Death sentences for corporate greed.
I remember an old Westclox in the house when I was young. I was amazed at how the numerals glowed at night, how beautiful they were. It seemed like magic.
Radioactivity is kind of magical and deadly.
In the admirable process of humanizing the tragedy, the reader proceeds down the path the majority of the dial painters' lives took as their health mysteriously began to fail. Young, vibrant women who were suddenly ailing in ways that belayed their years. The narrative describes photos and people with imagery, but it would have been much more compelling if there were photos to accompany the text. The majority of the girls are described in physical details and a personality notation which gave me a strange feeling of reading a catalog. Then there's the repetitive and quite gruesome death spirals to read. The same series of events occurring and the horrifying wait for the link to be made.
Radium was a wonder element when discovered by the Curies. People thought it could do everything and was used in applications from health tonics to industrial war efforts. It was hawked as being perfectly safe, even beneficial.
I abandoned my distaste for books that have the term "Girl" or "Girls" in the title when they mean women; it won't be too soon when this trend dies. Honestly, many of the women working in dial factories were girls with some starting as young as thirteen and many sixteen through eighteen years of age. While I wouldn't call this an enjoyable read, it is well researched and informative.
Where the first section introduced the women, the second focuses on the fight they faced and the beginning of the litigation process. Laws are meant to protect, but here money protects money, and power protects power. Each push to rectify a unbelievably horrid set of conditions and worker abuse is met with resistance and undermining. Rather than resolving issues and misery, money was used to obstruct. Laws were drafted in ways so that compensation could never be paid out and doctors who initially treated a large group of girls going to the USRC to get renumeration and agreeing to lie to his patients. Charming circumstances of business trampling over employees, and proof the world doesn't really change.
Except for one thing, the amazing determination of a few individuals who stood against the tide. This book is about those women and their allies: doctors, lawyers, and husbands.
Chronicled are the horrible consequences of two plants in Orange, New Jersey with USRC United States Radium Corporation and in Ottawa, Illinois with Radium Dial. There were other companies, indeed, the last one shut down in 1979, but this book focuses on these two companies and their workers' plight.
This is one of those unknown histories that affected so much, but was forgotten, maybe because they were women or blue-collar stories, regardless, out of the dial painters' struggle for justice came advances for all workers: safety regulations, corporate responsibility and OSHA. If you harbor any questions about the importance of the EPA, know that they were still cleaning up the Radium Dial site located in Ottawa, IL. This is one hundred years later.
Industries cannot self-regulate. If you need proof, read this book.
Favorite Quote: "Radium eats the bone [...] as steadily and surely as fire burns wood."
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