Part Two: William Bailey: The Gwyneth Paltrow of Radiation

Robert and Sofiya finish the story of William Bailey, after a brief interlude to talk about the radium girls.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh yeah, it is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
is always opened with a mixture of consummate skill and
of course inimitable charisma by myself Robert Evans. Also with
me on the call today, Sophie Leechderman, my producer, and

(00:26):
our lovely guest, Sophia Alexandra Sophia, can you can you
do a good? Can you do a good?

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah, oh yeah, it was good.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
It was good, Thank you so much. I actually, in
my free time I moonlight as the kool Aid man.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
Oh yeah, I had heard that.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
I had heard that I will not be doing that
because I would like to be excluded from this narrative.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah. Sophie's just saying that because she drives the Askermeyer
Wiener bus and doesn't want anyone to.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Know she's mad, because she's actually cap'n crunch. You think
you think?

Speaker 1 (01:02):
You think if I was driving that, Jamie Loft just
wouldn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
That's why you got to keep it a secret. Jamie
can't be trusted with that knowledge. Yeah, who knows what
she'd do.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
She probably God damn mine, she'd probably write a book
and then go on a comedy tour about it.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
That's right, clothes.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
How fucking horny that automobile is.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
It is pretty funny. Anytime you see that thing going
into a tunnel. It's a good time. Just good clean fun,
just good clean fun. So we're back and we're talking
about our boy Bill Bailey. So after nineteen twenty one,
Marie Curie has done her big, her big show. Bailey
has had a couple of cons get busted by the government.

(01:44):
But he is. He is off to the races now
making radioactive gizmos to make sure people have all of
the radium they need in their diets for optimum health.
He started selling Yeah, what a hero. He starts selling
a radioactive paperweight called the Bioay, which ensured any working
man could keep a healthy dose of uranium poisoning at

(02:05):
his desk while he worked. Hell yeah, efficiency, that's what
you need. He sold a radioactive water solution Befoorinator, which
is made with putting it's basically putting thorium in your water.
And then there was the ad Dino Ray, his next
foray into the dick medicine game. The a Dinner Ray
was a radioactive belt clip that was meant to beam

(02:25):
straight radiation into your penis. So really just a great
set of products there, Right, he invented the early cell phone.
You know, it.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Sounds like he was a plant by like feminists to
be like, yeah, the only way we can get free,
if we're being honest, is we got to murder.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Some of these men.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah, just like a little bit at a time in
unseen ways, like oh, you know how they get to
go outside the house and work. I propose you put
one in a paper weight.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
Enjoy your work, bitch.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
You know what else? They love belts, blood story someone
in there. You know, it's so fucking like I keep
thinking about, Yeah, there's like some of these weirdo right
wing guys will like flip out every now sperm councer
lower than ever in the West, and you know, like, man,
we made it through the era where people were just
putting shooting straight thorium into their penises, Like it's fine,

(03:21):
We'll make it through microplastics. As a species. I'm not worried,
you know, not that there's not health consequences, but people
aren't going to stop breeding just because we've poisoned ourselves.
We do that a lot.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
No fucking intensifies the more we actually feel like life
is being slowly poisoned quickly.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Everything's fine, folks. So Bailey's products were not cheap, and
you might view him as the same kind of dude
as like again, like the supplement salesmen who sponsor like
info wars and shit with their alpha brain supplements. And
this shit is not cheap. His dick cancer riser costs
like one thousand dollars, so the primary way and old
timey money. Yeah, in old timy money. So like this

(04:02):
is like buying a nice car, right, is buying one
of these dick cancer machines. Holy fuck?

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Sorry, I need to like actually process how much money
he wants for that dick shit.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Yeah, I mean it comes down in price. Eventually he's
selling him for just like one hundred and fifty bucks,
as they But at first, you know, it's.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Hard waiting for Black Friday guys. If anybody is looking to.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Buy for the deal to rate deal. Yeah, once people
start dying, you'll be able to irradiate your tick a
lot cheaper, folks, you know. So by this point, his
first company, Associated Radium Chemists, had been busted by the
Department of Agriculture for false advertising. So this man has
now been busted by different government agencies three times. I

(04:45):
think three different agencies. I think it's the FDA, the FTC,
and now the DA have all like gone after him
for various scams. Nothing stud he.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Got of criminals.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yeah, he has done. He has done the fucking patent
medication con man version of an egot. Yeah, that's great.
So he starts, you know, he forms another company. He
starts making new pills. He makes Linarium, which sounds like
it was basically radioactive icy hot. And thorone, which is
just a dick pill made out of thorium. Right, It's

(05:19):
just a thorium dick pill. It's wrong with me?

Speaker 3 (05:22):
Said that was some radium or whatever. I was like,
that sounds kind of.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Good, sounds kind of I bet it felt good, right,
I bet it felt good. That's all I'll say. He
had founded two new companies by this point. The Thorone, company,
named after his dick pills, was mostly thorium based supplements,
which he promised were good for all glandular metabolism and
faulty chemistry conditions. He also sold the radio Indocrinator, a
gold plated radium harness that you could use in several

(05:48):
ways when around the neck it would rejuvenate your thyroid
and around the midsection it would radiate your adrenals or ovaries.
The radio indocrenator, he claimed, gave off gamma rays that
would i the indocrine glands and I'm gonna could from
the book quackery again here, the idea was that ionizing
i E. Irradiating the indocrine system would increase harmone production,

(06:10):
or it was better understood by it's less enlightened audience.
The device worked by lighting up dark recesses of the body.
The radio indocrenator could even be worn under the scrotum
in a special jockstrap rigged up to energize on inspired penises.
So that's good. We're at like three different ways you
could expose your dick and balls to radiation. Now, like
this guy cannot irradiate enough testicles. Like he just loves it.

(06:34):
He loves it. And you know what they say, do
what you love and you'll never work a day in
your life. You know, respect you Yeah, yeah, radiate what
you love and yeah, you'll never work a day. It
is again unclear how much he believed in the therapies
he was selling. This is a guy who takes radiation
tonics himself. He clearly believes that this is helpful to

(06:56):
some extent as to a lot of people, but also
a lot of his ship is like clearly bogus. There's
definitely a degree because he's done cons before. There's certainly
a degree to which he knows he's conning people, right,
So you know, his stuff goes well, though he starts
doing better and better and make it getting better at
like conning people. He really one of the things that's

(07:16):
going to set him apart from a lot of the
pack is he goes directly to the medical community with
a lot of his inventions. And part of this is
that he's a Harvard man. He knows how to talk
to people who went to like these fancy colleges, right.
He knows the right things to say, he knows how
to put on that proper attitude. And in nineteen twenty four,
William Bailey stands up before an annual meeting of the

