Mrs. Ruth Shipley, Chief of the US Passport Office
Every formal communication or article about Ruth B. Shipley, whether written by journalists during her lifetime or by scholars in the decades since her death, refers to her as Mrs. Ruth Shipley. She was formidable. She was powerful. And in the end, she was controversial. In 1951, Time magazine described her as “the most invulnerable, the most unfireable, most feared and most admired woman in Government.” And yet, she is largely forgotten today.*
Mrs. Shipley* was the Chief of the State Department’s Passport Division for 27 years, from 1928 to 1955. She did not simply run the department—she personally approved and disapproved passport applications, often based on her own sense of whether an applicant would, as Reader’s Digest described it “be a hazard to Uncle Sam’s security or create prejudice against the United Stats by unbecoming conduct.” As a result, many Americans whose names we do remember corresponded with her about their travel plans.
Shipley took her duties seriously. In 1933, she led a successful campaign to prevent a magazine from using the word “passport” in a advertising campaign for its promotional literature. She believed such use “cheapened…the high plane to which a passport has been raised.*** In 1937, she changed Passport Division policy and began issuing passports in a married woman’s name without caveat, if the woman requested it. Previously married women’s passports were issued with her name followed by the phrase “wife of”.****
The functioning of the Passport Division was affected by larger issues of American politics. The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s restricted the ability of American citizens to do business abroad, and Shipley’s office became responsible for monitoring Americans’ international travel. A duty she exercised with a heavy hand and a lack of imagination regarding the consequence of some of her decisions. Since her decisions were not subject to judicial review, they were difficult to overturn, particularly since she did not offer reasons for the denial of any particular passport. (When she insisted on including the phrase “ on Official Business” on the passports of OSS agents, effectively “outing” them to enemy governments, the agency’s head, “Will Bill” Donovan, had to go all the way to President Roosevelt to get the decision reversed. )
Shipley’s single-handed control over the passport process put her in the center of political controversy at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. In 1950, Shipley helped draft legislation that made it illegal for members of communist organizations to hold an American passport. As a staunch anti-Communist, she used the power of her office to restrict the travel of left-leaning Americans whether they were avowed Communists or not. Critics claimed, with some validity, that she was denying passports on arbitrary and personal political grounds. Her supporters defended her actions as important in the fight against Communism.
In 1955, Mrs. Shipley reached the mandatory retirement age of 70. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a Cold Warrior of some note, asked her to continue in her post, but she chose to retire, perhaps because the power of her position was being dismantled through a series of judicial decisions that required the passport division to implement due process procedures and a review system.
*In all fairness, many equally powerful male civil servants are also forgotten today outside of specialist circles. It is easy to forget how easily we forget.
**I see no reason to change the convention
***Obviously a short-term victory. I wonder what she would think of, say, the National Park System’s passport program.
****The impact of marriage on not only passport status but even citizenship prior to the 1930s is a complicated and infuriating subject. The fundamental idea was that a woman’s citizenship was tied first to that of her father and then to that of her husband. Don’t get me started.
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A couple of notes about the blog:
1. Those of you who subscribe to the blog may have noticed that it disappeared for several weeks. (At least, I hope you missed me.) Apparently my used of a diacritical marker in a Slavic place name in an earlier post The Free State of Fiume upset the subscription software. I kept writing posts, but they weren’t going out by email. And it took me a while to notice. It’s been fixed. This post should go out in an orderly way. And the new system will include links to the last few posts so it will be easy to catch up with any you missed.
2. I am deep in the first “real” draft of my latest book. And I’ve got to admit, it’s going slowly. My manuscript is due May 1, 2023, which feels like tomorrow as far as I’m concerned. I love writing these blog posts, but for the foreseeable future I’m going to cut back to one post a week.
Thanks for reading.
Carolyn Wilson, From Fashion Reporter to War Correspondent
When I was writing Women Warriors I kept stumbling across women I’d never heard of.* I did not expect to have the same experience with women who served as foreign correspondents and/or war correspondents. After all, I’m writing about one particular woman, not a history about women journalists as a whole. And yet, women I’ve never heard about just keep popping up.
Case in point, Carolyn Wilson of the Chicago Tribune.
