0:00

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History

0:02

Class from housetof works dot com.

0:12

Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Deblin, a

0:14

chalk reparding and I'm fair Dowdy, and

0:16

we're just steering up for our long Labor Day

0:19

weekend. But by the time this episode airs,

0:21

that will already have passed and a

0:23

labor related memorial should have been unveiled

0:25

in a town called Ottawa, Illinois. And

0:28

the memorial, which was unveiled Friday,

0:30

September two, is a statue of

0:32

a woman holding flowers in one hand and

0:34

paint brushes in the other, and it's

0:37

meant to symbolize the women who worked for the Ottawa

0:39

based Luminous Processes factory and

0:42

there they painted watch and clock dials

0:44

in the early tent twentieth century. And

0:46

they were women who ended up getting serious radiation

0:49

poisoning as a result of their jobs.

0:51

And I'm not sure how much national media attention

0:54

this memorial and it's unveiling are going to receive.

0:57

It was conceived of by a young lady

0:59

named Madeline Pillar, who actually

1:02

came up with this idea for the memorial after

1:04

doing a junior high history project.

1:07

How about that, Yeah, her dad is a sculptor,

1:09

and she did this project and kind of couldn't

1:11

get this woman out of her head and proposed the idea

1:13

of doing a memorial to them, and they raised all this

1:16

money. But we're not sure. I

1:18

haven't seen that many news stories about it. I just randomly

1:20

kind of stumbled upon it. But the story of

1:22

the women who came to be known as the Radium

1:24

Girls actually became a media sensation

1:27

in the nineties and the nineteen thirties. Yeah,

1:29

they certainly deserve a monument.

1:31

And it wasn't just an Illinois

1:33

based story either, because workers at factories

1:36

in Connecticut and New Jersey were

1:38

really in the same boat. In fact, it was

1:40

a story coming out of New Jersey

1:43

that first brought this issue, this

1:45

radium poisoning issue, to the public's

1:48

attention in the first place. And that's

1:50

the story that we're going to focus on today

1:53

in the podcast. And we're gonna just

1:55

sort of take a look at the historical

1:57

circumstances and working conditions

1:59

that d to these women getting radiation

2:02

poisoning in the first place, because you're

2:04

probably gonna wonder pretty quickly how

2:06

something like this could happen. Yeah, and we're

2:08

also going to take a look at how they came to

2:10

be known as the Radium Girls and their struggle

2:12

for justice that led to some workplace

2:15

reforms in the end, so kind of try to put a positive

2:17

spin on what is ultimately a very

2:19

sad story. But before we can talk

2:21

about the Radium Girls, we need to take a closer

2:23

look at the element that's at the heart of their story,

2:26

and that is, of course radium, literally

2:28

the element very good, punned bliness. So

2:31

we're going to be talking about radium, of course, but

2:33

that also gives us the chance to talk

2:35

about one of our most frequently requested

2:38

podcast subjects, Polish born scientists

2:41

and Nobel Prize winner Marie

2:43

Curie. And this isn't

2:45

a podcast on her, it's not a profile

2:47

on her, but she is an important character

2:49

in it, mostly because she discovered

2:52

radium in eight and

2:54

radioactivity was still pretty

2:57

new at that time. It was not well understood.

2:59

The German and physicists Wilhelm

3:01

Konrad ren Gen had just discovered

3:04

X rays back in and just

3:06

a few weeks after that discovery

3:08

and rebekr l had identified radioactivity

3:11

during experiments with uranium

3:14

salts. So when Marie Carey made

3:16

her discovery. All of this stuff was kind of floating

3:18

around and kind of new science, and

3:20

people were really fascinated by it, and Jerry

3:23

was one of them. She was really fascinated, especially by

3:25

Beckerel's findings, because not that much attention

3:27

were given to them at the time. So she started

3:30

experimenting with pitch blend, which

3:32

was which is a shiny tar like byproduct

3:35

of mining. That eventually led

3:37

she and her husband Pierre to isolate

3:40

two new chemical elements, polonium

3:42

and the one we're focusing on today, which

3:44

is radium. It was radioactive,

3:47

it seemed to pulse with spontaneous

3:49

energy, and the other cool thing about radium

3:51

was that it glowed in the dark. Yeah, that certainly

3:53

seemed to be a selling point for it, as

3:56

we'll see. But by this time people had

3:58

started to realize that even though radiation

4:00

was invisible, it did have

4:03

strong powers. They could cause injury. Scientists

4:06

were exposed to enlarge doses

4:08

and they suffered from skin burns

4:10

and hair loss, so clearly this element

4:12

could do something. But this also

4:14

cluded physicians into the possibilities

4:17

that radiation held for treating cancer.

