Grace was galvanised into action: this was the good news she’d been waiting for. She got back in touch with lawyer Henry Gottfried and just two days after she’d read about the settlements the wheels of her own claim were set in motion. On 6 May 1926, USRC received the following message from Gottfried: ‘Gentlemen, unless you communicate with me relative to [Miss Fryer’s] claim for damages on or before Monday, May 10th, 1926, I will be compelled to institute suit.’
USRC, like clockwork, immediately referred the matter to their attorney Stryker, who seemingly asked Gottfried to name a number. On 8 June, Gottfried wrote to say that Grace would be willing to settle for $5,000 ($67,000).
It wasn’t a gigantic sum of money; it would cover the extensive medical bills that Grace had already run up, plus provide a nest egg to pay the future expenses that would undoubtedly be required. Grace wasn’t a greedy person, and she didn’t really want to start a big lawsuit. If the company would simply make her a fair offer, she was prepared to take that compensation and be done.
USRC took just one week to respond. ‘I have your letter of the 8th,’ Stryker replied on 15 June, ‘and note your suggestion. I cannot advise my client to adopt it.’ The company ‘refused to do anything for Miss Fryer without suit’.
Grace’s heart must have sunk when she heard. She must have been confused, too. For not only had the company agreed to pay out damages to her former colleagues just the month before, but Miss Wiley had put that new law in place. Didn’t that change anything?
But, it now transpired, it did not. And here it became clear just why Wiley had had such an easy ride getting the radiumnecrosis bill passed. For a start, the bill could not be applied retroactively, so no one injured before 1926 could claim. Also, as the new amendment became part of the existing law, it automatically had a five-month statute of limitations attached, a length of time that would never be long enough for radium poisoning to become evident in any dial-painter. Finally, and most crucially of all, it covered only radium necrosis – specifically jaw necrosis, of the aggressive kind suffered by Mollie Maggia and Marguerite Carlough. None of the other medical conditions arising from the women’s poisoning – their life-sapping anaemia, bad backs, locked hips, broken thighs, even simply their loosening teeth – was compensable. Wiley had found that the new bill was ‘not unpopular’ with the state Manufacturers’ Association; now, suddenly, it became obvious why. The law, as written, was designed so that no one would ever collect compensation.
Wiley soon realised her mistake. With renewed fervour, the Consumers League began campaigning to get radium poisoning into the law books. Tellingly, however, this fight would take them much, much longer before any changes were made – far too long, and far too late, to help Grace Fryer, sitting despondently at home in Orange in June 1926.
There may have been another reason the company wasn’t inclined to settle: there is some evidence to suggest that the firm was not doing quite as well as it once had financially; one executive referred to the situation as being ‘hand to mouth’. Part of the problem was finding staff; its remaining employees were ‘jumpy and nervous’ and new workers scarce. Before the year was out, USRC would cut its losses and shut down the Orange plant, putting the site up for sale. Even so, it wasn’t down-and-out completely. The firm simply transferred operations to New York.
Grace Fryer wasn’t down-and-out either, although USRC’s response led to a double blow as, learning of the firm’s refusal to settle, Gottfried dropped her case. Yet she felt more determined than ever to battle on; she was her father’s daughter and this child of a union delegate would not back down so easily from a fight against a guilty firm. ‘I feel we girls should not give up all hope,’ she said.
She went on to consult at least two other lawyers – but, frustratingly, without success. Part of her problem was that her former company, just as it had planned, was now beginning to benefit from expert publications that said radium poisoning was not to blame for the girls’ illnesses. The most high profile of these, which would be published in December 1926, was authored by one Dr Flinn.
‘An industrial hazard does not exist in the painting of luminous dials,’ he wrote plainly. He said the girls’ problems were due to a bacterial infection. Hoffman dubbed the report ‘more bias than science’.
Yet it went way beyond bias: Flinn was lying through his teeth. For not only did his published conclusions contradict his stated opinion to Dr Drinker – ‘I cannot but feel that the paint is to blame for the girls’ conditions’ – but in June 1926, six months before his study was published, Flinn finally discovered two radium-poisoning cases at the Waterbury Clock Company. These proved, once and for all, that it wasn’t a bacterial infection that had been passed around a single studio: it was the women’s profession that had killed them.
Despite knowing of the cases for so long, Flinn didn’t correct or withdraw his report and allowed it to be printed, giving USRC published expert evidence to draw on in their continued denial of responsibility. Later, Flinn did say that he regretted that decision. But from his future behaviour, one can infer, not too much . . .
Flinn wasn’t finished with the Orange girls, despite his proclamation that their illnesses were only an infection. In July 1926, the month after USRC turned down Grace’s attempt at a settlement, he finagled his way into examining Grace herself; the timing was probably a coincidence. Flinn – accompanied by another man who Grace did not know – took her blood and an X-ray. And when the results were in, Flinn pronounced with a smile, ‘Your blood picture [is] better than mine!’
‘He told me,’ Grace later remembered, ‘I was in better health than he was and there was nothing wrong with me.’
But that was not what Grace’s body told her.
The girls were all in dire straits that summer, notwithstanding Flinn’s assertions of good health to Grace, Katherine and Edna Hussman. Quinta McDonald was still attending Dr Knef for her loosening teeth; and it was Knef, now, who chose to make an appointment with the radium company. One morning during that summer of 1926, he met with the board of directors, including President Roeder and an up-and-coming vice president called Clarence B. Lee, at the USRC headquarters in New York. Knef was at his wits’ end from trying to treat the women, and he now made the radium firm an offer he hoped they couldn’t refuse.