فصل 45

45

As 1935 began, Jay Cook was busy working on the women’s lawsuit. He filed two separate claims for them: one in the normal law courts and a second with the Illinois Industrial Commission (IIC). The lead case, Cook determined, would be that of Inez Vallat. “She was a living corpse,” Catherine said of her former deskmate, “hobbling around like an old woman.”1

But, as the case got going, almost immediately the women ran into trouble. Radium Dial was being represented by a team of top lawyers who found several legal loopholes, through which they twisted the case. There was that old chestnut: the statute of limitations. Inez had filed suit years after she left Radium Dial, and her disability did not occur while she was employed. There was the fact that radium was a poison; injuries caused by poison were not covered by the Occupational Diseases Act. And there was the law itself: Radium Dial charged that its antiquated wording was “vague, indefinite, and did not furnish an intelligible standard of conduct.”2

“When Attorney Cook filed his test case,” the Chicago Daily Times later wrote, “Radium Dial did not even bother to deny the women’s charges. In effect, the company’s reply was, ‘Even if it is true, what of it?’”3

On April 17, 1935, a ruling was given. “The court ruled the legislature failed to establish any standards by which compliance with the law could be measured,”4 reported the Ottawa Daily Times. The women had lost, on a legal technicality. They could not believe it—yet they fought on. Cook, at his own expense, took the battle all the way to the Supreme Court. Yet it was all to no avail: the law was declared invalid.

The Chicago Daily Times called it “an almost unbelievable miscarriage of justice.”5 But there was nothing the women could do: they’d had their day in court, and the law itself had been found wanting. “There was never a trial of this case on its merits,”6 lamented the newspaper.

Cook, reluctantly, had to drop their case, even though the girls still had a claim filed with the IIC and legislators now vowed to rewrite the law in light of the women’s case. “I hated to have to do it, but I simply couldn’t afford to keep on,” Cook later said. “If I had the money, I’d fight their case free. It’s one of those things that should be fought through to a finish. I hope they get another lawyer.”7

But finding another lawyer was easier said than done. There were forty-one attorneys listed in the Ottawa town directory, but not one would help them. Just as the native physicians had done, the legal profession was shutting down what was seen as a scandalous attack on a loyal local business.

As if to rub it in, on the day the Ottawa paper reported the loss of the women’s case, it featured an article on Clarence Darrow, one of the nation’s leading lawyers. That was the kind of person the girls needed, but they had no money to secure legal aid.

The Donohues now found the mortgage on their house had crept to $1,500 ($25,000). “There are medicines that ease the pain,”8 Catherine said; and on these she and Tom were spending hundreds of dollars. They found themselves playing make-believe, trying to ignore what was happening to their family of four. “We never talk about it,” confessed Tom. “We just go along as if we were all going to be together forever. That’s the only way.”9

“We’re so happy together,” Catherine said with a too-big smile. “As long as we’re together, it doesn’t seem so bad. We just pretend I’m the way I was when Tom married me.”10

They hadn’t given up looking for a cure. Catherine found herself trying various Chicago hospitals and dentists, pushing herself to get to the appointments, even though she frequently “fainted during the course of the examinations”11 due to the pain. “She was looking for help,” a commentator said, “any way she could get.”12 But no one could stop the disintegration of Catherine’s mouth, which grew more serious by the day.

The women struggled on: downcast about the devastating loss of their court case; in denial about the looming demise that seemed inevitable. And then, just at the end of the year, word of another legal judgment reached them. It didn’t necessarily affect their case, but it was of considerable interest nonetheless.

On December 17, 1935, the ruling finally came back on the Irene La Porte case in New Jersey, which her husband Vincent had been fighting for more than four years. This was the case the United States Radium Corporation had chosen to see through to judgment: the one on which they had placed their bets. The company, by now, did not deny the cause of death—it simply cited the statute of limitations as the reason why it should not have to pay. “[Once Irene’s] employment [was] terminated,” the USRC lawyers stated, “all duty we had to that girl as our employee ceased. There is no relation afterwards; she is a perfect stranger.”13

Several dial-painters testified at the trial; many had their own lawsuits pending. All pinned their hopes on Irene winning her case, for if she did the verdict would apply to them too. Everyone gathered to hear the judgment.

The judge began:

Naturally, there is no question as to where the sympathies of any human being would lie in a case of this sort… It is tempting, in the light of the knowledge of today…to create the thought that the [company] must have been negligent in some way. Today, industrial methods which the [company] then employed would not be merely negligent but criminal. But it should be carefully noted that this case must be decided on the facts as they existed in the light of the knowledge of 1917… A court has no power to adjust the law to meet the needs of a time when no such case as this could be foreseen.14

He concluded bluntly: “The [case] must be dismissed.”15

USRC had chosen well. Seven years on from Grace Fryer’s case, there was now no censure in the media—no censure even from the judge. The company had the answer it was looking for: not guilty.

Justice had been denied to Irene La Porte—but not just to her. For all those New Jersey dial-painters with lawsuits still pending; for all the families battling on for loved ones who had died; for all those New Jersey women who had not yet found a worrying lump on their hip or their leg or their arm, but who would in future, justice was denied.

It had been, the USRC executives reflected, a very good day indeed.