4:20

Something that's powerful could potentially

4:22

fight something that was hurting people as well

4:25

as burn them or injure them. Yeah,

4:27

So it was that potential and

4:29

along with those kind of magical glowy

4:31

properties that it had that gave it

4:33

this reputation as a wonder

4:36

substance. Pretty much from the get go,

4:38

people thought it could cure everything from arthritis

4:41

to diabetes, not just cancer, and

4:43

an entire radium industry grew

4:46

out of that belief. Some form

4:48

of the word radium was actually incorporated

4:50

into a lot of brand names, whether the products

4:52

actually contained radium or not. That

4:54

was funny, Yeah, but a lot of products

4:57

had radium added in them, including

4:59

toothpaste, hair tonic bath salts,

5:01

lotions, heating pads, and

5:03

male pouches. Explain, do

5:06

you know what a male pouches? Now? Because

5:08

you told me, but it's it's your job to tell

5:10

listeners. They were condoms.

5:13

So those also contained radium or

5:15

some radium, but radium

5:18

or raid on laced water was probably one of

5:20

the most widely touted products, and it was called

5:22

liquid Sunshine because people thought that

5:24

this was some sort of magical elixir that

5:26

could like extend your youth

5:28

and make you healthy. And one

5:31

brand in particular was called Rata thor.

5:33

You read about this a lot. It was a popular brand

5:35

of radioactive water and doctors would give it

5:37

to patients as a tonic. Really doesn't sound

5:39

good. It doesn't sound good to us now,

5:41

but maybe it would have back then. I don't know. And

5:43

you and I were talking about it. It makes

5:46

you kind of concerned, what are we drinking

5:48

or consuming now that will sound

5:50

as horrible and ridiculous as radium

5:54

laced tonic in the future. I

5:56

mean, gosh, yeah, I kind of don't want to know. Maybe

5:58

I should, but but medium's use

6:00

went beyond just personal and health products.

6:03

To write. In nineteen o two, radium

6:05

was isolated into pure metal and Marie

6:07

Curry was involved with that as well, And soon

6:10

after American electrical engineer

6:12

William J. Hammer created a

6:14

radium treated paint which had the

6:16

trade name Undark, that when applied

6:18

to things, would make them glow in the dark. So

6:21

this was used on scientific instruments and things

6:23

like that. It was expensive to do, but it

6:25

became really significant during World

6:27

War One, especially when people realize the advantage

6:30

of applying this to military instruments.

6:32

You're in a dark trench and you can

6:34

actually read your watch or read your instruments

6:37

exactly. So that's where our story

6:39

about the radium girls really begins. So,

6:41

between nineteen seventeen and nineteen

6:44

hundreds of young women got jobs

6:47

applying radium treated paint

6:49

too watches, to aircraft

6:51

controls, clocks, and compass spaces

6:54

in factories in states like Illinois

6:56

and New Jersey, Connecticut. Even

6:59

Long Island factories were owned

7:01

by a big corporation, even

7:03

though they were in different parts of the country. It

7:06

was the US Radium Corporation. And

7:08

for the young women getting these jobs,

7:10

it seems like a pretty great opportunity, mostly

7:12

because it paid a lot better than

7:15

other factory jobs at the time, more than

7:17

three times as much. It was about eighteen

7:19

dollars per week instead of five dollars

7:21

per week. They got paid about

7:24

a penny and a half per dial they painted,

7:26

and they would paint about two d fifty dials

7:28

a day, so a pretty

7:30

good job and the work didn't seem too

7:33

treacherous either, at least for the time.

