It would turn out to be the worst way to absorb the poison. Structurally, the element radium can be considered a close if crazed cousin of the element calcium. Both are alkaline earth metals, silvery white in color. Both are built in cubic crystalline structures. As a result, when a person swallows radium, the body channels it in a way similar to calcium—some is metabolized away, some goes toward nerve and muscle function, and most is deposited into the bones.
But where calcium strengthens the mineral content of the skeleton, radium does the opposite. It bombards skeletal material with alpha radiation, blasting bony material full of tiny holes, then larger ones, then larger still. It irradiates the blood-forming marrow in the bone’s center. Nothing removes it until it burns itself out—and this is a material with a half-life of sixteen hundred years. Eventually Martland did find a way to get radium out of bones, but only after death: he incinerated the skeleton and then boiled the bone ashes for hours in hydrochloric acid. After that alpha radiation seemed to disappear. But otherwise, in the living body, radium spits out its alpha particles in apparently infinite supply. And its affinity for the bones explains precisely why jaws rotted away, hips broke, and ankles crumbled, why anemias and leukemias bubbled in the bone marrow.
In 1925 Martland detailed these principles of radiation poisoning in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
. He’d learned many of the facts by studying the bodies of dial painters who had died. Among those still living, based on the gas they exhaled, he’d developed a formula that calculated the amount of radium in their bodies. Radon gas was produced in the skeleton as the radium there decayed; the gas diffused into the bloodstream, was carried to the lungs, and was exhaled, to drift away.
Until the next breath.
THE YEAR Martland’s report was published, a small group of former employees sued U.S. Radium Corporation. Only five of the Radium Girls (as the press liked to call them) joined in that action. A few had settled, afraid to take on a big corporation, sure that they’d lose the jobs they held now, and that they’d lose in the courts as well.
These doubters knew that the company had no intention of giving in easily. It took the employees three years of legal wrangling even to get a trial date. That was why Harrison Martland called Charles Norris only in 1928 about the skeleton of a woman who had died years earlier.
The bones belonged to an Italian-American, Amelia Maggia, dead at twenty-five, who had worked as a dial painter for four years. In her last year at the factory, 1921, she’d abruptly lost weight and complained of joint pains. The following year her dentist discovered that her jaw was splintering apart; almost all of it was removed. She developed a worsening anemia and bled constantly from her mouth and died in September 1923. Her death certificate read “ulcerative stomachitis.”
Martland, having found Maggia on a list of former dial painters, suspected that the diagnosis was wrong. The symptoms read like textbook radium poisoning to him. Still, the only way to prove it was to look for radiation in her skeleton, which he’d had exhumed. But he wasn’t sure of the best way to test for radioactivity in these slightly decayed bones. So he wondered if the New York medical examiner’s office would be willing to help him out.
Norris volunteered the time of his talented toxicologist to do the work. They were curious at Bellevue too. No one really knew that much about radium poisoning. (The title of Martland’s paper was: “Some Unrecognized Dangers in the Use and Handling of Radioactive Substances.”) Scientists remained unsure of what the risk was to the living and were even more uncertain about how long alpha radiation might rattle in a dead woman’s bones.
THE REPORT on Amelia Maggia’s bones had a title that pretty much gave away the ending: “Radioactive Substances in a Body Five Years After Death.”
The paper, written by Alexander Gettler, Ralph Muller of New York University, and A. V. St. George of Bellevue’s pathology laboratories, offered detailed instructions on how to take bones and tissue from an aging corpse and test them for radioactivity.
The scientists first used a knife to scrape away as many shreds of remaining tissue as possible. They burned some of those scraps into ash, then boiled a selection of bones (the skull, five cervical vertebrae, five slices of rib, both feet, both femurs, the right tibia, the right fibula) for three hours in a solution of washing soda (the alkaline compound sodium carbonate). The bones were scrubbed to dazzling white and then air-dried. The larger bones were then sawed into two-inch pieces.
Gettler and Muller next took the prepared bones into a darkroom. They had prepared their test material: X-ray films wrapped in black safety paper. The scientists placed the pieces of bone on the wrapped film and sealed everything tight to keep any stray light from interfering with the experiment. They went through the same careful procedure for the tissue ash. Then, for comparison, they went through the same process with pieces of washed bone and tissue from a normal corpse. The bone, tissue, and film packages were left to sit for ten days with the idea that “if radioactive, the bones and the tissue ash would emit rays, and the beta and gamma rays would penetrate the black paper and affect the photographic film.”
After ten days they opened the packages. The published photographs showed a dazzle of pale spots, starred against a black background. “Those on which normal bones were placed are not shown, because they did not show any impression,” the authors noted. As the Bellevue team reported, every bright spot was the signature of a charged particle blowing from the dial painter’s bones through the protective paper onto the film. “Every piece of bone, as well as every tissue ash that we examined, showed radioactivity by the photographic method.”
The report displayed Gettler’s usual obsessive need to verify his results in multiple ways. He accompanied the film tests with results from experiments that relied on other techniques. He’d taken more pieces of skull, a few remnants of jaw, a vertebra, and bits of leg and foot and burned them into a gray-white ash. Scraps of tissue from the liver, lung, spleen, and brain were also weighed and incinerated.
Those ashes were placed into a radiation detector, called a Lind electroscope, and compared with comparable tissue and bone ash from another, “normal,” body. The device detected alpha radiation as well as beta and gamma rays. The electroscope work confirmed the results from the film tests. Maggia’s body, even after five years, was “strongly radioactive,” according to the published report.
