Berry was outraged. ‘I am sure you must agree,’ he wrote to Markley, ‘that there is a rather harsh irony in the situation which permits the victims of poisoning to languish and die because certain trained men must disport themselves in Europe.’
Despite the company’s intransigence, in Berry’s own words he was ‘far from finished in this fight’. Aware that USRC’s procrastination was arguably cynical – perhaps it wanted the girls to die before a verdict could be given – Berry now drew on the feeble health of his clients to fight their cause, asking four different doctors to sign to sworn statements: ‘These girls are all becoming progressively worse. It is very possible that all or some of these five girls may be dead by September 1928.’
It made for horrendous reading for the women. Humphries reported they were ‘kept under a constant mental strain’. Yet it was the kind of move that Berry instinctively knew would get results – and he was right. For faced with this kind of injustice, the media were up in arms. Berry’s ally Walter Lippmann rose to the occasion magnificently, writing in the World: ‘We confidently assert that this is one of the most damnable travesties of justice that has ever come to our attention.’
His influential editorial provoked immediate support from across the nation. One man wrote to the News, ‘Open the courts, quash the postponements, give these five women a fighting chance!’ Norman Thomas, meanwhile, a socialist politician who was often called ‘the conscience of America’, declared that the case was a ‘vivid example of the ways of an unutterably selfish capitalist system which cares nothing about the lives of its workers, but seeks only to guard its profits’.
‘Everywhere,’ said Katherine Schaub, almost in disbelief, ‘people were asking why justice was being denied these five women, who had but a year to live. What had once been a hopeless case, unheeded and unnoticed, now flashed before the public.’
And the public was transfixed. ‘Letters came pouring in from all corners of the earth,’ Katherine remembered.
Though most were positive, some swung the other way. ‘Radium could not produce the effects ascribed to it,’ one radium-company executive wrote bitterly to Quinta. ‘It is pathetic that your lawyers and doctors should be so ignorant.’ Some quacks were aggressive in their overtures. ‘For $1,000 [almost $14,000] I can cure each of you,’ a woman proposing a treatment of ‘scientific baths’ declared. ‘If not, I will ask nothing except the $200 [$2,775] I want in advance. This means life or death . . . You had better work fast, for when that poison reaches your heart – goodbye girlie.’
Many letters contained suggestions for cures. These ranged from boiled milk and gunpowder to magic words and rhubarb juice. An electric blanket was another suggestion, with its manufacturer envisioning a unique marketing opportunity. ‘It is not to make money we wish to cure them,’ protested the firm. ‘The advertising it would give our method would be amply paid.’
The girls were famous. Undeniably, truly famous. Berry, himself adept at envisioning opportunities, immediately capitalised on it. He broached the subject of courting the press with the girls and they were all for it. And so, as the month of May 1928 dragged on and every day seemed to bring forth another call for justice from the press, Berry ensured that the girls were centre stage. Close friends Quinta and Grace gave a joint photo-shoot and interview; Grace wore a pretty cherry-patterned blouse – with her now-constant bandage on her chin – while Quinta donned a pale dress with a pussy-bow neckline. And the girls, every one of them, talked. They shared the details of their lives: how Quinta had to be carried to her hospital appointments; how Albina had lost all her children; how Edna’s legs were crossed beyond repair. They let their personalities shine through their suffering – and the public adored them.
‘Don’t write all this stuff in the papers about our bearing up wonderfully,’ Quinta said with a cheeky smile. ‘I am neither a martyr or a saint.’ Grace remarked she was ‘still living and hoping’. ‘I am facing fate,’ she declared, ‘with the spirit of a Spartan.’
They weren’t always easy interviews. When journalists asked Quinta about Mollie’s death, she had to stop for a moment to compose herself. Katherine Schaub said in one interview: ‘Don’t think I’m crying because I’m downhearted – it’s because my hip hurts so. Sometimes it seems as though a knife was boring into my side.’
Yet the tragedy and pain were part of the appeal for the captivated public. Radium poisoning – with its child-killing devastation and disfiguring symptoms – ‘seemed to destroy their very womanhood’. The public, shocked and saddened, took the girls to their hearts.
Berry soon realised how much the coverage was helping – because Edward Markley was spitting feathers. ‘Personally, I do not like your attitude,’ wrote the USRC lawyer huffily to Berry, ‘especially the newspaper notoriety which you are giving these cases. The ethical aspect of trying your case in a newspaper is questionable, to say the least. I am quite confident that eventually you will be properly rewarded, either in this world or the next.’
Berry replied only briefly. ‘I am surprised,’ he wrote innocently, ‘that you should raise the question of ethics . . .’
Whatever Markley thought of the media, however, the firm he represented knew it had to present its side of the story. Predictably, USRC wheeled out Dr Flinn, who pronounced that his tests showed ‘there is no radium’ in the women; he was convinced, he said, that their health problems were caused by nerves. This was a common response to women’s occupational illnesses, which were often first attributed to female hysteria. The World, for one, was utterly unconvinced by Flinn. Lippmann wrote that his statement had ‘all the appearance of being timed to support the argument of the [USRC] lawyers’. He continued: ‘It is not part of this newspaper’s practice to attempt to put pressure upon the courts. But this is unmanly, unjust and cruel.’
Markley was powerless to stop the rising wave of support for the women. When asked for a comment, all he could say was that he felt the girls were being ‘exploited by a young Newark lawyer’. Yet the women themselves certainly didn’t feel that way. They were leading the charge to bring their employers to justice. At last, the world was listening to them – and they were not shutting up.
‘When I die,’ Katherine Schaub told the press with heartrending pathos, ‘I’ll only have lilies on my coffin, not roses as I’d like. If I won my $250,000, mightn’t I have lots of roses?