7:36

The women sat together at these

7:38

long tables with racks of dials

7:40

and they would paint the faces

7:43

sitting next to them and um

7:45

mix up this concoction of glue and

7:47

water and radium powder into

7:49

a glowing greenish white paint

7:52

and then use their little camel hair brushes

7:54

to apply the paint to the dial

7:56

numbers. So it sounds kind of social, kind

7:58

of artistic in a way. A pretty

8:01

nice job. Yeah, as they were painting

8:03

these dial numbers, though after a

8:05

few strokes the brushes, those camel

8:07

hair brushes they were using would lose their

8:09

shape and the women couldn't paint as

8:11

accurately. So their supervisors

8:14

had kind of a solution for this. They told them to

8:16

point the brushes with their lips, and

8:18

according to an article in the Journal American History,

8:21

some women later quoted their bosses as saying,

8:23

quote, not to worry if you swallow

8:25

any radium, it'll make your cheeks rosy.

8:28

So Grace Friar was one of seventy young

8:30

women who started working at a factory like this

8:32

an orange New Jersey in the spring of

8:35

ninete. Later,

8:37

about the brushes, she said, quote, I

8:39

think I pointed mine with my lips about

8:41

six times to every watch dial. It

8:43

didn't taste funny, it didn't have any

8:45

taste, and I didn't know it was harmful.

8:48

To add to matters, the workers really

8:50

had fun with this, licking

8:53

the brushes with the radium on it. They'd

8:55

paint their nails and their teeth to through

8:57

amuse each other and surprise their boy friends

9:00

when the lights would go out. Friar

9:02

even remembers that after she'd blow her

9:04

nose, her handkerchief would

9:06

glow in the dark with this radium

9:08

residue. But they just all

9:10

have a good laugh about it, go back to work,

9:13

keep licking those brushes and

9:15

and keep painting. Yeah, they didn't have any indication

9:18

that it was hurting them. In

9:20

nineteen twenty, Friar quit the factory

9:22

to take a better job as a bank teller, but

9:24

only two years later she started having

9:26

some major problems. Her teeth

9:28

started falling out and she developed painful

9:31

abscesses in her jaw. She got

9:33

X rayed and it showed that she had

9:35

such severe bone decay. The many

9:38

doctors and dennis that she went to to try to figure

9:40

out what was going on, they

9:42

said that they'd never seen anything like it. They they've

9:44

never seen bone decay to that degree.

9:47

In July n one doctor

9:50

finally suggested that her problems might

9:52

have been caused by her former job as a dial painter.

9:54

And I think the delay there is is pretty

9:56

remarkable. So when it was nineteen two

9:58

when she started having these stempt not till

10:00

nineteen five when somebody says,

10:02

this looks like it's radium

10:05

poisoning, and it turned out that Friar

10:07

wasn't the only former dial maker

10:09

having issues. I guess we can just assume that it

10:11

took that long for word to spread

10:14

among the medical community what was going on. But

10:16

at the request of the Orange City Health

10:18

Department, the National Consumers League,

10:20

which was an organization that fought

10:22

for safe workplaces and reasonable

10:25

wages and decent working hours, started

10:27

an investigation on these suspicious

10:30

deaths of four radium factory workers

10:32

between nineteen two and nineteen

10:34

twenty four. So right around that time

10:37

that Friar is realizing what's wrong with

10:39

her, other people are realizing

10:41

something's going on here. Yeah. The cause

10:43

of death for these other four radium

10:45

factory workers was listed as things like

10:47

phosphorus poisoning, mouth ulcers,

10:50

and syphilis. But the

10:52

factory workers thought that the paint ingredients

10:54

did have something to do with it. So New

10:56

Jersey Consumer League chairman Katherine

10:58

Wiley alded some experts.

11:00

She brought in a statistician, and she went to Harvard

11:03

and consulted some people, and she found out when she

11:05

was talking to people at Harvard that a few years

11:07

earlier, physiology professor

11:10

Cecil Drinker had been asked to study

11:12

the working conditions at us Radium and report

11:14

back to the company. So somebody had already been

11:17

looking into this before it

11:19

even came to their attention, and Drinker

11:21

found out that pretty much the entire workforce

11:23

that US Radium was contaminated. They

11:25

had strange blood conditions, and several

11:27

workers had advanced radium necrosis.