(07:37):
American Chemical Society and gives a career defining speech about
the medicinal potential of toxic radium exposure. He announces, we
have cornered aberration disease, old age and in fact life
and death themselves in the indocrines. Basically, like, we've backed
illness into a corner and it's in the endocrine system.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, I'm just watching him stand in front of like
illnesses and the mission accomplished banner.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Just yes, where did it? Yeah? Now, when you envision
this moment, this speech he gives to the American Chemical Society,
you got to think about it the same way we
used to think about like Apple's annual product announcement events. Right,
Will Bailey is the Steve Jobs of radium. Right, He's
getting up there being this is insanely great. You know,
you've never been able to irradiate your dick as much

(08:24):
as you can now. And a lot of people, many
of them doctors, are as excited for this moment as
people were in two thousand and eight to see the iPhone.
So they listened with rapt attention as he walked them
through his newly evolved understanding of how radium therapy was
supposed to work. By this point, Bailey had convinced himself,
or at least decided to market his products under the
understanding that aging was caused by the gradual failure of

(08:48):
one's indocrine glands. This process could be reversed by ionizing
them with radiation, which would reverse damage and rejuvenate the
worn out glands. Full of pride, he told this audience
of scientists, I am satisfied from definitely cinical experience with
the radio indocrenator that a method of ionization is now
available whereby we can definitely, practically, without exception, retard the
progress of cinnocence and give a new lease of relatively

(09:10):
normal functioning power to those whose son of life is
slowly sinking into the purple shadows of that longest night.
The wrinkled face, the drawn skin, the dully the listless gate,
the faulty memory, the aching body, the destructive effects of sterility,
all spell imperfect indocrine performance. So that's cool.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah, yeah, I mean the voice is really the only
part I care about.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, yeah, I do. I do always enjoy when I
get a chance to take that bad boy out for
a spin. So that is some grade a scientific mumbo jumble, right,
just unparalleled nonsense, but it's sold to his audience.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
Part of the act, he mentioned toxins.

Speaker 1 (09:51):
I'd like to know how many toxins are actually going
to be leaving my body?

Speaker 3 (09:57):
Yeah, what's the what's the toxin situation?

Speaker 2 (10:01):
You know, Star Trek. The radium is like a teleporter.
It beams the toxins right out of your body, you know,
the more radium you're exposed to. Yeah, there, you could
sell this shit today, right, we're not far from it.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
Another Republican administration and they'll make it legal to sell
this shit again. Right, It'll go everywhere. Joe Rogan'll be laughing,
which honestly could solve a lot of problems for us.
Like if we just all turned to blind eyed to
radium medicine for like five or six years, we might
be in the clear. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Yeah, we just solved a lot of stuff to just
let the ready.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, put like fifty to fifty ivermectin uranium mix and
just let people shoot it up their assholes. You know,
it'll be fine. So this this shit, this nonsense Bailey's
putting out. It sells to his audience. And part of why, again,
these are all real scientist. Part of why they believe
in what he's saying is they think that William Bailey

(10:58):
is a scientist like them. Right by this point, he
was not just pretending to have graduated from Harvard, but
he started. He'd started claiming that he'd went on to
do graduate work at a prestigious college in London and
become a PhD. Right, he's claiming to be a doctor
now now again. In reality, his Harvard admission exam he
got kind of mid grades on and all of his
worst grades were in like scientific fields engineering, physics. He's

(11:22):
not only is he not a doctor, but this is
specifically the shit he's bad at.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Right, It's like me selling accounting soft.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, exactly, hold of your taxes.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
Yeah, I'm like, you want to know what to do
with your money? Maybe talk to me? Who when someone
says stocks, I just picture.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
A folder and you open it and it's empty.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah. I'm imagining me at like a Jordan Belford at
the end of like when he's doing those big seminars
at the end of Wolf of Wall Street. I'm just
up in front of a crowd, folks. You're hearing a
lot of things about what you can do with your money.
Put it into a four to h one k a
high yield investment. No, no, no, no no. I want to walk
you through the real way to get rich. Bury it
in a big hole. That's right, the big hole method.

(12:06):
For just twenty thousand dollars, I will walk you through
everything you need to do to dig a big hole
in your yard and bury all your money in it.
You know, this is what Warren Buffett does. This is
what Bill Gates is doing. That's why Bill Gates boy
a lot farmland. He needs more holes, you know what.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
Else, For a very small monthly fee, I will let
you keep your money in my big hole.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
That's right. That's right. You put all your money in
my hole, and I promise it'll still be there when
you need it.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
That's right. And it will smell weirder anything.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
That's right. Yes, so his lies are not seriously Again,
there are doctors and scientists, as we'll talk about, who
are angry at Bailey and all of the who do
push back about this. But in the mainstream this is
pretty accepted. And in fact, the paper of record, the
New York Times, reaches out to Bailey the day after

(12:54):
this speech, and they wind up just exerting exerting his
exerting his speech to write an article about the unders
of like irradiating yourself for health. They just without questioning it,
like preprint chunks of his speech as an article in
the New York Times, so he's doing great. By nineteen
twenty five, Bailey moves his headquarters to each Orange, New

(13:14):
Joysey and he launches yet another company, the Bailey Radium Laboratories.
It was through this company that he would produce his masterpiece, Ratathor.
This was a pre bottled radiation infused beverage. Basically, it's
vitamin water if you put a couple horoshima's worth of
rats inside it. So he had the ear of a
decent chunk of the scientific community and a lot of

(13:36):
credulous journalists. And as a result, Bailey decides he's going
to do something new to advertise Ratathor, rather than like
these standard patent med ads. I mean, I think he's
doing these too, but he starts. He starts advertising specifically
in like medical journals and publications, right, And this part
is actually pretty brilliant. He's kind of on the cutting
edge here. He's aware at this point the FTC and

(13:58):
the FDA are looking at him and guys like him right,
putting out specific health claims and like a scientific journal
would get him in trouble. He can't do that, but
he wants scientific legitimacy, and so he realizes if I
just publish research, or at least articles that look like research,
talking in general about radium therapy and how radium affects

(14:18):
the human body, but without making claims about my products.
If I'm just publishing research on radium and it's attached
to the name of my company, that acts as an advertisement.
But I'm not in danger with the FTC. Right, they
can't come after you for that. Yeah, he's smart. This
is an innovation, right, profession. Yeah, so instead of saying
the thorinator will cure your depression, he just bought his

(14:41):
way into publishing scientific monographs and magazines and particularly publications
read by physicians. And I'm going to quote from the
Journal of the American Medical Association here one example of
these monographs. A thirty two page pamphlet published in nineteen
twenty six under the title Modern Treatment of the Indocrine
Glands with Radium Water ratathor the New Weapon of Medical Science,
was mailed to every physician in America. The pamphlet outlines

(15:05):
Bailey's theories and urges skeptical physicians to place one are
two of your most obstinate cases on radium water, so
that you may observe its action right in your own practice.
The pamphlet also included many photographs that purport to show
the process of radium refinement and purification at the Bailey laboratories.
These were later found to be fakes. Bailey simply bought
his radium and mesothorium from the nearby American Radium Laboratory

