[SPEAKER_00]: Orange New Jersey, October 15, 1927.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nine men stand around an open grave in Rosedale cemetery.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've erected a canvas tent over the plot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not for rain, but for privacy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Five of them are lawyers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two are doctors.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is a chemist.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is the dead woman's brother-in-law.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been given a time.
[SPEAKER_00]: 330 p.m. exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wait.
[SPEAKER_00]: The workers heave on ropes and silver chains.
[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, a wooden box rises from six feet down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The outer casing falls apart in their hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: The casket beneath it is rotting.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's glowing, not bright, not like a lamp, a soft luminescence, in a natural light coming from inside the box, the kind of light that has no business in a grave.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone pulls a silver name plate from the splintered wood.
[SPEAKER_00]: They hold it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia Magia.
[SPEAKER_00]: They show it to her brother-in-law.
[SPEAKER_00]: He nods.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's her.
[SPEAKER_00]: They open the lid.
[SPEAKER_00]: she still in her white dress.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her black leather pumps are still on her feet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Five years underground, and she is, as the doctor's note, in a good state of preservation.
[SPEAKER_00]: She almost looks like she's sleeping.
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost.
[SPEAKER_00]: Except her lower jaw is missing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was taken from her while she was still alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: They lift her from the coffin and carry her to a nearby funeral parlor.
[SPEAKER_00]: At four fifty p.m., the autopsy begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: They remove her upper jawbones in pieces.
[SPEAKER_00]: They saw through her spine, her skull, her ribs.
[SPEAKER_00]: They scraped the bones with the knife, wash them, try them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, they place the ash on photographic film, and wait.
[SPEAKER_00]: The film develops, pervert a break glow in vertical white lights, like a regiment of matches burning into black.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her skull, missing its jaw, makes her mouth stretch wide, as if she's screaming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kate Moore in her book, The Radium Girls, wrote that they looked like rows of shining dial painters walking home from work.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Doctor's Conclusion is eight words long.
[SPEAKER_00]: each and every portion of tissue and bone tested gave evidence of radioactivity.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was noted by the Examining Physicians in October 1927, and there's one more fighting, the one that matters even more.
[SPEAKER_00]: No evidence of syphilis.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia Magim was not killed by a sexual disease.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was killed by her employer, and for five years they lied about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a story about a corporation that made a mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a story about a corporation that knew what it was doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That watched young women die and blamed them for dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a story about a substance that was supposed to be a miracle, about a society that fell in love with something that it didn't understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: About teenage girls who painted their teeth so they'd glow when they smiled at their boyfriends, about a paint that turned them into ghosts, and then turned their ghosts into evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a story about how the law finally bent to wait for everyone in it, because of women whose bones be killed there testimony.
[SPEAKER_00]: About a Harvard professor who lied, about a fake doctor in a fake examination room, about a judge who let the trial be delayed while the plaintiffs were dying, about lawyers who took summers in Europe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a story about what came after because the bones of the women in this story are still radioactive and because of those bones, OSHA exists and because of those bones, thousands of workers on the Manhattan Project went home at night.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the radium girls.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to corporate wars.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Tom, and this is the Ghost Girls.
[SPEAKER_00]: act one, like with sunshine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we get back to that cemetery, we need to talk about a craze, because what happened in Orange, New Jersey wasn't just corporate negligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the end point of a society that fell in love with the substance that it didn't understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered Radium.
[SPEAKER_00]: Within a decade, it was the most famous element on Earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Within two decades, it was the most valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: A single gram of Radium sold for $120,000, adjusted for inflation, that's $2.2 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: Radium-tooth paste, Radium-Face cream, Radium-Chocolate, Radium-Suppositories, Radium-Lined Drinking Chars for the Welfi.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll recommend a dose of five to seven glasses of Radium-active water per day.
[SPEAKER_00]: One advert championed a Radium-based bug spray as completely harmless to humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers called Radium-Liquid Sunshine,
[SPEAKER_00]: doctors used it to shrink tumors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because it could save lives, people assumed it could improve them too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Radium was a miracle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone said so.
[SPEAKER_00]: The scientists that doctors, the advertisements, the government.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody questioned it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would they?