11:30

So Drinker made suggestions at that point,

11:32

and as of June, I

11:35

think that's when his report came out, and he

11:37

suggested that they make changes that would protect

11:39

the workers. But Arthur Rhoder, who

11:41

was president of us Radium at the time, he resisted

11:44

this, and furthermore, he refused to give

11:46

drink Or permission to publish his findings,

11:49

saying that Drinker had agreed to confidentiality

11:52

and that he wasn't allowed to. So it actually

11:54

turned out later they found out

11:56

that Rhodor had been circulating a

11:58

false report under Drinkers and him. It was basically

12:00

his report, but it said, oh, there's no

12:02

harm here, there's no problem with the radium

12:05

that's used in the paint, and why

12:07

he didn't want a drinker to publish the real report

12:10

exactly. But to be honest, Drinker's report

12:12

wasn't the only thing out there that indicated

12:14

that radium was a hazard. There were There was also

12:17

scientific and medical literature, some

12:19

of the dating back as far as nineteen o six

12:21

that contained plenty of information about

12:23

the hazards of radium, even one of

12:25

US Radium's own publications,

12:27

And that's the part I think is really surprising.

12:30

It was distributed to hospitals and doctor's offices,

12:33

and it contained a section with dozens

12:35

of references. This report was

12:37

called Radium Dangers dash

12:39

Injurious Effects, and so it was out there.

12:41

They knew what was going on the entire time, from

12:44

the same company encouraging their workers to

12:46

moisten their brushes. Yeah, and too, I guess

12:48

to be fair, we don't know that the supervisors

12:50

on the floor actually knew that there were dangers,

12:53

but it became pretty clear that company at the

12:55

whole did, though, so the consumer

12:58

leagues wildly try. I had

13:00

to get US Radium to pay

13:02

for the medical expenses for Friar and for

13:04

the other workers who were ill. But the company

13:07

insisted that radium was

13:09

not to blame, and it went beyond

13:11

that though, and launched this campaign

13:14

of misinformation. They tried to tarnish

13:16

the women workers reputations

13:18

by saying that the problem wasn't radium,

13:21

it was actually that they had syphilis.

13:23

And in nine when

13:25

Friar started exploring radium

13:27

as a cause for her illness,

13:30

a Columbia University doctor named Frederick

13:32

Flynn, who said that he was

13:34

referred to her by friends, asked

13:36

to examine her and he found

13:38

her health to be quote as good as my own.

13:41

Later, though, Fryar found out that Flynn wasn't

13:44

even a medical doctor. He was an industrial

13:46

toxicologist on contract

13:48

with US Radium. So it became pretty clear that

13:51

almost from the get go US Radium

13:53

had been acting um

13:56

shady about covering up the effects

13:58

of the element. Yeah, and we

14:00

should say that although Flynn wasn't a doctor,

14:02

I mean, as you pointed out earlier, it took a long time

14:04

for doctors to kind of you

14:07

mean, you mentioned catching on to the fact that

14:09

these women had had radium with

14:13

it, right, But I think part of it was also

14:15

that they didn't want to Radium

14:18

had so much promise, they didn't want to admit

14:20

that maybe this wonder element

14:22

that they had found also had some negative effects

14:25

because they were afraid it would keep people from accepting

14:27

the positive effects that radium

14:29

could have and just give it a bad name eventually.

14:32

Right, So, Friar did decide

14:34

to sue US Radium in nineteen, but

14:37

it took her two years to find an attorney who was

14:39

willing to take her case. On May

14:41

eighteenth, ninety seven, though, Raymond

14:43

Barry, who was a young Newark attorney,

14:45

took the case on contingency and filed a

14:48

lawsuit in a New Jersey court on her behalf

14:50

and pretty much right away, four other women

14:53

with severe medical problems joined the lawsuit.

