The Radium Girls And The Companies That Tried To Bury The Truth

As the US entered World War I in 1917, the United States Radium Corporation (USRC) opened a dial-painting plant in Orange, New Jersey, to make luminous watch faces. Hundreds of girls and young women were recruited to work in the new factory. Wages ranged from $20 to $40 a week, which was considered good money by the standards of working-class women at the time.

USRC supervisors taught new dial painters a technique called lip, dip, paint: shape a fine brush to a sharp point between your lips, then dip it in radium paint before painting a watch dial. USRC management favored this method because it saved time and paint. Radium dial painters worked for hours each day, lip-dip-painting hundreds of dials. With every stroke, they swallowed a minuscule amount of the poison they were paid to handle. They trusted their bosses to tell them what was safe.

The radioactive element radium was then being marketed as a health tonic and a novelty. It wasn’t seen as dangerous. So the women working on the dial-painting line at the New Jersey plant would occasionally paint their teeth, fingernails, or dresses with leftover radium in order to glow in the dark at social events. It wasn’t recklessness. At the time, no one, not even the scientists, knew what long-term exposure to low levels of radiation could do.

About 1920, some of the former dial painters started appearing in dental offices with infected gums, loose teeth, and sockets that just wouldn’t close. In extreme cases, the jawbone itself began to rot, later dubbed “radium jaw.” Doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on. There wasn’t even a suspicion yet that this had anything to do with their work painting watch dials.

By 1922, Mollie Maggia, a former USRC dial painter, was 24, and her jaw had begun rotting away so badly that dentist Joseph Knef had to pull out chunks of her jawbone with his fingers. When her diseased tissue burst her jugular vein on September 12, 1922, Maggia bled to death. From that point forward, USRC began listing syphilis, one of the most socially condemned diseases of the era, on deceased workers’ death certificates in order to avoid liability.

In 1924, USRC president Arthur Roeder engaged Harvard public health specialist Dr. Cecil Drinker to examine the Orange factory for radium. Drinker discovered dangerous levels of the substance and declared that radium was killing the women. Roeder suppressed Drinker’s report, fabricated a benign-sounding version, and submitted it to the New Jersey Department of Labor.

In 1924, Dr. Alice Hamilton, the first woman to teach at Harvard and a pioneer of occupational medicine in America, learned that USRC president Arthur Roeder had falsified Dr. Cecil Drinker’s report on the company’s safety record. Hamilton urged Drinker to release his actual data. His real paper appeared in the August 1925 issue of the Journal of Industrial Hygiene, alerting the public to the fact that the Orange facility was highly toxic.

In December of 1925, Dr. Harrison Martland, the medical examiner for Essex County, New Jersey, finally revealed the answer: when swallowed, radium mimics calcium and stays in the bones forever. It kept radiating its damaging rays from within.

On October 15, 1927, Mollie Maggia’s body was dug up by her family and lawyer Raymond Berry so they could have hard proof for a lawsuit. Forensic experts, including toxicologist Dr. Alexander Gettler and medical examiner Dr. Harrison Martland, ran tests on her bones in the lab. Photographic film sealed in a paper envelope near her remained blackened due to the radiation her bones had picked up. Syphilis? Not even close.

The dial painter Grace Fryer also wanted to sue USRC, her employer. But she searched for nearly two years for a lawyer to take the case, beginning in 1925. Most declined to take it, for fear of fighting a wealthy and powerful corporation, or losing on a technicality. It wasn’t until May 1927 that she finally convinced a young Newark lawyer named Raymond Berry to take her case.

On May 18, 1927, Raymond Berry filed suit against USRC for five former dial painters, including Grace Fryer, all of them sick. Each was asking for $250,000. The legal issue at hand was when the statute of limitations to sue started: was it from the time the painting stopped, or when they found out they had been poisoned? Journalists referred to the women as “the Five Living Dead.” By January 1928, none was able to lift her arm high enough to swear an oath in court.

At the beginning of 1928, USRC obtained a five-month stay in the trial brought by Grace Fryer and four other ill former dial painters. Walter Lippmann, editor of the New York World, wrote editorials criticizing the delay tactics used by the company. Lippmann’s editorials created anger across the country and fueled boycotts of USRC, adding to the pressure on a company already struggling to contain the scandal.

After public boycotts and continued negative publicity made the case impossible to ignore, USRC agreed to settle the case out of court on June 4, 1928. Each of the five women received a $10,000 lump sum plus $600 per year for the rest of her life and payment of her medical expenses. USRC agreed to pay the settlement, but the company never admitted any legal responsibility for what had happened to the workers.

Undark was the self-luminous radium paint that USRC’s dial painters applied every day. Dr. Sabin von Sochocky, the man who developed Undark’s formula, died of aplastic anemia on November 14, 1928, at age 45, a condition brought on by his own exposure to the substance. His radium paint had killed its creator.

In 1922, another company, Radium Dial Company, opened a dial-painting factory in Ottawa, Illinois, which was not connected to USRC in New Jersey. This company also assured its workers that their paint was safe and non-toxic. The painters were taught the same lip, dip, paint technique and the same malady began to take its toll.

By the mid-1930s, Catherine Wolfe Donohue, a former Radium Dial painter, was seriously ill herself. In July of 1937, she gathered together other formerly sick radium dial painters and filed a claim with the Illinois Industrial Commission. Leonard Grossman Sr., a Chicago lawyer, represented them pro bono, after aging lawyer Clarence Darrow reportedly directed the women to him.

By February 11, 1938, Catherine Donohue had become too weak to travel to a courthouse. So representatives from the Illinois Industrial Commission conducted their official hearing in her Ottawa home. In her living room, she sat on her bed to give sworn testimony about her illness and how the company had denied it. The episode made headlines across the nation, drawing new public attention to the dial painters’ plight.

In 1938, the Illinois Industrial Commission found Radium Dial Company guilty of corporate negligence and awarded Catherine Donohue, a former dial painter, a pension and medical care for the rest of her life. In contrast with USRC’s 1928 settlement in New Jersey, which included no admission of wrongdoing, this was an official adjudication. Donohue died in July 1938, while the company’s appeals were still pending.

Radium Dial Company filed eight appeals against the Illinois negligence ruling, hoping to invalidate a ruling that Catherine Donohue had fought long and hard to achieve. Finally, on October 23, 1939, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and the Illinois ruling was affirmed. This became a legal precedent that established liability for occupational radiation poisoning.

Radium measurements taken from the ill dial painters enabled the National Bureau of Standards to establish, in 1941, the first permissible level of radium in the human body. During the war, Manhattan Project scientists employed the NBS’s standard to keep their own workers safe from radiation as they built the first atomic bombs. For decades afterward, researchers tracked thousands of surviving dial painters, producing data still used in radiation safety today. And because radium retains its radioactivity for 1,600 years, the abandoned paint factories in New Jersey and Illinois required federal cleanups in subsequent decades.

This content was created with the help of AI.