Back before digital watches and cell phones existed, watches with luminous hands and numerals were cool — trust me, I used to have one and I loved it. A century ago, the luminous paint got its glow from the wondrous new element radium; THE RADIUM GIRLS: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore tells the story of how the women who painted the hands and the numbers began suffering mysterious, horrifying ailments. Jaws decaying. Cancers. Hair loss. As radium was a miracle substance that promoted and boosted human health, it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with their day job … could it?
At first it appears the company was genuinely clueless about its employees health problems. When it became clear that licking the paintbrushes to keep the tip from spreading (this was precision work) was poisoning them (even without that, there was enough radium dust flying around to be a problem), the company followed the usual corporate pattern. Lie. Obfuscate. False studies and lying experts. It took years before they were held liable for anything.
Moore does an excellent job showing the victims as individuals rather than statistics; it’s startling to realize most of them were around 15 or 16 years old and working full time. But as other histories point out, teenagers in this era were typically seen as young adults, not older kids. Moore tries too hard to end with a sunny conclusion — most of her speculations about how this tragedy influenced worker safety going forward did not convince me.
THE LEDGER AND THE CHAIN: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua D. Rothman spotlights three slave traders — John Armfield, Rice Ballard and Isaac Franklin — who worked together to build one of the most successful slave-trading operations of the 19th century and thereby became wealthy.
The book shows internal slave trading — shipping excess slaves from one part of the country to plantations with a shortage — was an incredibly lucrative career choice. It was also a business that other than treating humans as property, operating like any other. Establishing lines of credit and accepting promissory notes (with the risk that some buyers wouldn’t pay off). Forming partnerships with banks and shipping companies. Arranging for places to hold their slaves until the sale.
In the case of Armfield, Ballard and Franklin, they had the money to buy their own ships and holding pens, then make more money renting them out to other traders. They also worked hard to navigate a constantly changing legal landscape; after Nat Turner’s revolt, several states banned shipping new slaves into their territory so the company had to find ways around them.
While films often portray slave dealers as low-class sleazeballs — the kind of people genteel Southern plantes could barely tolerate — Rothman’s book shows they were perfectly acceptable in polite Southern society, particularly when they got as rich as these three. Rothman never forgets the horror of what they’re doing either, from the families sundered to the brutal transportation conditions to the female slaves raped (the men found this one of the perks of their business). A brilliant book on the subject, though it does leave me feeling like going back in time and killing people.
BY THE BOMB’S EARLY LIGHT: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age by Paul S. Boyer is the book that inspired me to rewatch The Atomic Cafe. The bombing of Hiroshima was one of those events that divided the world into Before and After; the news that a single bomb could reduce an entire city to ruins left Americans excited (the war was over, we had the ultimate weapon) and terrified — how long before some other nation did to New York or Chicago what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
American reactions were all over the map the next few years. Fantasies about the miracles of atomic power used for peace. Sane voices pointing out that nuclear powered taxis would probably never be a thing. Country Western songs about the bomb. Debates over whether now was the time to build a world government to ensure peace, or at least set up international control of nukes. Every profession and field weighed in: the ABA insisted lawyers could make a one-world government happen, classics teachers suggested when atomic power gave us more free time they’d steer people to the books to red. Christians debated whether nuclear war could ever be moral. Movies such as Beginning of the End grappled with the new atomic world; later SF treated radiation as a form of handwavium for anything from Peter Parker’s powers to the giant ants of Them.
Concern ebbed and flowed over the next few years, then the government began churning out reassuring propaganda — the bomb wouldn’t destroy an American city, Hiroshima was the fault of shoddy construction! Yes, radiation can cause cancer, but so can sunlight! In this fashion we settled down into an uneasy peace where the growing number of nuclear weapons was scary, but nothing we couldn’t live with. Specialized but interesting.
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