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When Women Fought Back Against Glowing Death · Ebbs of History

• Jason: Lessons we've learned today. Time for the Fun Fact Challenge! This day in History! Welcome to the Ebbs of History, the show where we into the strangest, wildest, and sometimes downright creepiest stories the past has offer. From dancing plagues to pirate queens, ⁓ You'll laugh, you'll gasp, and you'll even groan at the occasional dad joke. But ⁓ most importantly, you'll learn how history is way cooler than your textbook ever told you. We are history loving hosts Gavin ⁓ ⁓ me, Zoe. And in every episode the three of us will take a quick trip through time to see what lessons we can still learn today. This is the Ebbs of History. Hey there, history lovers, and welcome back to another episode of the Ebbs of History. We're so glad you're here with us today. Gavin, Dad, how's everyone's week? nothing to a port. Yeah, you're on vacation. Yeah. Summer vacation. ⁓ about to start camp current call. I'm like too nervous for that. Tomorrow, yeah. We'll have something to do. ⁓ it was the fourth of July yesterday, so we celebrated that. Mm. Yeah, it's been a kind of a chill weekend. Kinda nice. It's been really nice. Watching a lot of soccer. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ yeah, 100%. We were just watching the Norway game versus Brazil. That Cabo Verde game was insane. It was really good. Really good. ⁓ wow. So close. I think everyone here has watched that game or at least heard of it and seen how absolutely insane that was. Yes. They they really made them fight for it. That was It's crazy how close it was. Wow. Okay. Picture a job where the boss tells you to lick a paintbrush hundreds of times a day. The paint glows in the dark. They swear it's safe. They might even drink it themselves to prove it. A few years later your bones start crumbling. What do you do? ⁓ quit? Yeah. well thing is they probably didn't know that it was that. Okay. Well, I I guess I can't really answer that because I don't know if they know the correlation. ⁓ just wait and find out. Are we gonna find out? I think we will. I think we will. Okay. ⁓ story is about young women who walked into a dream job and walked out poisoned. ⁓ what they did next changed labor laws in this country forever. It is dark. It is wild. ⁓ at one point it involves digging up a coffin. Now stay with me. We have to start with the magical dust. The element radium was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie. And basically the whole entire world lost its mind. was a material that glowed in the dark all by itself. No batteries, ⁓ fire. It just sat there and sparkled. Scientists thought it was a miracle. The public thought it was a miracle. Companies thought it was a miracle that they could use to sell for a lot of money. So radium ended up in everything toothpaste, face cream, a hell tonic called which and I am not exaggerating here, radioactive water in a little bottle. People drank it on purpose. There was radium butter, radium chocolate, and radium suppositories. That's terrible. Gavin, Dad, on a scale of one to ten, how thrilled are you of the existence of radium suppositories? ⁓ that's a negative one for me. Yeah. I'd say negative ten. Yeah, I agree. There we're even. And this is my personal favorite, radium fishing lures. Yes. my god. People put radioactive material on their fishing hooks because it would glow underwater and attract fish. Imagine explaining that to a fish. Sorry, buddy, ⁓ been disco balled to death. ⁓ that's the backdrop. ⁓ World War One breaks out in nineteen fourteen ⁓ America enters the fight. And suddenly the US military needs millions of watches that glow in the dark. ⁓ Because soldiers in trenches need to read the time without lighting a match and getting shot. Companies sprang up to meet the demand. one of the biggest was the United States Corporation in Orange, New Jersey. ⁓ They needed workers, ⁓ lots of them, who could paint tiny little on tiny little watch faces with a tiny little brush. So they hired hundreds of young women, mostly teenagers, some as young as fourteen. Fourteen's like younger than you. Like that's insane. Yeah. The job amazingly well. We're three times what a typical woman could earn elsewhere. And the work was easy. You sat at table, you dipped your brush in glowing paint, y and you painted the numbers in the watch dial. The trick was that the numbers were really small, so the brushes had to be really sharp. Management taught the woman a technique to keep the brushes perfectly pointed. They called it lip pointing. You dip the brush into the paint, the tip of the brush until it makes a fine point. Paint a number. Dip, lick, paint. Hundreds of times a day, six days a week. Dad, quick question. When your boss tells you to put a glow in the dark paint in your mouth hundreds of times a day, what is your obvious follow-up question? Mmm is this safe? Yeah, exactly. And that's what the woman asked. and the supervisor said every single time, totally safe. People drink this stuff. It's good for you. Here's where it gets infuriating. The scientists and the executives who ran the US Radium Corporation knew. They wore lead aprons. They handled radium with long tongs. There's documentation that the company chemist refused to even be in the same