[SPEAKER_00]: A doctor named CG Davis wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Medicine that radioactivity prevents insanity, rounds his noble emotions, retards old age, and creates a splendid youthful joyous life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hotels advertised radium baths, pharmacies, sold radioactive pills, women applied radium
[SPEAKER_00]: A company called Radior sold a full line of radioactive toiletries through American department stores, face powder, hair tonic, soap, all guaranteed to retain their radioactivity for at least 20 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most notorious product was Radithore, Radium, dissolved in water.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sult at a dollar a bottle by William J.
[SPEAKER_00]: A. Bailey, a Harvard dropout who called himself a doctor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bailey offered physicians a 17% rebate on every bottle they prescribed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over 400,000 bottles were sold.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bailey got rich.
[SPEAKER_00]: A golfer named Even Buyers, a Yale graduate, socialite, U.S. amateur champion of 1906, drank three bottles a day for three years, around 1,400 bottles total.
[SPEAKER_00]: He believed it gave him a toned up feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: He even gave it to his race horses.
[SPEAKER_00]: his teeth fell out.
[SPEAKER_00]: His jaw crumbled.
[SPEAKER_00]: His skull began to disintegrate.
[SPEAKER_00]: It FTC attorney visited buyers at his long island mansion and later wrote that his entire upper jaw had been removed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of his lower jaw was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the remaining bone tissue in his body was slowly disintegrating.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Attorney wrote, a more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Buyer's died in 1932.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Wall Street Journal headline reportedly read, The Radium Water worked fine until his jaw came off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, hold on to even buyers for a second, because his story matters here.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was rich, he was famous, he was a public figure.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he died, the Federal Trade Commission moved fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Radium-based patent medicines were banned almost immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: The press covered it nationally.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Radium Girls had been dying for 10 years by then, working class women, Italian and Irish daughters.
[SPEAKER_00]: the press had covered them too, but nothing moved at the federal level.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It took the death of one wealthy man to do with the deaths of dozens of poor women could not.
[SPEAKER_00]: That asymmetric response is the secret engine of this entire story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who's body the system bothers to protect?
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll come back to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, into this world comes a man named Sabin Arnold Vonsuchalki, Austrian-born physician.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd studied weighty-wacctivity under the Cunaries in Paris, and he'd figured something out.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you mix a tiny amount of radium with zinc sulfide, you get paint that flows in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not for an hour, not for a day, permanently.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called it un-dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1917, he opened a factory at the corner of high in Alden Streets and Orange New Jersey.
[SPEAKER_00]: The factory did two things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It extracted radium from Carnotite or shipped by rail from Colorado, and it applied that radium to watch dials.
[SPEAKER_00]: why watch dials?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because America had just entered the first world war.
[SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers needed to tell time at night.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pilots needed to read instruments in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: The military wanted self-illuminating dials on everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Watches, compasses, gun sights, aircraft panels.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Radiant Luminous Material Corporation was happy to supply them.
[SPEAKER_00]: but they needed workers, specifically.
[SPEAKER_00]: They needed workers with small, steady hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers who could paint tiny numbers on tiny watch faces for 10 hours a day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers who would do detailed, repetitive work for low wages.
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers who wouldn't ask too many questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sell, they hired young women, dozens of them, eventually, hundreds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some were as young as 11.
[SPEAKER_00]: Catherine Shobb was 14 when she started.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Fire was 18.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia Magia was 19.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came from working class families in Newark and Orange.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pay was good, a penny and a half per dial, 250 dials a shift, that put them in the top 5% of female wage earners nationally.
[SPEAKER_00]: They felt lucky, and why wouldn't they?
[SPEAKER_00]: They were working with the most valuable substance on earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Radium cost $2 million a gram, and they had their own
[SPEAKER_00]: each painter mixed her own paint, a pinch of radium powder into a small bite crucible, a dash of water, some gummerabic adhesive, the result was a greenish white luminous paste.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fine yellow powder contained only a trace of radium mixed with zinc sulfide, the
[SPEAKER_00]: The room they worked in was large and dusty, long tables, rows of women hunched over tiny dials.
[SPEAKER_00]: The work was painstaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each number on a watch face was barely a millimeter wide.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the women could paint 250 dials in a single shift.
[SPEAKER_00]: At a penny and a half per dial, that was $3.75 a day.
[SPEAKER_00]: The magic family alone sent four sisters to the factory, Albina, Mali, Kinta, and fourth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seven magic sisters in total, all of them daughters of Italian immigrants.
[SPEAKER_00]: The factory was a family affair for half of orange.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Fryer was the daughter of a union man.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was the eldest of 11 children.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was 18 when she started and she took the job seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her younger sister Adelaide also got hired.
