On 17 December 1935, the ruling finally came back on the Irene La Porte case in New Jersey, which her husband Vincent had been fighting for more than four years. This was the case the United States Radium Corporation had chosen to see through to judgment: the one on which they had placed their bets. The company, by now, did not deny the cause of death – it simply cited the statute of limitations as the reason why it should not have to pay. ‘[Once Irene’s] employment [was] terminated,’ the USRC lawyers stated, ‘all duty we had to that girl as our employee ceased. There is no relation afterwards; she is a perfect stranger.’
Several dial-painters testified at the trial; many had their own lawsuits pending. All pinned their hopes on Irene winning her case, for if she did the verdict would apply to them too. Everyone gathered to hear the judgment.
The judge began:
Naturally, there is no question as to where the sympathies of any human being would lie in a case of this sort. It is tempting, in the light of the knowledge of today, to create the thought that the [company] must have been negligent in some way. But it should be noted that this case must be decided on the facts as they existed in the light of the knowledge of 1917. A court has no power to adjust the law to meet the needs of a time when no such case as this could be foreseen.
He concluded bluntly: ‘The [case] must be dismissed.’
USRC had chosen well. Seven years on from Grace Fryer’s case, there was now no censure in the media; no censure even from the judge. The company had the answer it was looking for: not guilty.
Justice had been denied to Irene La Porte – but not just to her. For all those New Jersey dial-painters with lawsuits still pending; for all the families battling on for loved ones who had died; for all those New Jersey women who had not yet found a worrying lump on their hip or their leg or their arm, but who would in future, justice was denied.
It had been, the USRC executives reflected, a very good day indeed.
46
You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.
On 25 February 1936, Inez Vallat died; she was twenty-nine. After eight years of agony, she finally succumbed to a ‘haemorrhage from sarcoma of the neck’, bleeding out as medics desperately tried to staunch the flow of blood. ‘Mr Vallat,’ dial-painter Frances O’Connell recalled, ‘would not talk at all about his wife because she had died a very horrible death and he did not want to think about it or talk about it.’
The Ottawa doctors completed her death certificate. Was death in any way related to occupation of deceased?
No.
Inez’s death, coming on top of the lawsuit defeat, left the Ottawa women reeling. Many of the original clique were too ill to attend her funeral, as much as they wanted to say goodbye. Catherine Donohue, these days, was ‘rapidly becoming too weak to move about her home very much’ and seldom even left the house.
There was some coverage of Inez’s death in the Chicago papers. The press called the girls, rather dismally, ‘The Suicide Club’. A senator commented that he would try to interest the Industrial Commission in their case, but added: ‘Unfortunately, any proposed legislation cannot be made retroactive. It is pitiful indeed.’
The girls couldn’t even get excited when the governor signed the new Illinois Occupational Diseases Act, which now included a provision for industrial poisoning. The new bill was the direct result of the women’s case and would protect thousands of workers – but it would not become law until October 1936. Given how quickly the women were dying, they hadn’t much hope they would be alive to see the day.
The same month the new law was signed, the girls had an approach from a journalist that lifted their spirits somewhat. Mary Doty, a leading reporter with the Chicago Daily Times, now gave them a voice. She turned the public spotlight back on their suffering in articles that ran for three days in March 1936. ‘We’ll always be grateful to the Times,’ Pearl Payne would later say, ‘for helping us when everything was so black.’
The Times was ‘Chicago’s Picture Newspaper’, a populist publication. Doty knew just how to write for her readership: ‘They shoot to kill when it comes to cattle thieves in Illinois, and fish and fowl are safeguarded by stringent game laws – but womenfolk come cheap.’ She decried the fact that dial-painters had been ‘dying off for thirteen years in Ottawa without any official comment or investigation’. And she painted a picture of the women’s conditions that would haunt her readers: ‘Some [girls] creep along, unable to move beyond a snail’s pace; another with an empty coat sleeve or a mutilated nose, withered hands, a shrunken jaw.’
The girls posed for photographs, many with their children. Mary Jane Donohue looked absolutely tiny – Doty called her a ‘wizened little baby’. At a year old, Mary Jane weighed only 10 pounds and had ‘match-thin arms and legs’. ‘Her parents,’ wrote Doty, ‘hope against hope her mother’s illness will not leave its permanent mark on her.’
Catherine herself said to the press, ‘I am in constant pain. I cannot walk a block, but somehow I must carry on.’ When the journalist asked about her friend Inez, ‘it brought tears’.
Marie Rossiter spoke of her son, Bill. ‘I’m frightened to death, but I want to live as long as I can for the sake of my little boy,’ she told the press. Though Marie now had five bad teeth, ‘the [Chicago] dentists say they won’t touch them because of the radium poisoning eating into the bones of my jaw’.
Charlotte Purcell was pictured with her daughter Patricia. She was gradually coping with having only one arm; ‘Having three babies, she adapted,’ said a relative. In time, she would relearn how to make beds, peel potatoes and even hang out washing, the clothespins stuffed into her mouth. As she told reporters, she was haunted by the thought that the sacrifice of her arm had not been enough; the radium ran right through her, and she didn’t know where it might strike next.
The final piece in Doty’s series focused optimistically on Catherine Donohue: ‘She waits hopefully for another call to the city for an operation.’
Privately, Tom had to whisper to Doty: ‘[It] will never come.’