WORKPLACE SAFETY IN ILLINOIS

To Reuben, access to a safe and secure working environment was a laborer’s right. After all, a worker’s health was not just a matter of well-being; it was their chief asset, the key to providing for their families. “All we [workers] have to sell is our labor,” Soderstrom explained. “If we are injured, our earning power is jeopardized. We know that the toll of accidents is not only one of suffering but one of economic hardship.”[1] Many in organized labor, including Reuben’s mentor John E. Williams, made great strides in securing compensation for injured workers, but the fight to prevent injury proved more difficult. Workers in union shops used their combined power to negotiate for safer conditions. As Reuben described, “In a union shop the wage earner has something to say about working conditions. Collectively, he is the greatest factor in freedom’s cause.”[2] Workers in non-unionized shops, however, faced an employer whose power was absolute. They often suffered deplorable conditions, including malfunctioning equipment, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and a lack of even the most rudimentary safety measures. In the early 20th century a series of sadly preventable tragedies, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York and the Cherry Mine fire in Illinois, awakened the public consciousness to the need for comprehensive safety legislation. Organized labor used this popular support to overcome employer resistance and pass legislation setting uniform safety standards. In Illinois, the most important of these were the Occupational Disease Act, which required employers to “adopt and provide reasonable and approved devices or methods for prevention of industrial or occupational diseases as are incident to such work.”[3] Although inadequate—the laws did not cover some common work-related diseases like silicosis, for example—these laws at least protected workers from the worst abuses, and provided a path for future reform.

That framework came crashing down on April 17, 1935—later referred to by organized labor as “Black Wednesday”—when the Illinois Supreme Court issued a series of four rulings that held the state’s safety law unconstitutional on the grounds that the legislature had failed to establish clear standards for employers to follow. Reuben’s early attempts to replace the Occupational Disease Act failed spectacularly, with only nine senators voting in support of his emergency bill (the greatest legislative defeat in ISFL history).[4] Unprotected, workers in Illinois found themselves at the mercy of their employers. While some owners acted out of a sense of moral duty, many more demonstrated a callous indifference to the safety of their workers. Others went even further, going to elaborate (and disgusting) lengths to disguise the danger to which they had exposed those in their employ.

THE SOCIETY OF THE LIVING DEAD

Of all these cover-ups, none was more outrageous or insidious than the case of the Radium Girls, a group of women and girls from Reuben’s own LaSalle County who had been knowingly poisoned by their employer through repeated exposure to radioactive materials while working for the Radium Dial Company in Ottawa, Illinois. Their story is one of courage, a struggle to overcome intimidation, slander, and legal manipulation at the highest levels to seek justice for themselves and their families.

Discovered in the closing years of the nineteenth century, Radium was originally seen as a wonder drug that could cure anything. It was initially used to treat everything from cancer to arthritis, and could even be found in some local water supplies.[5] Luminous and possessed of powerful (if poorly understood) radioactivity, this seemingly magical material was soon used for a variety of industrial applications. One of the most common was as a luminescent paint for watches, switches and dials so they could be seen in the dark. The Radium Dial Company (RDC) was one of the largest companies to use radium for this purpose, hiring women for its east coast factories to coat watch faces and hands with a radium-based paint. Of course, such detailed work required a fine brush point, so the girls were advised to lick their brushes after each stroke. Hundreds of times each day, Radium Dial employees pointed the fine brush with their lips, repeatedly exposing themselves to radiation. Eventually, of course, the women workers grew ill. Death posts appeared in papers across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and suspicion that the use of Radium was to blame steadily grew. With negative stories mounting, Radium Dial owner Joseph Kelly decided to move his operation out to the Midwest.[6]