[SPEAKER_00]: Adelaide was eventually fired for talking too much, that firing would save her life.
[SPEAKER_00]: The technique was simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: You took a fine-tipped camel hair brush.
[SPEAKER_00]: You dipped it into the glowing paint.
[SPEAKER_00]: You applied it to the dial.
[SPEAKER_00]: After a few strokes, the brush lost its point.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you put it between your lips rolled it into a fine tip and kept painting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lip, dip, paint.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were told this was harmless, but supervisors said so.
[SPEAKER_00]: The manager said so.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vansachaki himself told workers the paint had no hazardous ingredients.
[SPEAKER_00]: Using rags or water to shape the brush, we stood time and expensive material.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lips were more efficient, so the women liked the brushes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every time they did, they swallowed a tiny amount of radium.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they didn't worry.
[SPEAKER_00]: They painted their fingernails with this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: They coated their teeth so they'd glow in the dark when they smiled at their boyfriends.
[SPEAKER_00]: They went home at night with their hair and skin shimmering.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their dresses were luminous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their underclose were luminous.
[SPEAKER_00]: One worker's back glowed almost to her waist.
[SPEAKER_00]: They called themselves the Ghost Girls.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Fryer noticed something strange, which he blew her nose, her anger chief glowed in the dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: She thought it was funny, they all thought it was funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, in another part of the same building, the company's chemists handled radiant with lead screens, metal tongs, and protective masks.
[SPEAKER_00]: The company had distributed literature to the medical community, describing the injury as effects of radium.
[SPEAKER_00]: The scientists knew, the managers knew, the women did not.
[SPEAKER_01]: act to.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dying begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: It started with teeth, a toothache, a trip to the dentist, an extraction.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the whole where the tooth had been wouldn't heal.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wound stayed open.
[SPEAKER_00]: an abscess formed, bleeding that wouldn't stop, then the tooth next to it would loosen, and then the next, and then the entire jaw itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bone would soften, become porous, necrotic, pieces would break away, by condition
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what was happening inside their bodies, and it helps to understand it because the horror of it is also the science of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now Radium is chemically very similar to calcium.
[SPEAKER_00]: The body can't tell them apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when these women swallowed Radium, microscopic amounts, hundreds of times a day, their bodies treated it like a building block.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the Radium went into their bones.
[SPEAKER_00]: The teeth first.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the jaw.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the spine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then everywhere else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And once it was in there, it stayed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Radium 226 has a half life of 1600 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't going anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every second that it sat in their bones, it was a knitting radiation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, right next to the marrow, right next to the cells that produce blood, right next to the bone cells themselves, the marrow died first.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why the women became anemic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the bone cells died.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why the bones crumbled.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the surrounding tissues died.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why the wounds wouldn't heal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the cells that survived began to mutate.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why they got cancer.
[SPEAKER_00]: every symptom these women had, every dental abscess, every sarcoma, every lost vertebrae, every drop of bleeding came from the same source, the thing they'd been told was safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amelia Magia, Molly to her family.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of seven sisters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Four of them worked at the factory.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1921, her last year of painting, she started losing weight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her joints ached.
[SPEAKER_00]: She felt she said, like a tired old woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: But she was 23.
[SPEAKER_00]: her teeth began to fall out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her dentist found that her jaw was splintering apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: All-Sersformed, bleeding, full of pus.
[SPEAKER_00]: The disease spread through her jaw bone, and into the roof of her mouth, into the bones of her ears.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the days before she died, her dentist reached into her mouth and lifted out her entire lower jaw.
[SPEAKER_00]: By hand, the bone was so soft, it simply came away.
[SPEAKER_00]: On September 12, 1922, the radiation damage ruptured a jugular vein, a mealy amagia, blood
[SPEAKER_01]: She was 25.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her death certificate read, Ulcerative Stomatitis, the company made sure a different story circulated.
[SPEAKER_00]: The story that said syphilis.
[SPEAKER_00]: a 25-year-old Italian-American woman from a working-class family, dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the company that killed her tells the world she died of a sexually transmit disease.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1922, when that kind of accusation didn't just damage a woman's reputation, it destroyed it, and it silenced her family.
[SPEAKER_00]: More deaths followed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Helen Quinlan, 21.
[SPEAKER_00]: Irene Rudolph, 22.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was Catherine Shobbs cousin.