room as the powder without protection. But out on the factory floor, teenage dial painters got no protection. Not even a warning. Wow. The fact that they knew it's just like That's heartbreaking. Yeah. It's all that All in the name of money and profits. Meanwhile, the woman, the company called them Ghost Girls, would leave work absolutely covered in glowing dust. It got in their hair, on their clothes. They glowed in the dark walking home. And because everyone thought radium was magical and good for you, some of them painted their fingernails with it for fun. Painting designs on their teeth, painted their lips, used it as eyeshadow. ⁓ my god. They would go dancing on Saturday nights and literally glow on the dance floor. Gavin, on a scale of one to ten, how cool would you think you were if you literally glowed at a dance? I think I'd be pretty cool, but at what cost? Yeah. Well they didn't they were told it was safe. I'd say like eight, but like Yeah. Yeah, I mean you go to a rave and you're glowing literally glowing definitely. But they were told it was safe. That's the problem. Yeah. They had no idea what was actually going on inside their bodies. Now, here's what was actually happening. Radium, chemically, looks a lot like calcium to your body. So when you swallow it, your body cheerfully delivers it straight to your bones and teeth. And once it gets there, it stays there forever. Quietly emitting radiation, quietly destroying the bones from in the from the inside. Okay. That okay, I had a question that I wrote down here that I was gonna ask but I wanted to wait. Uhhuh. And it answered the question. Because you said earlier that they had it in butter and stuff like that. Like why would they put it in butter? But now I get it because it acts like calcium. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. ⁓ my god. I mean It took about four or five years to show up. The first to get sick was a young woman named Molly Maggia. In nineteen twenty one, she had a toothache. The dentist pulled the tooth, but the wound wouldn't heal, so he pulled the next one. That one wouldn't heal either. Either. Pretty soon, Molly's mouth was full of bleeding ulcers, and her jawbone had started to literally come apart. The dentist reached in to feel one of her teeth, and her entire lower jaw broke off in his hand. ⁓ my god. He pulled it out with He pulled it out with his fingers through her mouth. That's horrible. Gavin, on a scale of one to ten, how upsetting is that mental image? I think that's a good enough answer. Like ⁓ Lord. Molly died in September of 1922. ⁓ my gosh. She was 24. The company doctor wrote down her of death as syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease. That wasn't a mistake. ⁓ That was A ⁓ They were trying to make People think she was an immoral woman, so her family would be too embarrassed to ask questions. ⁓ And it happened to her sisters Quinta and Albina, who worked at the same factory. Then a woman named Grace Fryer, whose spine started collapsing. ⁓ Then Hussman and Kathryn Schwab. Then Albina Loris. ⁓ Their fell out. Their jaws crumbled. They got tumors. Some of them got so weak they couldn't stand up. The newspaper started calling them horribly the living dead women. Ugh This is horrible. I know. This so is something is like giving me the heebie jeebies. Yeah, like I knew the story a little bit, but not the details like this. God. And every time someone died, the company said the same things. Bad genetics, bad hygiene, probably syphilis. Definitely not our paint. Behind the scenes, US Radium had actually commissioned a Harvard psychologist named Cecil Drinker to investigate. Drinker came back and reported that yes, Radium had definitely been poisoning the workers. The company's response, they hid the report. They told Drinker to keep quiet. They sent out a different report. One that they had rewritten all by themselves. That conveniently said that everything was fine. That fake report is what they showed reporters for years. ⁓ my god, this is terrible. This reminds me of what the cigarette companies did later on. Thousand percent. Yeah. Like it's the exact same thing. They're just hiding what's actually happening. ⁓ god, this is terrible. When they knew the fact that they know just makes it so much worse. Yes, it does. ⁓ god. This makes me sick. Fryer to sue. It took her ⁓ my god. It took her Wait minute, you mean they didn't believe the reports that the company was giving? ⁓ they ⁓ my gosh. It took her two years to find a single lawyer willing to take the case. ⁓ that's horrible. Think about that. Grace is in constant pain. Her spine is collapsing. Her teeth are falling out. She had to write letter after letter, knock On door after door while she is dying just to find one attorney brave enough to go up against US Radium. Most lawyers were terrified. The company was huge. The case would take years. And there wasn't even clear legal precedent that a worker could sue an employer for a disease. workplace lawsuits were almost unheard of back then. Finally, in nineteen twenty-seven, a young attorney named Raymond Barry signed on. ⁓ women joined the lawsuit. Newspapers started calling them the Radium Girls. And here's where it gets cinematic. To prove that radium was killing these women, Barry needed a body. So in October of nineteen twenty seven, in