The New Jersey settlement made international headlines – and the front page of the Ottawa Daily Times. MORE DEATHS RAISE RADIUM PAINT TOLL TO 17! screamed the paper. A STARTLING JUMP IN THE TOLL OF RADIUM-POISON VICTIMS!
The girls in the Radium Dial studio were petrified. It wasn’t as though they didn’t have anything to worry about; Ella Cruse had died last summer and several former workers weren’t well: Mary Duffy Robinson; Inez Corcoran Vallat. The Ottawa paper, which the girls pored over with increasing panic, said the first manifestation of radium poisoning was decay of the gums and teeth. Peg Looney, whose tooth extraction from last year still hadn’t healed, felt sick to her stomach.
‘The girls became wild,’ remembered Catherine Wolfe. ‘There were meetings at the plant that bordered on riots. The chill of fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work – scarcely talk of our impending fate.’
The studio became a silent, still place: the girls slackening in their work, hands no longer lifting brushes to mouths at breakneck pace. Given they could scarcely work, production declined and Radium Dial took action, calling in experts to run medical tests.
Marie Becker Rossiter watched proceedings with a beady eye. She noted that ‘they separated the girls. Some of the girls they took upstairs, away from the other ones. They tested both groups, but separately.’ The women didn’t know why. Was it to do with those other tests the company had run, back in 1925? But those results had never been shared with the girls, so they did not know.
Divided into their groups, the women apprehensively went to meet the doctors. The physicians checked to see if the girls had radioactive breath, using the tests the Newark doctors had devised; they also took X-rays and blood.
Catherine Wolfe was tested; Peg Looney; Marie Rossiter. Helen Munch, who was about to leave the firm to marry, also blew into the machine. The girls, reassured that the firm was looking after their best interests, returned to their desks and waited for the results that, they hoped, would set their minds at ease.
But the results never came. ‘When I asked for a report on the examination,’ Catherine recalled, ‘I was told that this information could not be given out.’
She and Marie conferred about it. Didn’t they have a right to know? Marie, always forthright, determined that they shouldn’t take it lying down. Full of fear and indignation, she and Catherine confronted Mr Reed.
Their manager adjusted his glasses somewhat awkwardly and then made an expansive gesture. ‘Why, my dear girls,’ he said to them paternally, ‘if we were to give the medical reports to you girls there would be a riot in the place!’ He almost seemed to make a joke of it.
That response clearly didn’t settle the girls’ nerves, though Catherine later said, ‘Neither of us then realised what he meant.’
Mr Reed, seeing their uncertainty, continued, ‘Don’t worry. There is no such thing as radium poisoning. There is nothing to these stories of radium poisoning!’
‘Are the workers in danger?’ Marie demanded.
‘You don’t have anything to worry about,’ the superintendent repeated. ‘It’s safe.’
Nonetheless, the girls continued to devour the newspaper daily, seeing more horror stories that shot bolts of fear right through them.
And then, three days after the announcement of the New Jersey girls’ settlement, with tensions in the studio still running high, there was a big piece on page three of the local paper that completely supported their superintendent’s statements. The women all pointed it out to each other and read on with ever-lightening shoulders.
It was a full-page ad placed by the Radium Dial Company and here, at last, the girls learned the results of their recent tests. ‘We have at frequent intervals had thorough . . . medical examinations made by . . . technical experts familiar with the conditions and symptoms of the so-called “radium” poisoning,’ read the company statement. ‘Nothing even approaching such symptoms or conditions has ever been found by these men.’
Thank God. The results were clear. They were not going to die. And the company reassured them further: ‘If their reports had been unfavourable, or if we at any time had reason to believe that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would at once have suspended operations. The health of [our] employees is always foremost in the minds of [company] officials.’ The ad continued:
In view of the wide circulation given reports of [radium] poisoning . . . it is time to call attention to an important fact that has as yet received only occasional mention in the news . . . All the distressing cases of so-called ‘radium’ poisoning reported from the east have occurred in establishments that have used luminous paint made from mesothorium . . . Radium Dial [uses] pure radium only.
That was why Mr Reed had said ‘there was no such thing as radium poisoning’, the girls now realised. This was why radium was safe – because it wasn’t radium that had hurt the women out east, it was mesothorium.
Radium Dial, evidencing its claim, cited the work of the ‘expert’ Dr Frederick Hoffman, who was continuing to promulgate his long-held belief that mesothorium was to blame; a belief Hoffman held even after Dr Martland disagreed with him, von Sochocky changed his mind and Raymond Berry wrote to him, having seen some of his media statements, to say: ‘The tests would indicate that there is more radium than mesothorium affecting the [New Jersey] girls.’ But Hoffman seems to have ignored all these contradictions to his theory.
Now, in Ottawa, Mr Reed proudly printed bulletin notices with the company’s statement, posting them up in the workrooms and deliberately calling the girls’ attention to them. ‘He said that we should take particular notice of this advertisement,’ Catherine recalled.
And he continued to reassure the girls: ‘Radium will put rosy cheeks on you!’ he told Marie with a grin; then he turned to Marguerite Glacinski and said cheekily, ‘Radium will make you girls good-looking!’
The women continued to read the paper – but continued to read only good news. The company re-ran its advert over several days, and the newspaper itself wrote an editorial in support of the community employer, saying the firm had been ‘ever-watchful’ of its employees’ health. The whole town was happy. ‘Radium dials’ were heralded as one of Ottawa’s leading industries; it would have been an awful shame to have lost the business but, thanks to the firm’s solicitousness, there was no need for alarm.
In light of all this, the girls returned to work, their panic set at rest. ‘They went to work, they did what they were told to do,’ said a relative of Marie, ‘and that was the end of it. They never questioned it [anymore].’