by Deborah Blum
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.”
IN NOVEMBER 1928, Herbert Hoover won forty of the forty-eight states, including New York. Smith took Massachusetts and Rhode Island, both with large Catholic populations, and a small cluster along the Gulf Coast. The southern states had been swayed to Smith by deliberately spread, and untrue, rumors that Hoover favored integration of schools. But rumors manufactured by his opponent had taken a greater toll on Smith. Throughout the election he was forced to counter claims that he took his orders first from the Vatican, then from Tammany Hall, and then from gangsters who wanted to preserve their bootlegging profits.
Although the governor failed to carry his home state, he did win in New York City, where crooked politics were nothing new, and where an anti-Prohibition stand was considered next to godliness.
IN OCTOBER 1929, Marie Curie made another radium tour of the United States. Again she was welcomed as the most famous woman scientist of her time.
In the eight years since her first visit, radium had lost some of its popular luster. The Public Health Service was investigating the health hazards of radium dial painting, looking beyond New Jersey to watchmaking factories in Ohio and Connecticut. Curie herself was less ebullient about her favorite element, cautioning that radium could after all be dangerous and recommending that only experts handle it.
She suffered from an unusual state of dragging exhaustion on this trip, expressing gratitude to the press for its “generosity in excusing me from interviews and photographs because of my physical condition.” Still, even if the intervening decade had raised doubts about the element radium, its discoverer was considered a woman to celebrate. She was a pioneer, the rare woman of the early twentieth century to triumph in science, a researcher whose discovery had transformed both physics and chemistry.
During her second radium tour, Curie went to a dinner for Thomas Edison, hosted by Henry Ford; she planted a “radium maple” in a park in Westchester County; the New York City Women’s Federation awarded her their medal of honor; and she dedicated the Hall of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University, where she received an honorary degree. Naturally, she took the train down to Washington, D.C., to be feted at the White House, where President Hoover praised her “beneficent service to mankind.”
At the end of her month-long visit, she sailed back home on the Ile de France, bearing another gram of radium, worth $50,000, given to her by her American admirers and once again packed deep inside a box of lead. But the exhaustion that had plagued her did not relent. And eventually, Marie Curie fell victim to her beautiful radium. She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a disease caused when bone marrow is so dam
aged that it can no longer renew the body’s supply of blood cells. It was the same anemia that had killed so many of the Radium Girls.
CURIE’S SECOND radium fling in the United States ended just before the country slid into an economic crisis. Barely a week after she sailed for France, the New York Stock Market crashed. Stock prices fell for days, bottoming out on October 29, which would be forever after remembered as “Black Tuesday.” Financial losses totaled some $30 billion in less than a week, more than the country had spent in all of the Great War.
The business scandals, the threat of bank failures, and the flurry of suicides followed almost immediately. At the medical examiner’s office they could literally count the collateral damage—the head of a produce firm who jumped out a seventh-floor window on Wall Street, the broker who swallowed poison in his home, the banker who threw himself under a truck, the bookkeeper who drowned himself. In the midst of that eddying cycle of panic and death, Norris made what he always considered one of his worst mistakes as medical examiner.
Late on the night of Friday, November 9, J. J. Riordan, head of the County Trust Company, shot himself in the head. Norris was notified early Saturday morning, not long after Riordan’s widow had found the body and started making phone calls. These were highly placed phone calls. It was a friend of former governor Al Smith who contacted the medical examiner. Smith had left public office after losing the national election and was now president of a corporation which was preparing to build a monumental skyscraper, to be called the Empire State Building. But the former governor still had strong allies in city government. His associate arrived at Norris’s Upper West Side home driving a fire truck to convey the medical examiner to the banker’s home. Smith himself met Norris at the door and took him to the banker’s study.
Riordan’s body was still sitting in a red-plush chair. The crimson fabric helped disguise the blood that had saturated the chair, but the right side of the man’s once-white shirt was now a browning scarlet. The dead banker’s forehead was smudged black around a hole just over the right eyebrow. Norris leaned over and felt for an exit wound; there was none. Pressing harder around the skull, he could feel the bullet lodged against cracked bone on the left side of the head; it had plowed through the brain before stopping just inside the skull.
Where was the gun? he asked. Riordan’s wife admitted to prying it away from her husband’s hand and hiding it. Norris demanded its return. The gun was a five-chambered Colt .38 revolver, with all chambers loaded but one. He bagged the weapon, finished his notes, and prepared to return to the office to write his report. As he recalled later, it was at that moment that Norris belatedly realized why Al Smith was there, and why he himself had been conveyed in such secrecy.
The “ex-Governor was the principal spokesman” in a plea to hold back the announcement of the death. Specifically, the officials gathered around Norris wanted a delay until the close of banking hours on Saturday at noon. They needed the time, he was told, to make sure the accounts were in order. Everyone feared a bank run; news of bank closures seemed to arrive daily from elsewhere in the country, from Chicago, from Miami, from Los Angeles. The following year the banking crisis would arrive in New York City, shutting down hundreds of savings institutions; already the shrill of panic was sounding in the air.
