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UNITED STATES RADIUM CORPORATION HQ 30 CHURCH STREET, NEW YORK

—1925—

Arthur Roeder was having a very bad day. Ever since the Carlough girl had brought her lawsuit, every day seemed to be a bad day. The publicity had been horrendous—his company’s name dragged through the mud, as this little upstart charged that the firm had made her “totally incapacitated for work”1 and had “seriously injured”2 her. The coverage was affecting business; there were now only a few dial-painters left.

Roeder didn’t necessarily know it, but the scandal had also impacted on the dial-painting studio his firm had helped set up at the Waterbury Clock Company; following local news reports of the Carlough case, the watch firm had banned lip-pointing.

In fact, there might have been another reason for that, though the clock company would never admit it. In February 1925, a dial-painter there by the name of Frances Splettstocher had died, just a few weeks after falling ill in agonizing pain; she’d had a jaw necrosis that had bored a hole right through to her cheek. Her death was not formally linked to her job, but some of her colleagues made the connection. One Waterbury girl said she “became frightened when Frances died and would not work in the dial-painting department again for any money.”3

Frances’s father also worked for the firm. Though he was “sure”4 that Frances’s job had killed her, he “did not dare make any kick about it”5 for fear of being sacked.

Oh, for such obedient employees.

Roeder was fighting the Carlough case via the highly skilled (and highly expensive) USRC company lawyers. They’d immediately filed a motion to strike out the girl’s complaint, arguing that the case should be presented to the Workmen’s Compensation Bureau, where it would fail, as the girl wasn’t suffering from one of the nine compensable diseases. So far, however, their legal maneuvering wasn’t working—the judge had directed that a jury should decide the case.

The situation, from Roeder’s perspective, grew worse by the day. The family of Hazel Kuser had joined the lawsuit, with a claim of $15,000 ($203,000). The ambulance-chasing lawyers had been after Helen Quinlan’s mother Nellie too—but she, believing what the doctors had told her of her daughter’s death, saw no reason to go to them. It was a small mercy.

It was just as well, Roeder thought, that Miss Carlough’s sister, Sarah Maillefer, had quit her job in the dial-painting studio when the lawsuit was brought; there was no way she could have continued in their employ. He mused on Mrs. Maillefer for a moment. Viedt had told him what a sickly woman she was—lame for three years, walking with a cane; and all the while the company had assisted her so she could stay in her job. Well, in Roeder’s opinion, apples didn’t fall far from trees—and if one sister was sickly, the chances were it ran in the family.

He blamed the “women’s clubs”6 for all this bother. Katherine Wiley had been writing to him since the start of the year; she had, he thought disapprovingly, an “unusual interest”7 in the matter. He’d done his best to put her off, but it hadn’t worked. Even when Roeder had flattered her, saying he thought it “perfectly proper that your League should interest itself in reports of this type,”8 she had failed to come around to his point of view. Increasingly, she was becoming more than an annoyance.

And then there was the investigating statistician Dr. Hoffman. Although he wrote Roeder that “nothing could be further from [his] mind than to raise a controversy for no purpose,”9 his correspondence was exceedingly critical of the company. He had written to Roeder again about Marguerite Carlough, saying she was in a “truly pitiable condition.”10 He had urged Roeder or a company representative to visit her in person, but that was not going to happen.

Roeder could handle such begging letters—the company had easily dismissed Blum’s request for money before—but it was Hoffman’s investigation that was really troubling him. The man was planning to publish his report at the end of it—probably before the influential American Medical Association—but Roeder failed to see how Hoffman, who was not a physician and had no specialized radium knowledge, could be permitted to do so. Roeder had always thought “that a presentation of any subject before an important medical convention was based on extensive research or investigation or both.”11 In his opinion, “such an investigation should at least cover the United States, and would hardly be complete without including Switzerland and parts of Germany and France.”12 What was Hoffman thinking of, coming up with conclusions based only on his very brief studies in a few parts of the U.S.? (Hoffman had also visited the Radium Dial studio in Ottawa and some dial-painting plants in Long Island as part of his research.) If Hoffman wanted to examine the matter fully, Roeder thought, surely he should commit to several more years’ hard work and extended international study before presenting his conclusions.

But, instead, Hoffman had limited himself to sending questionnaires to the doctors and dentists who had attended the women, and conducting interviews with those affected. Hoffman later noted: “I heard the same story from all of them. They did the same identical work, under identical conditions…and consequently it was the same consequence.”13 Despite the brevity of his research, he seemed determined to publish.

Why, Roeder thought in frustration, he hadn’t even visited the factory; though, to be fair, that was perhaps because Roeder had tried to stymie his investigation—the firm had offered no assistance. Roeder had tried to appease Hoffman, writing, “We sincerely believe that the infection you refer to is not caused by radium. If there is a common cause, I think it lies outside our plant.”14 Yet Hoffman’s study had continued. Roeder couldn’t understand his tenacity.

