FIGHTING BACK - THEY WERE TOLD TO LICK THE BRUSH: THE RADIUM GIRLS

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fisher. Thursday May seventh, twenty twenty six, Day three of Fighting Back. Today we go back one hundred years to a factory in Orange, New Jersey, where a group of young women were being slowly killed by their employer, and where the employer knew it, concealed it, falsified the records, and then had the audacity to ask the courts for more time, hoping the women filing the lawsuit would die before a verdict could be reached. Some of them did. The ones who survived couldn't raise their arms high enough to take the oath. When they finally got into a courtroom, they took the oath anyway, and what they did in that courtroom in nineteen twenty eight changed worker safety law in the United States forever.

0:59 This is the story worry of the Radium Girls. To understand why what happened to these women happened, you need to understand what the job looked like from the outside, because it looked like a good job, a genuinely desirable job by the standards of what was available to working class women in nineteen seventeen, the United States Radium Corporation had a factory in Orange, New Jersey, and they needed workers with steady hands to do extraordinarily precise detail work, painting the tiny numerals on the faces of watches, clocks, compasses, and military instruments with a luminescent paint that glowed in the dark. The military application was what made this work so valuable. Soldiers in the trenches of the First World War needed to read their watches in the dark without striking a match and giving away their position. Radium dial paint made that possible, which made the factories producing it essential to the war effort, which made the jobs prestigious and relatively well paid. The women earned around twenty dollars a week, good money, the kind of money that put them in the top five percent of female earners at the time. They were called artists. The studios were bright and sociable. There was a camaraderie to the work, and the paint itself was almost magical. It glowed with this soft, greenish white light. The women would leave their shifts dusted with it, their hands, their faces, their hair, sometimes their clothes, all the way down to their corsets, luminous in the dark.

2:30 Some of them painted their nails with it, on their lunch break or their teeth to surprise their boyfriends when the lights went out. They thought it was fun. They thought it was harmless. Their supervisors had told them it was harmless. The company's literature said radium was not just safe, but beneficial, practically a health tonic. The technique they use was called lip dip paint. The brushes were camel hair, very fine, and they lost their points quickly. Using a rag or a water ins to repoint the brush wasted time and material, So the supervisors instructed the women to press the brush between their lips to bring it to a sharp tip, then dip it in the radium paint, then apply it to the dial. Lip dip paint hundreds of times a day, every working day for years. One of the women, Grace Fryar, noticed something strange after a while.

3:24 When she blew her nose after a shift, her handkerchief glowed green in the dark. Everyone thought it was funny. Radium they had been told was harmless. The handkerchief glowing just meant the stuff was really something. Grace Fryar was eighteen years old when she started at the factory in nineteen seventeen. Her father was a union organizer. She was sharp, opinionated, and by all accounts, not the kind of person who accepted being told something without wanting to understand why. She left in nineteen twenty for a better job as a bank teller, thinking her time at the factory was simply the first chapter of a working life that was going to go somewhere. Within two years of leaving, her teeth began to loosen and fall out. What was happening inside their bodies. Radium, it turns out, behaves chemically like calcium, which means the human body treats it exactly the same way.

4:17 When you ingest calcium, your body deposits it in your bones. When you ingest radium, your body deposits it in your bones, too, And then it sits there inside you, permanently emitting radiation from the inside out. There is no way to remove it. It has a half life of one thousand, six hundred years. The women who ingested it over years of lipti painting were building up deposits in their jaws, their skulls, their spines, radiating their own tissue from within. The first sign was usually dental aching teeth, then loose teeth, then teeth simply falling out, and the socket where the tooth had been would not close and heal the way it should. The bone itself was being destroyed. The jaw would develop necrosis, the tissue starved of blood, dying from the inside. In the most severe cases, which were not rare, the jawbone itself became so brittle and so degraded that it would separate from the skull. The women called it radium jaw.