Like many of my contemporaries who went on to careers in journalism, Wilson was editor of her college newspaper. She graduated from Wellesley in 1910, spent a brief time studying in Germany, and then went to work for the Sunday section of the Tribune. She may have dreamed of reporting on hard news, but her first beat was a typical one for a young female journalist at the time, a chatty by-lined column titled”A Matinee Girl Sees Players; Clothes Worn on Chicago Stages” in which she wrote about actresses, their roles, and their clothes, on-stage and off.
Over the next two years, Wilson managed to score an occasional feature outside the women’s pages, including an interview with Orville Wright.** She had hoped to get a ride in the plane, but she had to settle for a discussion about the aviation stabilizer he was developing. He made it clear that he didn’t think she would understand what he was talking about, but she let her readers know that she was an aviation geek and had no problem keeping up: “not for nothing have I talked myself blue in the face at the Burgess hangar in Marblehead, and studied aerodynamics and. aeronautics with a zeal usually to be found only in boys.” She followed up the technical interview with a visit to the airplane factory. I am sorry to report that she ended the piece with a self-deprecating nod to her usual beat: “But do you want to know what tormented me all the way back to Chicago? I never had a chance to wear that adorable aeroplane cap.” Apparently she felt the need to soften the impact of her “boyish” zeal for airplanes.
In June, 1914, the Tribune sent Wilson to Paris, with a commission to “observe and record matters concerning the lighter side of life in that capital”. For the most part that meant society gossip and fashion news—a specialized form of foreign correspondence, though seldom recognized as such. She managed to push the boundaries of the form to include aviation: one of her early Paris columns centered on a technical discussion of the Sperry gyroscope, another airplane stabilizer, disguised as a frothy description of taking a plane ride with Sperry fils. (Airplanes were hot news in the first decades of the century well before Lindburgh made his famous flight across the Atlantic. In fact, I would argue that the high news value of aviation in general made Lindburgh’s flight possible. But that’s a discussion for another day.)
When the Great War began on July 28, 1914, Wilson added war correspondence to her job description.*** She filed her first piece about the war on August 1, a description of the war panic that gripped Paris; it appeared on August 11.
For the first few months of the war, Wilson continued to write her illustrated fashion column, titled “Smartest Styles at Common Sense Prices,” alongside pieces that looked at the war through what newspaper publishers called “the woman’s angle”: women taking on the jobs of men as they leave for the front, women knitting for soldiers, women volunteering as nurses. But by September she had broadened her scope. In addition to “the woman’s angle,” she wrote human interest pieces dealing with soldiers, reported stories from both sides of the front,**** interviewed soldiers, and produced thoughtful political analyses. She was even arrested in Genoa on suspicion of being a spy and held for several days until the British ambassador intervened on her behalf—an event she described as fulfilling a life-long ambition
The last article I can find by Wilson dates from November, 1918, when she clearly was working as a foreign correspondent, not a fashion writer. I don’t know what she did after the war. I do know that she left a legacy at Wellesley, where she endowed a lecture series intended to introduce students to the important issues and figures of the day. Today the Wilson lecture continues to host impressive guests.
*I still am. Apparently the supply of women who fought or led troops is limitless.
**For any airplane buffs among my readers—and I know I have at least one—the interview appears on January 18 1914, p. E4
***Nothing I have found so far tells me whether the Tribune asked her to do this or whether she just grabbed the opportunity and ran with it. Either is possible. The Tribune’s owner and publisher, Robert McCormick was certainly not one to waste the opportunity for some “woman on the spot”coverage.
****She claimed the Germans were more welcoming to reporters than the Allies.
Bessie Beatty and The Red Heart of Russia
I was recently digging about in the history of women’s magazines in the early twentieth century when I came across a familiar name: Bessie Beatty. I knew Beatty’s work from her reporting on Russia’s Women’s Battalion of Death, which I wrote about in Women Warriors. At the time, I was totally engrossed in the women Beatty wrote about and gave no thought to the reporter herself. Funny how things change.
Beatty got her start in journalism at the age of eighteen, working for the Los Angeles Herald while she was still in college. Partway through her senior year, she left college to report on a miner’s strike for the Herald.
