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’; she called him ‘dishonest’.
The two women had thus come up with a master plan. Little knowing that USRC had already given a misleading precis 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?’
Katherine Drinker responded immediately; she and her husband were ‘very indignant’ at the idea that Roeder might have distorted their findings; ‘he has proved,’ Katherine concluded savagely, ‘a real villain.’ 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.’
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.
17
Arthur Roeder had not become the head of the United States Radium Corporation without being an astute and wily businessman. He was an expert negotiator, skilled in manipulating situations to his advantage. It was always wise, he considered, to keep your friends close – but one should always keep one’s enemies closer.
On 2 April 1925, he invited Frederick Hoffman to the Orange plant.
The statistician, in fact, visited two or three times, noting in particular the lack of warning signs about lip-pointing. And perhaps Roeder observed his notes, or maybe what happened next was simply part of the ongoing safety precautions the president had instructed Viedt to put in place. For on Hoffman’s final visit, on Good Friday 1925, Roeder called his attention to new notices in the studio which commanded employees not to put the brushes in their mouths. Hoffman approved: ‘They had impressed me,’ he later said, ‘with improved conditions.’
Roeder knew what he was doing. With relations between the two men cordial, he pressed home his advantage. ‘I wish that I could persuade you,’ Roeder wrote Hoffman, ‘to defer publishing a paper on the subject of “radium necrosis”.’ He wanted Hoffman, he said, to have the ‘opportunity to thoroughly investigate the subject’.
Hoffman responded genially: ‘I wish to express to you my sincere appreciation of the courtesy extended to me during my visit and of my own sympathy for the trying position in which you find yourself.’ However, Roeder was too late. ‘I find on looking over my file that an abstract of [my paper] was furnished to the [American Medical] Association some time ago for inclusion in the Handbook which has gone to the printer . . . The paper is now out of my hands.’ Hoffman added that he had agreed to supply the Bureau of Labor Statistics – the government agency led by Ethelbert Stewart – with a copy of his report.
One can only imagine Roeder’s reaction to that news; although he had smoothly tried to allay the concerns of the bureau as well. When Swen Kjaer had interviewed Roeder that spring about Marguerite Carlough, Roeder told him frankly that he ‘thought that the ailment was not due to any cause in the factory; in fact, was probably an attempt to palm off something on [the firm]’.
At least the Carlough girl had given him an excuse to put off John Roach. When Roach had heard that the report supplied by the firm was a whitewash, he had immediately requested a full copy of the study. But Roeder had replied that, because of the Carlough suit, ‘The matter has been placed in the hands of our New Jersey attorneys, Lindabury, Depue & Faulks, and I am consequently referring your request to Mr Stryker of that firm.’ He said the same in response to Drinker’s plea for him to publish the full study: ‘In view of the [legal] situation, I have taken no action in regard to submitting your paper for publication; we are not issuing any reports now except on advice of counsel.’
Now, however, the situation started to spiral out of Roeder’s hands. Drinker began to lose patience with the president’s continued stalling and wrote directly to Roach to find out exactly what the company had said of his study. Roach duly sent him Viedt’s letter of 18 June 1924 – and Drinker was stunned to find that, just as Hamilton had told his wife, the company had lied. ‘We have [both] been deceived,’ he declared to Roach, ‘in our dealings with the United States Radium Corporation.’ He was so shocked by the firm’s behaviour that he arranged a face-to-face meeting with Roeder in New York to confront him.
Roeder was still trying to calm the troubled waters. When Drinker told him sharply that he ‘felt the conduct of his firm in this affair had not been very creditable’, Roeder ‘assured [him] that their desire had been quite the reverse and he would at once see to it that [Roach] received a complete copy of the original report’. Though somewhat reassured, Drinker was not wholly placated. He therefore made a deal with the company president. As long as Roeder kept his word, Drinker promised him, ‘I will do nothing about publication.’
It was a good deal for Roeder: the game was now up with Roach, after all, and the lack of wider publication meant that the litigating Marguerite Carlough would have no access to the expert report that directly linked her illness with her employment. Yet it was also an ultimatum – and the powerful Arthur Roeder was not the sort to kowtow to pressure from those he had employed.
In fact, he did not seem at all perturbed by the doctor’s attempted negotiations; he simply passed on Drinker’s demands to Stryker, the company lawyer. Roeder was paying Stryker good money; he would trust him to deal with these latest developments. In the meantime, Roeder had an ace up his sleeve. Drinker, he thought, wasn’t the only expert in town.