Everybody seemed happy – everybody but the girls. They were not impressed. RADIUM VICTIMS REJECT CASH OFFERS: WILL PUSH CASES; PARLEYS NOW OFF yelled one headline. The firm had offered them $10,000 ($138,606) each in settlement, but all the girls’ medical bills and the costs of litigation were to be deducted from that sum, leaving only a pittance.
‘I will not grab at the first thing that comes along,’ exclaimed Grace fiercely. ‘I will not knuckle down to them now after all I’ve suffered.’ Quinta McDonald simply said, ‘I have two small children. I have to see to it that they are provided for after I’m gone.’
No, the women said, we do not accept. Grace, as ever, seemed to lead the fight: she declared that she would ‘absolutely refuse to accept the company’s offer’. Instead, after discussion with the girls, Berry pitched alternative terms to USRC: $15,000 ($208,000) as a cash lump sum for each woman, a pension of $600 ($8,316) a year for life, past and future medical expenses, and USRC to cover all court costs. The firm would have the weekend to think it over.
Monday 4 June would prove a hectic day. At 10 a.m., negotiations continued with the world’s press camped outside. When, after forty-five minutes, the lawyers exited Clark’s chambers, they had to use a rear stairway to escape the massed media.
They were leaving to draw up formal papers. That afternoon, Berry summoned five brave women to his office. They dressed for the occasion: all wore smart cloche hats, while Grace slipped a fox fur around her shoulders. Even Albina made it to this most exceptional meeting; she had barely left her bed in the past month. But better than any outfit, more dazzling than any jewels, were the smiles that wreathed all their faces. For they had done it. Against all the odds, after a phenomenally hard battle – fought while they were in the most fragile health imaginable – they had nonetheless held the company to account.
They spent three hours with Berry and, in that time, the women signed the settlement papers. The company had kept the lump sum in the final agreement at $10,000 – but it agreed all their other terms. It was a quite extraordinary achievement.
The media flashbulbs glared as the women posed for a photo to mark the moment. Quinta, Edna, Albina, Katherine and Grace. They stood all in a row: the dream team. The ‘smiling sorority’ – and, for this one day, not sadly smiling, but beaming, false teeth and all, in pure delight and not a little well-deserved pride.
The formal announcement of the settlement came from Judge Clark himself at 7 p.m. By now, a crowd of perhaps three hundred had gathered; ‘all aisles and passageways to the elevators were jammed’. Clark fought his way through the crowds to a good vantage point, from which he could break the news. He cleared his throat and asked for silence, which fell in a soft hush, broken only by the pop of flashbulbs and the papery whisper of pen on pad. Once he had the full attention of the press, the judge announced the exact terms of the deal. ‘You can say, if you want to,’ he added unctuously, ‘that the judge did a good job.’
The settlement specified that the company admitted no guilt. Markley added purposely, ‘[The firm] was not negligent and the claims of the plaintiffs, even if well-founded, are barred by the statute of limitations. We are of the opinion that [USRC’s legal] position is unassailable.’ The corporation itself, meanwhile, released a statement proclaiming its motivation in settling was purely ‘humanitarian’. The statement ended: ‘[USRC] hopes that the treatment which will be provided for these women will bring about a cure.’
And therein lay another crucial part of the settlement. The company had insisted that a committee of three doctors be set up to examine the girls regularly: one physician would be appointed by the girls, one by the company, and one mutually agreed. ‘If any two [doctors] of this board should arrive at an opinion that the girls are no longer suffering from radium [poisoning],’ Berry noted, ‘the payments are to cease.’
It was obvious what the company officials planned; they didn’t even try to hide it from Berry. ‘I fully believe,’ Berry wrote, ‘that it is the intention of the corporation, if possible, to work out a situation in which they will be able to discontinue payments.’
It all sat extremely uneasily with him, especially because, while he knew his former boss to be ‘a very honourable man’, he now heard rumours that Clark ‘was friendly with certain of the [USRC] directors’. Worse than that, he ‘possibly had some indirect business relations with some of the directors of [a company with] a controlling interest in [USRC] who were schoolmates of his’ and Berry even learned that Clark ‘is, or was, up to a very recent time, a stockholder in USRC’.
‘I have,’ Berry said with trepidation, ‘a great fear in the situation.’
In the Essex County courthouse in Newark, its elaborate murals are dedicated to four things: Mercy, Justice, Peace . . . and Power. In this case, Berry mused, the last seemed cruelly apt.
Clark himself wrote to the women: ‘I want to express to you my very great personal sympathy, and my earnest hope that some way will be found of helping your physical condition.’ And it was the women, at the end of the day, for whom this settlement was everything. They had come out on top; they had never thought they would live to see the day.
‘I am glad to have the money,’ commented Albina with a smile, ‘because now my husband will not have to worry so much.’ Her sister Quinta added, ‘The settlement will mean so much, not only to me, but to my two little children and my husband. I want to rest after this ordeal I’ve been through. I’d like to go with them to some seaside resort.’ She pronounced herself ‘dissatisfied with the terms’, but said: ‘I am glad to be free from the worry of the court and am pleased with the thought of receiving the money right away.’
‘I think Mr Berry, my lawyer, has done wonderful work,’ Edna enthused gratefully. ‘I’m glad to get the settlement; we couldn’t have waited much longer. It will mean a lot of the things we want, for as long as we can appreciate them.’
Katherine simply said: ‘God has heard my prayers.’
It was really only Grace who expressed a more muted response. She said she was ‘quite pleased’: ‘I’d like to get more, but I’m glad to get that. It will help in so many ways; it will alleviate some of the mental anguish.’ She added, of their courage in bringing the lawsuit in the first place and of what they had achieved so publicly, ‘It is not for myself I care. I am thinking,’ she said, ‘more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example.
‘You see, it’s got us – so many more of us than anybody knows yet . . .’
32
Ottawa, Illinois
June 1928