Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Pushkin. So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.
To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.
and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year. The most innovative companies are going further with T-Mobile for Business.
Together with Delta, they're putting 5G into the hands of ground staff so they can better assist on-the-go travelers with real-time information, from the Delta Sky Club to the Jet Bridge. This is elevating customer experience. This is Delta with T-Mobile for Business. Take your business further at t-mobile.com slash now.
This is a follow-up to our previous episode about two disturbing, yet quite different cases of mass radiation poisoning. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I suggest you do. Last time we heard about the Goiânia incident, how a highly radioactive substance was left unattended, discovered by grey market scrap dealers, and wreaked havoc on a neighbourhood of people who had no idea what they were dealing with, and no reason that they should know.
It was a story about critical thinking, about the brilliant, heroic detective work of a woman who figured out the source of the suffering but, alas, didn't survive her encounter with it. In the end, everyone pulled together to try to diagnose and solve the problem. But we also heard about a different case, one in which the risks of radiation poison were known, or at least widely suspected, and people weren't pulling together at all
Instead, powerful businessmen resorted to obfuscation, misdirection and outright lies, leading to the painful deaths of their employees. And there's much, much more to say about that. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to a special Book Club edition of Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES
That second story, the story of the Radium Girls, is our subject today. I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Kate Moore, the author of numerous books across a range of genres, in particular, the New York Times bestseller, The Radium Girls, which is a powerful, heartbreaking account of their experiences and their fight for justice. Kate Moore, welcome to Cautionary Tales. Thank you so much, Tim. Well, I'm delighted that you could join us.
How did you first come across this story? What inspired you to write the book? So I first discovered the story of the Radium Girls through directing a play about them. And it really has been just the most incredible serendipitous journey. I found the play through Googling great plays for women. And the moment I found the script, which was These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich, I fell in love with these characters.
This story of women fighting for justice, this story of heartbreak and tragedy, and yet strength and dignity and courage was just so universal in its power and it just connected with me straight away. And I knew it was based on a true story. So as I prepared for my theatre production, I did as much research as I could on the Radium Girls.
I was really interested in their personal stories. What were their weddings like? How many siblings did the girls have? What was personally important to them as they went through this experience? And I could not find the answers to my questions. I was absolutely stunned that this incredible story that had left such a lasting legacy did not have a book that celebrated the individual women.
And ultimately I thought, well, if no one else has written that book, why don't I? So tell us about these. We've described them both as girls and as women. There are employees in two factories working with radium because it makes numbers on watches glow. So it's useful. Were they girls? Were they women? How old were they?
They were girls at the beginning of the story because it was mostly teenage girls who were employed in these dial painting factories. Most of them were sort of 13, 14, 15, 16 years of age, but actually the records show that some of them were as young as 11.
It was seen as such a great job for the poor working girls, as the sources have it, that actually the women who were lucky enough to have jobs promoted it to their friends and sisters and cousins. And you'd have high schoolers coming and working in the summer holidays. People really wanted to be a radium girl. It was a glamorous job. It was a lucrative job. It was an artistic job.
One of my favourite moments in my research for the book was looking up Catherine Wolfe Donoghue in her local town directory and it listed her name and her address and her profession. And it didn't say dial painter, it said artist, Radium Dial Company. Some of the earliest studios opened sort of 1916, 1917, 1916.
just before the First World War really begins. And it was the First World War that really led to a boom in the radium dial painting industry because the women didn't just paint watches and clocks with this glow-in-the-dark radium paint. They would be painting the instruments that would light up dashboards of automobiles, of aeroplanes, things that were really useful in the war effort. These women, in some cases these girls, they're ingesting radium.
The radium, it's dusting their clothes, it's on the paintbrushes, they're licking the paintbrushes to get them to a fine point and their bodies are just absorbing more and more of this stuff which few people at the time realise is so dangerous. Exactly, and actually it's even worse than not realising it's dangerous. At the time we're talking about 1910s, 1920s, there was actually a belief that a small amount of radium was beneficial to health.