14:55

Their names were Edma Hussman, Catherine

14:58

Shobe, and two sisters also

15:00

Quentu McDonald and Albina Larisse.

15:03

And as the case started to grow into

15:05

a huge media sensation, the press

15:07

in the US and Europe student dubbed the five

15:09

women the Radium Girls. So that's where the

15:11

name comes from. So the Radium Girls

15:13

were looking for two hundred fifty thousand

15:16

dollars in compensation for medical

15:18

expenses in pain for

15:20

each of them. But first there was this

15:23

legal obstacle in New Jersey's

15:25

law that they had to get by. It was two year

15:28

statute of limitations. But the

15:30

lawyer, Raymond Barry, argued that the statute

15:33

applied from the moment the women learned

15:35

about the source of their problems, not from the date

15:37

they quit working for the factory, since, as

15:40

we've discussed, that took quite some

15:42

time. He also said that US

15:44

Radium's campaign of misinformation was

15:47

the reason the women weren't informed

15:49

in the first place, and the reason why they didn't take legal

15:51

action within the statute of limitations.

15:54

So maybe Radium's fake

15:57

doctor sort of complicated

15:59

matters here definitely. While

16:01

this was going on, though, medical examiners kept

16:04

looking into the situation. Medical examiners from

16:06

New Jersey and New York. They investigated

16:08

the suspicious deaths of the plant workers, and in

16:10

the process, a deceased sister of

16:12

two of the Radium girls, McDonald

16:15

and Laurie, was exhumed on October

16:17

sixteenth, n Her

16:20

name was Amelia Maggia, and she

16:22

had also worked at the plant, and her bones were

16:24

found to be highly radioactive. Her

16:26

former dentists to tip them off on it. He

16:29

actually had removed part of her jaw soon

16:31

before she died because it had deteriorated

16:33

to that point, and he kind of suspected

16:35

that radium poisoning might be

16:38

part of the issue, radiation poisoning, and so

16:40

they exhumed the body and found that he was

16:42

correct. Yeah, So these

16:44

investigations, the exclamation

16:47

and all of that and the legal maneuverings

16:49

took up quite a bit of time,

16:51

obviously, And in fact, it took up so

16:53

much time that the first hearing didn't

16:56

take place until January,

16:59

and by that point the women's health had

17:02

really deteriorated. Some of them

17:04

couldn't even raise their arms to take

17:06

the oath. The two sisters we mentioned

17:09

where bedridden. Grace Friar had

17:12

lost all of her teeth and couldn't sit up

17:14

without using a back Braith definitely

17:16

couldn't walk um. But the

17:19

severity of their conditions really

17:22

affected people in the courtroom when they

17:24

did testify. When those who were able to testify,

17:27

people in the courtroom were said to have wept

17:29

when they when they watched them. Yeah.

17:31

Just an example of one of their testimonies,

17:33

Edna Husband's testimony included details

17:36

about her financial troubles, which

17:38

were caused by the medical bills that she had,

17:40

and she said quote, I cannot even

17:42

keep my little house or bungalow. I

17:45

know I will not live much longer. For now, I

17:47

cannot sleep at night for the pains. So,

17:49

of course everyone was fascinated with the story,

17:52

and it was everywhere. Even

17:54

Marie Curie heard about it, and she was really

17:56

surprised to learn how the factory workers

17:58

had been handling radium on on the job.