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1924, 50 women who had worked at the Orange Plant were ill. A dozen were dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: Katherine Shob was watching this happen in real time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her cousin Irene had worked alongside her at the factory.
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd both started as teenagers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now Irene was dead at 22 of a terrible, mysterious illness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Catherine's own health was failing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her teeth had turned flinty and snapped when the dentist tried to pull them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her gums wouldn't heal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her legs were stiff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her stomach rejected food.
[SPEAKER_00]: On July 18, 1923, days after Irene's funeral, Catherine Shob walked into the New Jersey Department of Health and filed a formal complaint.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was 21 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: She described the symptoms she and her colleagues were experiencing.
[SPEAKER_00]: She named the company.
[SPEAKER_00]: She asked someone to investigate.
[SPEAKER_00]: The company had already ensured that the early deaths were attributed to other causes, syphilis, and China, both ulcers, nothing that pointed back to the factory.
[SPEAKER_01]: The case was closed before it began.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Catherine had planted a seed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The New Jersey Consumers League, a progressive organization that fought for worker protections, took notice.
[SPEAKER_00]: They assigned their chairman, Catherine Wiley, to look into the matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wiley brought in a statistical expert, and she contacted Alice Hamilton at Harvard.
[SPEAKER_00]: the threads were beginning to connect.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it would take years, and more women would die before anyone in power did anything about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the company's own chief chemist, Edwin Lehman, was die.
[SPEAKER_00]: He handled radium with his bare hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wood Harvard researchers visited the factory and warned him about the danger.
[SPEAKER_00]: He scoffed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He died in 1925.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dent his Joseph Neff was one of the first outsiders to suspect radium.
[SPEAKER_00]: After mages death, more women came to him with identical symptoms.
[SPEAKER_00]: He asked the company for the formula of their paint.
[SPEAKER_00]: They refused.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Naph did his own test.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrapped a piece of mages' jawbone in unexposed dental film.
[SPEAKER_00]: Laph did for a week.
[SPEAKER_00]: Developed the film.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bone had exposed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A dead woman's jawbone was still a knitting radiation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Act 3, the cover-up.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is where the story crosses from negligence into something much darker, something deliberate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Arthur Router became president of the company.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now renamed the United States Radium Corporation in 1921.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a corporate operator.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't a scientist, his job was to protect the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by 1924, the business had a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers were dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: Families were asking questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Health officials were starting to pay attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: The consumers league was investigating, and Catherine Wiley, the league's chairwoman, had directly written to Rotor, asking the company to pay some of the medical expenses for Grace Fryer and other sick workers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rotor's response was, revealing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He told Wiley that, Fryer's condition had nothing to do with radium.
[SPEAKER_00]: He accused Wiley of acting in bad faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: He claimed the company had shared a small amount of data with the league in confidence and that she'd betray that confidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, did I deflect and attack the messenger?
[SPEAKER_00]: Rotor needed the problem to go away.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he did what corporate executives have always done when the evidence points at an uncomfortable direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: He hired Cecil Drinker and his wife Catherine Drinker from the Harvard School of Public Health, respectable names with impeccable credentials, wrote her expected a clean bill of health.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the Drinker's found instead was a horror show.
[SPEAKER_00]: They walked into the orange factory in 1924.
[SPEAKER_00]: They examined the workers, they tested the dust, they observed the technique.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the more they looked, the worse it got.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cecil Drinker noticed the company's chief chemist, Edwin Lehman, had opened lesions on his hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Drinker tried to warn him about handling radium without protection.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lehman, as Drinker later wrote, scoffed at the possibility of future damage.
[SPEAKER_00]: Drinker described it as the attitude characteristic of those in authority throughout the plant.
[SPEAKER_00]: There seemed to be an utter lack of realization, he wrote, of the dangers inherent in the material which was being manufactured.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lehman was dead within a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: The factory was saturated with radium dust, every surface, every chair, every tool.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the researchers turned off the lights,
[SPEAKER_00]: Cecil Drinker later wrote what he observed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their hair faces hands, arms, necks, the dresses, the underclose, even the corsets of the dial painters were luminous.
[SPEAKER_00]: One woman had luminous spots on her legs and thighs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Drinker was unequivocal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Radium was causing the John Acrosis and the Anemia.
[SPEAKER_00]: He recommended immediate safety changes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Roter rejected the findings.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said the illnesses were caused by an infection the women had picked up outside the factory.
[SPEAKER_00]: He refused to implement any of drinker's recommendations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, he made his move.