In 1922 Kelly set up a new factory in an abandoned high school in Ottawa, Illinois, a small town located in the heart of Reub’s LaSalle County. Luring workers with high wages—as much as $17 dollars a week—Kelly soon employed a large number of local schoolgirls, some as young as 15, who brought the money home to desperate families still reeling from the recent depression. Despite his earlier experience, Kelly continued to instruct his employees to lick the brush. “They learn ya to put the thing in your mouth, that’s the first thing they taught ya,” one survivor later recounted.[7] Ignorant of the risks, the girls often played with the leftover paint. “We used to take a sneak, go into the dark room. Paint our faces up, paint eyebrows and mustaches. And one time we even had one girl who painted her teeth.”[8]

Like their counterparts out east, women at the Ottawa plant eventually became sick, suffering a variety of disfigurations and disease. Dubbed the “Radium Girls” by the press, many of these young girls shared their stories in the hope that they could expose the what was going on at Kelly’s plant. The details of their physical tortures were as compelling as they were gruesome; one after another, the girls told of crippling pain and exhaustion, of losing teeth, jaws, and even limbs. In an interview shortly before her death, one former worker casually told the reporter “I had all my teeth out a year ago. They didn’t decay, just chipped to the roots. Some were filled six times, but they just wouldn’t stay—just dissolved. My jawbone has holes in it.”[9] Others suffered internal injuries. “I used to get the funniest feeling in my legs,” Helyn Much, another of the girls, later recounted. “From knees to ankles, they felt as if they were hollow…” Helyn later discovered that the bones in her legs had been reduced to a honeycombed mess.[10]

Just as horrifying were the lengths to which Kelly and his men went to hide their culpability. Radium Dial, by now fully aware of what was causing these deaths, hired company doctors ordered to claim that the employees had died of pneumonia, typhus, and even syphilis. They whisked the sick away from their families and attempted to dispose of their bodies before independent doctors could examine them. Kelly frequently used bribes and intimidation, buying off potential whistleblowers and threatening to end the careers of anyone who attempted to reveal the terrible truth. The story of one victim’s family, recorded in the 1987 documentary Radium City, was an all too common example:

(Our sister) worked there about six years. And when, oh, it must have been about a year that she was so really bad…My parents took her to a doctor in Chicago, and he confirmed what they thought it was, but he said, “I cannot speak out and tell you, because this would be the end of my career.” Daddy went to a lawyer, but evidently the lawyer was bought off and couldn’t do nothing for us, so daddy said, “just forget it, we won’t go any further.”

And so she was put with the company’s doctor, his hospital, and we had no say whatsoever about that. They wouldn’t let us there. I went there one time and they wouldn’t let me into her room. I had to stay in the hall, and visit from the hall. And she was there for about two weeks and passed away. And when she passed away, it was about two, three in the morning, and they wanted to take her body out, put her body into something, what I don’t know. They wanted to bury it right now. And my brother-in-law happened to be there and he says, “No way is she going to be buried that way. She’s a good Catholic girl and she’s going to have a Mass and a whole funeral.” They had this autopsy set for a certain time, and when our doctor went the autopsy had been performed an hour before he got there. And they said dyptheria. So, what does this tell you?[11]

By 1934, several of these Radium Girls—now ghosts of their former selves—had come to be known by a different nickname: “The Society of the Living Dead.” One reporter gave the following account of his interview with one member of the Society:

“Do you feel the threat of death?” I asked Mrs. Purcell (one of the members).

“I don’t think of it,” she said in her frightened way. She acted like a woman seeing ghosts. Her eyes stayed open with uneasiness…

“How long does the doctor give you?”

“He won’t specify. It may take some time yet, maybe years…I don’t know.”

“Does such a sentence worry you?”

She took a little bottle of red medicine out of her handbag and drank from it greedily. She made a face. “Thant’s better,” she said, then went on: “You were asking? Oh, it’s not so bad. You become reconciled. No, I have no plan. You’ve too much suffering, are too weak, to make any program. Of course, I don’t want to give up. I want to live. Who doesn’t? I’m only 20. There’s much to live for. I used to dance, run around, loved it. I want to drive a car, travel a bit.”

“Would you ever marry again?”