Gettler and Muller would later find an even more theatrical way to demonstrate the danger of radium in bones. In a tube attached to a Geiger counter, they placed a piece of bone from their Radium Girl. The counter
click-click-clicked
as it registered the bombardment of alpha and beta particles. The scientists connected a pair of loudspeakers to the equipment, boosting the volume of that rapid-fire rattle. In a lecture hall, the amplified crackle of radium emissions evoked the unnerving sound of enemy fire.
AS THE LAWSUIT dragged on, the five Radium Girls became sicker and sicker.
Two of them, Quinta MacDonald and Albina Larice, were sisters of Amelia Maggia, whose bones had provided so much evidence. Both of Quinta’s hips had fractured. Albina was bedridden, and one of her legs was now four inches shorter than the other. Edna Hussman could barely shuffle across her room. Years after leaving the factory, her hair still glowed in the dark. Grace Fryer now worked in a bank, with a metal brace from neck to hips to support her spine. Katherine Schaub’s jaws were starting to break apart; as she told her lawyers, she hoped the money—they were asking for $250,000 each—would pay for her funeral. “If I won my $250,000, mightn’t I have lots of roses?”
Thirteen other dial painters, including Schaub’s cousin, had died in the three years since the lawsuit was filed. But the company lawyers, in the spring of 1928, found another argument for dismissing the complaint: they proposed that the statute of limitations had run out on the plaintiffs’ injuries. The workers should have come to court when they were actually exposed to radium, not now, years later, when they no longer had jobs with the U.S. Radium Corporation.
True, several of them were unemployed because they could no longer walk or talk (as their jaws had been removed due to bone necrosis). And true, legal maneuvering had delayed proceedings. But, the company asserted, the case had lost all validity. New Jersey law required court action within two years of an injury. Some of these workers had left the factory long before the 1925 filing of the lawsuit. And so much time had passed since any workplace injury that as a matter of law, the Radium Girls’ time had come and gone.
The response of the attorneys for the injured women came directly from the research publications of Harrison Martland and Alexander Gettler.
Unlike traditional toxins like arsenic or mercury, which poisoned in a single, direct dose, radium exposure inflicted a lifetime of harm. These women were still being poisoned every day by a radioactive element that never left their bodies. Yes, the suit was three years old, and yes, the women had left those dial-painting jobs years earlier. It didn’t matter. All five were still exhaling radon gas and the radium in their bones was still killing them.
The judges in Newark’s chancery court found the plaintiffs’ argument, the image of those irreversibly radioactive bones, absolutely plausible. And appalling. The court dismissed the corporation’s motion and set the trial, at last, for June 8 in federal district court in Manhattan.
Slightly more than a week later the company moved to settle the case.
The settlement was far less than the women had sought: each received only $10,000 in cash, a $400 annual pension, and the guarantee of complete medical care, to be covered by the U.S. Radium Corporation and its insurers. But they were grateful to get anything while they were still alive to use it.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY convention in Houston that June was, as always, an excellent party. All enjoyed it except for the New York delegates, who had very specific instructions to behave and not to drink in public. As humorist Will Rogers, who was covering the conference, wrote, the New
Yorkers were pitiful, just pitiful. “They all say ‘Why pick on us to be the only sober ones here?’ ”
The answer to that was obvious. New York governor Al Smith had a real chance at the presidential nomination. He also had two major political liabilities. He was a Catholic in a country dominated by Protestants, which couldn’t be changed. And he had a reputation as an enemy of Prohibition, even as a man in the pocket of the bootleggers. That could at least be minimized.
In Rogers’s words, “The whole talk down here is wet and dry; the delegates just can’t wait till the next bottle is opened to discuss it.” Smith suspected that being seen as a drinker’s friend was no longer as much of a handicap as it had been a few years earlier; the Democrats might even position themselves as the party opposed to punitive alcohol regulations.
By the convention’s end, aided by his alcohol-deprived colleagues, Smith had succeeded in his quest and was the Democratic candidate for U.S. President. In the November election he would face Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, a reform-minded Republican backed by pro-Prohibition partisans.
AS THE ELECTION approached, Rogers’s perspective on the nation’s illicit love affair with alcohol lost some of its lightheartedness. In a letter to the
New York Times
, musing on the perpetual danger now posed by drinking with friends, he wrote: “This ‘speakeasy’ business must be the most independent and prosperous business in the world, especially in New York, for no other industry in the world could afford to kill its customers off like that. They must run an undertaking business on the side.”
The first October weekend, four New Yorkers were killed and eleven were sickened by poisoned alcohol; the following weekend another eleven were dead and sixty hospitalized. Norris issued yet another warning: “Practically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic,” because practically all the liquor was redistilled denatured alcohol. “Whether they call it smoke, or white mule or put in some flavoring and call it gin, the effect is the same.”
Two days later another twenty-two people were dead.
Mayor Jimmy Walker was famously fond of the speakeasy lifestyle, earning himself the nickname “Night Mayor.” But even he had had enough. On October 8 he angrily demanded a sweep of backroom bars on the Lower East Side, the source of the recent cascade of deaths, and that an example be made: “I do insist that those responsible for this poison liquor, the sale of which amounts to a homicide and which is more than a violation of the Volstead act, be apprehended and prosecuted.”
For his part, Norris put most of the blame elsewhere. Gettler’s latest tests had found the lethal bite not only of methyl alcohol but of the government’s determined, ever-expanding use of poisonous additives: aldehol, pyridine, benzene, diethyl phlatate, nicotine, mercury, aniline, phenols.
“Prohibition is a joke,” Norris said flatly. “I invite both Presidential candidates to see the noble experiment in extermination. The medical examiners cannot stop these deaths. It is up to the authorities to stop them.”