Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
Speaker 2: is always opened with a mixture of consummate skill and
Speaker 2: of course inimitable charisma by myself Robert Evans. Also with
Speaker 2: me on the call today, Sophie Leechderman, my producer, and
Speaker 2: our lovely guest, Sophia Alexandra Sophia, can you can you
Speaker 2: do a good? Can you do a good?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, it was good.
Speaker 3: It was good, Thank you so much. I actually, in
Speaker 3: my free time I moonlight as the kool Aid man.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I had heard that.
Speaker 1: I had heard that I will not be doing that
Speaker 1: because I would like to be excluded from this narrative.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sophie's just saying that because she drives the Askermeyer
Speaker 2: Wiener bus and doesn't want anyone to.
Speaker 3: Know she's mad, because she's actually cap'n crunch. You think
Speaker 3: you think?
Speaker 1: You think if I was driving that, Jamie Loft just
Speaker 1: wouldn't know.
Speaker 2: That's why you got to keep it a secret. Jamie
Speaker 2: can't be trusted with that knowledge. Yeah, who knows what
Speaker 2: she'd do.
Speaker 1: She probably God damn mine, she'd probably write a book
Speaker 1: and then go on a comedy tour about it.
Speaker 2: That's right, clothes.
Speaker 3: How fucking horny that automobile is.
Speaker 2: It is pretty funny. Anytime you see that thing going
Speaker 2: into a tunnel. It's a good time. Just good clean fun,
Speaker 2: just good clean fun. So we're back and we're talking
Speaker 2: about our boy Bill Bailey. So after nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 2: Marie Curie has done her big, her big show. Bailey
Speaker 2: has had a couple of cons get busted by the government.
Speaker 2: But he is. He is off to the races now
Speaker 2: making radioactive gizmos to make sure people have all of
Speaker 2: the radium they need in their diets for optimum health.
Speaker 2: He started selling Yeah, what a hero. He starts selling
Speaker 2: a radioactive paperweight called the Bioay, which ensured any working
Speaker 2: man could keep a healthy dose of uranium poisoning at
Speaker 2: his desk while he worked. Hell yeah, efficiency, that's what
Speaker 2: you need. He sold a radioactive water solution Befoorinator, which
Speaker 2: is made with putting it's basically putting thorium in your water.
Speaker 2: And then there was the ad Dino Ray, his next
Speaker 2: foray into the dick medicine game. The a Dinner Ray
Speaker 2: was a radioactive belt clip that was meant to beam
Speaker 2: straight radiation into your penis. So really just a great
Speaker 2: set of products there, Right, he invented the early cell phone.
Speaker 2: You know, it.
Speaker 1: Sounds like he was a plant by like feminists to
Speaker 1: be like, yeah, the only way we can get free,
Speaker 1: if we're being honest, is we got to murder.
Speaker 3: Some of these men.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just like a little bit at a time in
Speaker 1: unseen ways, like oh, you know how they get to
Speaker 1: go outside the house and work. I propose you put
Speaker 1: one in a paper weight.
Speaker 3: Enjoy your work, bitch.
Speaker 2: You know what else? They love belts, blood story someone
Speaker 2: in there. You know, it's so fucking like I keep
Speaker 2: thinking about, Yeah, there's like some of these weirdo right
Speaker 2: wing guys will like flip out every now sperm councer
Speaker 2: lower than ever in the West, and you know, like, man,
Speaker 2: we made it through the era where people were just
Speaker 2: putting shooting straight thorium into their penises, Like it's fine,
Speaker 2: We'll make it through microplastics. As a species. I'm not worried,
Speaker 2: you know, not that there's not health consequences, but people
Speaker 2: aren't going to stop breeding just because we've poisoned ourselves.
Speaker 2: We do that a lot.
Speaker 1: No fucking intensifies the more we actually feel like life
Speaker 1: is being slowly poisoned quickly.
Speaker 2: Everything's fine, folks. So Bailey's products were not cheap, and
Speaker 2: you might view him as the same kind of dude
Speaker 2: as like again, like the supplement salesmen who sponsor like
Speaker 2: info wars and shit with their alpha brain supplements. And
Speaker 2: this shit is not cheap. His dick cancer riser costs
Speaker 2: like one thousand dollars, so the primary way and old
Speaker 2: timey money. Yeah, in old timy money. So like this
Speaker 2: is like buying a nice car, right, is buying one
Speaker 2: of these dick cancer machines. Holy fuck?
Speaker 1: Sorry, I need to like actually process how much money
Speaker 1: he wants for that dick shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it comes down in price. Eventually he's
Speaker 2: selling him for just like one hundred and fifty bucks,
Speaker 2: as they But at first, you know, it's.
Speaker 3: Hard waiting for Black Friday guys. If anybody is looking to.
Speaker 2: Buy for the deal to rate deal. Yeah, once people
Speaker 2: start dying, you'll be able to irradiate your tick a
Speaker 2: lot cheaper, folks, you know. So by this point, his
Speaker 2: first company, Associated Radium Chemists, had been busted by the
Speaker 2: Department of Agriculture for false advertising. So this man has
Speaker 2: now been busted by different government agencies three times. I
Speaker 2: think three different agencies. I think it's the FDA, the FTC,
Speaker 2: and now the DA have all like gone after him
Speaker 2: for various scams. Nothing stud he.
Speaker 3: Got of criminals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he has done. He has done the fucking patent
Speaker 2: medication con man version of an egot. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2: So he starts, you know, he forms another company. He
Speaker 2: starts making new pills. He makes Linarium, which sounds like
Speaker 2: it was basically radioactive icy hot. And thorone, which is
Speaker 2: just a dick pill made out of thorium. Right, It's
Speaker 2: just a thorium dick pill. It's wrong with me?
Speaker 3: Said that was some radium or whatever. I was like,
Speaker 3: that sounds kind of.
Speaker 2: Good, sounds kind of I bet it felt good, right,
Speaker 2: I bet it felt good. That's all I'll say. He
Speaker 2: had founded two new companies by this point. The Thorone, company,
Speaker 2: named after his dick pills, was mostly thorium based supplements,
Speaker 2: which he promised were good for all glandular metabolism and
Speaker 2: faulty chemistry conditions. He also sold the radio Indocrinator, a
Speaker 2: gold plated radium harness that you could use in several
Speaker 2: ways when around the neck it would rejuvenate your thyroid
Speaker 2: and around the midsection it would radiate your adrenals or ovaries.
Speaker 2: The radio indocrenator, he claimed, gave off gamma rays that
Speaker 2: would i the indocrine glands and I'm gonna could from
Speaker 2: the book quackery again here, the idea was that ionizing
Speaker 2: i E. Irradiating the indocrine system would increase harmone production,
Speaker 2: or it was better understood by it's less enlightened audience.
Speaker 2: The device worked by lighting up dark recesses of the body.
Speaker 2: The radio indocrenator could even be worn under the scrotum
Speaker 2: in a special jockstrap rigged up to energize on inspired penises.
Speaker 2: So that's good. We're at like three different ways you
Speaker 2: could expose your dick and balls to radiation. Now, like
Speaker 2: this guy cannot irradiate enough testicles. Like he just loves it.
Speaker 2: He loves it. And you know what they say, do
Speaker 2: what you love and you'll never work a day in
Speaker 2: your life. You know, respect you Yeah, yeah, radiate what
Speaker 2: you love and yeah, you'll never work a day. It
Speaker 2: is again unclear how much he believed in the therapies
Speaker 2: he was selling. This is a guy who takes radiation
Speaker 2: tonics himself. He clearly believes that this is helpful to
Speaker 2: some extent as to a lot of people, but also
Speaker 2: a lot of his ship is like clearly bogus. There's
Speaker 2: definitely a degree because he's done cons before. There's certainly
Speaker 2: a degree to which he knows he's conning people, right,
Speaker 2: So you know, his stuff goes well, though he starts
Speaker 2: doing better and better and make it getting better at
Speaker 2: like conning people. He really one of the things that's
Speaker 2: going to set him apart from a lot of the
Speaker 2: pack is he goes directly to the medical community with
Speaker 2: a lot of his inventions. And part of this is
Speaker 2: that he's a Harvard man. He knows how to talk
Speaker 2: to people who went to like these fancy colleges, right.
Speaker 2: He knows the right things to say, he knows how
Speaker 2: to put on that proper attitude. And in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 2: William Bailey stands up before an annual meeting of the
Speaker 2: American Chemical Society and gives a career defining speech about
Speaker 2: the medicinal potential of toxic radium exposure. He announces, we
Speaker 2: have cornered aberration disease, old age and in fact life
Speaker 2: and death themselves in the indocrines. Basically, like, we've backed
Speaker 2: illness into a corner and it's in the endocrine system.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm just watching him stand in front of like
Speaker 1: illnesses and the mission accomplished banner.