So if you went into your local pharmacy, you could buy radium pills, radium dressings, radium cosmetics to give you a brighter complexion, radium milk, radium toothpaste. You know, there was a whole range of products. People actually drank radium water as a health tonic and the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day. Wow. It...
it becomes slowly apparent that maybe in fact radium is not a health tonic. What are the symptoms at first of radium poisoning? Well, Molly Maggia was one of the first to begin her suffering. She worked with her sisters in the Orange Plant in New Jersey and Molly's first symptom was simply an aching tooth.
And this is what's so insidious about the type of radiation poisoning suffered by the radium girls. It started so innocently. Grace Fryle, she had a sore back.
Catherine Donoghue in Illinois, she's got a painful ankle, you know, affecting the women in different ways and in ways that you wouldn't immediately think, oh, I've got a fatal poisoning. Different symptoms and they all seem so mild at first. Exactly. And Molly obviously goes to the dentist because she has this painful tooth and he extracts it. But then Molly finds that the next tooth starts to hurt and then the next tooth and then the next.
until her dentist doesn't have to pull her teeth anymore because they simply fall out on their own. How long does this take?
In Molly's case, it's very rapid. She's one of the first radium girls to be suffering in this way and the dentists don't realise that actually pulling the teeth and trying to deal with it actually accelerates her condition. So she started getting a sore tooth in the October of 1921. By the May of 1922, she has gone to her dentist to complain again about the pains in her jaw and the dentist
reaches into her mouth to prod at her jawbone and he finds that it literally splinters to his touch and he's able to remove Molly's jaw, not by an operation, but simply by lifting it out. The point at which your jaw is literally falling apart, of course, at that moment...
you realize that something terrible is wrong. But how do the women in New Jersey start to figure out they had some kind of suffering in common? Radium poisoning may take several years to show itself even in those mild symptoms that we first talked about.
The women may not have been dial painters anymore, but of course they still were in contact with the sisters and cousins and friends they had worked with. And so it was literally the women sharing their stories, being open about the pain that they were suffering and realizing, as Catherine Sharpe put it, one of the New Jersey girls, there is something going on with this thing.
the women realized before any of the experts did because it took a long time before people actually took any attention of the fact that dozens of young women were dying in new jersey and once the women themselves had figured out that something was going on what what then these poor working-class women had no way of proving what had happened to them and without that proof
they couldn't really do anything. For me, one of the shocking things about the story is they didn't get that expert help until the first male employee of the radium firm died. When Dr. Lehman passed away in June 1925, which actually is three years after Molly Maggia dies in September 1922,
A man dies, a brilliant doctor called Harrison Martland steps up, autopsies him. None of the other women have been autopsied. And it's through Martland that the women finally get the expert proof they need to be able to take on the company.
But even then, it's not straightforward, partly because the law is set against them. There's a statute of limitations which says you have to file suit within two years. It takes sometimes up to five years or longer for radium poisoning to show itself. And the second major block to these women's fight for justice is
was that the radium firms themselves denied responsibility and not only that, they were active in trying to cover up this scandal and this tragedy. And for them to admit that radium was dangerous, even in small amounts, would mean the end of their lucrative industries. And so they tried everything in their power to silence the truth coming out and to silence the radium girls as well.
They did engage in all kinds of denial and obfuscation. Tell us a little bit about the tactics they were using. When the rumours that the women were being killed by their work surfaced, one of the first things they did was they commissioned an independent report to look into it. The problem came when the report came back that the radium was the culprit.