“I suppose I would if someone would have me. No one would have me, I guess.” And she smiled bitterly.[12]

FIGHT FOR JUSTICE

One member of the Society, Inez Vallat, did have a plan. Once a bright and vivacious 19 year-old girl, Inez had been emaciated by radium poisoning. “She was eight years ill,” her father later said. “It showed at the ankles first. Then the hips locked. She got so that she had to walk upstairs backward. Then the teeth fell out and pieces of the jawbone broke loose.”[13] Undaunted, Inez sued Radium Dial under the Occupational Disease Act. Her case went all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court, where Kelly and Radium Dial, no longer able to credibly plead ignorance of the danger in which they placed their workers, instead claimed the legal requirement that they provide a safe work environment was itself unconstitutional. According to historian Claudia Clark:

Among other complaints, the company’s lawyers claimed that the phrases charging businesses with employing “reasonable and approved devices, means or methods” to prevent industrial diseases were “vague, indefinite, and did not furnish an intelligible standard of conduct.” Thus, the act was unconstitutional because “it fails to set up an intelligible standard of duty and violates the due process clauses of the state and Federal constitutions.”[14]

Astonishingly, the Justices agreed, and on Wednesday, April 17, 1935—”Black Wednesday”— the Illinois Supreme Court found Radium Dial not guilty of turning Inez into one of the “living dead.” Vallat vs. Radium Dial Company, along with three other rulings issued on the same day, was used by the conservative Illinois Justices to invalidate the entire Occupational Disease Act. Reuben and his Secretary, Victor Olander, were beyond furious at the ruling. Olander resigned from his posts on the several State Commissions in protest of the decision, as well as the legislature’s and administration’s failure to correct this wretched wrong. Reuben worked tirelessly to pass a new Occupational Disease Act. After his initial attempts at emergency legislation failed, Soderstrom bypassed the normal legislative process entirely, negotiating directly with the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association (IMA) to craft a bill agreeable to both parties that re-established protections for Illinois workers (later referred to as the “agreed bills” process). The new bill passed and was signed into law in March of 1936, allowing 15 of the Radium Girls to again seek restitution from Radium Dial. Unfortunately, Vallet would not be among them; she died one month before the bill’s passage.[15] Catherine Donahue was the first to have her case settled by the new law’s Industrial Commission, which in April of 1938 awarded her a little over $6,000 in damages. Catherine died three months later; Radium Dial appealed the award the following day.[16] In attempt to escape paying restitution, Joseph Kelly closed his company, only to re-open it six weeks later under the name Luminous Processes, Inc. After a series of legal battles, he was eventually forced to pay a total of $10,000 for his actions. The sum was a pittance to Kelly, who made millions as a war profiteer by reprocessing radium into polonium for America’s Atomic Bomb.[17]

Although Kelly escaped justice, the tale of Ottawa’s Radium Girls had a lasting impact, both on the town itself and in the broader American psyche. The workers and their stories have been memorialized in poems, plays, short stories, books, and documentaries. In 2006, Madeline Piller, an 8th grade student in Ottawa, began a campaign to erect a monument to the fallen workers. After years of hard work and advocacy, the Radium Girls memorial was dedicated in 2011.[18]

For Reuben, the girls’ plight was powerful inspiration, a rallying cry used to usher in a new era of workplace safety in Illinois and beyond. In the decades that followed, Soderstrom used the direct ISFL / IMA negotiation process he pioneered to radically expand the Illinois Occupational Disease and Workmen’s Compensation Acts, both in the variety of ailments covered and the amount of compensation received. During World War II, he used his position on the Illinois’s Industrial Safety Committee and Health and Safety Committee to institute a wide array of proactive safety measures, including increased employee training, higher factory and equipment standards, and work-hour limitations to prevent laborer fatigue. In the post-war era, Soderstrom was repeatedly called to Washington to serve on committees advising the President on national safety standards and practices.

Reuben’s reforms drew crucial attention and effort to the need for workplace safety. Still, another abuse highlighted by the Radium Girls tragedy—the exploitation of female workers—was yet to be definitively addressed. The journey to right that wrong soon led Reuben to establish yet another of his pillars of labor: the rights of women in the workplace.

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