(15:28):
of New Jersey, bottling it into skilled water distilled water
at his plant and marking up the price more than
four hundred percent. But at least its real radiation.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
You know, yeah, I mean, Lisa, he has integrity.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, That's what I respect is a man
who sells honest poison to you. Right, thank you, good man.
So Bailey shipped his pamphlets to every registered physician in
the country and filled them with testimonials from happy patients
and doctors. He helped blazer trail that would later be
followed by Produe Pharmaceutical decades later in the marketing of

(16:00):
oxycontent by offering a rebate to physicians as a professional fee.
So if you prescribe ratathor to a patient, whatever they
spend on it, you get seventeen percent of that as
a kickback directly to you. Right, that's smart. Now, to
their credit, the AMA does eventually come after it takes
them a while, but the AMA is like, this is

(16:22):
unbelievably unethical, like incredibly evil, but it works really well.
And again, some of these doctors are prescribing it, are
prescribing the equivalent of like hundreds or thousands of doses
per patient. So there is good money in this shit,
especially because a lot of these patients are rich, right, Like,
you are milking the rich by poisoning them with radiation,

(16:43):
which like not necessarily always bad, you know, worse, it's complicated.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah, yeah, the maybe pio in the maybe file.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah. So from what we can tell, Bailey definitely overhyped
his products beyond what he actually believed they could do.
But he also seems to have been yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
Yeah, radiation, And then you get cocky.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah yeah, and then you start to get a little arrogant.
Right now, he seems to have been genuinely convinced that,
to some extent, radiation was good medicine. Again he is
he becomes a daily user of ratathor. I have found
no evidence that he was lying about this. He does
seem to have taken his own poison, and we'll talk
more about that at the end.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
Again, I respect him. Is this actually a fan episode.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Because yeah, yeah, this is now we're fans of this guy, right,
That's all I'm hearing is. And he does seem to
he seems to be upset. And again he is to
some extent consciously still conning people because he has he
has made con products like he has made outright cons
So he's he's both we all contain multitudes, right, And
he does seem to have an actual obsession with trying

(17:55):
to figure out why radium is good for you. Right,
he is trying. And again he doesn't have any competence
as a scientist, but he does try to do his
own research here and I'm going to quote from Smithsonian
Magazine again. By nineteen twenty five, Bailey had formulated his
central pharmacological thesis concerning radium stimulatory powers, as described in
a lecture that he gave in nineteen twenty five. This

(18:16):
thesis was essentially a variant of the radiation as catalyst
school of thought. More than ninety percent of all diseases,
claimed Bailey, were the result of indocrinologic funk dysfunction that
prevented the transmission of essential physiological factors. Without the correct
metabolic signals, the body lapsed into a state of biochemical
energy deprivation. Eventually, this state exhausted the perchonymal organs, resulting

(18:38):
in anemia, lassitude, cancer, depression, idiocy, and many other problems.
Bailey believed that the energy lost through ineffective metabolism could
be replenished using the power of radium's alpha particles, thus
allowing the body to return to its proper state of
oxidative metabolic balance through radioactive gland control. Yeah that all scans.
That seems real.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Sure, Yeah, Actually, uh me and my girls, yea our
band radio Radioactive gland Controls.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
So yeah, that's actually a pretty good band name.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
Yeah, we're piking actually opening for what's the name of
that of the name of that like device that that
dude was pedaling to make your dick what was it called?

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, oh uh uh thorn.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, yeah, we're actually opening for our own so yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yeah, And speaking of irradiating your dick again, you can
buy some dick pills that probably aren't radioactive if you
listen to these ads. Ah, we're back and uh yeah,
we're we're talking Bill Bailey. So Rada Thor takes the

(19:52):
fuck off. This is a huge success. He finally has
his big hit right. It's fucking it's it's fucking whe
He sells more than four hundred thousand half ounce bottles
of ratathor in just five years, and again these are
all four hundred percent markup, so he is making bank
off this shit. Now, by this point the boom years

(20:13):
of ratathor, evidence had begun to mount that there were
horrific long term health consequences to being exposed to radiation.
And this is going to bring us to a bit
of a digression. But this is a story worth telling,
infamous tale of the Radium Girls. It is this is
a fuck I think a lot of people are broadly
aware of this, which is why I didn't like make
it the whole focus. But this is a wild ass story.

(20:35):
It is laid out in gripping detail by author Kate
Moore in her book The Radium Girls.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yeah, I was like, why do I know that?

Speaker 2 (20:44):
I think people have heard this, and this is the
Radium Girl story is a standard story of like an
evil corporation abusing its workers for profit, you know, when
they should have known better, and ultimately killing them. It's
very shady. I wanted to focus more on the patent
medicaid and stuff because that's more fun. But we are
going to talk about the radium girls. Now. This is
this is where shit gets pretty bleak. As I've noted before,

(21:07):
sufficient doses of radium and like toothpaste will make your
teeth glow, right, this was the thing people advertised for
at the time. This meant that radium, because it can glow,
has the potential practical uses. You can make stuff like
watches and dials that need to glow in the dark,
glow right for like planes, for military equipment, right, for
industrial equipment, and like it's obviously it's useful if you

(21:27):
have like a watch that can glow in the dark, Right,
you don't have to like, yeah, a road divide our compass, right,
you know, all of the different things you need if
you're like firing artillery in the night or some shit.
So obviously there's a military application. A lot of this
takes off, like radium dial painting takes off as an
industry when we get into World War One because there's
a sudden demand for the equipment that they need to

(21:49):
be able to have, like dials lit up on and
This is a demanding job, right, you cannot if you
are if you are working on stuff that's going to
be military. It's going to be used to like drop
bombs and fire shells at people. It has to be precise, right,
you have to be accurately putting everything on. So that is,
you know, a job that has to be done by

(22:10):
skilled workers. And there's no other way to apply this
stuff than by hand. Right, it has to be done
by hand, and women with tiny hands were generally seen
to be the best at this job. Right, So dial
painting becomes.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
Robert just fecking texting the next time a pod just secking.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
Like that.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
You would have been a great radium although it's girl.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
Yeah, those radium girl.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
You have those radium girl hands. You don't want to
have those because it does not end well for them.
But this is considered an incredible job for a while, right,
it has a reputation for being the elite job of
poor working girls because it pays three times normal factory wages.
Kate Moore notes that dial painters were in the top
five percent of female workers nationally when it came to compensation.