the rain, under a tent, in a New Jersey cemetery, they dug up Molly Maggia. Nope. Five years after she'd been buried, they lifted the coffin out of the mud, opened it, and tested the bones with s a scientific instrument they called an electroscope. Dad, you wanna guess what happened? With what we know now about radium. She was Radioactive. Yeah, yeah. Her bones glowed. They were still radioactive five years after her bones. They were still glowing? Yes. ⁓ my god. That's a clear sign if I've ever seen one. Yeah. That this is the this is crazy. But the company kept stalling. They kept asking the court for delays. They figured if they could just drag it out, the dying woman would just die before they could testify. And it nearly worked. When the trial finally started in January of nineteen twenty eight, none of the five women could lift their own arms to take the oath. ⁓ my god. Unbelievable. All in the name of money. They couldn't The Greed, the corruption. It just ⁓ it makes me sick. You know, as as as bad as I feel it is today with greed and corruption, it's worse. There was a time in history where there were no laws against certain things. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so like and they would definitely and they knew that and they could get around that so easily. Yeah, and the laws today prevent things like this happening ever again, you know? Yeah. But they find new ways to be corrupt, but that's another story. But then something amazing happened. The press got a hold of the story. There was a columnist named Walter Lippman who wrote a furious piece about it. The public was outraged. Suddenly US radium was getting hate mail from across the country. In June of nineteen twenty eight, the company gave up and settled. Each woman got ten each woman got ten thousand dollars, a yearly pension, and all their medical bills paid. it was less than they deserved, but least they won. Yeah, can you go over those what they got again? Yeah. The ten thousand dollars is very little but everything else is like So that was like ten thousand dollars a year? I think just ten thousand dollars baseline and then a yearly pension and all their medical bills paid. But at that point they're so close to dying, like it didn't matter. ⁓ I mean that's more for their families at that point, not having to deal with medical bills and stuff. Yes. Yeah. Sadly. But it didn't end there. In Illinois, another group of dial painters at a different company, the Radium Dial Company, filed their own lawsuit in nineteen thirty-eight. Their leader was a woman named Katherine Wolfe Donahue. By the time she went to court, she weighed seventy one pounds. She testified from a chair because she couldn't ⁓ stand up. is that like Okay. That mass was lost. I wanna say it again. Yeah. Yeah, that radiation was eating away her bones. Yeah. And they used it like calcium, thinking it would strengthen your bones. Yeah. ⁓ Ugh. ⁓ She had to hold her teeth place with hand so she could speak. ⁓ the company's ⁓ my god. The company's lawyers tried every dirty trick they had. ⁓ There's actually footage of giving her testimony like this. can find it online. Really? Nope, I'm not gonna look at that. I I don't want to. I am I want to. I wanna see it. And she won her case in nineteen thirty nine. She died later that year. She was thirty-five years old. ⁓ my god. That's terrible. These women dying in pain, they kept fighting. Not for themselves. They knew that nothing was gonna save them. They fought so it wouldn't happen to anyone else. Thank God. I d ⁓ Historiography. ⁓ For decades after they the girls were a footnote. Historians wrote about the legal precedent. Workers can sue their employers for occupational which was huge. But the women themselves got lost. That changed slowly. In nineteen ninety seven, Claudia Clark wrote Radium Girls, and Health Reform. ⁓ It the first serious academic study to put them in the center. Then in 2017, Kate Moore published the a popular book called The Radium Girls, The Dark Story of America's Shining Woman, and that one exploded. ⁓ Moore read the women's actual letters and diaries. ⁓ Suddenly, the Radium Girls were people again, with crushes and weddings and inside jokes, not just plaintiffs. shift is part of a much bigger move in history writing called History from Below. ⁓ of just kings and presidents, historians started actually looking at the lives of ordinary workers, especially women, ⁓ the Radium Girls turned out to be a perfect example of why that matters. ⁓ most important characters in this story were not the executives or the lawyers, they were the teenagers. That's really interesting because I've heard that history from below or whatever. But like I am big into medieval history, everybody knows that. Yeah. They didn't have accounts from the low people. Yeah. Yeah. You know, all of it was written by, you know the winners. Yeah. Or the nobles and the old the higher people that could read and write, 'cause most people couldn't read and write back in those days. Correct. And the only thing that you have from the peasants, s you know, quote unquote, are land deeds and things like that. You know, so it's not really it it's tough to get a bottom up yeah perspective from medieval. So I d I don't like like I said, I've heard the term but I've never even thought about it because of that. So now it's I should really start Trying to think a little bit differently on that. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Like ⁓ like history n ⁓ like at least the history that you read never looks at the little people, you know? Like a history. There are some things here and there, but it's like it's not ⁓ it's it's hard to get ⁓ primary resources ⁓ from the little people. ⁓ In, you know, ten sixty six. What can we take away from this? ⁓ just appalled at the greed. ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ And ⁓ Just the greed. The greed, you know, all in the name of profit. Yeah. They lied to these teenagers, these girls in the name of profit. And it's just like it's it's always been around this greed. You add money to anything and it just Yeah. Something changes. Something changes in people and w how could they do that? Yeah. What the line that really hit me was they tried to stall it out. So they would just die before they could testify. That's that's what that's the part that really got me because I'm just like that is like almost inhumane. That's it, that's a really point. That's where it's just like I I'm done. It's like, okay, well, you're still just thinking about the money. Yeah. You do not care about the people or the lives that you have affected. Mm-hmm. It's practically indirectly like murder. Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah. Cause they knew this whole time that it was Poisonous. ⁓ it would kill them. I have to say, like don't let money get to your head. Yeah. Like ⁓ Yep, it's tough though. That's real tough. Yeah. I mean like it's it's easier said than done 'cause like 'cause like in a vacuum, yes, you can say that and yes it works. But in real life and i in actuality, you don't know how you're gonna react when you get sums of money. Yeah. Like like you don't know like 'cause you know, you get what I'm trying to say. I do, I do. I guess ⁓ don't always trust what being told your ⁓ you know, your bosses, I guess. Yeah. That's that's one of the points I had here. Think about where they're coming from. I this kind of goes right back to question everything. Like we that's a beam of our pocket. And it's not just history though. It's when you're at work. You know, what is the angle that your boss is coming from? Mm. Because I 'cause I feel like as humans we're always trying to get something. Like whenever we speak, we're always trying to get something out of it. Even if it's just we want to share our feelings, we want to get more of whatever. Like there's always a motive behind it. And good or bad, it's still like something to benefit us as a human. Yeah. You know? I have a couple here. ⁓ ⁓ this one's kind of going off of what we were just talking about was when someone in power says, Don't worry about it. It's safe. That is exactly the moment to worry about it. That's literally like what I have here. Yeah. ⁓ the executives at US Radium knew they had lead aprons, they had the tongs, they just decided the woman didn't need to know. Yeah, it's just they're ⁓ had the equipment. It Yeah. Second, the protections that we take for granted today, OSHA, workers comp The basic idea that your boss has to keep you alive at work, those gifts weren't from anybody. They were won by the people, mostly women, dying in courtrooms. And third, courage isn't about being unafraid. The radium girls were terrified. They were dying. They knew they were dying. But they kept going to court anyway because they wanted the future to be different. That's the actual definition of brave. Not the absence of fear, doing it scared. Yeah. Yeah. Going against ⁓ the grain. Going against the grain. Yeah. When everybody is against you and you still move forward, that's brave. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. ⁓ I have You're going down, boy. I've not been taking notes. Gavin? I know you haven't. I have. ⁓ Three questions. ⁓ We have a new rule though, or look it up. And don't look it up. That's what it says. That's what Okay, never mind. Okay. We do have a new rule though. Yes. If somebody Wait, wait, I want to preface this. Okay. Go ahead. Thanks to one of our weekly listeners. We'll call him Mosif. We've mentioned him on this podcast before. Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail. Not his real name, obviously. Mosif. ⁓ he suggested that You can lock in at any time during the question. You just can't get it right. You get it wrong, the question continues and you can't lock in until the other person has a chance to guess. Okay. So if you think you know it before she's done reading, lock in. Okay. So thank you, Mosef, for the tip. But if you jump the gun and you get it wrong, then that That's a free chance for me. Then that opens it up. All right. Okay. Question number one. What was the technique the radium girls were taught to keep their brushes nice and pointed? Look luck I I'm gonna say that was done. Okay, so I didn't quite understand what you said. It's either lip pointing or lick pointing. Lip pointing. So it's lip. Lip. Okay. I couldn't understand but it was I knew it was Either way. Yeah. It works. Because they would lick. Yeah. Because I thought I heard you say lip, but then you said lick. 