Her work in Nevada caught the attention of Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin.* At the Bulletin, Beatty ran a feature page, titled “On the Margin” [!!!], in which she covered women’s issues and social work, broadly defined. (Among other things, she ran a campaign on behalf of prostitutes who were put out of work when the red light district was closed. Not your typical social justice campaign even today, let alone in the first years of the twentieth century. )
In 1917, as the Great War raged on, Older sent Beatty on a large-scale reporting assignment: a series of articles called “Around the World in War.” Four days after she sailed, the United States declared war on Germany.
American correspondents, officially accredited and otherwise, headed toward Europe. Beatty and a few others headed east. She reported on social and cultural traditions in Hawaii,** Japan, and China, but her real destination was the revolution in Russia. Like other reporters who built their careers reporting on social justice issues and exposing corruption in government, she had a romantic vision of the new socialist government and wanted to see it first hand.
She traveled traveled from the Pacific port of Vladivostok to Petrograd (formerly, and once again, St. Petersburg) aboard the TranSiberian Railway, a twelve-day trip through Russia to the heart of the revolution. Once in Petrograd, she managed to get a room in the War Hotel, where Russian officers lived with their wives. With the hotel as her base, she followed Russia’s involvement in the war and the course of the revolution. She traveled to the front, getting within 160 feet of the German trenches, and sat in a concrete observation station from which she could see barbed wire of no-man’s land through a narrow peephole. She and another reporter, Rheta Childe Dorr, spent a week with the Women’s Battalion of Death, traveling with them to the front and sleeping with them in their barracks. She interviewed sailors, soldiers, peasants and the woman in the street.
When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in November, Beatty witnessed every stage of the new revolution, aided by a pass from the Military Revolutionary Committee that gave her access everywhere in the city. She spent hours in the Soviet, listening as revolutionary leaders argued about the shape of the new state. She interviewed political prisoners, including ministers of the deposed Provisional Government
Like other American journalists drawn to report on the revolution, she believed in the experiment she was watching unfold. (In fact, she would later testify in favor of the Bolshevik Revolution before Senator Overman’s sub-committee on the influence of Bolshevism in America.)***
In February 1919, Beatty and two other journalists, Madeline Doty andLouise Bryant, decided it was time to leave Russia. They caught the last train to leave Petrograd for Finland, which was fighting to free itself from Russian rule, and then traveled by sleigh from the northernmost corner of Finland into Sweden. (*Brrr*)
Like many of her fellow journalists, Beatty wrote a book about her experience of the revolution, The Red Heart of Russia (1918). Her sentiments about the revolution, as she expressed them at the end of the book, were complicated: “Mingled with my sorrow, the morning I left Petrograd, was a certain exultant, tragic joy. I had been alive at a great moment and knew that it was great.”
Back in the United States, Beatty chose not to return to San Francisco. Instead she stayed in New York, where she finished her book and worked as the editor of McCall’s from 1918 to 1921.
She soon grew eager to travel as a journalist again. Her articles on politics, women’s rights, and even tourist destinations, appeared in popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The New Republic, Women’s Home Journal, and Century.
Beatty returned to Russia in 1921. It took her weeks to get into the country, but once there she stayed for nine months, writing a series of interviews with Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and Trotsky, for the San Francisco Bulletin.
She spent some time as a screenwriter for MGM. She remained a dedicated activist. And in 1940, she entered a new career as the host of a popular radio show on WOR in New York. During World War II, she used her show to sell more than $300,000 in war bonds.**** She continued to broadcast until her death in 1947 at the age of 61.
Describing her on-air personality, Time magazine described her as “a short, voluble bit of human voltage.” Not bad.
*Older was unusually supportive of women reporters and gave a number of talented women, including Rose Wilder Lane, their start in a field that was not always welcoming to women.
**Which was annexed by the United States in 1898 and became a US territory in 1900. Just to give you a piece of chronology to hang your hats on.
***An early version of the Red Scare.
****$5,270,000 in today’s dollars.
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I am deep in the first “real” draft of my latest book. And I’ve got to admit, it’s going slowly. My manuscript is due March 1, 2023, which feels like tomorrow as far as I’m concerned. I love writing these blog posts, but for the foreseeable future I’m going to cut back to one post a week.