5:18 Doctors at the time had never seen anything like it. By nineteen twenty two, the first dial painter had died. By nineteen twenty four, fifty women at the Orange factory had reported serious illness, and a dozen were already dead. And throughout all of this, while the symptoms were accumulating, while the dentists in Orange were noticing an inexplicable flood of young women with the same jaw deterioration, While women were dying, the United States Radium Corporation was telling anyone who asked that radium was perfectly safe, and that whatever was wrong with their former employees had nothing to do with the factory. What the company actually knew. This is where I need you to pay close to ten, because this is the part of the story that goes from tragedy into something colder and more deliberate. The executives and scientists at US Radium were not ignorant of the dangers of radium. They were not operating in good faith with incomplete information. The scientists who worked with radium at that facility used lead screens, protective masks, and tongs to handle the material. They knew. They had access to the scientific literature describing radiation's harmful effects, going back to at least nineteen fourteen, when it was already documented that radium could cause anemia and tissue damage. The people who ran this company understood exactly what radium did to human tissue, took extensive precautions to protect themselves from it, and then told two hundred young women to put it in their mouths every single day. In nineteen twenty four, as the evidence

6:52 of widespread illness was becoming impossible to ignore, US Radium commissioned a study. They hired Cecil Drinker, a physician from the Harvard School of Public Health, to come into the orange factory and examine the working conditions and the health of the workers. Drinker did his job properly. His report concluded that the total lack of safety precautions at the factory was putting the dial painters in serious danger, identified radium as the likely cause of their illnesses, and recommended immediate changes to protect the workers. The company president, Arthur Roder, rejected the findings. The Drinker report was buried, and then this is the detail that I find genuinely hard to process.

7:35 Even one hundred years later. US Radium submitted a falsified version of the report to New Jersey labor officials, a fraudulent document designed to give the appearance of having conducted a safety review which exonerated the company of any responsibility. The real report sat suppressed while the women kept getting sick and kept dying. When individual women could insulted their own doctors, and those doctors began to suspect an occupational cause, the company moved again. They sent a man named Frederick Flynn to examine Grace Fryar Flynn identified himself as a Columbia University specialist and declared, after examining her that her health was as good as his own. A colleague who happened to be present, enthusiastically agreed It was only later that Grace found out Flynn had no medical license. He was a toxicologist on the US radium payroll. The colleague who agreed with his diagnosis was a vice president of the company. The entire examination was a piece of theater, staged by her former employer to give her false assurance and muddy the medical record. And for the women who had died whose deaths needed an official cause, the company went further still. They leaned on their doctors, threatened legal action against physicians who might release findings connecting the deaths to raid, and in multiple cases succeeded in having death certificates amended to list the cause as syphilis. Syphilis a

9:08 sexually transmitted infection, chosen specifically because it would destroy a dead woman's reputation, cast doubt on her character, and make it easier for the public to dismiss her story and the stories of the women still living who were trying to tell it. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. A series of deliberate, documented choices made by people who knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. Coming up, five dying women spend two years trying to find a lawyer willing to take their case. They finally get into court, the company asked for delay after delay, hoping they'll die before the verdict, and when they can't raise their arms to take the oath, they do it anyway.

9:59 Grace Fryar understood by nineteen twenty five what had been done to her, and she wanted to sue. The problem was the same problem that working class people have always faced when going up against a company with resources. She needed a lawyer willing to take the case, and US Radium was a well funded corporation that could bury a plaintiff in legal costs before they ever saw a courtroom lawyer. After lawyer turned her down for two years, she searched two years of rejection while her health deteriorated and the clock ran on whatever time she had left. It was not until nineteen twenty seven that she found Raymond Barry, a young attorney from Newark who was either brave enough or principled enough to see what this case was and what it could mean, and who agreed to take it on.

10:46 Grace filed suit against the United States Radium Corporation in May nineteen twenty seven. Four other dial painters joined her Edna Hussman, Catherine Shaub, and sisters Quentin MacDonald and Albina Lauris of Ameliamaggia, who had been one of the first women to die, and whose jawbone, when a dentist tested at post mortem, was so saturated with radiation that it exposed a piece of dental film simply by being placed near it. The five women together were seeking two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each in damages. The newspapers called the lawsuit the case of the five Women Doomed to die. That was not hyperbole. All five of them were already dying.

11:31 What happened next is the kind of legal strategy that has a playbook so well worn you could write it in your sleep. Us Radium requested a continuance. The trial date was pushed back. They requested another continuance, The date moved again. Their argument was procedural and their motive was transparent. These five women were sick and getting sicker, and every month that passed without a trial was another month in which one of them might die, reducing the number of living plaintiffs, reducing the pressure on the company, potentially allowing the case to simply exhaust itself. Their attorney said it plainly at the time that if the company succeeded in delaying long enough, the girls would just die and the trial would die down. The press had picked up the story, and the coverage was relentless. The New York World, under editor Walter Lippmann, ran the case prominently public sympathy was with the women. Marie Curie herself, who would die of radiation exposure in nineteen thirty four, heard about the case and wrote to express her sympathy. Though she told them that there was no medical way to remove the radium from their bodies once it was in their bones, She suggested raw liver to manage the anemia. The science had not yet caught up to the scale of what was happening to them, but the moral picture was clear enough to anyone paying attention. By the time the case finally got its first court appearance in January nineteen twenty eight, two of the five women were bedris and could not attend.