Speaker 2: Just yes, where did it? Yeah? Now, when you envision
Speaker 2: this moment, this speech he gives to the American Chemical Society,
Speaker 2: you got to think about it the same way we
Speaker 2: used to think about like Apple's annual product announcement events. Right,
Speaker 2: Will Bailey is the Steve Jobs of radium. Right, He's
Speaker 2: getting up there being this is insanely great. You know,
Speaker 2: you've never been able to irradiate your dick as much
Speaker 2: as you can now. And a lot of people, many
Speaker 2: of them doctors, are as excited for this moment as
Speaker 2: people were in two thousand and eight to see the iPhone.
Speaker 2: So they listened with rapt attention as he walked them
Speaker 2: through his newly evolved understanding of how radium therapy was
Speaker 2: supposed to work. By this point, Bailey had convinced himself,
Speaker 2: or at least decided to market his products under the
Speaker 2: understanding that aging was caused by the gradual failure of
Speaker 2: one's indocrine glands. This process could be reversed by ionizing
Speaker 2: them with radiation, which would reverse damage and rejuvenate the
Speaker 2: worn out glands. Full of pride, he told this audience
Speaker 2: of scientists, I am satisfied from definitely cinical experience with
Speaker 2: the radio indocrenator that a method of ionization is now
Speaker 2: available whereby we can definitely, practically, without exception, retard the
Speaker 2: progress of cinnocence and give a new lease of relatively
Speaker 2: normal functioning power to those whose son of life is
Speaker 2: slowly sinking into the purple shadows of that longest night.
Speaker 2: The wrinkled face, the drawn skin, the dully the listless gate,
Speaker 2: the faulty memory, the aching body, the destructive effects of sterility,
Speaker 2: all spell imperfect indocrine performance. So that's cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean the voice is really the only
Speaker 1: part I care about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I do. I do always enjoy when I
Speaker 2: get a chance to take that bad boy out for
Speaker 2: a spin. So that is some grade a scientific mumbo jumble, right,
Speaker 2: just unparalleled nonsense, but it's sold to his audience.
Speaker 3: Part of the act, he mentioned toxins.
Speaker 1: I'd like to know how many toxins are actually going
Speaker 1: to be leaving my body?
Speaker 3: Yeah, what's the what's the toxin situation?
Speaker 2: You know, Star Trek. The radium is like a teleporter.
Speaker 2: It beams the toxins right out of your body, you know,
Speaker 2: the more radium you're exposed to. Yeah, there, you could
Speaker 2: sell this shit today, right, we're not far from it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Another Republican administration and they'll make it legal to sell
Speaker 2: this shit again. Right, It'll go everywhere. Joe Rogan'll be laughing,
Speaker 2: which honestly could solve a lot of problems for us.
Speaker 2: Like if we just all turned to blind eyed to
Speaker 2: radium medicine for like five or six years, we might
Speaker 2: be in the clear. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we just solved a lot of stuff to just
Speaker 3: let the ready.
Speaker 2: Yeah, put like fifty to fifty ivermectin uranium mix and
Speaker 2: just let people shoot it up their assholes. You know,
Speaker 2: it'll be fine. So this this shit, this nonsense Bailey's
Speaker 2: putting out. It sells to his audience. And part of why, again,
Speaker 2: these are all real scientist. Part of why they believe
Speaker 2: in what he's saying is they think that William Bailey
Speaker 2: is a scientist like them. Right by this point, he
Speaker 2: was not just pretending to have graduated from Harvard, but
Speaker 2: he started. He'd started claiming that he'd went on to
Speaker 2: do graduate work at a prestigious college in London and
Speaker 2: become a PhD. Right, he's claiming to be a doctor
Speaker 2: now now again. In reality, his Harvard admission exam he
Speaker 2: got kind of mid grades on and all of his
Speaker 2: worst grades were in like scientific fields engineering, physics. He's
Speaker 2: not only is he not a doctor, but this is
Speaker 2: specifically the shit he's bad at.
Speaker 3: Right, It's like me selling accounting soft.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, hold of your taxes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm like, you want to know what to do
Speaker 3: with your money? Maybe talk to me? Who when someone
Speaker 3: says stocks, I just picture.
Speaker 1: A folder and you open it and it's empty.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm imagining me at like a Jordan Belford at
Speaker 2: the end of like when he's doing those big seminars
Speaker 2: at the end of Wolf of Wall Street. I'm just
Speaker 2: up in front of a crowd, folks. You're hearing a
Speaker 2: lot of things about what you can do with your money.
Speaker 2: Put it into a four to h one k a
Speaker 2: high yield investment. No, no, no, no no. I want to walk
Speaker 2: you through the real way to get rich. Bury it
Speaker 2: in a big hole. That's right, the big hole method.
Speaker 2: For just twenty thousand dollars, I will walk you through
Speaker 2: everything you need to do to dig a big hole
Speaker 2: in your yard and bury all your money in it.
Speaker 2: You know, this is what Warren Buffett does. This is
Speaker 2: what Bill Gates is doing. That's why Bill Gates boy
Speaker 2: a lot farmland. He needs more holes, you know what.
Speaker 3: Else, For a very small monthly fee, I will let
Speaker 3: you keep your money in my big hole.
Speaker 2: That's right. That's right. You put all your money in
Speaker 2: my hole, and I promise it'll still be there when
Speaker 2: you need it.
Speaker 3: That's right. And it will smell weirder anything.
Speaker 2: That's right. Yes, so his lies are not seriously Again,
Speaker 2: there are doctors and scientists, as we'll talk about, who
Speaker 2: are angry at Bailey and all of the who do
Speaker 2: push back about this. But in the mainstream this is
Speaker 2: pretty accepted. And in fact, the paper of record, the
Speaker 2: New York Times, reaches out to Bailey the day after
Speaker 2: this speech, and they wind up just exerting exerting his
Speaker 2: exerting his speech to write an article about the unders
Speaker 2: of like irradiating yourself for health. They just without questioning it,
Speaker 2: like preprint chunks of his speech as an article in
Speaker 2: the New York Times, so he's doing great. By nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty five, Bailey moves his headquarters to each Orange, New
Speaker 2: Joysey and he launches yet another company, the Bailey Radium Laboratories.
Speaker 2: It was through this company that he would produce his masterpiece, Ratathor.
Speaker 2: This was a pre bottled radiation infused beverage. Basically, it's
Speaker 2: vitamin water if you put a couple horoshima's worth of
Speaker 2: rats inside it. So he had the ear of a
Speaker 2: decent chunk of the scientific community and a lot of
Speaker 2: credulous journalists. And as a result, Bailey decides he's going
Speaker 2: to do something new to advertise Ratathor, rather than like
Speaker 2: these standard patent med ads. I mean, I think he's
Speaker 2: doing these too, but he starts. He starts advertising specifically
Speaker 2: in like medical journals and publications, right, And this part
Speaker 2: is actually pretty brilliant. He's kind of on the cutting
Speaker 2: edge here. He's aware at this point the FTC and
Speaker 2: the FDA are looking at him and guys like him right,
Speaker 2: putting out specific health claims and like a scientific journal
Speaker 2: would get him in trouble. He can't do that, but
Speaker 2: he wants scientific legitimacy, and so he realizes if I
Speaker 2: just publish research, or at least articles that look like research,
Speaker 2: talking in general about radium therapy and how radium affects
Speaker 2: the human body, but without making claims about my products.
Speaker 2: If I'm just publishing research on radium and it's attached
Speaker 2: to the name of my company, that acts as an advertisement.
Speaker 2: But I'm not in danger with the FTC. Right, they
Speaker 2: can't come after you for that. Yeah, he's smart. This
Speaker 2: is an innovation, right, profession. Yeah, so instead of saying
Speaker 2: the thorinator will cure your depression, he just bought his
Speaker 2: way into publishing scientific monographs and magazines and particularly publications
Speaker 2: read by physicians. And I'm going to quote from the
Speaker 2: Journal of the American Medical Association here one example of
Speaker 2: these monographs. A thirty two page pamphlet published in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty six under the title Modern Treatment of the Indocrine
Speaker 2: Glands with Radium Water ratathor the New Weapon of Medical Science,
Speaker 2: was mailed to every physician in America. The pamphlet outlines
Speaker 2: Bailey's theories and urges skeptical physicians to place one are
Speaker 2: two of your most obstinate cases on radium water, so
Speaker 2: that you may observe its action right in your own practice.
Speaker 2: The pamphlet also included many photographs that purport to show
Speaker 2: the process of radium refinement and purification at the Bailey laboratories.
Speaker 2: These were later found to be fakes. Bailey simply bought
Speaker 2: his radium and mesothorium from the nearby American Radium Laboratory
Speaker 2: of New Jersey, bottling it into skilled water distilled water
Speaker 2: at his plant and marking up the price more than
Speaker 2: four hundred percent. But at least its real radiation.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, I mean, Lisa, he has integrity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, That's what I respect is a man
Speaker 2: who sells honest poison to you. Right, thank you, good man.