Unbeknown to the company president, it was perhaps partly driven by the fact that even the paint’s inventor now acknowledged that the girls’ trouble was due to their work. In February 1925, Sabin von Sochocky had written to Hoffman to say that “the disease in question is, without doubt, an occupational disease.”15

Roeder sighed and turned back to his desk to read his correspondence, smoothing down his dark hair—flattened, as it always was, with pomade—and self-consciously adjusting his elegant bow tie. Yet his heart sank further when he saw what was before him: another letter from Miss Wiley.

“My dear Mr. Roeder,” she wrote easily. “I [have] learned that Dr. Drinker made an investigation [last spring]. I have heard nothing of the result, but have been looking with great interest to the time when it would be published…”16

A troubled look crossed Arthur Roeder’s affluently rounded face. The Drinker investigation: that was another thorn in his side. He’d so looked forward to the delivery of the doctors’ report last June—here, finally, would be the scientific proof, the unchallengeable confirmation, of what he knew to be the truth: that these grim illnesses and deaths had absolutely nothing to do with his firm.

He had been stunned when he read the covering letter Cecil K. Drinker had enclosed with the report. “We believe that the trouble which has occurred is due to radium,” Drinker had written almost a year ago, on June 3, 1924. “It would, in our opinion, be unjustifiable for you to deal with the situation through any other method of attack.”17

Well, that was…unexpected. The Drinkers had delivered a provisional opinion on April 29, following their initial academic research, that “it would seem that radium is the probable cause of the trouble.”18 But that was before they’d even returned to the plant, and Roeder had been certain that further study would prove them wrong.

Yet the final report hadn’t made for better reading. “In our opinion, so great an incidence among these employees of this unusual disease…cannot be a coincidence but must be dependent on some type of bone damage occasioned by the employment.”19

The Drinkers had methodically gone through the paint’s ingredients, dismissing each one in turn as non-toxic, but at radium they declared there was “ample evidence”20 of the dangers of overexposure. “The only constituent of the luminous material which can do harm,” the Drinkers concluded, “must be the radium.”

They even gave a detailed hypothesis of what they thought was happening inside the women as a result of their exposure. Radium, they noted, had a “similar chemical nature” to calcium. Thus radium “if absorbed, might have a preference for bone as a final point of fixation.” Radium was what one might call a boneseeker, just like calcium; and the human body is programmed to deliver calcium straight to the bones to make them stronger… Essentially, radium had masked itself as calcium and, fooled, the girls’ bodies had deposited it inside their bones. Radium was a silent stalker, hiding behind that mask, using its disguise to burrow deep into the women’s jaws and teeth.

As Drinker had read in scientific literature, radium, since the beginning of the century, had been known to cause serious flesh wounds. It was why workers exposed to large amounts of radium dressed themselves in heavy lead aprons and wielded ivory-tipped tongs; why lab workers at Radium Dial were restricted in the amount of time they could spend in its presence. It was why Dr. von Sochocky didn’t have the tip of his left index finger anymore; why Dr. Leman, the chief chemist in his former company, had lesions all over his hands; why von Sochocky’s partner Willis no longer had a thumb. The impact it had externally could easily kill a man, as Pierre Curie had noted back in 1903.

That was the effect it had on the outside. Now imagine the impact of it, once it had craftily concealed its way inside your bones.

“Radium, once deposited in bone,” wrote Drinker in his report, “would be in a position to produce peculiarly effective damage, many thousand times greater than the same amount outside.”

It was radium, lurking in Mollie Maggia’s bones, that had caused her jaw to splinter. It was radium, making itself at home in Hazel Kuser, that had eaten away at her skull until her jawbones had holes riddled right through them. It was radium, shooting out its constant rays, that was battering Marguerite Carlough’s mouth, even at this moment.

It was radium that had killed Irene, and Helen, and so many more…

It was radium, the Drinkers said, that was the problem.

The doctors enclosed a table of their test results of the workers and, crucially, analyzed them. “No blood [from the USRC employees],” they wrote, “was entirely normal. These same findings were noted in previous reports by the Life Extension Institute, but the Institute did not appear to have been aware of their meaning.” While some employees registered marked changes in their blood, other results were noted to be “practically normal.”21 But not one worker had wholly normal blood; not even a woman who had been with the firm for only two weeks.

The Drinkers commented specifically on the case of Marguerite Carlough, whom they had interviewed on their very first visit to the studio: the case at the root of all Roeder’s present woes. And here, for a moment, they dropped the detached tone that characterized the rest of the technical report. “It seems to us important to express our opinion,” they wrote, “that Miss Carlough’s present serious condition is the result of her years of employment in your plant.”22 They wanted, they said, “to call your attention to the fact that this girl needs the best of medical attention if she is to survive.”23

Almost a year on, the company had not lifted a finger to help her.

