Radium, Corporate Reputation, and the Glowing Women of Orange, New Jersey
In my sophomore year of high school, I performed in my school’s production of The Radium Girls by D.W. Gregory. For three months, I played Irene Randolph, a young factory worker who finds herself afflicted with a mysterious illness of the jaw before becoming the martyr in an Erin Brockovich-style court drama against her employer. Although the play was performed in a BlackBox theatre with a plethora of empty seats in the audience, the ominous portrait painted of America past left a lasting impression on me.
During World War One, while most of America’s men were on European battlegrounds, a gaggle of New Jersey teenage girls found war-effort work with the United States Radium Corporation (USRC). The young women’s working hours consisted of painting numbers on glow-in-the-dark watches using paint tinged with radium, all the while pressing their lips to their brushes in order to achieve a fine point. The girls were told that the radium would pass right through their digestive systems, and due to radium’s short-term effect of multiplying red blood cells, in the girl’s first few months their jobs appeared to give them rosy cheeks and good spirits. When going out for the night, an eerie glow stuck to their hair, pressed on their skirts, and sometimes clumped in their teeth.
Contrary to what the girls were told, radium does not, in fact, pass harmlessly through the digestive system. Instead, it mimics calcium and burrows into bones. Over several years, the buildup can lead to necrosis, or death of tissue, especially closest to the women’s contact site: the jaw. Mollie Maggia, grossly misdiagnosed with syphilis, was the first of the workers to succumb to radium poisoning. As other women began reporting similar symptoms of rotting teeth and achy backs, they were advised by a local doctor that their common former occupation may have had something to do with their suffering.
The USRC was well aware of radium’s effects on the body but held brief confidence that they would get away with it. While women in the company’s plant were repeatedly assured of radium’s safety, company scientists were employing lead-lined aprons and forceps to even touch the substance, let alone ingest it. The USRC also repeatedly covered up any notions of the paint’s toxicity, whether that be via having the women medically examined and “cleared” by a non-medical professional or misreporting independent investigation data to the Department of Labor. It took the women nearly two years to find a lawyer willing to stand up to the company, eventually receiving hefty settlements for their sufferings.
Although these women suffered for the remainder of their lives, this story seems to have the happy ending of “bad guy has to pay.” However, I was always haunted by the pure effort it took these women one-hundred years ago to receive compensation; today, a company poisoning its workers would be easy to litigate against. In reality, it is the horror these women endured that prompted the development of the protections American workers enjoy today.
While the radium girls’ graves still remain radioactive, their story was vital in the development of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under President Nixon. Workers now must enter a job with a full overview of the chemicals they work with and the risks involved. Employers must pay for all necessary safety equipment for their employees. There are standards for legitimate medical testing of workers and a federal complaint hotline for workplace concerns. In essence, a lot of work and money goes into an organization that works to ensure that no one is unnecessarily endangered by their job.
OSHA’s reach has also gone much further than radium dial factories. It has worked in establishing safe limits of asbestos exposure. It has effectively worked to prevent brown lung in textile workers, caused by inhaling minute amounts of “cotton dust”, subsequently causing an uptick in textile production. OSHA even works to prevent hearing loss by requiring certain employers to test their employees and share the results with them. These types of developments would have been a godsend to the men and women of industrial eras yore, but at the very least they are here now.
Laws are essentially a government’s way of ensuring collective well-being, even at the cost of individual choice. The Radium Girls, as a play and as a historical incident, serve as an adverse example of when a corporation was able to decide how it viewed worker safety by itself. The entire plot of my sophomore play dove into company executives sorting through such a dilemma. Granted, at times it did value employee well-being, such as with its lead-guarded scientists. At other times, as with young uneducated women, profit and reputation were valued over safety. Organizations like OSHA do take this choice away, and that is something that should only be done with great consideration. However, taking the choice away means that companies must always rule in favor of their employees over their pocketbooks.
Sources
Kilby, Jacqueline, and Jana Leighton. “The Radium Girls at the National Archives.” The National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, 4 Jan. 2018, text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2018/01/04/the-radium-girls-at-the-national-archives/.
Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women. Sourcebooks, Inc, 2017.
Prisco, Jacopo. “Radium Girls: The Dark Times of Luminous Watches.” CNN, Cable News Network, 19 Dec. 2017, www.cnn.com/style/article/radium-girls-radioactive-paint/index.html.