And at that point, they profess to not be able to believe what the expert has said. This is an expert called Dr. Cecil Drinker, who worked with his wife, Catherine Drinker, on this groundbreaking report that said a small amount of radium was to blame for the radium girls' illnesses and deaths. So they hush up this report, but they don't only do that. They decide to commission another expert called Dr. Frederick Flynn,
to write another report. And he finds that it's not the radium. And this is the report that gets published. The other one, the company refuses to allow the drinkers to publish. And so it's the other report that comes out. And this doctor, Dr. Flynn, is also hired to try to examine the radium girls to tell them that they're in perfect health despite their limps.
despite their aching teeth, despite the fact that some of their legs are beginning to shorten as the radium inside them is destroying their bones. Despite all of those things, the doctors are saying, no, you're in perfect health. There is no reason for you to file suit against the company. There is no reason for you to feel worried. And of course, these women don't know how to respond to be told by an expert that,
that you're in perfect health, even if your body is telling you that it's not. You know, the lawyers are reading Frederick Flynn's report, so they don't want to take on the case either because to their minds there is no proven link that says the radium is hurting the women. But it wasn't only the lawyers who didn't want to help the women. After the break, we'll find out how they were treated by their community.
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry, and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So, buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI.
OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has 4 to 8 times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds.
If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. oracle.com slash strategic. I love cycling, and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe.
which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it and then he was on the bike and ready to ride.
The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian Bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian Bike today. Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed.
Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look, events are unfolding quickly. But now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist,
So you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis, and even their extensive archives. So, welcome back.
Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.
And one of the things that really shocked me reading your book was not just that the company hired an expert to write this report and it was a whitewash. Okay, that's bad. But their own community doctors wouldn't believe them and wrote off their experiences. And that seems to partly be because the Great Depression is approaching as we move into the 1930s. They were worried that
if the women were believed, then that would be the end of the factory. And if it's the end of the factory, then a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. That's going to be bad for the community. And so there seems to be this response from the community at large, for example, from the community doctors to hush all this up. Absolutely. And it's hard enough that they're suffering this excruciating pain. It's hard enough that they're facing financial hardship because, of course, they're having to pay out so much money for operations, for medicines, etc.
But on top of all of that, you've got, you know, your friends and your neighbours shunning you, criticising you, calling you liars and fakes and frauds. You know, people thought the women were trying to take the companies for a ride. They thought the women had just got sick and they were trying to claim money under false pretenses. And so the women were really shamed for that.
And there was no support. So for me, it makes their courage and their resilience and their persistence in pursuing this case. And as you say, it's the 1930s now. This is decades the women have been fighting. It makes their determination to hold the companies to account even more impressive. Do you think that if all the people working in the radium dial factories had been men,
this would be a different story? I think it would, personally. When women say they're in pain, when women say, I think it's this, often they are dismissed. They're called hysteric, which happened to a lot of the radium girls. And people disbelieve them. I also think there is
a tendency that women can be seen as expendable. I think that definitely happened in the case of the Radium Girls. So I do think it would be a different story if it had been men who had been harmed. And I think for me, one of the most shocking things about the story is that these radium firms not only have the dial painting studios where the women are being taught to lip point and put the brushes between their lips,
They're not informed of any danger, so the women think it's fine to be covered in the glowing dust and go out dancing after work. They think it's fine to paint a silly moustache on their face with the glowing paint. Next door to those dial painting studios where all of that is happening, you have the laboratories where, admittedly, the men are handling large amounts of radium, but they are protected.
They are issued with lead aprons. They are told to take enforced vacations so they're not overexposed to the radiation. They handle the radium with ivory-tipped tongs and they are warned about the danger. And there's also a tendency to lie to the women about the severity of their own condition, even from people who have the women's best interests at heart. There's one...
as really a very moving moment towards the end of your book where one of the heroines of the story, Catherine Wolfe Donoghue, she doesn't know she's dying and she discovers that in really the most painful and public way possible. I wrote that scene that you're talking about with tears streaming down my face and that scene takes place in the courtroom in Ottawa, Illinois. Catherine Donoghue is now very, very sick
She's got a grapefruit-sized tumour on her hip.