18:01

Referring to the radium Girl, she said, quote,

18:03

I see no hope for them. My experiments

18:06

with radium convinced me that if a poison

18:08

is taken, if the poison sorry is

18:10

taken internally, it is practically

18:12

impossible to destroy it. So,

18:14

you know, just an aside here. Many of

18:16

you may know this, but Curie herself died in nineteen

18:19

thirty four of complications resulting from

18:21

long term radium exposure. Also, but

18:23

even then, with with Curie saying that

18:25

she saw no hope for them, with the radium

18:27

girls visibly deteriorating and

18:29

public sympathy pouring in US,

18:32

Radium didn't hesitate to try

18:34

to still delay the legal proceedings

18:36

as much as they possibly could, so after

18:39

a hearing in April, the judge granted

18:41

the defense of five month adjournment,

18:44

and Barry tried to remind the judge

18:46

that the women might not last those

18:49

five months, not survive until

18:51

September, and he even found lawyers

18:53

with cases that we're going to be tried

18:55

in less than a month who were willing to switch

18:58

dates with him, but US Radium as the refused

19:00

that that their witnesses were not going

19:02

to be ready. They weren't going to be available

19:05

until that five month window was

19:07

was up. Yeah. So what ended ultimately

19:10

helping them move the trial up

19:13

was the power of the press, in particular

19:15

Walter Littman of The New York World, and

19:17

he helped kind of speed things along. The New York

19:19

World was a really influential paper at the time,

19:22

and Littmann had written a number of editorials about

19:24

the Radium girls. When he wrote on May

19:26

tenth nine was particularly

19:28

skating. He called the delay a quote

19:30

damnable travesty of justice and said

19:33

that if ever a case called for prompt

19:35

adjudication, it is the case of

19:37

five crippled women who are fighting for a

19:39

few miserable dollars to ease their last

19:41

days on earth, and those editorials,

19:44

combined with the public outrage they caused,

19:47

and the efforts of Barry and others altogether

19:49

helped convince the New Jersey court system to change

19:52

the trial day to early June.

19:55

But just days before the trial, the Radium

19:57

girls ended up settling out of court. They

20:00

got ten thousand dollars each, coverage

20:03

of their medical expenses, and a six hundred

20:05

dollar annuity until death, So much

20:08

less than they were hoping for in the end. Yeah,

20:10

but at least it was something before

20:12

they passed away, because some of them did start

20:15

dying from their condition

20:18

pretty quickly after that. McDonald died

20:20

in nineteen twenty nine at age thirty four,

20:22

Friar died at age thirty four,

20:25

and Shob died at age thirty

20:27

in nineteen thirty three, and Huffman

20:29

died in nineteen thirty nine at age

20:31

thirty seven. One lived for quite

20:34

some time after Laris, she died

20:36

in nineteen forty six at age

20:38

fifty one. But it's a really

20:41

sad story anyway you look at it,

20:43

But there is a silver lining. The reason

20:45

why we're covering this for labor Day,

20:48

they did make some strides for workers.

20:50

Industry safety standards were

20:52

enhanced, and the Radium Girls set

20:55

a precedent in case law for the

20:57

right of individual workers to soothe

20:59

their lawyers for damages caused

21:01

by labor abuse. And of

21:03

course it made people aware of the dangers of radium.

21:06

New tolerance levels were set for workers

21:08

and for researchers. And as

21:11

for some of the products that we talked about earlier,

21:13

the FTC issued a cease

21:15

and desist order against the manufacturer

21:18

of the product Rati thor in tonic

21:22

liquid Sunshine exactly that magical

21:24

elick, sir, And they found that it contained

21:26

enough radium to kill the people who drank it regularly.

21:30

And of course the Radium Girls are not forgotten.

21:32

There have been poems, books, and plays written

21:34

about them. And now there's

21:36

that memorial to that we mentioned earlier

21:38

in Illinois. So so we're

21:40

speaking from the past. But maybe after this Labor

21:43

Day weekend we will go um check

21:45

out photos of the unveiling of the memorial

21:48

and and hope that something like this does

21:50

get a little press for for Labor Day weekend.