Speaker 2: So Bailey shipped his pamphlets to every registered physician in
Speaker 2: the country and filled them with testimonials from happy patients
Speaker 2: and doctors. He helped blazer trail that would later be
Speaker 2: followed by Produe Pharmaceutical decades later in the marketing of
Speaker 2: oxycontent by offering a rebate to physicians as a professional fee.
Speaker 2: So if you prescribe ratathor to a patient, whatever they
Speaker 2: spend on it, you get seventeen percent of that as
Speaker 2: a kickback directly to you. Right, that's smart. Now, to
Speaker 2: their credit, the AMA does eventually come after it takes
Speaker 2: them a while, but the AMA is like, this is
Speaker 2: unbelievably unethical, like incredibly evil, but it works really well.
Speaker 2: And again, some of these doctors are prescribing it, are
Speaker 2: prescribing the equivalent of like hundreds or thousands of doses
Speaker 2: per patient. So there is good money in this shit,
Speaker 2: especially because a lot of these patients are rich, right, Like,
Speaker 2: you are milking the rich by poisoning them with radiation,
Speaker 2: which like not necessarily always bad, you know, worse, it's complicated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the maybe pio in the maybe file.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So from what we can tell, Bailey definitely overhyped
Speaker 2: his products beyond what he actually believed they could do.
Speaker 2: But he also seems to have been yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, radiation, And then you get cocky.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and then you start to get a little arrogant.
Speaker 2: Right now, he seems to have been genuinely convinced that,
Speaker 2: to some extent, radiation was good medicine. Again he is
Speaker 2: he becomes a daily user of ratathor. I have found
Speaker 2: no evidence that he was lying about this. He does
Speaker 2: seem to have taken his own poison, and we'll talk
Speaker 2: more about that at the end.
Speaker 1: Again, I respect him. Is this actually a fan episode.
Speaker 2: Because yeah, yeah, this is now we're fans of this guy, right,
Speaker 2: That's all I'm hearing is. And he does seem to
Speaker 2: he seems to be upset. And again he is to
Speaker 2: some extent consciously still conning people because he has he
Speaker 2: has made con products like he has made outright cons
Speaker 2: So he's he's both we all contain multitudes, right, And
Speaker 2: he does seem to have an actual obsession with trying
Speaker 2: to figure out why radium is good for you. Right,
Speaker 2: he is trying. And again he doesn't have any competence
Speaker 2: as a scientist, but he does try to do his
Speaker 2: own research here and I'm going to quote from Smithsonian
Speaker 2: Magazine again. By nineteen twenty five, Bailey had formulated his
Speaker 2: central pharmacological thesis concerning radium stimulatory powers, as described in
Speaker 2: a lecture that he gave in nineteen twenty five. This
Speaker 2: thesis was essentially a variant of the radiation as catalyst
Speaker 2: school of thought. More than ninety percent of all diseases,
Speaker 2: claimed Bailey, were the result of indocrinologic funk dysfunction that
Speaker 2: prevented the transmission of essential physiological factors. Without the correct
Speaker 2: metabolic signals, the body lapsed into a state of biochemical
Speaker 2: energy deprivation. Eventually, this state exhausted the perchonymal organs, resulting
Speaker 2: in anemia, lassitude, cancer, depression, idiocy, and many other problems.
Speaker 2: Bailey believed that the energy lost through ineffective metabolism could
Speaker 2: be replenished using the power of radium's alpha particles, thus
Speaker 2: allowing the body to return to its proper state of
Speaker 2: oxidative metabolic balance through radioactive gland control. Yeah that all scans.
Speaker 2: That seems real.
Speaker 1: Sure, Yeah, Actually, uh me and my girls, yea our
Speaker 1: band radio Radioactive gland Controls.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's actually a pretty good band name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're piking actually opening for what's the name of
Speaker 1: that of the name of that like device that that
Speaker 1: dude was pedaling to make your dick what was it called?
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh uh uh thorn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we're actually opening for our own so yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And speaking of irradiating your dick again, you can
Speaker 2: buy some dick pills that probably aren't radioactive if you
Speaker 2: listen to these ads. Ah, we're back and uh yeah,
Speaker 2: we're we're talking Bill Bailey. So Rada Thor takes the
Speaker 2: fuck off. This is a huge success. He finally has
Speaker 2: his big hit right. It's fucking it's it's fucking whe
Speaker 2: He sells more than four hundred thousand half ounce bottles
Speaker 2: of ratathor in just five years, and again these are
Speaker 2: all four hundred percent markup, so he is making bank
Speaker 2: off this shit. Now, by this point the boom years
Speaker 2: of ratathor, evidence had begun to mount that there were
Speaker 2: horrific long term health consequences to being exposed to radiation.
Speaker 2: And this is going to bring us to a bit
Speaker 2: of a digression. But this is a story worth telling,
Speaker 2: infamous tale of the Radium Girls. It is this is
Speaker 2: a fuck I think a lot of people are broadly
Speaker 2: aware of this, which is why I didn't like make
Speaker 2: it the whole focus. But this is a wild ass story.
Speaker 2: It is laid out in gripping detail by author Kate
Speaker 2: Moore in her book The Radium Girls.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was like, why do I know that?
Speaker 2: I think people have heard this, and this is the
Speaker 2: Radium Girl story is a standard story of like an
Speaker 2: evil corporation abusing its workers for profit, you know, when
Speaker 2: they should have known better, and ultimately killing them. It's
Speaker 2: very shady. I wanted to focus more on the patent
Speaker 2: medicaid and stuff because that's more fun. But we are
Speaker 2: going to talk about the radium girls. Now. This is
Speaker 2: this is where shit gets pretty bleak. As I've noted before,
Speaker 2: sufficient doses of radium and like toothpaste will make your
Speaker 2: teeth glow, right, this was the thing people advertised for
Speaker 2: at the time. This meant that radium, because it can glow,
Speaker 2: has the potential practical uses. You can make stuff like
Speaker 2: watches and dials that need to glow in the dark,
Speaker 2: glow right for like planes, for military equipment, right, for
Speaker 2: industrial equipment, and like it's obviously it's useful if you
Speaker 2: have like a watch that can glow in the dark, Right,
Speaker 2: you don't have to like, yeah, a road divide our compass, right,
Speaker 2: you know, all of the different things you need if
Speaker 2: you're like firing artillery in the night or some shit.
Speaker 2: So obviously there's a military application. A lot of this
Speaker 2: takes off, like radium dial painting takes off as an
Speaker 2: industry when we get into World War One because there's
Speaker 2: a sudden demand for the equipment that they need to
Speaker 2: be able to have, like dials lit up on and
Speaker 2: This is a demanding job, right, you cannot if you
Speaker 2: are if you are working on stuff that's going to
Speaker 2: be military. It's going to be used to like drop
Speaker 2: bombs and fire shells at people. It has to be precise, right,
Speaker 2: you have to be accurately putting everything on. So that is,
Speaker 2: you know, a job that has to be done by
Speaker 2: skilled workers. And there's no other way to apply this
Speaker 2: stuff than by hand. Right, it has to be done
Speaker 2: by hand, and women with tiny hands were generally seen
Speaker 2: to be the best at this job. Right, So dial
Speaker 2: painting becomes.
Speaker 1: Robert just fecking texting the next time a pod just secking.
Speaker 3: Like that.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: You would have been a great radium although it's girl.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those radium girl.
Speaker 2: You have those radium girl hands. You don't want to
Speaker 2: have those because it does not end well for them.
Speaker 2: But this is considered an incredible job for a while, right,
Speaker 2: it has a reputation for being the elite job of
Speaker 2: poor working girls because it pays three times normal factory wages.
Speaker 2: Kate Moore notes that dial painters were in the top
Speaker 2: five percent of female workers nationally when it came to compensation.
Speaker 2: So like this is seen for ambitious, poor young women.
Speaker 2: This is how you get a leg up. This is
Speaker 2: how you can escape poverty, right, which is again why
Speaker 2: this is a lot less fun than selling radioactive poison
Speaker 2: to rich people. Because these jobs are so good, the
Speaker 2: first women who get them guard them jealously, often recruiting
Speaker 2: close friends, and they keep it in the family, right.