[SPEAKER_00]: When Drinkard told Rotor he intended to publish the report, Rotor threatened to sue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Drinkard backed down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while Drinkard was silenced, Rotor took the report and rewrote it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He submitted a falsified version to the New Jersey Department of Labor.
[SPEAKER_00]: The altered version claimed that every girl was in perfect condition.
[SPEAKER_00]: afforged scientific report, submitted to a government agency by the President of the company that was killing its workers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Labor Department reviewed rotors' version and closed the case, and it might have ended there except for a woman named Alice Hamilton.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hamilton was a Harvard colleague of the Drinkers, a national authority on occupational health.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had contacts at the National Consumers League, which had already begun investigating the deaths in Orange.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through those contacts, Hamilton learned that Roder had submitted the Drinker report to the state, but not the real one.
[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote to Catherine Drinker, the letter still survives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you suppose Roter could do such a thing as to issue a forged report in your name?
[SPEAKER_00]: confronted with the fraud, Cecil Drinkard dropped his agreement with Router and published the Real Report.
[SPEAKER_00]: The New Jersey Labor Commissioner read it and ordered every one of Drinkers safety recommendations to be implemented immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Orange Factory effectively closed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the cover-up didn't stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just changed shape.
[SPEAKER_00]: wrote her deployed a man named Frederick Flint to handle the growing number of sick workers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Flint presented himself as an independent specialist from Columbia University.
[SPEAKER_00]: He told Grace Fire, he'd been referred by friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: He examined her and declared her health was as good as his.
[SPEAKER_00]: A consultant who happened to be present enthusiastically agreed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fire was relieved until she found out the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Flynn wasn't a doctor.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no medical license.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was an industrial toxicologist on USRC's payroll.
[SPEAKER_00]: The examination was a setup.
[SPEAKER_00]: The diagnosis was a lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: and behind all of it, a quieter campaign.
[SPEAKER_00]: The company pressured local doctors and dentists to suppress their findings.
[SPEAKER_00]: They threatened legal action against any physician who released data.
[SPEAKER_00]: When deaths couldn't be hidden, the company insured the deaths certificates said syphilis.
[SPEAKER_00]: and when all else failed, they used a line that is breathtaking in its cruelty.
[SPEAKER_00]: USRC claimed it had hired and I'm quoting this directly, a great many people who were physically unfit to procure employment in other lines of industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Inactive kindness, you see, these women were already broken when they arrived.
[SPEAKER_00]: Act 4.
[SPEAKER_00]: The five women doomed to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Friar decided to sue.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had lost all her teeth.
[SPEAKER_00]: A steel brace held her spine together because the radio had crushed her vertebrae.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her hazel eyes clouted with pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was 30 years old, but she looked 60.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's a detail about Grace that I want you to hold on to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her father was a union representative.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had grown up political.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had spoken publicly about her enthusiasm for voting at a time when women's suffrage was still a live issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was, by every account, intelligent, capable, and stubborn.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was also kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: A newspaper of the time-wrote, Grace has not been pampered, nor has she been taught to think first of her own happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Family meant everything to her.
[SPEAKER_00]: The youngest of her 10 siblings remembered her as the heart of the household.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kate Moore, who wrote the definitive account, said that, despite the steel brace, Grace Fire had the strongest backbone of perhaps all the girls.
[SPEAKER_00]: She spent two years looking for a lawyer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every firm in New Jersey said no.
[SPEAKER_00]: U.S.R.C.
[SPEAKER_00]: was wealthy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its lawyers were connected.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the women hadn't worked at the factory in years.
[SPEAKER_00]: The legal landscape was a minefield.
[SPEAKER_00]: In May 1927, a young Newark attorney named Raymond Barry agreed to take the case on contingency.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had very little experience, yet very little money, and his clients were dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kinta McDonald, and Albina Laris, a mealy magis sisters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Katherine Schobb, who had been 14 when she started painting, and Edna Hussman, each sought $250,000 in damages.
[SPEAKER_00]: The newspapers gave them a name.
[SPEAKER_00]: The case of the five women, due to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: Barry's first move was to dig up the dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: He arranged the accumation of Amelia Magia, the scene I described at the start of this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tent, the glowing coffin, the bones that still omitted radiation five years after burial.
[SPEAKER_00]: The film that developed to show a skull with no jaw, a mouth stretched wide, as if screaming.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first court hearing came on January 12, 1928.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two of the five women were bedridden.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of them could raise their arms to take the oath.