13:02 The three who made it to the courtroom could not raise their arms high enough to take the oath. Their attorney explained to the court, when you have heard that you are going to die, that there is no hope in every newspaper you pick up, Prince, what really amounts to your obituary? There is nothing else. The judge allowed them to take the oath as best they could. Grace Fryer had lost all of her teeth and needed a back brace to sit upright in a chair. She sat upright. She testified. She was twenty nine years old. US Radium settled out of court in June nineteen twenty eight, just before the trial was set to conclude and just before the jury would have delivered its verdict. The terms were considerably less than what the women had sought. Each of them received ten thousand dollars in damages worth roughly one hundred eighty thousand dollars today, plus a six hundred dollars annual annuity for the rest of their lives, plus coverage of all medical and legal expenses Against the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each they had been seeking. It was a fraction against the suffering that produced it. There is no number that makes sense, But what the settlement established in law mattered far beyond the dollar amount, Because, for the first time in the United States, a corporation had been held liable for occupational disease for the systemic, documented, foreseeable harm done to workers by conditions the employer knew were dangerous and chose not to address. Grace Fryar died

14:37 in October nineteen thirty three at the age of thirty four, of a radium induced sarcoma in her shoulder. Catherine Shab died the same year. All five of the women who brought that lawsuit were dead by the late nineteen thirties. The radium in their bones will continue to emit radiation for the next fifteen hundred years. They are technically still glowing in their graves, but the legal and regul ulatory changes that their case set in motion outlasted all of them. The right of individual workers to sue corporations for occupational disease was established directly by this case. It changed how courts understood the relationship between employer and employee when the employer had knowledge of a danger and chose to conceal it.

15:19 In nineteen forty nine, more than twenty years after the settlement, Congress passed a bill guaranteeing compensation for occupational diseases and extending the statute of limitations so that workers like Grace Fryer, who had left a job, developed symptoms years later and found themselves outside the window to file acclaim, would have more time to seek justice. That bill happened in part because of what the Radium girls demonstrated about how those limitations could be weaponized against sick workers, and the framework that eventually produced OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration created in nineteen seventy, traces its intellectual and legal lineage back through these cases to these five women who couldn't raise their arms to take the oath and took it anyway.

16:11 The detail I keep coming back to, I want to close on something that I think is the moral center of this story. Because there are a lot of elements here, the suffering, the legal fight, the corporate cover up, But there's one specific detail that I think tells you everything you need to know about what kind of company US Radium was and what kind of decision they made. The scientists who worked with Radium at that facility used lead shields, they used tongs, they wore protective masks. They took the precautions that the science said were necessary to protect a person from the material they were working with. They had that knowledge, they applied it to themselves, and then they walked out onto the factory floor where two hundred young women were pressing radium paint against their lips with their brushes hundreds of times a day, and they said nothing.

17:00 They were protecting themselves from the same substance they were telling the workers was harmless. That is not an oversight, That is not a gap in understanding. That is the deliberate decision to value their own safety above the lives of the people working for them, made by people who had the information to know exactly what that decision meant. Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, Catherine Schaub, Quenta MacDonald, Albina Laris. They were told to lick the brush, they were told it was safe. They trusted the people who told them that the way workers trust employers, the way you trust the institution you show up to every day. And the institution lied to them and kept lying to them while the evidence of what the lie was doing accumulated in their bones. They deserve better than that factory, They deserve better than that settlement, and they deserve to live past thirty four years old. Remember them. That's day three of fighting Tomorrow, we shift gears completely same theme, different era, and honestly a story that most of you think you already know, but almost certainly don't. A seventy nine year old woman, a cup of coffee McDonald's, and a corporate PR campaign that successfully convinced the American public that a woman with third degree burns on sixteen percent of her body was the villain in her own story. Stella Leebeck, The Hot Coffee Case, The truth That's tomorrow. Do Better,