![]() The tests were planned for November 1927. Berry had at last found a specialist who would run the new radioactivity tests on the girls Elizabeth Hughes was a physicist and former assistant to von Sochocky. The trial date was set for January 12, 1928. The Court of Chancery was dubbed “the Court of King’s Conscience”9: it was where pleas for mercy that might be left unanswered through a strict reading of the law were heard. Assuming he and the girls were triumphant, there would then be a second trial, which would rule on whether the company was at fault. Instead, the girls’ cases-which had all been consolidated into one case to avoid duplicate hearings-were transferred to the Court of Chancery, where their cases would be presented and a ruling given on whether Berry’s interpretation of the statute held. He was right, in a way the court did not agree with the company. ![]() But Lippmann was quick to give his own interpretation of that kind of legal trickery in the World, calling the attempt by the corporation to take refuge in the statute “intolerable”6 and “despicable.”7 “It is scarcely thinkable,” he wrote, “that the Court will not agree with counsel for the complainant.”8 USRC, as was to be expected, had cited the statute of limitations in its defense the company argued that the cases should be thrown out of court before the firm’s guilt could even be examined. Immediately, Berry got a taste of just what Lippmann could do. ![]() To have him in the girls’ camp was something of a coup. Lippmann was one of its leading writers he would become the paper’s editor in 1929 and later be deemed by several sources as the most influential journalist of the twentieth century. It promised to “never lack sympathy with the poor always remain devoted to public welfare,”5 so the dial-painters’ case was a perfect cause célèbre for the paper to get behind. The World was arguably the most powerful newspaper in America at the time. Separately from the Flinn matter, Hamilton now equipped Berry with what would prove to be an all-important secret weapon: a personal connection with Walter Lippmann and the World. Berry, meanwhile, reported Flinn to the authorities for practicing medicine without a license. He is “impossible to deal with,”4 she exclaimed. Hamilton was frustrated by Flinn’s glib reply. He replied to Hamilton: “What you mean by ‘my recent conduct’ is beyond my ken.”3 He seems to have been unperturbed by Berry’s discovery of his real degree in his eyes, he was still an expert in industrial hygiene-just as Hoffman, a statistician, could also be called a specialist in that field-and he had done nothing wrong. Wiley, reeling from being duped, called him “a real villain.”1 Hamilton wrote to Flinn urging him to “consider very seriously the stand you are taking.”2 But Flinn was nonplussed. The news of Flinn’s non-medical degree was shocking to all.
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