[SPEAKER_00]: Barry told the press, when you've heard that you're going to die that there's no hope and every newspaper you pick up prints what really amounts to your obituary, there is nothing else.
[SPEAKER_00]: a newspaper reported that the five women smiled as they entered the courtroom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Smiled, knowing they were dying, knowing the company that killed them was sitting across the aisle with a team of lawyers and a wall of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Fryer sat in her steel brace.
[SPEAKER_00]: Catherine Shobb, the girl who had once dreamed of being a writer, could barely speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: Albina Louise, four foot eight, the worst stricken of the five, weighed almost nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: the hearings lasted several days.
[SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses took the stand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doctors, dentists, company officials, and Arthur wrote her himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Under oath, the president of the United States Radium Corporation testified that he had never seen the dial painters point their brushes in their mouths.
[SPEAKER_00]: never seen it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a room where hundreds of women did it 250 times a day, where supervisors instructed them to do it, where the technique had a name, lip, dip, paint.
[SPEAKER_00]: Katherine Wiley of the Consumers League also testified.
[SPEAKER_00]: She gave her account of how the league had investigated, how they had tried to get USRC to take responsibility, how they had been stoned walled at every turn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, USRC's lawyers made their move.
[SPEAKER_00]: They asked the judge to adjourn.
[SPEAKER_00]: The judge scheduled the next hearing for April.
[SPEAKER_00]: By April, the women were too sick to appear.
[SPEAKER_00]: USRC's expert witnesses were unavailable.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were, the company said,
[SPEAKER_00]: the judge adjourn the case until September.
[SPEAKER_00]: September.
[SPEAKER_00]: Five months away for women who might not live five weeks
[SPEAKER_00]: the public revolt was immediate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Walter Littman, editor of the New York World, ran the story relentlessly.
[SPEAKER_00]: A May 1928 editorial cartoon showed the doors of justice barred to the doomed radium victims by three locks, statute of limitations, summer vacation, and postponement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Under that pressure, USRC settled.
[SPEAKER_00]: In autumn 1928, each of the five women received $10,000, about $188,000 into days money, plus a $600 annual annuity in coverage of all medical bills.
[SPEAKER_00]: The company admitted no wrongdoing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They asked for $250,000 each.
[SPEAKER_00]: Katherine Shob spent her settlement money helping her family.
[SPEAKER_00]: She bought herself expensive clothes, like Cinderella, she wrote.
[SPEAKER_00]: She bought a tie brighter.
[SPEAKER_00]: She invested some.
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd always wanted to be a writer, dying had it changed that.
[SPEAKER_00]: She enrolled in a Columbia University home course.
[SPEAKER_00]: She started her memoir.
[SPEAKER_01]: for sense on the dollar.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they got something more important than money.
[SPEAKER_00]: They got precedent.
[SPEAKER_00]: The right of individual workers to sue a corporation for damages from workplace exposure.
[SPEAKER_00]: That had never been established before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not in New Jersey, not anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: New Jersey became the first state to make way the employees in a compensable occupational disease.
[SPEAKER_00]: The case rewrote the legal definition of what a company owns its workers.
[SPEAKER_00]: It established that an employer cannot knowingly expose people to harm and then hide behind claims of ignorance.
[SPEAKER_00]: One month after the settlement, in November 1928, Sabin Arnold von Sachaki died.
[SPEAKER_00]: The inventor of Undarck, the man who had told his workers the paint was harmless, a plastic anemia, radiation poisoning from his out creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the 16th known victim.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to contemporary reports, he denied the danger of radium until his dying breath.
[SPEAKER_01]: Epilogue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Fryer died on October 27, 1933.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was 34.
[SPEAKER_00]: Katherine Schob died the same year.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was 31.
[SPEAKER_00]: She had enrolled in a Columbia University Home Course while dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: She'd written a memoir called, Camping with Radium.
[SPEAKER_00]: After her death, her sister burned the manuscript.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does not survive.
[SPEAKER_00]: of all the things lost in this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: That one cut steepest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Catherine was just a teenager when she started painting dials.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was an instructor when she taught other girls to put the brushes between their lips.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the years she had left.
[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote it all down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The work.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dye.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it felt like to know your bones were turning against you.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's gone, burned by a grieving sister who probably couldn't bear to read it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Quinta Magimic Donald, the sister of the first victim, died at 29 of a sarcoma in her leg.