Speaker 2: They're like, if there's an opening, I'm going to make
Speaker 2: sure my sister, my aunt, my niece gets the job,
Speaker 2: rather than like somebody off the street. And so one
Speaker 2: of the things that's going to be devastating about this
Speaker 2: is that often factories will have like multiple sisters, all
Speaker 2: the sisters in a family working side by side on
Speaker 2: the production line, and you know, one guess as to
Speaker 2: how their lives end right. Other workers at the factory,
Speaker 2: and this is very important. The radium girls are not
Speaker 2: wearing any kind of ppe. They are exposed directly physically
Speaker 2: through their skin with a mix of radium and paint. Right,
Speaker 2: it's like mixed into a powder and then turn into
Speaker 2: a paint. Basically, they have no protective gear. The workers
Speaker 2: at the factory that is making the paint, that's mixing
Speaker 2: these pigments, that are processing raw radium, they wear protective gear. Right,
Speaker 2: they've got like lead aprons. They're wearing gloves like they
Speaker 2: understand they matter. They in fact are men.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they matter, Like that's obvious, Like what are we
Speaker 1: gonna be wasting stacy equipment on fucking vaginas.
Speaker 2: That is a big part. That is a big part
Speaker 2: of what's going on. But that's it's interesting. That's not
Speaker 2: all of it. As we'll talk about, a lot of
Speaker 2: these men are insanely reckless with this stuff in ways
Speaker 2: that kind of confuse me, because they do know it's dangerous.
Speaker 2: They're covering up the dangers for the women, but they
Speaker 2: are also taking risks with this shit. I don't fully
Speaker 2: get some of it. You get the feeling. I think
Speaker 2: radium and uranium and shit. When people first started fucking
Speaker 2: with it, I think it kind of there's a high.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's like an actual physical high
Speaker 2: that it affects your brain, but like because of all
Speaker 2: of the buzz around this, because of how new and
Speaker 2: exciting is, it deranges people a little bit. I don't
Speaker 2: I don't know that. I don't think there's like a
Speaker 2: medical or pharmacological I think it's a psychological thing, but
Speaker 2: it does appear to be. We'll talk about this in
Speaker 2: a bit, but that.
Speaker 1: Doesn't in the first Uh yeah, but I was thinking like,
Speaker 1: since the life expectancy is so not great, like, how
Speaker 1: many studies could there have been possibly done?
Speaker 2: Oh there's none at this point, right, No, like for.
Speaker 1: Somebody like you might absolutely be one hundred percent correct,
Speaker 1: Like how would you check that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean they know that it can kill you
Speaker 2: just because like pure radium will like burn people. People
Speaker 2: have died as a result of that. But the idea
Speaker 2: that like tiny amounts, like for one thing, it hasn't
Speaker 2: been being used long enough that people who are being
Speaker 2: exposed constantly as smaller doses are getting aren't getting cancer yet,
Speaker 2: So you can't really like it's just not as it
Speaker 2: wasn't immediately clear. Although as we'll talk about, they did
Speaker 2: know enough that they should have been taking precautions, right,
Speaker 2: But they certainly don't know nearly as much as we
Speaker 2: know now, right. And part of why they're not giving
Speaker 2: these girls PPE is that the paint used by the
Speaker 2: radium girls is so diluted. They're like, it can't this
Speaker 2: is not enough to be danger And again, part of
Speaker 2: how they're thinking about this, they're not thinking about this
Speaker 2: the way we think about radiation, which is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you want to be exposed to as little radiation as possible. Right,
Speaker 2: they're thinking about it as well. In high doses, super concentrated,
Speaker 2: you know, radium can be very dangerous to people, but
Speaker 2: in lower doses it's a medicine. It treats these different illnesses.
Speaker 2: So it's like they're thinking about it the way we
Speaker 2: think of aspirin. Right. Obviously, if you were to like
Speaker 2: chow down on a brick of aspirin, you would get
Speaker 2: very sick. But if you take a pill when you've
Speaker 2: got a headache or whatever, you feel better. You know.
Speaker 2: That's kind of how they're thinking about this, right, So
Speaker 2: they're like, well, in these doses, it's not going to
Speaker 2: hurt these girls right now. Obviously this is absurd. As
Speaker 2: Kate Moore writes in a column for BuzzFeed, radium's luminosity
Speaker 2: was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon
Speaker 2: became known as the ghost girls because by the time
Speaker 2: they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark.
Speaker 2: They made the most of the perk, wearing their good
Speaker 2: dresses to the plants so they'd shine in the dance
Speaker 2: halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth
Speaker 2: for a smile that would knock the suitors dead. Grace
Speaker 2: and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they'd been taught
Speaker 2: for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some
Speaker 2: of which were only three and a half centimeters wide.
Speaker 2: The girls were instructed to slip their paint brushes between
Speaker 2: their lips to make a fine point, a practice called
Speaker 2: lip pointing or lip dip paint routine. As playwright Melanie
Speaker 2: Marnick later described it, every time the girls raised the
Speaker 2: brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little bit of
Speaker 2: the glowing green paint. So that's that's great, that's good. Yeah, yeah, Now,
Speaker 2: one of the women who instructed Grace in this technique
Speaker 2: later recalled to an interviewer, the first thing we asked
Speaker 2: was does this stuff hurt you? Naturally, you don't want
Speaker 2: to put anything in your mouth that is going to
Speaker 2: hurt you, mister savoys, The manager said it wasn't dangerous,
Speaker 2: that we didn't need to be afraid. Now, this was
Speaker 2: a lie. Even giving the incomplete understanding of radiation at
Speaker 2: the time. They knew enough to know that there was
Speaker 2: a danger to the jobs these women. Again, the men
Speaker 2: handling radium and labs are wearing lead aprons and tongs
Speaker 2: and shit. These women are not even warned that those
Speaker 2: precautions exist, right, They're not being told that there is
Speaker 2: an amount of radium that's dangerous because that is that's
Speaker 2: common knowledge to scientists, but to lay people, there's no
Speaker 2: knowledge that there's any danger to this stuff. That's like
Speaker 2: widespread and like so, even though I think a lot
Speaker 2: of these guys legitimately believed they were not being exposed
Speaker 2: enough to hurt them, these women were not being told
Speaker 2: that there are any potential dangers to radium, which, like
Speaker 2: is irresponsible. Is particularly bad because the founder of the
Speaker 2: US Radium Corporation, which employed the radium girls, was a
Speaker 2: scientist named Sabine von Sochoki. He literally invented the paint
Speaker 2: that they used, and he was aware of the dangers
Speaker 2: of radium, even in smaller quantities. Again, this is not
Speaker 2: just some businessman who adopts this because it's good money.
Speaker 2: This is a scientist. He had worked personally with the
Speaker 2: Kiris in the earliest radium research. He had seen radiation burns,
Speaker 2: and he had been injured by radiation himself. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to quote from the radium girls here, from them
Speaker 2: and from the specialist medical literature he had studied. Von
Speaker 2: Soochoki understood that radio carried great dangers. The curries by
Speaker 2: that time were intimately familiar with radium's hazards, having suffered
Speaker 2: many burns themselves. Radium could cure tumors, it was true,
Speaker 2: by destroying unhealthy tissue, but it was indiscriminating in its
Speaker 2: powers and could devastate healthy tissue too. Von Sachoki himself
Speaker 2: had suffered its silent and sinister wrath. Radium had gotten
Speaker 2: into his left index finger, and when he realized, he
Speaker 2: hacked the tip of it off. It now looked as
Speaker 2: though an animal had gnawed it. Of course, to the
Speaker 2: layman this was all unknown. The mainstream position, as understood
Speaker 2: by most people, was that the effects of radium were
Speaker 2: all positive, and that was what was written about in
Speaker 2: newspapers and magazines. So again, this guy that finger is intent, Yeah,
Speaker 2: like he cut his own finger off when he got
Speaker 2: a little bit of it in there. He knows these
Speaker 2: girls are taking a risk, and he just doesn't care, right.
Speaker 1: Like I made the sexism joke earlier, which I'm sure
Speaker 1: is a part of it, but I mostly think, honestly,
Speaker 1: it's a classism thing, right, Yeah, it's like you don't
Speaker 1: give a fuck, like you know, Okay, I'm gonna recommend
Speaker 1: this book that I've talked about before called The Fashion
Speaker 1: Victims by Alison Matthews David. I sent you guys it
Speaker 1: because I'm going to do a podcast with her.
Speaker 3: But she talks about.
Speaker 1: All of the different like ways that clothes were essentially
Speaker 1: killing people that were making them and wearing them.
Speaker 3: But one of the things is like.
Speaker 1: The people that work in the factories matter so little
Speaker 1: that their lives are totally an okay thing to sacrifice,
Speaker 1: which is like why workers' rights even had to be
Speaker 1: a thing. You know, people were just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we give a fuck about the people that make our shit,
Speaker 1: like that would not even be an issue clearly anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying anything new, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, yeah, that's I always valid to like
Speaker 2: bring up, especially when we as we're in this new
Speaker 2: age of unionization, Like there's a good reason why because
Speaker 2: without unions and worker protections, they would literally just poison
Speaker 2: us all with radium. First yeah to.
