Three “Lady Coders”: a Guest Post by Jack French
I love it when readers of History in the Margins reach out to share something they think will catch my interest, or a suggestion for a blog post, or a gentle correction. Long time reader Jack French occasionally offers to tell me, and you, a story. It is always interesting, and I am always pleased to welcome him back.
Take it away, Jack!
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While women have excelled in the art of code breaking, they have seldom received the recognition they deserved. First because they were women in what historically was a man’s world, and secondly because most of their impressive accomplishments were classified by the government agency for whom they worked.
Three of the most skilled and talented women code breakers in American history were Agnes Meyer Driscoll, Elizebeth Smith Friedman , and Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein. But The Code Book, (Anchor Books, 1999) an extensive history of cryptography by Simon Singh, while detailing the work of hundreds of men, does not even mention one female code breaker. The massive 1136 page The Code Breakers (Macmillan Company, 1967) by David Kahn also describes the work of hundreds of men. Kahn relates some of the successes of Friedman, has three sentences about Driscoll (one under her maiden name) and totally ignores Feinstein. It would be up to Liza Mundy and her brilliant book, Code Girls, (Hachette, 2017) to give proper credit to the entire trio of these lady code breakers, as well as the great multitude of unsung female analysts in the Army and Navy who contributed to cracking the German and Japanese codes and ciphers in WW II.
Agnes Meyer was born in Illinois in 1889 and got her degree in mathematics and physics from Ohio State. She also studied foreign language and was fluent in four of them. After a brief career as a school teacher, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1918 and was assigned to their Code and Signal Section where she excelled. She married Michael Driscoll, a DC lawyer in 1924, by which time she had become one of the Navy’s top codes and cipher experts. The government awarded her $ 15,000 for a cipher machine that she and William Greshem invented. Her small Navy team broke the Japanese code in 1926 and also broke the one the Japanese replaced it with in 1930. By 1939 she had solved Japan’s entire fleet code. In 1940 she was transferred to the group working on the solution to the German Enigma coding machine. Dubbed “the First Lady of Navy Cryptography” she last worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) retiring in 1959 at the age of 70. Driscoll died in September 1971, age 82, and was buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington. In 2000 she was inducted into NSA’s Hall of Honor.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman was born the youngest of nine children in 1892 in Indiana. She graduated in 1915 from Hillsdale College with a major in English and minor in foreign languages. She briefly taught school before being hired at Riverbank Laboratory, a private entity that worked with government agencies to break codes and ciphers. There she met and married William Friedman; the two of them would spend the rest of their careers breaking codes and solving ciphers for the federal government. Although they both worked for the War Department, she left in 1923 to become the head of the code breaking section of the Department of Treasury, Bureau of Prohibition and Customs. Her job was to crack the codes of bootleggers and international smugglers, which she did brilliantly. Her success resulted in her transfer to the U.S. Coast Guard, where she continued to successfully attack the codes used by violators of the Volstead Act, solving over 12,000 coded messages in three years. Her court testimony in criminal trials resulted in convictions of over thirty smuggling ring leaders. In WW II, she testified against “The Doll Lady” who was convicted of being a Japanese spy. Friedman led the team that broke the German code used for their spy network in South America, although J. Edgar Hoover claimed the credit for the FBI. She died in October 1980 at the age of 88; after cremation, her ashes were scattered over her husband’s grave in the National Cemetery. Friedman is the only one of the talented trio to receive some acclaim recently; two biographies about her, plus a children’s book, have been released in the past five years and her accomplishments were lauded in a PBS television special in January 2021.
Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein is the least known of the trio of remarkable lady code breakers, but this does not mean her accomplishments were less impressive. She was born in 1913 in Buffalo, NY and graduated from the University of Buffalo, summa cum laude, with a degree in mathematics in 1938. The following year she was hired by William Friedman in the Army Signal Intelligence Service, which concentrated on breaking the codes of Germany. From then until her retirement from the government in 1947, she would be the linchpin of her unit in breaking whatever codes which they were assigned. In 1940 she made a discovery that enabled her team to break the Japanese “Purple Code”, which was the protection of their diplomatic corps message traffic. This also opened the door to German military plans, which were relayed to the Japanese diplomatic corps. Later, working on Russian codes, she devised a process for recognizing the reuse of its code keys, thereby permitting the decryption of KGB messages. She had married chemist Hyman Feinstein in 1943 and she retired from federal service and became a mathematics professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. This illustrious code breaker died at the age of 93 in August 2006.