[SPEAKER_00]: She left behind two young children.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doctors had put her in plaster casts trying to bring her relief.
[SPEAKER_00]: Albina Magillan race, four foot eight, the smallest of the five plaintiffs, died too.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was the worst stricken at the time of the lawsuit.
[SPEAKER_00]: She survived longer than anyone expected, but not long enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: Edna Hussman, the only one of the five who hadn't known the others well before the case, died young.
[SPEAKER_00]: All five plaintiffs were dead by the mid-1930s.
[SPEAKER_00]: In estimated 112 dial painters died from radiant poisoning across three U.S. factories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many more suffered chronic illness for decades.
[SPEAKER_00]: Arthur Roder was removed as President of U.S.R.C.
[SPEAKER_00]: after the settlement.
[SPEAKER_00]: The board had had enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went on to become President of Colorado fuel in iron.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was removed within a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Labor disputes.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pattern.
[SPEAKER_00]: After that, he disappears from the historical record.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not buried with his employees.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never apologized for the falsified report.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never apologized for the simplest story.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never apologized for the perjury.
[SPEAKER_00]: He died some time in middle age.
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact date isn't recorded anywhere I could find.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the company continued operating.
[SPEAKER_00]: It produced luminous products through the Second World War with up to 1,000 employees.
[SPEAKER_00]: It reorganized in 1980 and eventually dissolved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its former sites became superfund cleanup projects.
[SPEAKER_00]: The EPA finished cleaning up the orange factory in 2006.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a playground where the paint building used to stand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the people who live there have no idea what happened on that ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that image stays with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: A playground.
[SPEAKER_00]: Children swinging on a set of swings on the exact spot where Molly mages jaw was crumbling out of her mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: were Catherine Shobb 14 years old, learned to put a brush between her lips.
[SPEAKER_00]: The land has been remediated.
[SPEAKER_00]: The radioactive soil has been hauled away.
[SPEAKER_00]: The buildings demolished.
[SPEAKER_00]: The history paved over.
[SPEAKER_00]: And nobody who plays there knows.
[SPEAKER_00]: and maybe that's how it should be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe ground that took so much from so many should be given back to children.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe there should be a sign, a plaque, something, anything to mark what happened there.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Ottawa, Illinois, where a second dial painting company had operated,
[SPEAKER_00]: The Radium-Dial Company had opened in 1922.
[SPEAKER_00]: Same business model, same paint, same technique, lip, dip, paint.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the time news of the New Jersey lawsuits reached Illinois, the company's owner, a man named Joseph Kelly, told the Ottawa woman the Radium was safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent the workers in New Jersey, were showing signs of viral infections, it's got nothing
[SPEAKER_00]: George Willis, the company co-founder, actually visited the automobile factory to lecture the women on the supposed safety of Radium.
[SPEAKER_00]: They believed him, and why wouldn't they?
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the expert.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, they went back to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the Ottawa woman started dying, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Margaret Looney, Red Hair, Slender, wanted to be a school teacher.
[SPEAKER_00]: She started painting dials at 17 to help support her family of 12.
[SPEAKER_00]: She never left the factory.
[SPEAKER_00]: She worked until a week before she died, at age 24.
[SPEAKER_00]: Katherine Wolf Donahue became the grace fryer of the Midwest.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was so sick during her testimony that she passed out on the witness stand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her lawyer had to hold her upright.
[SPEAKER_01]: She died before the verdict.
[SPEAKER_00]: But her family won.
[SPEAKER_00]: It established that companies are liable for occupational diseases under workers' compensation law.
[SPEAKER_00]: The principle that would eventually underpin OSHA.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Joseph Kelly, he shut down the Radium Dial Company in 1936.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he immediately opened an identical business on the same street.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called it Luminous Process as Incorporated.
[SPEAKER_00]: They continued painting dials with Radium until the late 1970s.
[SPEAKER_00]: The original building and the surrounding land remained contaminated until the Illinois Department of Nuclear Safety demolished the site in 1985.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, there's the legacy no one expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: During the Second World War, a nuclear chemist named Glenn C. Bork was working with plutonium at Berkeley.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Kate Moore recounts, he wrote in his diary that he had a disturbing vision of the workers from the Radium Dial Painting Industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: the Ghost Girls, the Shining Girls.