Speaker 3: Death, and they don't care because there's a million more
Speaker 3: people shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And again, I will say, as we're as we're
Speaker 2: critiquing him for this very validly, he is also again
Speaker 2: he has this kind of irrational transfiction with radium, right,
Speaker 2: And by all reports, he was also pretty reckless with
Speaker 2: this shit. He was known to play with it, to
Speaker 2: hold tubes of radium with his bare hands to watch,
Speaker 2: like he would turn the light off so we could
Speaker 2: like watch its luminosity in the dark. He would expose
Speaker 2: his arm up to the elbow in Radium Solutions Company
Speaker 2: co founder George Willis was also really reckless. He would
Speaker 2: pick up tubes of radium with his like four finger
Speaker 2: finger and they were supposed to use forceps, but he
Speaker 2: would just use his hands. And again, these guys are
Speaker 2: so reckless with this stuff because they just kind of
Speaker 2: love it, and their colleagues are like, well, these guys
Speaker 2: are the scientists. If they're doing this, it must be safe.
Speaker 3: And again, if he saw.
Speaker 1: This in a movie, and you do see it, and
Speaker 1: like you know superhero movie, when a like a villain
Speaker 1: or what like draw the thing, You're always like, this
Speaker 1: is so ridiculous. But listening the way that these people
Speaker 1: actually relate to uranium and shitaactly.
Speaker 2: I'm like, it's wild, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, psychological, yeah, something component that is connected to it,
Speaker 1: because like, ef, that's not normal.
Speaker 2: No, and yeah I do. I don't fully understand what
Speaker 2: it is, but something is clearly going on here because
Speaker 2: these people are yeah, they're treating it, yeah, like a
Speaker 2: fucking villain in a Spider Man movie treats like the
Speaker 2: superheroes Sarum or some shit, right, Like they're Willem Defoe
Speaker 2: right here. Yes. And it's interesting because, like a lot,
Speaker 2: there are scientists, prominent ones who are warning about this,
Speaker 2: one of them. Normally. This is the only time we're
Speaker 2: going to bring up Thomas Edison and him not be
Speaker 2: the bastard. But Thomas Edison was aware of all this
Speaker 2: and thought it was fucking crazy. He remarked right around
Speaker 2: this time, there may be a condition into which radium
Speaker 2: has not yet entered that would produce dire results. Everybody
Speaker 2: handling it should have care, right. That's again the only
Speaker 2: time Edison says something perfectly reasonable, but like, yeah, man,
Speaker 2: they probably should be wearing protection. He's basically like, we
Speaker 2: don't understand this stuff. You're just you're sticking your arm
Speaker 2: into a vat of it? What is wrong with you?
Speaker 2: Like this burns people. We should be careful here now.
Speaker 2: You will not be surprised to hear that the effect
Speaker 2: of all of this radium on the bodies of the
Speaker 2: young women painting these dials was nothing short of calamitous.
Speaker 2: The radium that they had eaten particularly settled inside their
Speaker 2: bodies and basically honey combs their bones with radiation. It
Speaker 2: is drilling holes inside their bones like Swiss cheese. This
Speaker 2: kills their marrow and it causes their bodies to literally
Speaker 2: collapse in on it themselves like a dying star. One worker,
Speaker 2: this young woman named Grace, her spine is crushed. She
Speaker 2: is like given a brace. Basically her spine just crumbles
Speaker 2: inside of her. Another girl has her jaw eaten away
Speaker 2: to a stump. Some girls would shrink, they would lose
Speaker 2: multiple inches because their leg bones are just crumbling and
Speaker 2: compacting from the inside. And while all of this is
Speaker 2: going on, their bones were glowing in the dark, right
Speaker 2: so fucked up like it is. Some of these women
Speaker 2: first realized they were sick when they saw their They
Speaker 2: would see their own bones glowing back at them. In
Speaker 2: the mirror, like what the fuck, Yeah, it's insane, and like, yeah,
Speaker 2: we've got a picture here. This is one of the
Speaker 2: radium girls who has I mean, honestly, I don't mean
Speaker 2: to be like blithe about this. It looks like a
Speaker 2: nineties prosthetic, like if you were going to give someone
Speaker 2: a fake chin for like a skit where they're you know,
Speaker 2: you're trying to make them look like Jay Leno or
Speaker 2: something like that's what. But it's just a tumor. It's
Speaker 2: like a tumor that's a good eight inches of like
Speaker 2: chin basically like it's grueser it. It's really thick, I
Speaker 2: mean it is. It's actually it's more like the mass
Speaker 2: of a brick that's just stuck under her jaw. Like
Speaker 2: the tumors these these young women got are ghastly some
Speaker 2: of the most unsettling body horrorshit I have ever encountered
Speaker 2: in my research. Like it is gnarly. And yeah, obviously,
Speaker 2: by the time you have this kind of radium exposure,
Speaker 2: there's no cure treatment. You can't fix this, like this
Speaker 2: is this is by the time your bones are glowing
Speaker 2: in the dark, you're dead, you know.
Speaker 1: But also, how much research and work would have to
Speaker 1: even be done for anybody to even try to reverse it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, like there's no way to even.
Speaker 3: Like there's so far behind the ball.
Speaker 2: On the But even then, I think today, by this point,
Speaker 2: I don't think there's shit we could do for these girls.
Speaker 3: Oh no, we can't. We can't fix it.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, like the amount of time you would
Speaker 1: need to figure out how to solve something like this,
Speaker 1: like they do not have that time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, absolutely not, Like this is a death sentence
Speaker 2: and they you know, these are not dumb people. These women,
Speaker 2: like they realize as soon as they they don't know
Speaker 2: what radiation poisoning is because it's not really well known
Speaker 2: at that point, but they know by the time your
Speaker 2: bones are crumbling inside of you, well I'm going to die,
Speaker 2: right They are not. They are not possessed of like
Speaker 2: irrational like like hope here, you know, they're very aware like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, my job has fucking killed me. I
Speaker 2: was lied to right now, while they start coming out
Speaker 2: going to the press trying to like get help, like
Speaker 2: get you know, basically the equivalent of workmen's comp for
Speaker 2: getting poisoned at work. The radium industry these companies making
Speaker 2: the paints, painting the dials deny there is any danger
Speaker 2: to their products. They basically say, these girls are crazy.
Speaker 2: Something else is wrong with them. Radium. We all know
Speaker 2: radium's a health product, right, and there's so little of
Speaker 2: it in this paint that no one could get harmed
Speaker 2: by it, right. And in fact, when the story that
Speaker 2: radium girls are getting sick breaks in the news, the
Speaker 2: New York Times is like, well, we got to report
Speaker 2: on this. See if you know, see what's up to it.
Speaker 2: You know who can tell us if these girls are
Speaker 2: full of shit or not. Our buddy William Bailey. So
Speaker 2: they call will Bailey, the guy selling radium water, and
Speaker 2: he's like, there's no proof that radium is responsible for
Speaker 2: any of these debts. You know, nobody gets sick from radium.
Speaker 2: This is just nonsense. They're women, you know, they don't
Speaker 2: know anything.
Speaker 1: Hi. It's also awesome that if you want to know
Speaker 1: about a thing, you don't go to the people have
Speaker 1: the thing.
Speaker 3: No, You're like, no, well there to learn from them.
Speaker 2: No, Well, Bailey's a scientist. We the New York Times
Speaker 2: didn't check to verify that he has any kind of degree,
Speaker 2: but he says he's a scientist, good lie about that,
Speaker 2: not a man, I'm being a Harvard man. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So I mean I bet that is a big part
Speaker 2: of it. I bet the fucking reporter who reached out
Speaker 2: as some Harvard educated writer and was like, well, a
Speaker 2: Harvard man would never poison people for money, he would
Speaker 2: never lie on behalf of his industry. So now I
Speaker 2: will say again, a lot of the doctors and stuff
Speaker 2: we're talking about this are are not good people. There
Speaker 2: are some these girls, you know, when they get sick,
Speaker 2: this is horrifying, and the physicians who are seeing them
Speaker 2: and realize what's happened are horrifying, and some very brave
Speaker 2: crusading physicians basically go to bat against a significant chunk
Speaker 2: of the medical industry and against the radium industry to
Speaker 2: like try to get not just get justice for these
Speaker 2: girls because to an extent that's impossible, but to try
Speaker 2: and stop people from being exposed to radium, right because
Speaker 2: they realize, oh, these girls are getting sick from radium paint.
Speaker 2: All of these products on their shelves are full of radium.
Speaker 2: Potentially tens of thousands, hundred thousands of people could be getting
Speaker 2: sick we have to stop this shit, right and the
Speaker 2: Radium girls, though I will say, you know these doctors,
Speaker 2: A lot of these doctors, they testify they are great.
Speaker 2: The primary response to this, to this attempt to kind
Speaker 2: of bring it into this industry, is centered around these
Speaker 2: Radium girls who are actively dying and basically organize a
Speaker 2: very effective crusade to bring their employer to some sort
Speaker 2: of justice and to put a stop to this shit.