(22:56):
So like this is seen for ambitious, poor young women.
This is how you get a leg up. This is
how you can escape poverty, right, which is again why
this is a lot less fun than selling radioactive poison
to rich people. Because these jobs are so good, the
first women who get them guard them jealously, often recruiting
close friends, and they keep it in the family, right.
They're like, if there's an opening, I'm going to make

(23:17):
sure my sister, my aunt, my niece gets the job,
rather than like somebody off the street. And so one
of the things that's going to be devastating about this
is that often factories will have like multiple sisters, all
the sisters in a family working side by side on
the production line, and you know, one guess as to
how their lives end right. Other workers at the factory,
and this is very important. The radium girls are not

(23:39):
wearing any kind of ppe. They are exposed directly physically
through their skin with a mix of radium and paint. Right,
it's like mixed into a powder and then turn into
a paint. Basically, they have no protective gear. The workers
at the factory that is making the paint, that's mixing
these pigments, that are processing raw radium, they wear protective gear. Right,
they've got like lead aprons. They're wearing gloves like they

(24:02):
understand they matter. They in fact are men.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, they matter, Like that's obvious, Like what are we
gonna be wasting stacy equipment on fucking vaginas.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
That is a big part. That is a big part
of what's going on. But that's it's interesting. That's not
all of it. As we'll talk about, a lot of
these men are insanely reckless with this stuff in ways
that kind of confuse me, because they do know it's dangerous.
They're covering up the dangers for the women, but they
are also taking risks with this shit. I don't fully
get some of it. You get the feeling. I think

(24:35):
radium and uranium and shit. When people first started fucking
with it, I think it kind of there's a high.
I don't know if it's like an actual physical high
that it affects your brain, but like because of all
of the buzz around this, because of how new and
exciting is, it deranges people a little bit. I don't
I don't know that. I don't think there's like a
medical or pharmacological I think it's a psychological thing, but

(24:55):
it does appear to be. We'll talk about this in
a bit, but that.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
Doesn't in the first Uh yeah, but I was thinking like,
since the life expectancy is so not great, like, how
many studies could there have been possibly done?

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Oh there's none at this point, right, No, like for.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
Somebody like you might absolutely be one hundred percent correct,
Like how would you check that?

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah, I mean they know that it can kill you
just because like pure radium will like burn people. People
have died as a result of that. But the idea
that like tiny amounts, like for one thing, it hasn't
been being used long enough that people who are being
exposed constantly as smaller doses are getting aren't getting cancer yet,
So you can't really like it's just not as it
wasn't immediately clear. Although as we'll talk about, they did

(25:44):
know enough that they should have been taking precautions, right,
But they certainly don't know nearly as much as we
know now, right. And part of why they're not giving
these girls PPE is that the paint used by the
radium girls is so diluted. They're like, it can't this
is not enough to be danger And again, part of
how they're thinking about this, they're not thinking about this
the way we think about radiation, which is like, yeah,

(26:04):
you want to be exposed to as little radiation as possible. Right,
they're thinking about it as well. In high doses, super concentrated,
you know, radium can be very dangerous to people, but
in lower doses it's a medicine. It treats these different illnesses.
So it's like they're thinking about it the way we
think of aspirin. Right. Obviously, if you were to like
chow down on a brick of aspirin, you would get

(26:26):
very sick. But if you take a pill when you've
got a headache or whatever, you feel better. You know.
That's kind of how they're thinking about this, right, So
they're like, well, in these doses, it's not going to
hurt these girls right now. Obviously this is absurd. As
Kate Moore writes in a column for BuzzFeed, radium's luminosity
was part of its allure, and the dial painters soon
became known as the ghost girls because by the time

(26:47):
they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark.
They made the most of the perk, wearing their good
dresses to the plants so they'd shine in the dance
halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth
for a smile that would knock the suitors dead. Grace
and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they'd been taught
for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some
of which were only three and a half centimeters wide.

(27:08):
The girls were instructed to slip their paint brushes between
their lips to make a fine point, a practice called
lip pointing or lip dip paint routine. As playwright Melanie
Marnick later described it, every time the girls raised the
brushes to their mouths, they swallowed a little bit of
the glowing green paint. So that's that's great, that's good. Yeah, yeah, Now,

(27:29):
one of the women who instructed Grace in this technique
later recalled to an interviewer, the first thing we asked
was does this stuff hurt you? Naturally, you don't want
to put anything in your mouth that is going to
hurt you, mister savoys, The manager said it wasn't dangerous,
that we didn't need to be afraid. Now, this was
a lie. Even giving the incomplete understanding of radiation at
the time. They knew enough to know that there was

(27:50):
a danger to the jobs these women. Again, the men
handling radium and labs are wearing lead aprons and tongs
and shit. These women are not even warned that those
precautions exist, right, They're not being told that there is
an amount of radium that's dangerous because that is that's
common knowledge to scientists, but to lay people, there's no
knowledge that there's any danger to this stuff. That's like
widespread and like so, even though I think a lot

(28:14):
of these guys legitimately believed they were not being exposed
enough to hurt them, these women were not being told
that there are any potential dangers to radium, which, like
is irresponsible. Is particularly bad because the founder of the
US Radium Corporation, which employed the radium girls, was a
scientist named Sabine von Sochoki. He literally invented the paint
that they used, and he was aware of the dangers

(28:36):
of radium, even in smaller quantities. Again, this is not
just some businessman who adopts this because it's good money.
This is a scientist. He had worked personally with the
Kiris in the earliest radium research. He had seen radiation burns,
and he had been injured by radiation himself. And I'm
going to quote from the radium girls here, from them
and from the specialist medical literature he had studied. Von

(28:58):
Soochoki understood that radio carried great dangers. The curries by
that time were intimately familiar with radium's hazards, having suffered
many burns themselves. Radium could cure tumors, it was true,
by destroying unhealthy tissue, but it was indiscriminating in its
powers and could devastate healthy tissue too. Von Sachoki himself
had suffered its silent and sinister wrath. Radium had gotten
into his left index finger, and when he realized, he

(29:21):
hacked the tip of it off. It now looked as
though an animal had gnawed it. Of course, to the
layman this was all unknown. The mainstream position, as understood
by most people, was that the effects of radium were
all positive, and that was what was written about in
newspapers and magazines. So again, this guy that finger is intent, Yeah,
like he cut his own finger off when he got
a little bit of it in there. He knows these

(29:42):
girls are taking a risk, and he just doesn't care, right.

Speaker 1 (29:46):
Like I made the sexism joke earlier, which I'm sure
is a part of it, but I mostly think, honestly,
it's a classism thing, right, Yeah, it's like you don't
give a fuck, like you know, Okay, I'm gonna recommend
this book that I've talked about before called The Fashion
Victims by Alison Matthews David. I sent you guys it
because I'm going to do a podcast with her.

Speaker 3 (30:07):
But she talks about.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
All of the different like ways that clothes were essentially
killing people that were making them and wearing them.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
But one of the things is like.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
The people that work in the factories matter so little
that their lives are totally an okay thing to sacrifice,
which is like why workers' rights even had to be
a thing. You know, people were just like, oh, yeah,
we give a fuck about the people that make our shit,
like that would not even be an issue clearly anyway,
I'm not saying anything new, but.

Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, no, no, yeah, that's I always valid to like
bring up, especially when we as we're in this new
age of unionization, Like there's a good reason why because
without unions and worker protections, they would literally just poison
us all with radium. First yeah to.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Death, and they don't care because there's a million more
people shit.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah. And again, I will say, as we're as we're
critiquing him for this very validly, he is also again
he has this kind of irrational transfiction with radium, right,
And by all reports, he was also pretty reckless with
this shit. He was known to play with it, to
hold tubes of radium with his bare hands to watch,

(31:17):
like he would turn the light off so we could
like watch its luminosity in the dark. He would expose
his arm up to the elbow in Radium Solutions Company
co founder George Willis was also really reckless. He would
pick up tubes of radium with his like four finger
finger and they were supposed to use forceps, but he
would just use his hands. And again, these guys are
so reckless with this stuff because they just kind of
love it, and their colleagues are like, well, these guys

(31:40):
are the scientists. If they're doing this, it must be safe.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
And again, if he saw.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
This in a movie, and you do see it, and
like you know superhero movie, when a like a villain
or what like draw the thing, You're always like, this
is so ridiculous. But listening the way that these people
actually relate to uranium and shitaactly.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
I'm like, it's wild, right.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, psychological, yeah, something component that is connected to it,
because like, ef, that's not normal.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
No, and yeah I do. I don't fully understand what
it is, but something is clearly going on here because
these people are yeah, they're treating it, yeah, like a
fucking villain in a Spider Man movie treats like the
superheroes Sarum or some shit, right, Like they're Willem Defoe
right here. Yes. And it's interesting because, like a lot,
there are scientists, prominent ones who are warning about this,

(32:31):
one of them. Normally. This is the only time we're
going to bring up Thomas Edison and him not be
the bastard. But Thomas Edison was aware of all this
and thought it was fucking crazy. He remarked right around
this time, there may be a condition into which radium
has not yet entered that would produce dire results. Everybody
handling it should have care, right. That's again the only
time Edison says something perfectly reasonable, but like, yeah, man,

(32:55):
they probably should be wearing protection. He's basically like, we
don't understand this stuff. You're just you're sticking your arm
into a vat of it? What is wrong with you?
Like this burns people. We should be careful here now.
You will not be surprised to hear that the effect
of all of this radium on the bodies of the
young women painting these dials was nothing short of calamitous.

(33:15):
The radium that they had eaten particularly settled inside their
bodies and basically honey combs their bones with radiation. It
is drilling holes inside their bones like Swiss cheese. This
kills their marrow and it causes their bodies to literally
collapse in on it themselves like a dying star. One worker,
this young woman named Grace, her spine is crushed. She

(33:38):
is like given a brace. Basically her spine just crumbles
inside of her. Another girl has her jaw eaten away
to a stump. Some girls would shrink, they would lose
multiple inches because their leg bones are just crumbling and
compacting from the inside. And while all of this is
going on, their bones were glowing in the dark, right
so fucked up like it is. Some of these women

(34:00):
first realized they were sick when they saw their They
would see their own bones glowing back at them. In
the mirror, like what the fuck, Yeah, it's insane, and like, yeah,
we've got a picture here. This is one of the
radium girls who has I mean, honestly, I don't mean
to be like blithe about this. It looks like a
nineties prosthetic, like if you were going to give someone

(34:21):
a fake chin for like a skit where they're you know,
you're trying to make them look like Jay Leno or
something like that's what. But it's just a tumor. It's
like a tumor that's a good eight inches of like
chin basically like it's grueser it. It's really thick, I
mean it is. It's actually it's more like the mass
of a brick that's just stuck under her jaw. Like

(34:43):
the tumors these these young women got are ghastly some
of the most unsettling body horrorshit I have ever encountered
in my research. Like it is gnarly. And yeah, obviously,
by the time you have this kind of radium exposure,
there's no cure treatment. You can't fix this, like this

(35:04):
is this is by the time your bones are glowing
in the dark, you're dead, you know.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
But also, how much research and work would have to
even be done for anybody to even try to reverse it.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
Yeah, I mean, like there's no way to even.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Like there's so far behind the ball.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
On the But even then, I think today, by this point,
I don't think there's shit we could do for these girls.

Speaker 3 (35:26):
Oh no, we can't. We can't fix it.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
I'm just saying, like the amount of time you would
need to figure out how to solve something like this,
like they do not have that time.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah, no, absolutely not, Like this is a death sentence
and they you know, these are not dumb people. These women,
like they realize as soon as they they don't know
what radiation poisoning is because it's not really well known
at that point, but they know by the time your
bones are crumbling inside of you, well I'm going to die,
right They are not. They are not possessed of like

(35:55):
irrational like like hope here, you know, they're very aware like,
oh my god, my job has fucking killed me. I
was lied to right now, while they start coming out
going to the press trying to like get help, like
get you know, basically the equivalent of workmen's comp for
getting poisoned at work. The radium industry these companies making
the paints, painting the dials deny there is any danger

(36:18):
to their products. They basically say, these girls are crazy.
Something else is wrong with them. Radium. We all know
radium's a health product, right, and there's so little of
it in this paint that no one could get harmed
by it, right. And in fact, when the story that
radium girls are getting sick breaks in the news, the
New York Times is like, well, we got to report
on this. See if you know, see what's up to it.
You know who can tell us if these girls are

(36:39):
full of shit or not. Our buddy William Bailey. So
they call will Bailey, the guy selling radium water, and
he's like, there's no proof that radium is responsible for
any of these debts. You know, nobody gets sick from radium.
This is just nonsense. They're women, you know, they don't
know anything.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Hi. It's also awesome that if you want to know
about a thing, you don't go to the people have
the thing.

Speaker 3 (36:58):
No, You're like, no, well there to learn from them.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
No, Well, Bailey's a scientist. We the New York Times
didn't check to verify that he has any kind of degree,
but he says he's a scientist, good lie about that,
not a man, I'm being a Harvard man. Yeah, yeah,
So I mean I bet that is a big part
of it. I bet the fucking reporter who reached out
as some Harvard educated writer and was like, well, a
Harvard man would never poison people for money, he would

(37:25):
never lie on behalf of his industry. So now I
will say again, a lot of the doctors and stuff
we're talking about this are are not good people. There
are some these girls, you know, when they get sick,
this is horrifying, and the physicians who are seeing them
and realize what's happened are horrifying, and some very brave
crusading physicians basically go to bat against a significant chunk

(37:48):
of the medical industry and against the radium industry to
like try to get not just get justice for these
girls because to an extent that's impossible, but to try
and stop people from being exposed to radium, right because
they realize, oh, these girls are getting sick from radium paint.
All of these products on their shelves are full of radium.