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Jack French is a former Navy officer and retired FBI Agent in Virginia. He is a vintage radio historian and the author of two published books on the subject. Jack is a guest lecturer whose topics include: Civil War Heroines, History of Toys & Games, and the Golden Age of Radio.
You ca learn more at his website: www.jackfrenchlectures.com
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Come back on Monday for four questions and an answer with music professor Michael Cooper who is involved in reviving the work of composers Florence Price and Margaret Bonds
Talking About Women’s History with Debby Applegate
Debby Applegate is a historian and obsessive reader whose first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2007 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Washington Post, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and American Heritage Magazine.
The Most Famous Man in America was an unconventional portrait of an unconventional minister and antislavery activist whose celebrity rivalled Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln. With her second book, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, she plunged from the world of virtue to the underbelly of vice. It took thirteen years of immersion in the archives to research and write and – to give fair warning to all readers — is much racier than the first.
I’m thrilled to have Debby here on the Margins to answer questions about writing, biography, and Polly Adler.
Take it away, Debby!
What path led you to Polly Adler? And why do you think it is important to tell her story today?
I discovered Polly Adler by accident when I was strolling through the stacks of the Yale library. I was looking at books on the 1920s when this slim red volume caught my eye. This was A House is Not a Home, Polly’s best-selling 1953 memoir of her career as Jazz Age Manhattan’s most infamous and influential madam. I’d never heard of her before but I was captivated by her autobiography, whitewashed though it obviously was.
I’d always enjoyed reading about the Lost Generation, the Algonquin Roundtable, and the explosion of American culture between the World Wars – but Polly presented these familiar stories from a radically different perspective. I think of Madam as telling the secret, hidden history of those formative years, revealing how much the glamorous parties and fabulous creativity of the era were intertwined with corruption, hypocrisy, and our darkest moral impulses.
But I didn’t know when I began, how much Polly’s clear-eyed perspective and hard-boiled career would speak to the cultural zeitgeist of 2022. Her story seems especially suited to a moment when we are increasingly interested in exposing the intersections of sex and power and dismantling the conspiracies of silence that protect powerful people from bearing the full cost of their desires.
It’s an enormous jump from the subject of your first biography, famous preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, to infamous madam Polly Adler. Are there common threads in their stories that called to you?
If I’d known just how enormous a jump it would be, I’m sure I’d never have dared to take the leap! It was no small thing to move from would-be saints to unrepentant sinners, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth.
Despite their many differences, however, Polly and Henry share the kind of personality that I like in everyone: open-minded, open-hearted, intellectually curious, clear-eyed but not cynical, ambitious but generous, a wonderful sense of humor about themselves and life in general. Just as important, they were great cultural connectors, who seemed to pop up in all the hotspots of their time and to know everyone who was anyone. So, I could use their lives as a way to tell a bigger story about America.
Writing about a historical figure like Polly Adler requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as your constant companion?
I really enjoyed her company, just like Henry Ward Beecher. There were many parts of her story that were dismaying, even disgusting – as the “Queen of the Underworld” she knew more than her share of sociopaths and hypocrites. Writing this book did not improve my opinion of human nature. But Polly herself was always a pleasure to be around. There was never a dull moment!
You’ve successfully made the jump that many academics dream of, from writing purely academic work to popular narrative non-fiction based on rock-solid scholarship. Do you have any advice for readers who dream of doing the same?
My transition from academic writing to popular non-fiction was very rocky at the beginning. I had no idea what I was doing and no idea how much I didn’t know. In fact, the contract for my first book was terminated when I turned in the initial disastrous chapters. But I had to repay the advance, which meant reselling the book. So I set myself on a self-study course to learn how to write for a general audience. I read books about how to write thrillers and mysteries, and even a very useful essay about to write pornography.