Speaker 2: And these again, this is an incredibly heroic story. These
Speaker 2: girls are aware we cannot be saved, right. We are
Speaker 2: doing this to stop other people from getting sick and dying.
Speaker 2: Grace Fryer, who is one of the one of the
Speaker 2: Radium girls, said at the time it is not for
Speaker 2: myself I care. I am thinking more of the hundreds
Speaker 2: of girls to whom this may serve as an example.
Speaker 2: Kate Moore writes quote as Grace, who led their fight,
Speaker 2: determined to find a lawyer, even after countless attorneys turned
Speaker 2: her down, either disbelieving the women's claims, running scared from
Speaker 2: powerful radium corporations, or being unprepared to fight a legal
Speaker 2: battle that demanded the overturn of existing legislation. At the time,
Speaker 2: Radium poisoning was not a compensable disease. It hadn't even
Speaker 2: been discovered until the girls got sick. And the women
Speaker 2: were also stemy by the Statute of Limitations, which ruled
Speaker 2: that victims of occupational poisoning had to bring their legal
Speaker 2: cases within two years. Radium poisoning was insidious, so most
Speaker 2: girls did not start to sicken until at least five
Speaker 2: years after they started work. They were trapped in a
Speaker 2: vicious legal circle that seemingly could not be squared. But
Speaker 2: Grace was the daughter of a union delegate, and she
Speaker 2: was determined to hold a clearly guilty firm to account. Eventually,
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty seven, a smart young lawyer named Raymond
Speaker 2: Barry accepted their case, and Grace, along with four colleagues,
Speaker 2: found herself the center of an internationally famous courtroom drama.
Speaker 2: By now, however, time was running out. The women had
Speaker 2: been given just four months to live, and the company
Speaker 2: seemed intent on dragging out the legal proceedings. As a consequence,
Speaker 2: Grace and her friends were forced to settle out of court,
Speaker 2: but they had raised the profile of radium poisoning. Just
Speaker 2: said Grace, as Grace had planned, and you know this
Speaker 2: is again. You know, they're not able to take the
Speaker 2: radium girls, this first group of them grace. They're not
Speaker 2: able to take this case as far as they want
Speaker 2: to because they don't have much time. But they settle.
Speaker 2: They get money for their families, and this becomes an
Speaker 2: international story. And so thousands, hundreds, you know, at least
Speaker 2: hundreds of other women, and I also assume an equal
Speaker 2: number of men at least working in various industries with radium,
Speaker 2: find out for the first time that this shit is dangerous, right,
Speaker 2: And it is like, this is like a horror movie scene.
Speaker 2: Right as these as these stories start to come out
Speaker 2: and they're being read in offices where people are using
Speaker 2: radium paint and doing other shit with radium, right, One dive.
Speaker 1: Men after brushing their teeth, yeah, with with their radium
Speaker 1: tooth basse, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone's just looking at their
Speaker 1: glass of radium water being like uh oh no.
Speaker 2: One young one who worked for another radium corporation. She's
Speaker 2: a dial painter as well, but in a different stay.
Speaker 2: She's in Illinois. Catherine Wolf later recalled, there were meetings
Speaker 2: at our plant that bordered on riots. The chill of
Speaker 2: fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work. And
Speaker 2: now I bet you're wondering, why the fuck would you
Speaker 2: keep working after you learn this. Well, you got to
Speaker 2: keep in mind a lot of the shit is breaking
Speaker 2: right at the start of the Great Depression, right and
Speaker 2: in the middle of the Great Depression, and so people
Speaker 2: are suddenly aware, oh my god, this is killing me.
Speaker 2: But also you know it will kill my family. Is
Speaker 2: if I can't buy food from my kids that I'm
Speaker 2: a single mother to suddenly if we get shit pushed
Speaker 2: out on the street when there are no other jobs,
Speaker 2: so they really this is like it's an impossible situation, right,
Speaker 2: you don't want to die of cancer.
Speaker 3: But also Starvations right around the corner.
Speaker 2: Of Starvations right there too. Yeah, it's it's fucked it's
Speaker 2: fucked up. So yeah, real bummer. But you know what's
Speaker 2: not a bummer, Sophia, these goods and services. That's not
Speaker 2: a bomer at all. Just a good time. So have
Speaker 2: some products, folks, right now we're back. So this is
Speaker 2: it's also you know, part of why people don't quit immediately,
Speaker 2: why there's like a lot of confusion in the industry
Speaker 2: among these workers is just like, well, we still need money,
Speaker 2: and another part of it is that the companies, all
Speaker 2: these radium companies, they're kind of I haven't read precisely
Speaker 2: if the tobacco industry looks at how these companies respond
Speaker 2: when they formulate their own responses later in the century
Speaker 2: to a similar sort of like you know, revelation, but
Speaker 2: they use a lot of the same tactics that will
Speaker 2: later be used by big tobacco. And the biggest one
Speaker 2: is they flood the zone with disinformation. The Illinois firm
Speaker 2: that Wolf worked at, Radium Dial denied any responsibility. And
Speaker 2: the way that they do this is they come out
Speaker 2: and they say, you know, we're concerned obviously about our workers.
Speaker 2: We don't want anyone to get hurt. So we did
Speaker 2: medical tests, you know, we studied. We did tests on
Speaker 2: these women who got sick to try and see if
Speaker 2: they had radium poisoning. Now here's the thing. They had
Speaker 2: done medical tests on these employees, and those tests had
Speaker 2: shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of
Speaker 2: these women had radiation poisoning. So what does Radium Dial do.
Speaker 2: They just lie, They just say the test didn't show anything,
Speaker 2: and they burned that fucking research to further muddle waters.
Speaker 2: They paid for a full page ad where they stated,
Speaker 2: if we at any time had reason to believe that
Speaker 2: any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees,
Speaker 2: we would have at once suspended operations.
Speaker 1: Now, listen, if we had known Harvey Weinstein was some
Speaker 1: sort of a raper, we would have.
Speaker 3: Never allowed him to dominate the film industry like he has.
Speaker 2: Oh God, so here's the thing. This actually gets more
Speaker 2: ghoulish than that. This is one of the worst things
Speaker 2: I've ever heard about a company doing, because not only
Speaker 2: are they hiding research that proves that their employees are
Speaker 2: getting sick from this work, not only are they lying
Speaker 2: to people where they continue to get exposed to more radium.
Speaker 2: Not only are they putting out propaganda, but when their
Speaker 2: workers die, obviously, families who are losing their kids could
Speaker 2: pay for an independent autopsy, could have research done, could
Speaker 2: have these bones studied, and that would prove that these girls,
Speaker 2: they steal the bones of these dead girls to hide,
Speaker 2: to like destroy them so that it can't be like
Speaker 2: they are the bones of their employ their dead employee,
Speaker 2: that is.
Speaker 3: And you said steals their steal their bones.
Speaker 2: I think that might be the worst thing I've heard
Speaker 2: of a company doing to their workers. That's like it's
Speaker 2: a high bar. But that's that's like I mean when
Speaker 2: I say ghoulish, I'm not like, that's not even figured.
Speaker 2: That is literal ghuleshit. You are stealing the bones of
Speaker 2: a corpse. That is actual literal ghullshit.
Speaker 3: Mother, motherfucking bones.
Speaker 2: My dear. Yeah, that is pretty bad. So nineteen thirty eight.
Speaker 3: It's like when fucking.
Speaker 1: Is it Mormons that like convert oh dead people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well they're like they'll make Anne Frank into a
Speaker 2: Mormon iba to.
Speaker 3: Come through a Jewish cemetery and be like, you're a.
Speaker 2: Mormon now, man. I have I have applied what I
Speaker 2: call the Anne Frank rule, which is that if you
Speaker 2: start to bring up or reference Anne Frank in anything
Speaker 2: other than, for example, the Diary of Anne Frank, stop it.
Speaker 2: Stop it. Don't do that, like, let let her be
Speaker 2: she wrote her book. Talk about the book if you
Speaker 2: want to. If you are bringing up Anne Frank for
Speaker 2: any other reason, cease.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily the Martin Luther King rule. It's like, yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: are you white?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Not bring no Luther King into your argument.
Speaker 2: Think you leave it, bitch. There's plenty of things that
Speaker 2: he said, just stop, just stop.
Speaker 3: They do not need to be made a part of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I'm in nineteen thirty eight, not long after
Speaker 2: Catherine Wolf. You know that the stories had gone viral
Speaker 2: in her workplace. They're having these meetings, you know, freaking out,
Speaker 2: do we have to worry about getting cancer? Shortly after
Speaker 2: that point, Catherine wakes up with a tumor on her
Speaker 2: hip and in very short order it grows to these
Speaker 2: size of a grapefruit. Her teeth start to fall out.