She has lost most of her teeth. Her mouth is constantly seeping past, so she's having to dab her mouth with a patent handkerchief. And she's been carried to the courtroom because she cannot walk anymore and her bones are so fragile from the radium that she can almost barely be carried. It's a large undertaking in order even to get her there. But Catherine is determined to have her day in court.
And so she's sitting in this room in the courthouse and one of her doctors is on the stand and is being grilled about her prognosis. And he is asked directly, what are her chances? You know, how long does she have left? What is the situation here? And he hesitates before answering because he knows that Catherine doesn't know and she is sitting right there in the courtroom and he glances over at her
And in that glance and in that hesitation, tells Catherine all she needs to know, that she is not going to make it. She knows she is not going to be there for her children, her two young children. They are going to grow up without a mother. And she lets out this shriek, this scream and collapses to the floor. And her husband rushes to her and her friend Pearl rushes to her.
And they carry her out and the doctors warn that if Catherine continues with the case, if she continues to give evidence, it's very likely to end in her death. They say that the risk is too great. But when Catherine recovers, she insists. She says, even if I cannot get to the courtroom, the court can come to me. And the following day, the court comes to her house at 520 East Superior Street.
And they crowd into her front room and Catherine is laid out on the sofa with a blanket over her. And even though her voice is almost gone, even though she is in incredible pain and incredible emotional pain at having just been told that she is going to die from this,
She uses the last vestiges of energy that she has to give her evidence, and she does it for herself, and she does it for her friends and her family, and she does it for all the other workers out there who may be hurt if she doesn't continue with this fight. It's an incredibly moving scene.
You kind of love and hate her lawyer at that moment because you realize he's engineered this. He knows this is going to happen. And it's all good for the cause, but it's just excruciating for her. The other thing that I could not believe as I was reading was that the company then kept on appealing to...
because they realised if they were able to hold it up long enough she'd just die and then they didn't have to pay anything because she'd be dead. Catherine dies in the end the day after, you know, one of those appeals has been filed so she wins her case but they appeal it and when she learns of that the strength just went and she passed away at home. So at first these women were being rejected by their employers, they were being rejected to some extent by their own community
Nobody seemed to believe them. But then they did have some champions. They did have people who came to fight alongside them. I really admire the fact that it's other women who championed them. Given we're talking about a time, as you say, 100 years ago, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, it was still rare to have women in public roles
So one of those champions was a person called Katherine Wiley. She was the executive secretary of the Consumers League, which fought for better working conditions for women. And she finds out about the story when a health officer who's been dealing with the case, she said people were just hushing it up and brushing it under the carpet.
it. You need to keep after them to ensure that something will be done. And Katherine Wiley was the best person that could have been reached out to. And she immediately interviewed the radium girls who were suffering at that time. And she met a woman called Marguerite Carlo, who was actually the first radium girl to file suit. At that point,
Marguerite was very near death. She was suffering extremely. And Catherine Wiley said, having met Marguerite, I cannot rest until I have done something to ensure that this never happens again. She was the kind of woman that just kept knocking on the doors, kept getting the meetings, kept niggling at the...
company president to say you've got to release the drink report what's happening with it and she was just tenacious in ensuring that ultimately the truth came out
And this was partly campaigning for changes in the law because one of the astonishing things is what the radium dial company and the other radium companies were doing was not actually illegal. There was no protection for workers from poisoning. And if it's a slow burning condition, if it takes more than two years to become apparent, that doesn't count either. There's a statute of limitations. So this isn't just, oh, the company needs to behave better. It was also a case that the whole system needed to
change. Absolutely. And Katherine Wiley very quickly got the law changed so that something called radium necrosis became a compensable disease under New Jersey law.
But radium necrosis only referred to the jaws disintegrating. It didn't impact on the cancers that the women later received. It wasn't to do with the anemia that killed many of them. It wasn't to do with the fracturing bones that they were suffering. And so Catherine Wiley had, as she put it, a pretty easy time getting that first law through. And it was because no one really could claim on it.