My biggest insight was that creating suspense is the key to persuading regular readers to turn the page. Readers have to wonder “what happens next?” or “why did that just happen?” I used the practical exercises from these how-to books all the time and I still do when I’m stuck. I am also a big believer in what I call “reverse outlining”. I take chapters from books or essays I admire and outline them paragraph by paragraph – not the content, but the action of the paragraphs (i.e. paragraph 1 introduces the main character; paragraph 2 describes their backstory; paragraph 3 introduces their desire or goal; paragraph 4 introduces a conflict or thwarting of that goal, etc.). This makes it easier to see the structure or scaffolding that creates the effect I admire.
However, it is trite but true: the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Many times I’ve wished that I could just lay out my findings for fellow scholars, without having to kowtow to regular readers who aren’t as fascinated by every tiny detail or complex historical argument the way I am.
Your books are praised for reading like novels. Do you consciously use novelist’s tools in writing narrative history?
Indeed, I do. What I like about a good history book, or any kind of book, is the feeling of immersion in that imaginative world. What does is it like to swim in another atmosphere, steeped in foreign ways of thinking? So, whenever possible I try to convey the action through actual or implied points of view, constructing a scene as it would be experienced through an individual’s sensibility rather than by an omniscient narrator. I try to let the characters make the interpretive points, rather than me, and let the characters, in effect, argue among themselves as to whose interpretation the reader should believe. Pungent quotes help with that. But I’m also fond of the novelistic technique of “free indirect discourse” where you as narrator subtly employ the language of the characters and their milieu as your own, as a way to move in and out of various positions.
Frankly, I’ll use any means to make a scene come alive in a reader’s head, as long as there is a factual foundation for it. Sometimes that requires a little sleight of hand – and the judicious use of the passive voice and implication over declaration — but I am scrupulous about making certain that what I’ve written is true to the best of my knowledge. That’s the historian’s chosen game, after all.
One of the questions I’m fascinated with right now is how biographers name their subjects, particularly when writing about a woman. Did you chose to use Polly, Adler, or something else in your book and why?
With my first book, about the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, I had to use the name “Henry” to distinguish him from all the other “Beechers” in the main cast of characters. But really that was just my excuse. I spend so much intimate time with my characters that I am always inclined to call them by their first names. Any reader who is going plow through a long biography wants to feel that sort of intimacy with the subject, I think. However, I am very careful to make sure that I dole out first names on an equal basis, so that even the highest and mightiest of men are treated as domestic creatures.
There is meaning in the way a person’s name can evolve over the course of a lifetime – from childhood endearments to nicknames to official titles — and you miss all those nuances when you depend only on a last name.
What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved? (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format? )
I recently re-read Zelda, Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, a book that had a huge impact on my thinking when I was a freshman in high school. It was only on rereading it now, as a historian and a grown-up, that I realized how revolutionary it was in 1970 to write a fully fleshed biography of a woman, especially one who’d been written off as merely “the wife of an important artist.” It’s a great feminist book, yet it reads like a heartbreaking novel.
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
I loved researching women of the underworld and the demimonde because they are so unconventional in the evidence they leave behind. Women who aren’t terrified about compromising their “respectable” status are much candid and surprising in what they reveal. They boldly defy the historical stereotypes that lodge in our heads, even when we know better. Also, counterintuitively, wayward women (as they used to be called) often leave behind more traces than the average, respectable woman who keeps her nose clean and her private life private. Their tangles with law enforcers, moral reformers, and muckraking reporters leave a surprisingly rich record. The down side is that they don’t leave a lot of diaries and letters. (Then again, who writes diaries and letters anymore?)
Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?
Absolutely! Annual celebrations like Women’s History Month are not just about consciousness-raising or turning on a spotlight — although that is no small thing. They function a little like regular rituals or religious holidays, connecting us to our values and our past, all those things that are so often forgotten in the hubbub of daily life.
What are you working on now?
Absolutely nothing! I do feel a little guilty about that. If someone asks me to write something or contribute my modest might, I’ll happily say yes. But after spending thirteen years on Polly Adler, the idea of initiating a new project to take over my life…well, I’d have to be crazy to do that again, wouldn’t I?