(38:08):
Potentially tens of thousands, hundred thousands of people could be getting
sick we have to stop this shit, right and the
Radium girls, though I will say, you know these doctors,
A lot of these doctors, they testify they are great.
The primary response to this, to this attempt to kind
of bring it into this industry, is centered around these

(38:28):
Radium girls who are actively dying and basically organize a
very effective crusade to bring their employer to some sort
of justice and to put a stop to this shit.
And these again, this is an incredibly heroic story. These
girls are aware we cannot be saved, right. We are
doing this to stop other people from getting sick and dying.
Grace Fryer, who is one of the one of the

(38:50):
Radium girls, said at the time it is not for
myself I care. I am thinking more of the hundreds
of girls to whom this may serve as an example.
Kate Moore writes quote as Grace, who led their fight,
determined to find a lawyer, even after countless attorneys turned
her down, either disbelieving the women's claims, running scared from
powerful radium corporations, or being unprepared to fight a legal

(39:10):
battle that demanded the overturn of existing legislation. At the time,
Radium poisoning was not a compensable disease. It hadn't even
been discovered until the girls got sick. And the women
were also stemy by the Statute of Limitations, which ruled
that victims of occupational poisoning had to bring their legal
cases within two years. Radium poisoning was insidious, so most
girls did not start to sicken until at least five

(39:31):
years after they started work. They were trapped in a
vicious legal circle that seemingly could not be squared. But
Grace was the daughter of a union delegate, and she
was determined to hold a clearly guilty firm to account. Eventually,
in nineteen twenty seven, a smart young lawyer named Raymond
Barry accepted their case, and Grace, along with four colleagues,
found herself the center of an internationally famous courtroom drama.

(39:53):
By now, however, time was running out. The women had
been given just four months to live, and the company
seemed intent on dragging out the legal proceedings. As a consequence,
Grace and her friends were forced to settle out of court,
but they had raised the profile of radium poisoning. Just
said Grace, as Grace had planned, and you know this
is again. You know, they're not able to take the

(40:13):
radium girls, this first group of them grace. They're not
able to take this case as far as they want
to because they don't have much time. But they settle.
They get money for their families, and this becomes an
international story. And so thousands, hundreds, you know, at least
hundreds of other women, and I also assume an equal
number of men at least working in various industries with radium,

(40:33):
find out for the first time that this shit is dangerous, right,
And it is like, this is like a horror movie scene.
Right as these as these stories start to come out
and they're being read in offices where people are using
radium paint and doing other shit with radium, right, One dive.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
Men after brushing their teeth, yeah, with with their radium
tooth basse, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone's just looking at their
glass of radium water being like uh oh no.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
One young one who worked for another radium corporation. She's
a dial painter as well, but in a different stay.
She's in Illinois. Catherine Wolf later recalled, there were meetings
at our plant that bordered on riots. The chill of
fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work. And
now I bet you're wondering, why the fuck would you
keep working after you learn this. Well, you got to
keep in mind a lot of the shit is breaking

(41:20):
right at the start of the Great Depression, right and
in the middle of the Great Depression, and so people
are suddenly aware, oh my god, this is killing me.
But also you know it will kill my family. Is
if I can't buy food from my kids that I'm
a single mother to suddenly if we get shit pushed
out on the street when there are no other jobs,
so they really this is like it's an impossible situation, right,

(41:42):
you don't want to die of cancer.

Speaker 3 (41:44):
But also Starvations right around the corner.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
Of Starvations right there too. Yeah, it's it's fucked it's
fucked up. So yeah, real bummer. But you know what's
not a bummer, Sophia, these goods and services. That's not
a bomer at all. Just a good time. So have
some products, folks, right now we're back. So this is

(42:15):
it's also you know, part of why people don't quit immediately,
why there's like a lot of confusion in the industry
among these workers is just like, well, we still need money,
and another part of it is that the companies, all
these radium companies, they're kind of I haven't read precisely
if the tobacco industry looks at how these companies respond
when they formulate their own responses later in the century

(42:37):
to a similar sort of like you know, revelation, but
they use a lot of the same tactics that will
later be used by big tobacco. And the biggest one
is they flood the zone with disinformation. The Illinois firm
that Wolf worked at, Radium Dial denied any responsibility. And
the way that they do this is they come out
and they say, you know, we're concerned obviously about our workers.

(42:58):
We don't want anyone to get hurt. So we did
medical tests, you know, we studied. We did tests on
these women who got sick to try and see if
they had radium poisoning. Now here's the thing. They had
done medical tests on these employees, and those tests had
shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of
these women had radiation poisoning. So what does Radium Dial do.
They just lie, They just say the test didn't show anything,

(43:21):
and they burned that fucking research to further muddle waters.
They paid for a full page ad where they stated,
if we at any time had reason to believe that
any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees,
we would have at once suspended operations.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
Now, listen, if we had known Harvey Weinstein was some
sort of a raper, we would have.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
Never allowed him to dominate the film industry like he has.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
Oh God, so here's the thing. This actually gets more
ghoulish than that. This is one of the worst things
I've ever heard about a company doing, because not only
are they hiding research that proves that their employees are
getting sick from this work, not only are they lying
to people where they continue to get exposed to more radium.
Not only are they putting out propaganda, but when their

(44:10):
workers die, obviously, families who are losing their kids could
pay for an independent autopsy, could have research done, could
have these bones studied, and that would prove that these girls,
they steal the bones of these dead girls to hide,
to like destroy them so that it can't be like
they are the bones of their employ their dead employee,

(44:34):
that is.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
And you said steals their steal their bones.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
I think that might be the worst thing I've heard
of a company doing to their workers. That's like it's
a high bar. But that's that's like I mean when
I say ghoulish, I'm not like, that's not even figured.
That is literal ghuleshit. You are stealing the bones of
a corpse. That is actual literal ghullshit.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
Mother, motherfucking bones.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
My dear. Yeah, that is pretty bad. So nineteen thirty eight.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
It's like when fucking.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
Is it Mormons that like convert oh dead people.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah, well they're like they'll make Anne Frank into a
Mormon iba to.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Come through a Jewish cemetery and be like, you're a.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Mormon now, man. I have I have applied what I
call the Anne Frank rule, which is that if you
start to bring up or reference Anne Frank in anything
other than, for example, the Diary of Anne Frank, stop it.
Stop it. Don't do that, like, let let her be
she wrote her book. Talk about the book if you

(45:47):
want to. If you are bringing up Anne Frank for
any other reason, cease.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
It's not necessarily the Martin Luther King rule. It's like, yeah, sorry,
are you white?

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (45:57):
Not bring no Luther King into your argument.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Think you leave it, bitch. There's plenty of things that
he said, just stop, just stop.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
They do not need to be made a part of it.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Yeah. So I'm in nineteen thirty eight, not long after
Catherine Wolf. You know that the stories had gone viral
in her workplace. They're having these meetings, you know, freaking out,
do we have to worry about getting cancer? Shortly after
that point, Catherine wakes up with a tumor on her
hip and in very short order it grows to these
size of a grapefruit. Her teeth start to fall out.