The report finished with various safety recommendations, which Drinker described as “precautions you should take at once.”24 Ever since this thing had blown up in Roeder’s face, there seemed to be nothing but safety recommendations. He had recently instructed Viedt to put some of them into practice: “This is much more economical,” he’d told his deputy in a memo, “than paying $75,000 lawsuits.”25

Roeder had been aghast at the Drinkers’ report by the time he’d finished reading. Surely it couldn’t be true. He had taken a few days to collect his thoughts and then, over the course of several weeks in June 1924, he had exchanged further correspondence with Dr. Drinker. Seeming to forget the doctor’s undoubted brilliance—the very attribute that had driven Roeder to recruit him in the first place—Roeder now pronounced himself “mystified”26 by the doctor’s conclusions and longed to “reconcile in my own mind the situation that you have found.”27 Yet, perhaps anticipating an offer from Drinker to discuss it further, Roeder stressed that he was far too busy to meet him; so much so that he was “contemplating giving up my Saturdays which I usually spend at the seashore during the summer”28 to spend more time at work.

On June 18, 1924, the day that Harold Viedt wrote to the Department of Labor to share the company’s sleight-of-hand summary of the Drinker report, Roeder and Drinker were still in debate by letter. In the company president’s correspondence of that date, he wrote dismissively to Drinker, “Your preliminary report is rather a discussion, with tentative conclusions, based on evidence, much of which is necessarily circumstantial.”29

Of course, the doctor had responded. “I am sorry our report impressed you as preliminary and circumstantial and fear that reiteration can do little to alter such an impression.”30 Yet he stated once again: “We found blood changes in many of your employees which could be explained on no other grounds.”31

The two had then got into a heated dispute, with letters flying back and forth. Roeder was adamant: “I still feel that we have to find the cause.”32

Privately, Drinker was surprisingly understanding about the president’s position. He wrote to an associate: “The unfortunate economic situation in which he finds himself makes it very hard for him to take any stand save one in regard to radium, namely that it is a harmless, beneficent substance which we all ought to have around as much as possible.”33 He added: “It does not seem to me that [the company can] be blamed”34 for what had happened to the girls.

The doctor’s standpoint may in part have been due to the discipline in which he worked: industrial hygiene. Until 1922, Drinker’s department at Harvard was wholly funded by business; even in 1924, commercial firms contributed money for special projects. To offend such a prestigious institution as USRC would not be wise. As one industrial physician put it: “Are we in industry to help carry out some soft, silly, social plan? Are we in industry to buy the goodwill of the employees? No. We are in industry because it is good business.”35

Thus, after a final exchange of views between Roeder and Drinker, during which—perhaps to keep the doctor at bay—Roeder made sure to mention “the almost complete closing down of our application plant for lack of business,”36 it had all gone quiet. The full report had never been published; the Department of Labor had been satisfied with the company’s version of events; the current dial-painters were no longer listening to hysterical rumors and were back at work; and Arthur Roeder had been able to get on with business as usual.

Until now.

Until Katherine Wiley had stuck her nose in where it wasn’t wanted.

Unknown to Roeder, Wiley and the female doctor she had previously asked for help, Dr. Alice Hamilton (who worked in the same department as Drinker), were stirring things up with his erstwhile investigators. Hamilton had learned that the reason the Drinkers’ report had not yet been published was because Cecil Drinker believed Roeder should first give consent, which naturally was not forthcoming as the company was concealing the true results. Wiley thought Drinker’s position “showed a very unethical spirit”37; she called him “dishonest”.38

The two women had thus come up with a master plan. Little knowing that USRC had already given a misleading précis of the report to the Department of Labor, they conspired to ask John Roach to request the results from Roeder. Such a move, they judged, would force Roeder’s hand and bring the report into the light, as he could hardly refuse Roach in his official capacity.

Therefore, when Roach revealed to Wiley that he had in fact already seen the Drinkers’ report—and that it put the company in the clear—she was taken aback. Wiley immediately told Hamilton; and Hamilton, who not only knew the Drinkers personally but perceived that they would be perturbed by this misrepresentation of their data, wrote at once to Katherine Drinker.

“Do you suppose,” she wrote in mock-innocence, “Roeder could do such a thing as to issue a forged report in your name?”39 Katherine Drinker responded immediately; she and her husband were “very indignant”40 at the idea that Roeder might have distorted their findings; “he has proved,” Katherine concluded savagely, “a real villain.”41 Encouraged by his wife, Cecil Drinker wrote to Roeder—still, it has to be said, using language that flattered and appeased the president—to suggest the publication of the full study, urging that “it can only be to your interest to see the publication…your strongest position is one which must convince the public that you have done everything humanly possible to get to the bottom of the trouble in your plant.”42

Wheels thus set in motion, Hamilton wrote to Wiley that she now believed the situation almost resolved. Surely, she said, Arthur Roeder would not be “stupid enough [as] to refuse to let Dr. Drinker publish the report.”

But she had underestimated the audacity of the president.