21:53

Yes, but we're not quite finished with

21:55

labor related topics. We have done

21:57

a few of this year, and one

22:00

kind of touched on some of those things. The Leo

22:02

Frank trial episode, we received a lot

22:04

of mail on, so we want to share some of that with you in our

22:06

Listener Male segment. Now. So,

22:11

one of the things we asked of our listeners after the

22:14

Leo Frank trial episode is, first

22:16

of all, if they had heard of Leo Frank,

22:18

and if so, then how they learned

22:20

about him. Did they learn about Leo Frank in history

22:23

class? Because Sarah had and I

22:25

hadn't, and she grew up in Georgia and I

22:27

had not, So we wondered if it was a totally

22:29

Georgia's specific story, and

22:31

we got back some interesting responses. We got back a

22:33

lot of responses, and most people, I think, especially

22:35

people who weren't from Georgia's said that they had

22:37

never heard of Leo Frank before, or they hadn't

22:40

learned about him in class. A few people

22:42

had heard about him, quite a few people,

22:44

but they heard about him from kind of a surprising

22:46

source. And this letter from Grace that

22:49

I have here kind of indicates that or

22:51

tells us a little bit more about that. She says, Hey,

22:53

guys, I just listened to the podcast

22:55

on Leo Frank and the whole time I wanted to burst

22:57

out into song. Why because

22:59

our school recently did a production of Parade.

23:02

It's a musical about the trial of Leo Frank.

23:04

Like you said in the podcast, a lot of historians

23:06

think that Leo was innocent and that was the stance.

23:08

The play took two If you ever get

23:10

a chance to see it, it's a great production, written by

23:13

Jason Robert Brown. Also, I'm

23:15

from Melbourne, Australia, and if I hadn't

23:17

done Parade or listened to this podcast, it is

23:19

very unlikely that I would have found out about such an

23:21

interesting piece of Georgian history. So we

23:23

also got some mail about another artistic

23:26

interpretation of the Leo Frank story.

23:28

This one is from Marika and she wrote,

23:30

Hey, ladies, I knew about Mary

23:32

Fagan and Leo Frank, but not from

23:34

history class. I learned about the case

23:37

because I am a Lana Turner fan.

23:39

The movie They Won't Forget is considered

23:41

to be one of the best films of the nineteen thirties

23:44

and it is based on the Leo Frank case. Lana

23:47

Turner plays Mary Clay. The Murdered

23:49

Girl and it was her very first film

23:51

appearance. Claude Raines and Edward

23:53

Norris also star So

23:56

how about that a Lana Turner movie and

23:58

a musical. So just like

24:00

the Radium Girls that

24:03

we just talked about, they have some dramatic interpretation.

24:06

Absolutely. So those

24:08

were some positive responses that we got from

24:10

people um or some neutral responses,

24:12

and we also got a few critical responses

24:14

of the episode, and we wanted to share one of those two

24:16

that brought up some interesting points and

24:19

and kind of respond to that a little bit and just

24:21

put it out there for you guys to think about. This

24:23

is from John in Florida, and he

24:25

says, I found the podcast on

24:27

Leo Frank to be disturbing on a few levels.

24:30

I get that this is about a miscarriage of justice,

24:32

but I don't get the Jewish aspect. People

24:35

are subject to prejudice every day all over

24:37

the world. Once you add the element

24:39

of a victim's religion, you separate them

24:41

from the fabric of society and it becomes more

24:43

about the prejudice than the injustice.

24:46

You could not have worked any harder of painting a

24:48

wonderful picture of Leo Frank in

24:50

reality he was engaged in child labor.

24:53

To say he was using children and women for

24:55

light duty sounds like it is from a pr

24:57

firm for the Frank family. How out

25:00

Mary? What were her working conditions? We

25:02

did hear a lot about Frank's degrees and his work

25:04

as a leader in the industry. Why did Mary

25:07

have to get her check from Frank? Do you have

25:09

to get your check from the founder of how Staff

25:11

Works? I found this to be a one

25:13

sided and very cold report. I

25:15

felt no compassion for Mary, and I felt I was

25:17

being told to feel compassion for Frank. Sorry,

25:20

but in the real world, I do not trust people who hire

25:22

women and children to save a few cents. When

25:25

we see this now, we bring it to the media's attention

25:28

and boycott the products. Why is Mr

25:30

Frank excused from this kind of inspection because

25:32

it happened a hundred years ago? Exploitation

25:35

of workers is exploitation of workers. Mary

25:37

was exploited as a worker. Why was she

25:40

not safe in her own workplace? What was

25:42

the effect of the death on her family? Was

25:44

there prejudice because she was irish? We

25:46

did hear about Frank's final request as

25:48

we get away from child labor. We forget the injustice

25:51

and the abuses forced on workers. It

25:53

took the federal government to step in and stop

25:55

people like Frank from exploiting children. Do

25:58

you really think he had Mary's interest in? Sayfety

26:00

at heart, I love your podcast on

26:02

history. Please don't let it become revisionist history.