You had to be really smart in how you were drafting these laws so that actually people could be held accountable. But she realized her mistake. And then she fought again to get radium poisoning, which would cover everything on the statute books. But tellingly, that fight took her much longer. It wasn't until the 1930s that she succeeded in getting that law changed.
And I want to talk briefly about Alice Hamilton. I know she's not a central figure in this story, but she is a fixture in cautionary tale. She's a bit of a legend. Is she? Well, she was the country's leading expert on lead poisoning and she told...
Thomas Midgley, who was the inventor of CFCs and of adding lead to gasoline, she told him not to do it. And she tried to get him to stop and tried to get that regulated. But she also has this role in the radium story as well, doesn't she?
That's right. Not only did the radium firms cover up the Drinker report, but they actually told the Department of Labour, who had started investigating all these deaths, they said the Drinker report had proved that actually it wasn't radium. So they totally lied about the results. And because they were refusing to let Drinker publish, there was no way to refute that. And Alice Hamilton was central in...
essentially ferreting out that truth that the company had lied. Drinker obviously was absolutely furious when he found out that the company had done that. Catherine Drinker called Arthur Reader, the company president, a real villain for having done that. So Alice Hamilton was involved in that way and helping Raymond Berry, the New Jersey lawyer, with the cases as well, assisting him in whatever way she could to ensure that
the medical and technical information that he needed was there so that he could really do his best work in representing the women in court. We'll find out about lawyer Raymond Berry and the man who represented the women involved in a horrifyingly similar case in Ottawa after the break.
I love cycling and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe. Which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble, with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it
And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.
Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,
Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis and even their extensive archives. So...
Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.
We're back and I'm talking to Kate Moore, author of Radium Girls. So tell me about the two lawyers who are central to these two cases, Raymond Berry and Leonard Grossman. They're quite striking characters.
Very much so. It was a pleasure to write them in the book. A smile comes to my face as I'm thinking about them. Very different characters, I have to say. Raymond Berry was the first lawyer to tackle the radium cases because he was working in New Jersey. The New Jersey women were working during the First World War. The Ottawa studio didn't open until 1922. So they
Everything that's happening in New Jersey is happening about five years ahead of what's happening in Ottawa. And it's one of those really frustrating things about looking back at these stories from history and thinking, if it had to happen that the radium girls had to get hurt before we realised that a small amount of radium was dangerous, it should only have happened to one group of women. And actually, because of
The lies because of the lack of communication and publication and promotion in those days, it took much longer for the truth to out and it led to the suffering of many, many more women. In New Jersey, when the court cases are coming up, the women try desperately to find a lawyer. Everyone is saying no until Raymond Berry. He was a very young lawyer, not even in his 30s yet. He had...
baby-faced good looks, blue eyes, blonde hair, a very, very smart man. And his brilliance was in tackling the statute of limitations question, which was why the women kept getting knocked back by many other attorneys. They just couldn't figure out, because the law said you had to file suit within two years. This is now sort of 1925 that we're talking. Seven years, eight years since the women have been hurt at their workplace.
No one else can figure it out, but Raymond Berry does. So what's the trick? So there are kind of two tricks to it, really. The women could not file suit until they had that proof, the medical scientific proof, that it was the radium that had hurt them. One trick is that because the radium firm had covered up the drinker report, they shouldn't be allowed to...
rely on the delay caused by their cover up. Morally, absolutely. I'm just surprised that legally that works, but apparently it does. Completely. And then the other twist that he put on it, which I think is really smart, is that you're supposed to file suit within two years of the point of injury. What has happened to Catherine and to Grace and all the other women is that they've ingested the radium through lip-pointing.