Speaker 2: The detail that like fucked me up about this is
Speaker 2: that she wentz in my nightmare. She's like picking fragments
Speaker 2: of her jawbone outside of her mouth, out of her mouth,
Speaker 2: like because it's just crumbling inside of her.
Speaker 3: This is my fucking nightmare. Honestly, literally, I have nightmares
Speaker 3: about this.
Speaker 2: Oh god, it's yeah, it's I can't imagine really much
Speaker 2: worse other than like this happening to your kid, right,
Speaker 2: that's the only thing worse than this's happening here. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 2: and I I don't think I would be a functional
Speaker 2: person if I were going through this. Catherine launches a
Speaker 2: fucking war on her employer, like while she is literally
Speaker 2: pulling fragments of her own jaw out of her head
Speaker 2: on a daily basis. Her body is rotting on her.
Speaker 2: She fucking organizes a legal campaign against them. She sues,
Speaker 2: she's fucking these all of these ladies are fucking awesome.
Speaker 2: She sues her employer, which is one of you know,
Speaker 2: and this is like, not only is this not easy
Speaker 2: because they have a lot of money, but her neighbors
Speaker 2: start coming after her when she sues the Radium Dial company.
Speaker 2: Because it's the Great Depression, there's not a lot of
Speaker 2: other employers, so they're like, you're threatening everyone's ability to
Speaker 2: make a living right. They don't care that they're in
Speaker 2: danger too.
Speaker 3: I want my husband to go to the job that's
Speaker 3: killing them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Catherine does not let this stop her. She
Speaker 2: testifies before a judge she like. The court case goes
Speaker 2: through again, the company tries to delay it. She gets
Speaker 2: too sick to go into court, and so she has
Speaker 2: They have the judge and the lawyers show up to
Speaker 2: her house. She gives her like testimony on her deathbed,
Speaker 2: and she and her lawyer, Leonard Grossman, win their case.
Speaker 2: The horrific story of the Radium Girls builds popular support
Speaker 2: for a whole raft of new regulations. A lot of
Speaker 2: our working workers regulations come out of the backlash to
Speaker 2: what happened to these girls. And in fact, Catherine and
Speaker 2: this whole, like the series of court cases launched by
Speaker 2: the Radium Girls, are a major factor in the establishment
Speaker 2: of OSHA. Right, this is a big part of how
Speaker 2: we get OSHA, and you know it is obviously does
Speaker 2: not save any of these young women, but they are
Speaker 2: continuing to save lives to this day. Before OSHA, about
Speaker 2: fourteen thousand Americans died on the job every year. And again,
Speaker 2: this is like when the country's a third the size
Speaker 2: that it is now today, about forty five hundred workers
Speaker 2: die in the job every year, right, still too many,
Speaker 2: but like that is like the improvement. These girls saved
Speaker 2: a lot of lives, you know, while losing their own.
Speaker 2: It's as admirable as story as I've ever heard. So
Speaker 2: that is a long digression from the story of William Bailey,
Speaker 2: although he did tie into this. You know, he's given
Speaker 2: comments to The New York Times. But you can't really
Speaker 2: talk about radium poisoning without talking about the Radium Girls,
Speaker 2: nor should you. So one crucial difference here between what
Speaker 2: the Radium Dial Corporation and these other radium companies that
Speaker 2: these girls work at is doing, and what Bailey is
Speaker 2: doing is that the death toll of the radium dial
Speaker 2: companies is very well documented because we have all these
Speaker 2: these women who go to work there and they get sick,
Speaker 2: and we know they died, and we know it was
Speaker 2: because of the radium that they were exposed to at work.
Speaker 2: We don't know how many people died or were maimed
Speaker 2: as a result of all of the radiation they got
Speaker 2: from Will Bailey's products, Like because in number one, it's
Speaker 2: a lower dose than the radium dial girls are getting,
Speaker 2: but they're taking it sometimes and these people are taking
Speaker 2: it for years and then maybe ten years later they
Speaker 2: get a cancer and like, well they were a smoker too. Now,
Speaker 2: of course we know that if you're a smoker, you're
Speaker 2: going to get more lung cancer faster if you're also
Speaker 2: exposed to radium. Right, it is not known. We will
Speaker 2: never know how many people do eyed because of this
Speaker 2: guy's stuff. But like he's tens of thousands of people
Speaker 2: are taking the radium products that he makes, maybe more.
Speaker 2: I think his death toll is significant. I think I'm
Speaker 2: guessing this guy's got at least a nine to eleven
Speaker 2: on him, you know, but I don't think it's provable, right.
Speaker 2: It should also be noted that the Radium Dial Corporation
Speaker 2: and others were at least manufacturing products that did something right.
Speaker 2: They had a function. Bailey is just selling pure snake oil.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Whether or not that makes him better or worse is
Speaker 2: pointless to discuss, but I do think the difference is interesting.
Speaker 2: It's also worth noting that the progress that came about
Speaker 2: as a result of the Radium Girl's Brave battle was
Speaker 2: not immediate. As late as nineteen thirty, the FDA had
Speaker 2: taken no serious action against Bailey or his compatriots, and
Speaker 2: these this last court case like ends in nineteen twenty eight, right,
Speaker 2: so there is starting to be backlash building and people
Speaker 2: agitating to like really restrict where this stuff can be used.
Speaker 2: But in nineteen thirty, the FDA is still like, we
Speaker 2: don't have any legal basis to go after this guy.
Speaker 2: Several warnings. The FDA does publish warnings because of all
Speaker 2: of these grizzly photos of dyeing dial painters, but they
Speaker 2: don't really do anything. The FTC is a bit faster
Speaker 2: on the draw. In nineteen twenty eight, which is the
Speaker 2: year that Catherine Wolf sues the Radium Dial company, they
Speaker 2: start an investigation into William Bailey's company right particularly into
Speaker 2: the claims he's making about Ratathor. But this takes a
Speaker 2: while to work its way through the system, so in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty, two years later, they finally charge him with
Speaker 2: false advertising. Now unclear if that would have been enough
Speaker 2: to bring him down. He has enough money at this
Speaker 2: point to have fought this. But this charge comes across
Speaker 2: at the same time as another very significant development, which
Speaker 2: is what's going to actually bring it into not just Bailey,
Speaker 2: but this whole industry. And of course it's a rich
Speaker 2: white guy getting sick from radium poisoning, right, No, that
Speaker 2: leads to real fast changes even the m buyers is
Speaker 2: an upper class athlete. He's a competitive trapshooter, and he
Speaker 2: was the champion of the US Amateur golf tournament.
Speaker 3: In nineteen He didn't say he was that kind of white.
Speaker 3: That's yeah.
Speaker 2: He is is golf champion white. He is also the
Speaker 2: CEO of a metal foundry.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: He is a millionaire who is famous for his parties
Speaker 2: and womanizing. Smithsonian Magazine writes that his quote suave demeanor
Speaker 2: and social conquest at nearby girls schools earned him the
Speaker 2: nickname Foxy Grandpa. So ew, that's probably that's probably something criminal, right,
Speaker 2: that's probably that's probably bad el Foxy Foxy Grandpa. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because he's going after women or people who are so young. Right,
Speaker 2: I'm not sad this guy winds up dying around town. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it is you can't even sing. It is funny that,
Speaker 2: like you have these deeply sympathetic, really incredible people, these
Speaker 2: these radium girls get sick and die and it slowly
Speaker 2: brings change. But like the worst man in the world,
Speaker 2: it's sick on radium and it's this instant fucking backlash. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Seriously, it's like the like the lacrosse like rapist guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that really's like, well, now we got to end radiation.
Speaker 2: You do have to think of this guy. He's like
Speaker 2: a Gatsby type, right.
Speaker 3: Oh, here I pictured Leonard DiCaprio me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's got like horse racing stables in multiple countries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you said Foxy Grandpa. I immediately though, you or DiCaprio.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there you go. So his downfall even buyers.
Speaker 2: His downfall begins in nineteen twenty seven. He's, you know,
Speaker 2: attending the annual Harvard Yale football game, and on his
Speaker 2: way back, he's got a private train, he owns a
Speaker 2: private train car. He's like partying with his friends and
Speaker 2: he falls drunkenly off of his top bunk and injures
Speaker 2: his arm. You know, he thinks it's just like a
Speaker 2: spraying or something, but the pain doesn't leave him.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He goes to a bunch of doctors. He takes different
Speaker 2: treatments for weeks, all these different physical therapies, and you know,
Speaker 2: months go by and it's just not It's still this
Speaker 2: chronic pain. He can't play golf anymore, and the constant
Speaker 2: pain makes it he can't get directions anymore. So he's
Speaker 2: like anything, I'll do anything to deal with this.
Speaker 1: He's like, one, no golf, Two no more trap shooting,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, and.