26:05

Thank you. All right, So, obviously

26:07

there's a lot to address in this letter, right, definitely,

26:10

Yeah, I mean, first, we wanted to start out

26:12

by saying that the podcast,

26:15

as the title indicates, was to focus

26:17

on the Leo Frank trial, and as John

26:20

mentioned, it was mostly about the miscarriage

26:22

of justice there, and so that's why I

26:24

think Leo Frank got

26:26

more more more

26:29

of the focus in in the podcast.

26:31

And and the murder itself

26:34

is so horrific and unequivocally

26:37

wrong that kind of speaks through itself

26:39

in a way. Yeah, I mean, and I think because

26:41

Mary was so young and she was the murder victim,

26:44

and because of the press of the trial

26:46

has gotten, we really don't know that much

26:48

about her. We know that she was thirteen, that

26:50

she was young, that she was beautiful, that she was

26:52

a sweet girl, she went to church, that she

26:54

was Catholic, I mean, we know all these

26:56

things about her, that she worked in the factory, putting

26:59

the little eraser is in the middle case scenes at

27:01

the end of the pencil. That's what she did, but

27:04

we don't really know that much

27:06

more to answer John's questions

27:08

well, and consequently her story and her

27:11

role in history, and not just the way we've

27:13

presented it, but the way it is presented is

27:15

as the murder victim, and that's

27:17

terrible. That's part of the injustice

27:19

of her life, that that's all she got to be.

27:22

Yeah, and that's one reason that we

27:24

pointed out exactly how much money

27:26

she made. You know, we talked about her collecting a

27:28

dollar twenty five that week, and

27:31

it was our intention by doing that

27:33

to point out how very little she died

27:35

for and how tragic her life was

27:37

and her death. But beyond

27:40

that, the podcast did move into

27:43

more of a discussion of the trial and of Leo

27:45

Frank and as we indicated at the end

27:47

of that episode, more most sources do

27:49

kind of assume that he was not guilty

27:52

of her murder, and so maybe that is why

27:54

that side of the story came through

27:56

more. But we did try to emphasize at the end when

27:58

we mentioned that he

28:01

had received the posthumous pardon

28:03

that a lot of people have said that

28:05

this doesn't mean that he

28:08

is exonerated for the crime. Nobody

28:10

really knows it is. And yeah, no one

28:12

knows what happened to Mary Fagan. And you

28:14

know, maybe someday we'll have more information,

28:16

maybe not, um, but at this point

28:18

we can only give you as much information that

28:20

we have, and we can say that we always try

28:23

to give you a balanced story

28:25

and that's always our goal, but maybe

28:27

it doesn't always turn out that way. Maybe sometimes

28:29

it's a little more emphasis

28:32

on one person than another character

28:35

in a story that we're telling, and you know, we're we

28:37

apologize for that. We we always hope that we can tell

28:39

something that's a balanced story. But

28:41

thank you John for that email. We always

28:43

love to get really honest responses from

28:46

our listeners and here what you guys are

28:48

thinking and hopefully

28:50

kindly put, like, yeah, this one was really kindly

28:53

put and it was really thoughtful and we

28:55

appreciated it, and um,

28:57

you know, please send us more of those.

28:59

We do read them. So I hope this shows you

29:01

guys that. But are we are at History

29:03

Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. If you want to send

29:05

us anything else about this or any other podcasts,

29:08

or react to any of the listener mails,

29:10

or tell us more about Leo Frank or US

29:12

Radium or the Radium Girls, anything,

29:15

please write us. You can also look us up

29:17

on Facebook. You can like us there if

29:19

you actually like us, that is, and

29:21

you can look us up on Twitter

29:24

at MISS Industry. And if you want to learn a

29:26

little bit more about radium

29:28

and radiation, we do have an article called

29:31

how nuclear radiation Works. Then

29:33

you can find it by searching for

29:35

nuclear radiation at www

29:38

dot how stuff work dot com.

29:45

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