They had not – and there was a very good reason why: Dr Frederick Flinn. Flinn had enjoyed access to the Waterbury girls almost from when they began falling ill. He was given privileged admittance to the workforce and the girls not only knew him but trusted him. When he told them they were in perfect health, they believed him. And once radium poisoning was discovered, Flinn became ‘willing to play a two-faced role: to the dial-painters, he presented himself as a concerned medical expert, whereas for the company he persuaded dial-painters to accept settlements that explicitly freed the company from further liability’.
And this was the reason that not one case had been filed with the Compensation Commission – any claims that might have been raised had been quietly settled by the firm. There was one obvious reason for the difference in the Waterbury Clock Company’s approach compared with that of USRC – and the clue is in its name. As Waterbury was a clock company, and not an out-and-out radium firm, agreeing to settlements – and in so doing tacitly admitting that the paint had harmed the girls – didn’t affect its wider business, for it didn’t make money from selling radium. And so, when its employees started dying, the company simply settled any cases that came up, using the gentle mediations of Dr Flinn. ‘In these negotiations,’ wrote one commentator, ‘Flinn held the upper hand. He knew what he wanted and the women he dealt with were invariably young, unsophisticated, vulnerable, and without the benefit of legal counsel.’ Had the Waterbury women taken some legal advice, they could have discovered what Berry well knew: that under Connecticut law, many of them might well have found justice thanks to the more generous five-year statute. It is to be noted, however, that the statute was five years only at the time of the discovery of radium poisoning; following the emergence of the girls’ cases, the law was rewritten in order to shorten it.
With the good doctor’s intervention, the company spent an average of $5,600 ($75,000) per affected woman, but this figure is skewed by a handful of high settlements. Most victims received less than this average; some, insultingly, were offered only two-digit sums, such as – in one shocking case – $43.75 ($606) for a woman’s death.
If one squinted at the situation and tried really hard, one could say that Flinn did the Waterbury girls a favour. He certainly saw it that way; intervening to save them the trouble of bringing a lawsuit. But the company and Flinn held all the cards – and Flinn hadn’t finished with what Martland called his ‘double-dealing and two-faced’ shenanigans. For even though Flinn had now been forced to acknowledge the existence of radium poisoning, it didn’t mean that all the girls who fell sick suffered from it. And so, as Flinn continued to run his tests on the Waterbury women, he continued to find no positive cases of radium poisoning. Not one – not in 1925, not in 1926, not in 1927. Only in the fading months of 1928 would he concede, at last, that five girls might be affected. He told one worker, Katherine Moore, on eight separate occasions that there was not a single trace of radium in her body. She later died from radium poisoning.
Berry, hearing back from the commission, knowing nothing of Flinn’s work at Waterbury, was completely stumped by the lack of evidence. But his new friend Alice Hamilton quickly realised what had gone on and filled him in. With the cases settled quietly by Flinn, of course there had been no evidence: no publicity; no Department of Labor knocking on the clock company’s door; no lawyers involved at all – just a tidy sum passed across a desk, and a grateful recipient who took it. It was all hush hush.
None of it helped Raymond Berry.
From the beginning, Berry was very interested in Dr Flinn. He had learned from the girls about his declarations of their good health – declarations that had confused them and for some girls taken the wind out of their sails when it came to filing suit. Berry thus decided as early as August 1927 to dig a little deeper into Dr Flinn. His enquiries soon unearthed a shocking piece of news.
Dr Flinn had been examining the girls; taking blood; reading their X-rays. He had been arranging medical treatment and writing to the women on the letter-headed paper of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. ‘[I] understood,’ said Grace’s physician Dr McCaffrey, who’d arranged her examination with Flinn, ‘that Dr Flinn was an MD.’
But now, when Berry asked the authorities to look into exactly who Flinn was, he received the following letter from the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners: ‘Our records do not show the issuance of a license to practice medicine and surgery or any branch of medicine and surgery to Frederick B. Flinn.’
Flinn was not a medical doctor.
His degree was in philosophy.
He was, as the Consumers League put it, ‘a fraud of frauds’.
26
Ottawa, Illinois
August 1927
Ella Cruse slammed the screen door of her house on Clinton Street and made her way down the few steps outside. She called goodbye to her mom Nellie as she went – but her voice was not as spirited as it once had been.
Ella didn’t know what was wrong with her. She had always been ‘strong and robust’ before, but now she felt tired all the time. She started walking to work, taking her bearings, as always, from the spire of St Columba, which was only a block or two from her home. Ella and her family – mom Nellie, dad James and little brother John – regularly attended services at the Catholic church, like most everybody she worked with.
Nellie’s reply to her as she said goodbye had been quiet too; but then her mom disapproved of Ella being a dial-painter. ‘I never wanted Ella to work there,’ she used to say, shaking her head, ‘but [it’s] a clean place and they’re a jolly bunch of girls.’
Clinton Street was only a couple of blocks from the art studio too, so even with her new snail-pace gait, Ella was soon there. She made her way up the school steps with all the other girls arriving for work. There was Catherine Wolfe, walking with that slight limp she’d recently developed; Marie Becker, talking – as ever – nineteen to the dozen; Mary Vicini, Ruth Thompson and Sadie Pray. Peg Looney was already at her desk when Ella entered the studio, as conscientious as always. Ella said hello to them all; she was ‘a popular young woman’.
In 1927, Mary Ellen Cruse (as she’d been christened by her parents) was twenty-four, the same age as Catherine Wolfe. Her glossy chestnut hair was cut into a fashionable bob which ended daringly short at her cheekbones; it was finished with a dramatic fringe that swept across her flawless skin. She wore her eyebrows neatly plucked and had a shy smile that brought out a dimple in her left cheek.
She settled at her wooden desk and picked up her brush. Lip . . . Dip . . . Paint. It was a familiar routine by now, as she’d started working there when she was about twenty – she worked twenty-five days a month, eight hours a day, with no paid vacations.