payment in shoes, you know,
if that was all they had going, he would fight
for them. And the case of the Radium girls, he
(29:58):
did it pro bono and it was hours and hours
and hours of his time. And he kept fighting even
after Catherine Donahue died. He kept fighting for years because
it was the right thing to do. He was a
man who always did the right thing.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
But he did the right thing in the most flamboyant
way he did.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Yeah, he was the kind of man that wore sort
of you know, spat shoes. And he was a larger
than life character, a large man in himself, and he
just had that energy and that presence.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
And he deployed that brutally. Sometimes we've alluded to the
moment where Katherine wil Tonahue discovers in court that she
is going to die. Leonard Grossman knew that would happen.
Presumably that whole exchange was something he had rehearsed in
his mind, I imagine, because he knew it would be
a winning moment.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, and I'm sure Lenna Grossman was aware of the optics,
shall we say, of Catherine lying on her sofa close
to death, and everyone crowded around her dining table taking
the evidence. He had the media there crowded into that
front room taking pictures of Catherine lying on the sofa
of her friend Charlotte Purcell, with her dress pinned up
(31:09):
because her arm has been amputated because of the radium poisoning.
All the women there sitting in a row, showing physically
viscerally what they have suffered. And Leonard Grossman, I'm sure
was aware of the power of those images in reaching
the public, in reaching the judge, hoping to achieve the
(31:30):
verdict that he was going for.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, Grossman was very clever there, very much. So I
was really struck by the bravery and the tenacity of
the women, but also of their solidarity and their sense
of wider purpose. They weren't just doing this for themselves.
They were very conscious of their families, husband's children, and
the wider community that what had happened to them couldn't
(31:54):
be allowed to happen again.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
That's absolutely right. I think it's one of the amazing
things about their story, actually, the altruism with which they
fought for justice, because there wasn't any hope for the
Radium girls who had got sick, and yet they fought on.
And in fact, one of my favorite quotations in the
book comes from Grace Fryer, one of the New Jersey girls,
who was instrumental in making sure that the court case happened.
(32:19):
She was single minded in ensuring that they would get
an attorney. You know, she tried lawyer after lawyer after lawyer.
Grace was incredibly smart. She ended up working for a
bank after she had been in the dial painting studios,
and she used every bit of her brain's channeled on
this case to make it happen. She was the daughter
(32:40):
of a union delegate, and I think that passion for
politics and that understanding of workers' rights and that this
was wrong. Really drove Grace. When she was asked about
filing suit while she was doing it, she said, it
is not for myself that I care. I am thinking
more of the hundreds of other girls to whom this
(33:02):
may serve as an example for me. That really sums
up the power of what they did and what they achieved.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So what did they achieve? Did they get conversation for
themselves within their own lives. What's the legacy of this
case within their own lifetimes?
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Some of them achieved a small measure of justice, shall
we say, Partly that was court case judgment that went
for them. Partly it was compensation to help them with
their medical bills. But the money was really never enough.
And by the end, it wasn't about the money. It
was about the moral victory and it was about the
scientific proof. The legacy therefore goes beyond what they achieved
(33:43):
in their own lives, and it impacts many different areas
of society and our world. On a legal front, they
changed workers compensation laws. They made it so that it
was illegal to poison your employees. So there were lots
of gains that they made in that regard. And theirs
(34:04):
was one of the first cases in which an employer
was held responsible for the health of their employees. They
have an incredible legacy in terms of the science of
this story. No one had ever been poisoned in this
way before. And actually, the Radium girls were studied for
decades because scientists appreciated that their bodies held unique knowledge
(34:28):
for the world about what radiation does to the human body.
There were departments set up that studied them. The women
came voluntarily to submit to medical tests, blood tests, sex rays,
bone marrow investigations, and so on. They had everything done,
and they came out ruistically to give that knowledge to
the world because they hoped it would help. They hoped
(34:50):
no one else would suffer as they did. Radium girls
were exhumed from the graves in these studies so that
women that had died in the past their bodies gave
up the secrets so that the world and scientists could
learn from them about what radiation does. And in fact,
they are still using the girls bodies to learn now.
(35:11):
I've actually been contacted by scientists from NASA and they're
using the data on the Radium girls to try to
determine what might happen to astronauts bodies, for example, on
the journey to Mars. What might space radiation do to them?
How might it affect them? And so the Radium Girls
are still having a legacy and they're still helping us
(35:33):
today learn more about radiation. And I'd say there's also
a final element to their legacy, which is specifically workplace
safety in nuclear industries. Thanks to the Radium Girls, they
did discover that even a small amount of radiation is harmful.
And it happened just in time for the Second World
(35:56):
War and the race to build the atomic bomb. And
the scientist who was in charge of the Manhattan Project
literally wrote in his diary that as he was walking
through the labs, he sort of had a vision of
the Ghost Girls, as the Radium Girls were known. He
remembered what had happened to them. He only knew what
would happened to them because of the women's tenacity in
(36:16):
making their court cases front page news. And he said,
I don't want anyone on the Manhattan Project to suffer
as they did, so he insisted that they conduct experiments
to find out about the biomedical properties of the uranium
and the plutonium they were using. They were found to
be biomedically very similar to radium, and therefore the workers
(36:38):
on the Manhattan Project were protected, and therefore everyone today
working in nuclear industries is protected because of the Radium Girls.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
There's a more disheartening legacy as well. I mean, the
first deaths were in the nineteen twenties, the court cases
were often in the nineteen thirties. Katherine Wilf Donohue died
in the nineteen thirties, but as late as the nineteen
seventies you describe people in those communities denying the experiences
of these women. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Because scientists were studying the women for decades. They would
go and interview people in Ottawa, Illinois, and the interviews
they conducted, even in the nineteen seventies had those community
members saying so and so was never very healthy to
begin with. I don't think it was radium poisoning. You know,
she always had one foot in the grave. They were
denying it even in the nineteen seventies. And I think
(37:30):
one of the lessons of the Radium Girl's story is
that history can repeat itself if we're not vigilant, and
we know that similar stories are happening even today, and
so it's about being aware of that, and it's about
tackling injustices and lies when we see them, and knowing
(37:54):
that it may take years, but if you're patient and
you persevere, the truth will out.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
We always promise our listeners a lesson in every cautionary tale,
and I think you've just given us the lion to
think about. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
I think the only thing I'd like to add is
about the girls themselves, which was always my mission and
my motive in writing The Radium Girls. It was about
celebrating the women Grace Fryer, Katherine Wolf, Danny Hughe, Molly Maggia,
these incredible women and for me, actually, I think the
(38:35):
biggest lesson of all that we can learn from The
Radium Girls is that no matter how small you may
feel or how powerless, you can make a difference. Because
that's what these women did as a sisterhood. They banded together,
they fought for what they believed in, and they stood
up for themselves and they made every second count.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Kate More, thank you so much for talking to cause
me tales. Thank you so much for inviting me. I've
been speaking with Kate Moore. She is the New York
Times best selling author of The Radium Girls, which of
course is available wherever you get good books. She has
(39:22):
written many other books, and most recently the critically acclaimed
The Woman They Could Not Silence. Cautionary Tales is written
by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by
Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design
and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah
(39:44):
Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of
Ben Crowe, Melanie Gushridge, Stella Harford, Jamma Saunders and rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Dital Mollard, John Schnaz,
Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is
(40:07):
a production of Pushkin in Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor
Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends,
and if you want to hear the show ad free,
sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page. It's
Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm. Slash plus
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