'Cause they would lick the brushes. That's why I'm like, wait a minute, what? Lip pointing. They licked the brush after every single stroke. Okay. Question two. What element does your body confuse radium for? Which is why calcium. Good job. I'm gonna continue the question just so we get it out. What element does the body confuse radium for, which is why it goes straight to your bones? And the answer, Gavin was correct, is calcium. Your body thinks it's helping when it puts radium in your skeleton. It is not helping. That's nuts. It's just crazy. Like Okay, we're to hide. Question three, the tiebreaker. What dramatic piece of evidence did the lawyers use in nineteen twenty seven? Gabinet. ⁓ the fact that the first victim, the body was s like the carcass was still glowing. I don't know. The it was still glowing after five years. Yeah. ⁓ what I have here is they dug up Molly Maggie's body and her bones are still glowing five years after she was buried. So I'll give it to Gavin. Skull. Yeah. Shocked I won that. Alright, so you won that dude. Good job. Nice. I like this new rule. ⁓ So I wanna talk a little bit about what you did in your drama class. ⁓ Yeah. That's what spurred you wanting to do this episode. Can you tell us like what was that even? Was it a was that a ⁓ a play or something like that? Yeah. They made a Radium Girls play. Like they took all of the I think they probably used the books that we talked about earlier that were written as like source material and they made it a play. it's called Radium Girls. We did it for a festival. It's by D.W. Gregory. And it's a stage play. Yes. It was first produced in New Jersey in two thousand. In the year two thousand. And we did it for like it's kind of It's it's a specific regional like competition that we that my school competes in and we brought a we combined the whole play into just eight minutes and we told the story of the Radium Girls. And it went through and it used the real girls' names. So like so I my personally played Grace Fryer, but it also talked about Molly Maggia and c Catherine Schwab, like those were actual characters that we played and and there was like Raymond Barry, there was reporters Like that was my favorite of your D task things that you've done. I have to agree. Yeah. It was really fun and it felt like such an important story to tell. Absolutely. It it it felt like it meant something rather than just, you know silly playing around. You're silly playing around from class. Like it meant something more than what you guys were doing. And it at least for me it was fun. Not fun, but like it was interesting to like play through because my character she at least with the cut that we use survives throughout the whole thing. Like she dies off play, but like Yeah. ⁓ but it was fun to kind of play around with like having life at the beginning and then at the very end, like at like the reporters stands, like just being like crippled and like just having like a lot less energy. Because like I had to show that like these girls were dying. Yes. Like 'cause they were. And like during this thing you just were talking about, they Died within a year of the trial, a couple of them, you know, like they stalled it out for so long. Yeah. Ugh. Today is ninth, so I'm gonna doing three things that happened on day. ⁓ In seventeen sixty two, Catherine the Great takes power in Russia. Catherine overthrew her husband, Peter the Third, and began her reign as Empress of Russia on this day. Women in STEM. Women in STEM. Taking over the man. Uh-huh. ⁓ she's a very big figure in Russian history. Yes. And there are things that people say she did ⁓ ⁓ and she didn't. It's it it actually might be ⁓ it's a little bit more mature of a topic that we could probably do on our podcast, but I I kinda wanna keep it geared towards, you know, teenagers, kids and teenagers. I mean after this episode, I don't know. I know that's true. But no, this is this is a little bit more ⁓ Yeah. There's a little it turns a little happy at the end. If you guys wanna look into it later, y I be my guest. You guys just know that what you read is not true and did not happen. And people who know that what I'm talking about, if you know, you know. In eighteen sixty eight, probably one of the most important constitutional amendments was ratified. The fourteenth amendment, defining citizenship and guaranteeing due process and equal protection. That is going a g it's disintegrating as we speak right now. It it is. And then on this date, nineteen forty three, Allied forces land in Sicily. Do you guys remember our Operation Mince Meat episode? Yes. Yeah. Interesting. And that's it for this day in history. Back to you, Zoe. Awesome. So the radium girls glowed with with disease, and finally with courage. safe workplace in America exists because they refuse to quit. That's it for this episode. ⁓ Thanks for traveling through with us on the Ebbs History. If you like today's story, ⁓ share it with a teacher, a friend, or your family Instagram at Ebbs of History. If you have any show ideas, corrections, or questions, you can contact us at questions at Ebbs of History. Signing off, this has been Nikos, Gavin, ⁓ Jason, and me, Zoe, reminding you that history is not about dates and battles, it's about people. Curiosity and the weird, wonderful choices that shaped your world. next time. Keep wondering. Keep laughing. And keep learning through the ends of ⁓ Cool. Awesome. If you guys okay with it.