[SPEAKER_00]: He insisted on strict safety protocols for his team.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gloves, hoods, remote handling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those protocols were extended to the entire Manhattan Project.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, just think about what that means.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most powerful weapons program in human history, tens of thousands of workers handling materials orders
[SPEAKER_00]: and the safety protocols that protected them came from a vision of dead women in a new Jersey factory.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lewis Hempelman, a doctor at Los Alamos, later confirmed explicitly.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Manhattan Project Safety Regulations were directly based on lessons from the dial painting factories.
[SPEAKER_00]: The women who lick their brushes saved the men who built the bomb.
[SPEAKER_00]: After the war, the atomic energy commission officials made a remarkable statement.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it hadn't been for the radium girls, countless thousands of other workers would have been killed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The woman who survived the longest allowed their bodies to be studied by researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory.
[SPEAKER_00]: They hoped a cure might be found.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the data they provided on how radiation accumulates in bone, how it damages Merro, how it causes cancer, became the foundation of modern radiation safety standards.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their suffering was instrumentalized twice, first by the company that poisoned them, then by the government that studied them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a phrase that haunted me ever since I read it, a gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't give anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was taken, every test, every measurement, every data point.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came from women who were lied to, poisoned, and discarded, and yet the data saved thousands of lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1970, the occupational safety and health act was passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: OSHA was established at same year.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Radium Girls are cited as foundational catalysts.
[SPEAKER_00]: 42 years from Molly Majes' death to a federal agency created in part because of what happened to her.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2011, a bronze statue was erected in Ottawa, Illinois, on the side of the old Radium dial company.
[SPEAKER_00]: It shows a young woman holding a paintbrush in one hand and a dying tool at the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go to Rosedale Cemetery today and stand at Catherine Shob's grave with a Geiger counter, it still registers a positive reading.
[SPEAKER_00]: Radium 226 has a half-life of 1,600 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bones of the Radium Girls are still radioactive.
[SPEAKER_00]: They'll outlast every building, every company, and every law that they're suffering helped
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the Ghost Girls, the Radium Girls, and the United States Radium Corporation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been listening to corporate wars.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I keep coming back to a single image, Katherine Schob, 14 years old, her first day on the job, and the first thing her supervisor teaches her is how to put the brush between her lips.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lip, dip, paint.
[SPEAKER_00]: she later became an instructor.
[SPEAKER_00]: She taught other girls the same technique.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was in the most literal sense, trained to deliver the thing that killed her, and then trained to pass it on.
[SPEAKER_00]: The worst thing is, the company knew.
[SPEAKER_00]: They distributed literature about radiums
[SPEAKER_00]: their chemists used lead shields and tongs, their painters use their tongs.
[SPEAKER_00]: This isn't negligence, that's calculation, and it's one that gets made every time a company decides that protecting its workers costs more than replacing them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing I can't shake is the syphilis lie, because it was in just a cover story.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1920s, accusing a dead woman of syphilis didn't explain her death.
[SPEAKER_00]: It destroyed her name.
[SPEAKER_00]: It shamed her family into silence.
[SPEAKER_00]: It made other sick women think twice about coming forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: The company attacked these women twice, once with the radium and once with the lie about how they died.
[SPEAKER_00]: and what really gets to me, is that they fought anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grace Fryer, who couldn't sit up without a steel brace, spent two years searching for a lawyer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Catherine Shaw walked into the health department and filed a complaint while her teeth were still falling out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when they finally got their day in court, none of them could raise their arms to take the oath.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they showed up.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew they were going to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew that the settlement wouldn't cure them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew they would never see the law that their suffering would create.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they still, sued, they told their stories anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: They allowed scientists to assume their dead and dig into their living bones anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they understood something that the rest of us forget.
[SPEAKER_00]: Justice isn't always for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, it's for the next set of girls.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ones you'll never meet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ones who will work in factories, you'll never see, with materials, nobody has discovered yet under managers who haven't been born.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Grace Fire said it best
[SPEAKER_00]: care.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls whom this may serve as an example.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it did.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's served as an example and it continues to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: If this episode made you think, share it with someone who will appreciate it, subscribe wherever you listen, so you don't miss what's coming next.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because next time on corporate wars, we're telling a story about a different kind of poison.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not radio.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's tobacco.
[SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, how the biggest tobacco companies in the world ran of 50-year campaign to convince the public that cigarettes were safe, while their own scientists were telling them otherwise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Internal memos, buried research, congressional perjury, and one whistleblower who blew the whole thick apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Next episode, big tobacco, the longest lie, on Thomas Lovecremsell, and I'll see you then.