(46:30):
The detail that like fucked me up about this is
that she wentz in my nightmare. She's like picking fragments
of her jawbone outside of her mouth, out of her mouth,
like because it's just crumbling inside of her.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
This is my fucking nightmare. Honestly, literally, I have nightmares
about this.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
Oh god, it's yeah, it's I can't imagine really much
worse other than like this happening to your kid, right,
that's the only thing worse than this's happening here. Yeah, Like,
and I I don't think I would be a functional
person if I were going through this. Catherine launches a
fucking war on her employer, like while she is literally

(47:06):
pulling fragments of her own jaw out of her head
on a daily basis. Her body is rotting on her.
She fucking organizes a legal campaign against them. She sues,
she's fucking these all of these ladies are fucking awesome.
She sues her employer, which is one of you know,
and this is like, not only is this not easy
because they have a lot of money, but her neighbors

(47:28):
start coming after her when she sues the Radium Dial company.
Because it's the Great Depression, there's not a lot of
other employers, so they're like, you're threatening everyone's ability to
make a living right. They don't care that they're in
danger too.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
I want my husband to go to the job that's
killing them.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Yeah, exactly. Catherine does not let this stop her. She
testifies before a judge she like. The court case goes
through again, the company tries to delay it. She gets
too sick to go into court, and so she has
They have the judge and the lawyers show up to
her house. She gives her like testimony on her deathbed,
and she and her lawyer, Leonard Grossman, win their case.

(48:04):
The horrific story of the Radium Girls builds popular support
for a whole raft of new regulations. A lot of
our working workers regulations come out of the backlash to
what happened to these girls. And in fact, Catherine and
this whole, like the series of court cases launched by
the Radium Girls, are a major factor in the establishment

(48:24):
of OSHA. Right, this is a big part of how
we get OSHA, and you know it is obviously does
not save any of these young women, but they are
continuing to save lives to this day. Before OSHA, about
fourteen thousand Americans died on the job every year. And again,
this is like when the country's a third the size
that it is now today, about forty five hundred workers
die in the job every year, right, still too many,

(48:46):
but like that is like the improvement. These girls saved
a lot of lives, you know, while losing their own.
It's as admirable as story as I've ever heard. So
that is a long digression from the story of William Bailey,
although he did tie into this. You know, he's given
comments to The New York Times. But you can't really
talk about radium poisoning without talking about the Radium Girls,

(49:08):
nor should you. So one crucial difference here between what
the Radium Dial Corporation and these other radium companies that
these girls work at is doing, and what Bailey is
doing is that the death toll of the radium dial
companies is very well documented because we have all these
these women who go to work there and they get sick,
and we know they died, and we know it was

(49:28):
because of the radium that they were exposed to at work.
We don't know how many people died or were maimed
as a result of all of the radiation they got
from Will Bailey's products, Like because in number one, it's
a lower dose than the radium dial girls are getting,
but they're taking it sometimes and these people are taking
it for years and then maybe ten years later they
get a cancer and like, well they were a smoker too. Now,

(49:51):
of course we know that if you're a smoker, you're
going to get more lung cancer faster if you're also
exposed to radium. Right, it is not known. We will
never know how many people do eyed because of this
guy's stuff. But like he's tens of thousands of people
are taking the radium products that he makes, maybe more.
I think his death toll is significant. I think I'm
guessing this guy's got at least a nine to eleven

(50:12):
on him, you know, but I don't think it's provable, right.
It should also be noted that the Radium Dial Corporation
and others were at least manufacturing products that did something right.
They had a function. Bailey is just selling pure snake oil.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
You know.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Whether or not that makes him better or worse is
pointless to discuss, but I do think the difference is interesting.
It's also worth noting that the progress that came about
as a result of the Radium Girl's Brave battle was
not immediate. As late as nineteen thirty, the FDA had
taken no serious action against Bailey or his compatriots, and
these this last court case like ends in nineteen twenty eight, right,
so there is starting to be backlash building and people

(50:49):
agitating to like really restrict where this stuff can be used.
But in nineteen thirty, the FDA is still like, we
don't have any legal basis to go after this guy.
Several warnings. The FDA does publish warnings because of all
of these grizzly photos of dyeing dial painters, but they
don't really do anything. The FTC is a bit faster
on the draw. In nineteen twenty eight, which is the

(51:11):
year that Catherine Wolf sues the Radium Dial company, they
start an investigation into William Bailey's company right particularly into
the claims he's making about Ratathor. But this takes a
while to work its way through the system, so in
nineteen thirty, two years later, they finally charge him with
false advertising. Now unclear if that would have been enough
to bring him down. He has enough money at this

(51:33):
point to have fought this. But this charge comes across
at the same time as another very significant development, which
is what's going to actually bring it into not just Bailey,
but this whole industry. And of course it's a rich
white guy getting sick from radium poisoning, right, No, that
leads to real fast changes even the m buyers is

(51:56):
an upper class athlete. He's a competitive trapshooter, and he
was the champion of the US Amateur golf tournament.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
In nineteen He didn't say he was that kind of white.
That's yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
He is is golf champion white. He is also the
CEO of a metal foundry.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
He is a millionaire who is famous for his parties
and womanizing. Smithsonian Magazine writes that his quote suave demeanor
and social conquest at nearby girls schools earned him the
nickname Foxy Grandpa. So ew, that's probably that's probably something criminal, right,
that's probably that's probably bad el Foxy Foxy Grandpa. Yeah,

(52:35):
because he's going after women or people who are so young. Right,
I'm not sad this guy winds up dying around town. Yeah,
it is you can't even sing. It is funny that,
like you have these deeply sympathetic, really incredible people, these
these radium girls get sick and die and it slowly

(52:57):
brings change. But like the worst man in the world,
it's sick on radium and it's this instant fucking backlash. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Seriously, it's like the like the lacrosse like rapist guy. Yeah,
and that really's like, well, now we got to end radiation.

Speaker 2 (53:12):
You do have to think of this guy. He's like
a Gatsby type, right.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
Oh, here I pictured Leonard DiCaprio me.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Yeah, yeah, he's got like horse racing stables in multiple countries.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
Yeah, you said Foxy Grandpa. I immediately though, you or DiCaprio.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
Yeah, yeah, there you go. So his downfall even buyers.
His downfall begins in nineteen twenty seven. He's, you know,
attending the annual Harvard Yale football game, and on his
way back, he's got a private train, he owns a
private train car. He's like partying with his friends and
he falls drunkenly off of his top bunk and injures
his arm. You know, he thinks it's just like a

(53:47):
spraying or something, but the pain doesn't leave him.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
You know.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
He goes to a bunch of doctors. He takes different
treatments for weeks, all these different physical therapies, and you know,
months go by and it's just not It's still this
chronic pain. He can't play golf anymore, and the constant
pain makes it he can't get directions anymore. So he's
like anything, I'll do anything to deal with this.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
He's like, one, no golf, Two no more trap shooting,
yeah yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
Three no more pussy, Like I will kill myself.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yeah, you have to fix me, doc. So he's got
all this money. He shops around for doctors until he
finds one named Charles Moyer. Now Moyer is one of
these doctors who who is aware of Bailey's kickback program
on Ratathor and is like, well, if I get this
rich guy to take a shitload of Ratathor, I'll get
I'm getting a fucking I'm getting a pointer. I'm getting
a couple of points off at each bottle he buys. Right,