So Norris agreed to hold off on his findings. After Riordan’s bank closed for the day, he went to personally inform the police commissioner and to turn over the telltale revolver. But despite all precautions, the little conspiracy leaked to the newspapers, embarrassing them all. No one apparently more than Norris—he was, at least, the only member of the cover-up to apologize publicly.
It had been a mistake, he later said. He’d been persuaded that he needed to help avoid a banking panic but he should have shown more respect for the good citizens who patronized the Country Trust Company. The result of the Riordan fiasco, he feared, was more mistrust, a sense that the medical examiner’s office was willing to conspire with the city’s elite. “I accept responsibility for the delay,” Norris said in a spare public statement that helped put an end to the controversy.
But the chief medical examiner remained furious with all concerned, especially himself for going along with the scheme: “The chief kept his peace publicly, but he had quite a lot to say privately, and his language was picturesque and to the point,” city pathologist Edward Marten later recalled. Norris blamed himself for forgetting one of his cardinal rules, that medical examiners should never be swayed by politicians. He wouldn’t forget again.
NINE
ETHYL ALCOHOL (C2H5OH) 1930-1932
FROM the records of Alexander O. Gettler:
CASE 1: A moderate drinker, aged 25, in apparent good health, wagered that he could drink 1 pint of whiskey within ten minutes. He drank one-and-a-half pints of cheap whiskey and started for home. He soon became unconscious, vomited, and became comatose. His face was livid, he breathed heavily, and after four or five convulsions, he died six hours from time of drinking the spirits. At autopsy, undigested liquor still in stomach, pupils widely dilated and unequal, brain saturated with blood, lungs spotted with hemorrhages.
CASE 2: Woman, aged 41, a periodic inebriate, drank one and a half pints of exceptionally strong whiskey. Found lying on back insensible in a few minutes, died five and a quarter hours later without recovering consciousness. On autopsy: pupils were dilated, patches of mucous membrane of the stomach were found semi-detached; parts of stomach walls were fiery red.
CASE 3: Laborer aged 33, drank between 10 and 15 ounces of whiskey. He became intoxicated in 20 minutes, and fell to the ground in a deep sleep soon afterward. It was impossible to rouse him. The pupils were contracted to almost pinpoint size; death took place nineteen hours later. Autopsy, thirty hours after death: body completely stiff with rigor mortis, brain congested with blood.
All three deaths wove together in a pattern recognizable to any forensic chemist. The party boy, the old alcoholic, and the drunken laborer—none of them, as Gettler’s analyses would prove, died from imbibing the notoriously dangerous methyl alcohol. They’d been killed instead by so-called good liquor: whiskey made intoxicating and toxic by ethyl alcohol.
Thanks to the government’s deliberate poisoning of alcoholic spirits people had seemingly forgotten that liquor had always been dangerous. There was a reason that beverages containing ethyl alcohol were known as “hard liquor,” that its consumption, or overconsumption, had driven the outrage that led to Prohibition, that its history was threaded with destructive behavior from addiction to street brawls, and that it had killed many more people than methyl alcohol ever would.
“From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal,” Gettler wrote in a paper, listing a seemingly endless record of fatalities. “No other poison causes so many deaths or leads to or intensifies so many diseases, both physical and mental, as does [this] alcohol in the many forms in which it is taken.”
Ever the research chemist, Gettler believed it was time, past time, to start understanding exactly how ethyl alcohol compromises a human body. He especially wanted to study its effects on the brain. “In a nation trying to enforce alcoholic prohibition, it would seem unwarranted to do any research work on the alcoholic content of human organs,” he added. But he would do it anyway. The dry crusaders in the federal government might believe this work was unnecessary, but the new generation of forensic toxicologists knew better.
SO DID the country’s insurance agencies. Their findings came from statistics rather than test tubes, but the conclusions were remarkably similar.
In early 1930 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company reported that deaths due to alcoholism were now 600 percent higher (among its 19 million policyholders) than those tallied in 1920, the first year that consumption of alcohol was prohibited. These statistics suggested that Prohibition had fostered a nation of heavy drinkers and that the habit was killing thousands of people.
Prudential Life Insurance reported the same disheartening trend: at the start of Prohibition, the company’s records showed a national rate of about 1,000 deaths a year due to acute alcoholism. That number now approached 5,000. These numbers reflected only the company’s policyholders, but Prudential’s chief statistician had extrapolated to estimate that about 3 in every 100,000 Americans now died from acute alcoholism. In the wettest state in the country, New York, the death rate was 7.5 per 100,000. In only one other place were people drinking themselves to death at a comparable rate: Washington, D.C., where the laws creating this particular chapter in the history of Gettler’s “most important poison” had been written.
ALEXANDER GETTLER had another reason, though, for exploring the chemistry of ethyl alcohol. It was an important poison, absolutely, but it was also a fascinating one. It offered an illuminating case study in the peculiar, paradoxical nature of the planet’s chemistry: what sustained life could also kill it.