Speaker 3: Three no more pussy, Like I will kill myself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to fix me, doc. So he's got
Speaker 2: all this money. He shops around for doctors until he
Speaker 2: finds one named Charles Moyer. Now Moyer is one of
Speaker 2: these doctors who who is aware of Bailey's kickback program
Speaker 2: on Ratathor and is like, well, if I get this
Speaker 2: rich guy to take a shitload of Ratathor, I'll get
Speaker 2: I'm getting a fucking I'm getting a pointer. I'm getting
Speaker 2: a couple of points off at each bottle he buys. Right,
Speaker 2: So Buyers tries this stuff. He like says, hey, try
Speaker 2: this Ratathor shit, it'll cure you. Buyers tries it, and
Speaker 2: he likes it. Right, He feels energized. He starts feeling
Speaker 2: like his old self again. He can get hard, he
Speaker 2: can play golf again. I don't know. Is this the
Speaker 2: placebo effect? He just finally did his Was his arm
Speaker 2: just actually healing and he should have given it more time?
Speaker 2: I don't know, But he claims to feel fucking great,
Speaker 2: and in fact he falls. He he is like the
Speaker 2: power user of Ratathor. Right, He's drinking on a daily basis.
Speaker 2: He's drinking three times the maximum maximum recommended dose, and
Speaker 2: he loves it. That his gifts. He starts buying cases
Speaker 2: of it for his friends and loved ones.
Speaker 1: But he's also like taking it off label, right, so
Speaker 1: like three times the maximum amouth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and his doctor's like, sure, that's just three times
Speaker 2: as much money for me. Fuck it. He buys cases
Speaker 2: whenever he gets a new girlfriend, and I think the
Speaker 2: term girl is very literal there. He'll give them cases
Speaker 2: of ratathor to drink for their own health, and he
Speaker 2: starts using it to water his race horses.
Speaker 3: Between mocking killed the horses.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Between nineteen twenty seven and nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 2: he personally consumes between one thousand and fifteen hundred bottles
Speaker 2: of the stuff. Estimates that have been done recently, you know,
Speaker 2: after the fact, when we started to learn how to
Speaker 2: measure radiation better. Scientists now estimate that he exposed himself
Speaker 2: to about three times a fatal dose of radiation over
Speaker 2: the course of four years, the equivalent of several thousand
Speaker 2: X rays. Wow, so that's cool. Starting in early nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty one, buyers began to experience increasing complications. His bones
Speaker 2: seemed to be eating themselves, splintering and dissolving one by one.
Speaker 2: His marrow failed and his kidneys stopped working. A brain
Speaker 2: abscess destroyed his hearing. By the end, he was bedridden,
Speaker 2: unable to move her here, but still alive and horribly alert.
Speaker 2: Now his social prominence means you cannot sweep this under
Speaker 2: the rug. This is a famous rich guy. A radiologist
Speaker 2: Joseph Steiner, who looked at the radiographs of Buyer's rotting bones,
Speaker 2: launched a crusade of his own. He had to take
Speaker 2: action because the other doctors who worked with Buyers, including
Speaker 2: Buyer's personal physician, refused to acknowledge that this was radium intoxication, right,
Speaker 2: I think, because they're all getting kickbacks, like, no, man,
Speaker 2: you're not sick because a radium. You just need to, yeah,
Speaker 2: drink more milk. So this guy Steiner is like, no,
Speaker 2: this is fucking radium poisoning. He's been poisoned by this
Speaker 2: stupid drink he's taking. And you know, he makes this
Speaker 2: enough of a noise about this that a government commission
Speaker 2: is formed to investigate, and they have buyers again. He
Speaker 2: becomes another person. He testifies from his sick bed right
Speaker 2: before he dies to this commission. An attorney who was
Speaker 2: present to that testimony later described quote, a more gruesome
Speaker 2: experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.
Speaker 2: We went to Southampton, where Buyers had a magnificent home.
Speaker 2: There we discovered him in a condition with Beggar's description,
Speaker 2: young in years in mentally alert, he could hardly speak.
Speaker 2: His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two
Speaker 2: successive jaw operations, and his whole upper jaw, excepting two
Speaker 2: front teeth, and most of his lower jaw, had been removed.
Speaker 2: All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly
Speaker 2: disintegrating and holes were actually forming in his skull. Jesus Christ, Yeah,
Speaker 2: pretty fucked up, pretty bad. On December nineteenth, nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 2: the Commission issued a cease and desist to Bailey's company.
Speaker 2: This did not help buyers. He dies in early nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty two, but his death provided the impetus for the
Speaker 2: fdaight to push for expanded power so that they can
Speaker 2: take action against quack medication. A lot of the FDAs
Speaker 2: what teeth it has come out of this period. As
Speaker 2: a result of this, a backlash boiled over from the
Speaker 2: medical community against patent drugs like Ratathor. Regulations came quickly,
Speaker 2: and Bailey's business collapsed. He escaped any personal consequences for
Speaker 2: this or his role in any other countless number of deaths,
Speaker 2: though we know of at least one female friend of
Speaker 2: his who died because he kept giving her ratathor, but
Speaker 2: the number of people who developed cancer as a result
Speaker 2: of taking his and his other products is kind of unknown.
Speaker 2: Bailey does become persona and on grata. After this point,
Speaker 2: he's you know, the press starts going after him. He's
Speaker 2: like hounded in the streets by journalists and stuff. There's
Speaker 2: these constant inquiries from like Newark public health officials. Eventually
Speaker 2: he has to flee town. Right worker or reporters find
Speaker 2: him at his office front at the Adeno Ray Company
Speaker 2: in East Orange and when they ask what kind of
Speaker 2: business he's conducting, he's like, it's an advertising business. And
Speaker 2: they're like, well, the name on the door is the
Speaker 2: same as this radiation product you were selling, and he's like,
Speaker 2: oh no, the name on the door doesn't mean a thing.
Speaker 2: I'm not selling anything radioactive. Eventually, he has to like
Speaker 2: drop out of public life entirely, although weirdly.
Speaker 3: Enough, I feel like he is like Army Hammer.
Speaker 2: Kind of he has more of a second act than
Speaker 2: Army Hammer.
Speaker 3: Oh no.
Speaker 2: He somehow gets a job as the editor of a
Speaker 2: newspaper in New Jersey and like pivots to being a
Speaker 2: politics influencer. He writes books on global politics and like health.
Speaker 2: In World War Two, he's an aircraft observer under the
Speaker 2: First Fighter Command. He invents a method of swimming instruction
Speaker 2: for soldiers he like puts together. He possibly it's hard
Speaker 2: to tell how much of this he definitely does. Some
Speaker 2: of this. Some of it's lies, Like he claims that
Speaker 2: he was the manager of an IBM electronics division during
Speaker 2: the war, and we don't actually know if that's the
Speaker 2: case or not. There's not evidence of it.
Speaker 1: Really, I feel like Charlatan's be Charlatan. Yeah, So it's
Speaker 1: hard for me to like know if like any of
Speaker 1: the achievements or whatever it's it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. What we do know for a fact is that
Speaker 2: on May sixteenth, nineteen forty nine, in Tinsborough, Massachusetts, he
Speaker 2: dies aged seventy four from bladder cancer. And this is
Speaker 2: almost certainly due to all of the radiation tonics that
Speaker 2: he drank over the course of his life. So he
Speaker 2: lasted too long still, but uh, I don't know. Shane
Speaker 2: McGowan beat him by a year. So there's that.
Speaker 1: You've never read the book A drink with Shane McGowan,
Speaker 1: you should absolutely.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 3: Not to you, but to like a person listening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and listen to I mean, all of his albums
Speaker 2: are great. I'm always if you're looking for an inroad
Speaker 2: into the Pogues, Rumsodomy and the Lash never been.
Speaker 1: Beat incredible and but also like read it, read the book,
Speaker 1: listen to the music at the same time.
Speaker 3: It's fucking tight.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, hell yeah. Well that's a happy note to
Speaker 2: end on. Listen, listen to and read Shade mcgo and
Speaker 2: don't irradiate yourself for unclear health benefits.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, if you were gonna drink some uranium tonight,
Speaker 1: maybe don't, maybe don't.
Speaker 2: Maybe no uranium to drink tonight?
Speaker 3: You know you do you girl?
Speaker 1: Okay, you can girl boss your way ins and some
Speaker 1: uranium if you want.
Speaker 3: Yeah, why to tell you? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Uh so got anything to plug?
Speaker 1: Yes, please follow me to my new Patreon patreon dot
Speaker 1: com slash Sophia Alexandra and you can read my writing
Speaker 1: there and you can look at pictures and stuff and
Speaker 1: watch videos.
Speaker 3: It's it's a good ass time. So come through.
Speaker 2: Yeah, come through, check it out, and uh you know,
Speaker 2: go to hell.
Speaker 3: I love you, We all love you. Take care of
Speaker 3: yourself unless you're Bill Bailey. Okay, bye.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
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