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 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’ 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’ 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’, she had failed to come onside. 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’, 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’. 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 seen off 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 specialised 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’. 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’. What was Hoffman thinking of, coming up with conclusions based only on his very brief studies in a few parts of the US? (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.’ 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.’ 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’.
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 . . .’
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 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 3 June 1924. ‘It would, in our opinion, be unjustifiable for you to deal with the situation through any other method of attack.’
Well, that was . . . unexpected. The Drinkers had delivered a provisional opinion on 29 April, following their initial academic research, that ‘it would seem that radium is the probable cause of the trouble’. 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.’
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’ of the dangers of over-exposure. ‘The only constituent of the luminous material which can do harm,’ the Drinkers concluded, ‘must be the radium.’