and radium is what's called a bone seeker, so it's a bit like calcium in that way. We know when we drink a glass of milk, calcium in the milk goes into our bones, makes them nice and strong. When the radium girls ingested the radium, it also settled in their bones.
but there once it has settled it's emanating its immense radioactivity and this is why the jaw bones are splintering the women's legs are spontaneously fracturing and shortening because the radium is inside their body and it is hurting them constantly because it's constantly emanating radioactivity
And the legal argument therefore is the women are still being injured because the radium is inside them, it is hurting them anew with every second. And so they can file suit because the point of injury is still occurring. Clever. Very. Tell us about Leonard Grossman, the lawyer who was paid in shoes, I understand. Exactly.
Leonard Grossman Sr. was, again, a very special man. He was dynamic, you know, a real showman in the courtroom. He really knew what he was doing in that regard. He fought for the underdog, as you say. If people couldn't pay him, he sometimes accepted payment in shoes. You know, if that was all they had going, he would fight for them. And the case of the Radium Girls, he did it pro bono and insolvent.
It was hours and hours and hours of his time. And he kept fighting. Even after Catherine Donoghue died, he kept fighting for years because it was the right thing to do. He was a man who always did the right thing. But he did the right thing in the most flamboyant ways. He did. Yeah, he was the kind of man that wore sort of, you know, spat shoes. And he was a larger than life character, a large man in himself. And he just had that energy and that presence.
And he deployed that brutally sometimes. We've alluded to the moment where Catherine Wiltonahue discovers in court that she is going to die.
Leonard Grossman knew that that would happen. Presumably that whole exchange was something he'd rehearsed in his mind, I imagine, because he knew it would be a winning moment. Yeah, and I'm sure Leonard Grossman was aware of the optics, shall we say, of Catherine lying on her sofa close to death and everyone crowded round her dining table taking the evidence. He had the media there crowded into that front room taking pictures of Catherine
Catherine lying on the sofa of her friend Charlotte Purcell with her dress pinned up because her arm has been amputated because of the radium poisoning. All the women there sitting in a row showing physically, viscerally, what they have suffered. And Leonard Grossman, I'm sure, was aware of the power of those images in reaching the public, in reaching the judge, hoping to achieve the verdict that he was going for.
Yeah, Grossman was very clever there. Very much so. I was really struck by the bravery and the tenacity of the women, but also of their solidarity and their sense of a wider purpose. They weren't just doing this
for themselves they were very conscious of their families husbands children and the wider community that what had happened to them couldn't be allowed to happen again that's absolutely right i think it's one of the amazing things about their story actually the altruism with which they fought for justice because there wasn't any hope for the radium girls who had got sick and yet they fought on and in fact one of my favorite quotations in the book comes from grace fryer
one of the New Jersey girls who was instrumental in making sure that the court case happened. She was single-minded in ensuring that they would get an attorney. You know, she tried lawyer after lawyer after lawyer. Grace was incredibly smart. She ended up working for a bank after she had been in the Dahl painting studios. And she used every bit of her brains channeled on this case to make it happen.
She was the daughter of a union delegate and I think that passion for politics and that understanding of workers' rights and that this was wrong really drove Grace when she was asked about filing suit while she was doing it. She said, For me, that really sums up the power of what they did and what they achieved.
So what did they achieve? Did they get compensation for themselves within their own lives? What's the legacy of this case? Within their own lifetimes, some of them...
achieved a small measure of justice, shall we say. Partly that was court case judgment that went for them. Partly it was compensation to help them with their medical bills. But the money was really never enough. And by the end, it wasn't about the money. It was about the moral victory. And it was about the scientific proof. The legacy, therefore, goes beyond what they achieved in their own lives.
And it impacts many different areas of society and our world. On a legal front, they changed workers' compensation laws. They made it so that it was illegal to poison your employees. So there were lots of gains that they made in that regard. And theirs was one of the first cases in which an employer was held responsible for the health of their employees.