(54:36):
So Buyers tries this stuff. He like says, hey, try
this Ratathor shit, it'll cure you. Buyers tries it, and
he likes it. Right, He feels energized. He starts feeling
like his old self again. He can get hard, he
can play golf again. I don't know. Is this the
placebo effect? He just finally did his Was his arm
just actually healing and he should have given it more time?
I don't know, But he claims to feel fucking great,

(54:58):
and in fact he falls. He he is like the
power user of Ratathor. Right, He's drinking on a daily basis.
He's drinking three times the maximum maximum recommended dose, and
he loves it. That his gifts. He starts buying cases
of it for his friends and loved ones.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
But he's also like taking it off label, right, so
like three times the maximum amouth.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Yeah, and his doctor's like, sure, that's just three times
as much money for me. Fuck it. He buys cases
whenever he gets a new girlfriend, and I think the
term girl is very literal there. He'll give them cases
of ratathor to drink for their own health, and he
starts using it to water his race horses.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Between mocking killed the horses.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
Yeah. Yeah, Between nineteen twenty seven and nineteen thirty one,
he personally consumes between one thousand and fifteen hundred bottles
of the stuff. Estimates that have been done recently, you know,
after the fact, when we started to learn how to
measure radiation better. Scientists now estimate that he exposed himself
to about three times a fatal dose of radiation over

(55:58):
the course of four years, the equivalent of several thousand
X rays. Wow, so that's cool. Starting in early nineteen
thirty one, buyers began to experience increasing complications. His bones
seemed to be eating themselves, splintering and dissolving one by one.
His marrow failed and his kidneys stopped working. A brain

(56:19):
abscess destroyed his hearing. By the end, he was bedridden,
unable to move her here, but still alive and horribly alert.
Now his social prominence means you cannot sweep this under
the rug. This is a famous rich guy. A radiologist
Joseph Steiner, who looked at the radiographs of Buyer's rotting bones,
launched a crusade of his own. He had to take

(56:41):
action because the other doctors who worked with Buyers, including
Buyer's personal physician, refused to acknowledge that this was radium intoxication, right,
I think, because they're all getting kickbacks, like, no, man,
you're not sick because a radium. You just need to, yeah,
drink more milk. So this guy Steiner is like, no,
this is fucking radium poisoning. He's been poisoned by this
stupid drink he's taking. And you know, he makes this

(57:03):
enough of a noise about this that a government commission
is formed to investigate, and they have buyers again. He
becomes another person. He testifies from his sick bed right
before he dies to this commission. An attorney who was
present to that testimony later described quote, a more gruesome
experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.
We went to Southampton, where Buyers had a magnificent home.

(57:24):
There we discovered him in a condition with Beggar's description,
young in years in mentally alert, he could hardly speak.
His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two
successive jaw operations, and his whole upper jaw, excepting two
front teeth, and most of his lower jaw, had been removed.
All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly
disintegrating and holes were actually forming in his skull. Jesus Christ, Yeah,

(57:46):
pretty fucked up, pretty bad. On December nineteenth, nineteen thirty one,
the Commission issued a cease and desist to Bailey's company.
This did not help buyers. He dies in early nineteen
thirty two, but his death provided the impetus for the
fdaight to push for expanded power so that they can
take action against quack medication. A lot of the FDAs
what teeth it has come out of this period. As

(58:07):
a result of this, a backlash boiled over from the
medical community against patent drugs like Ratathor. Regulations came quickly,
and Bailey's business collapsed. He escaped any personal consequences for
this or his role in any other countless number of deaths,
though we know of at least one female friend of
his who died because he kept giving her ratathor, but

(58:28):
the number of people who developed cancer as a result
of taking his and his other products is kind of unknown.
Bailey does become persona and on grata. After this point,
he's you know, the press starts going after him. He's
like hounded in the streets by journalists and stuff. There's
these constant inquiries from like Newark public health officials. Eventually
he has to flee town. Right worker or reporters find

(58:50):
him at his office front at the Adeno Ray Company
in East Orange and when they ask what kind of
business he's conducting, he's like, it's an advertising business. And
they're like, well, the name on the door is the
same as this radiation product you were selling, and he's like,
oh no, the name on the door doesn't mean a thing.
I'm not selling anything radioactive. Eventually, he has to like
drop out of public life entirely, although weirdly.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
Enough, I feel like he is like Army Hammer.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Kind of he has more of a second act than
Army Hammer.

Speaker 3 (59:20):
Oh no.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
He somehow gets a job as the editor of a
newspaper in New Jersey and like pivots to being a
politics influencer. He writes books on global politics and like health.
In World War Two, he's an aircraft observer under the
First Fighter Command. He invents a method of swimming instruction
for soldiers he like puts together. He possibly it's hard

(59:43):
to tell how much of this he definitely does. Some
of this. Some of it's lies, Like he claims that
he was the manager of an IBM electronics division during
the war, and we don't actually know if that's the
case or not. There's not evidence of it.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
Really, I feel like Charlatan's be Charlatan. Yeah, So it's
hard for me to like know if like any of
the achievements or whatever it's it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah. What we do know for a fact is that
on May sixteenth, nineteen forty nine, in Tinsborough, Massachusetts, he
dies aged seventy four from bladder cancer. And this is
almost certainly due to all of the radiation tonics that
he drank over the course of his life. So he
lasted too long still, but uh, I don't know. Shane

(01:00:26):
McGowan beat him by a year. So there's that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
You've never read the book A drink with Shane McGowan,
you should absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:37):
Not to you, but to like a person listening.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Yeah, and listen to I mean, all of his albums
are great. I'm always if you're looking for an inroad
into the Pogues, Rumsodomy and the Lash never been.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
Beat incredible and but also like read it, read the book,
listen to the music at the same time.

Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
It's fucking tight.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Hell yeah, hell yeah. Well that's a happy note to
end on. Listen, listen to and read Shade mcgo and
don't irradiate yourself for unclear health benefits.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
Yeah. You know, if you were gonna drink some uranium tonight,
maybe don't, maybe don't.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
Maybe no uranium to drink tonight?

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
You know you do you girl?

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Okay, you can girl boss your way ins and some
uranium if you want.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
Yeah, why to tell you? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Uh so got anything to plug?

Speaker 1 (01:01:26):
Yes, please follow me to my new Patreon patreon dot
com slash Sophia Alexandra and you can read my writing
there and you can look at pictures and stuff and
watch videos.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
It's it's a good ass time. So come through.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
Yeah, come through, check it out, and uh you know,
go to hell.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
I love you, We all love you. Take care of
yourself unless you're Bill Bailey. Okay, bye.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:03):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.