They have an incredible legacy in terms of the science of this story. No one had ever been poisoned in this way before.
And actually, the radium girls were studied for decades because scientists appreciated that their bodies held unique knowledge for the world about what radiation does to the human body. There were departments set up that studied them. The women came voluntarily to submit to medical tests, blood tests, x-rays, bone marrow investigations, and so on. They had everything done, and they came out truistically
to gift that knowledge to the world because they hoped it would help they hope no one else would suffer as they did radium girls were exhumed from the graves in these studies so that women that had died in the past their bodies gave up the secrets so that the world and scientists could learn from them about what radiation does and in fact they are still using the radium girls bodies to learn now i've actually been contacted by scientists from nasa and they
And they're using the data on the radium girls to try to determine what might happen to astronauts' bodies, for example, on the journey to Mars. What might space radiation do to them? How might it affect them? And so the radium girls are still having a legacy and they're still helping us today learn more about radiation. And I'd say there's also a final element to their legacy, which is science.
specifically workplace safety in nuclear industries. Thanks to the radium girls they did discover that even a small amount of radiation is harmful and it happened just in time for the Second World War and the race to build the atomic bomb. And the scientist who was in charge of the Manhattan Project
literally wrote in his diary that as he was walking through the labs, he sort of had a vision of the ghost girls as the radium girls were known. He remembered what had happened to them. He only knew what had happened to them because of the women's tenacity in, you know, making their court cases front page news. And he said, I don't want anyone on the Manhattan Project to suffer as they did. So he insisted that they conduct examinations
experiments to find out about the biomedical properties of the uranium and the plutonium they were using. They were found to be biomedically very similar to radium and therefore the workers on the Manhattan Project were protected and therefore everyone today working in nuclear industries is protected because of the radium girls.
There's a more disheartening legacy as well. The first deaths were in the 1920s, the court cases were often in the 1930s. Catherine Wolfe Donoghue died in the 1930s. But as late as the 1970s, you describe people in those communities denying the experiences of these women. Tell me about that.
because scientists were studying the women for decades, they would go and interview people in Ottawa, Illinois. And the interviews they conducted, even in the 1970s, had those community members saying, so-and-so was never very healthy to begin with. I don't think it was radium poisoning. You know, she always had one foot in the grave.
They were denying it even in the 1970s. And I think one of the lessons of the Radium Girls story is that history can repeat itself if we're not vigilant. And we know that similar stories are happening even today. And so it's about being aware of that and it's about tackling injustices and lies today.
when we see them and knowing that it may take years but if you're patient and you persevere the truth will out. We always promise our listeners a lesson in every cautionary tale and I think you've just given us the lesson to think about. Is there anything else you'd like to add? I think the only thing I'd like to add is
about the girls themselves, which was always my mission and my motive in writing The Radium Girls. It was about celebrating the women. Grace Fryer, Katherine Wolfe-Dunnehy, Molly Maggia, these incredible women. And for me, actually, I think the biggest lesson of all that we can learn from The Radium Girls is that no matter how small you may feel or how powerless, you can make a difference.
because that's what these women did. As a sisterhood, they banded together, they fought for what they believed in, and they stood up for themselves, and they made every second count. Kate Moore, thank you so much for talking to Cautionary Tales. Thank you so much for inviting me.
I've been speaking with Kate Moore. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Radium Girls, which of course is available wherever you get good books. She has written many other books, most recently the critically acclaimed The Woman They Could Not Silence. ♪
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Vital Moulad, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. Tell your friends.
And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.
and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.
So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.
To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.
The news isn't always good news, but when you're getting quality journalism and in-depth expert analysis that's held up for more than 180 years, that is definitely good news. So if you haven't already, save 20% with The Economist's summer sale today and stay on top of the stories that matter to you. You'll instantly gain unlimited digital access to daily articles, special reports, award-winning podcasts, subscriber-only events, and so much more. Now that's
Good news. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.