Want to know more about Debby Applegate and her work?
Check out her website: https://debby-applegate.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @Debby_Applegate
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Come back tomorrow for a post on “lady coders’ from regular History in the Margins reader and occasional guest poster, Jack French.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Marcia Biederman
Marcia Biederman has contributed more than 150 articles to the New York Times, writing about everything from ice dancing to automobile wheel repair. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, the New York Observer, the Daily News, and Crain’s New York Business. A former mystery novelist, she’s the author of three biographies, Popovers and Candlelight: Patricia Murphy and The Rise and Fall of a Restaurant Empire (SUNY Press 2018), Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed Reading Worked, (Chicago Review Press 2019), and A Mighty Force: Dr. Elizabeth Hayes and Her War for Public Health (Prometheus Books 2021).
Take it away, Marcia!
You write about women who were well known during their lifetimes (which were not that long ago), who had an impact on their world, and who are not well known today. Why do you think we forget the roles women have played in history so quickly?
As twentieth-century women, my biographical subjects had to buck prejudice about women’s roles to grab the public’s attention and approval, even temporarily. The two who were entrepreneurs, restaurateur Patricia Murphy and speed-reading marketer Evelyn Wood, had to market their brands relentlessly to gain recognition. Murphy drew record-breaking crowds to her enormous restaurants in New York State and southern Florida; Wood enrolled hundreds of thousands in her courses. However, their fame ended with the conclusion of the ad campaigns. Murphy’s restaurants never entered the annals of food history, the way the Four Seasons did. Wood’s brand lived on after her death, but many people thought of her as a fictitious figure, like Betty Crocker.
Both were in fields deemed appropriate for females – cooking and teaching – although Murphy couldn’t boil water, and Wood had spent little time in a classroom. But, if being women enhanced their brands in their lifetimes, it worked against them later on. Food critics and newspaper feature writers belittled Patricia Murphy’s Candlelight restaurant chain because its patrons were mostly female. In fact, late in her career, Murphy opened a men-only dining room in Florida to try to scrub off the “tearoom” taint. As for Evelyn Wood, until debunkers exposed her speed-reading method as a shame, she was one of the century’s great con artists. But no one recognized her as such. As we see today in the cases of Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey, people are reluctant to believe that women can be scammers..
Erasure was completely different for my most recent biographical figure, Dr. Elizabeth Hayes, who in 1945 led 350 coal miners on a successful strike for clean water and decent housing in their company-owned town. In the final weeks of World War II, Hayes and the strikers dominated headlines. Every news outlet in the country, from the Socialist Call to Business Week, was rooting for “Dr. Betty’s miners,” as they were known. The “we-can-do-it” spirit of the times briefly blurred gender roles. Thirty-three years old, Hayes made a great 1940s heroine, taking on a powerful mining company with bold leadership and quotable quips.
But, unlike the women of my other two biographies, Hayes had never sought the spotlight, and she didn’t spend money on ads and publicists to keep herself visible. Hence, it was a fairly easy task for history to erase her. Her struggle inspired President Harry S. Truman to commission a medical survey of coal communities, but the admiral leading it didn’t acknowledge Hayes or invite her participation. For a while, she gave talks about the strike, eventually disappearing into private life. Like a meteor streaking across the sky, she had a brief moment of fame, which I had the privilege to discover and, I hope, revive.
You published mystery novels before you made the leap to writing non-fiction. Does your experience as a novelist shape how you write narrative non-fiction?
Yes, I’m definitely able to apply the techniques of mystery writing to my narrative nonfiction. I can’t make anything up, but I can find the drama in real-life events.
When I was having trouble with an early draft of one of my books, I scheduled a mentoring session with Cathy Curtis, a past president of Biographers International Organization who has written several amazing biographies of women. She advised me to look for a “Rosebud moment.” I immediately knew what she meant. Looking at the life I was chronicling, what was the person’s driving motivation? I also look for antagonists, reactions to setbacks, and big life-changing decisions.
There are some differences, though. Because the women I write are unknown to many readers, I begin with a prologue that establishes their importance. For Patricia Murphy, this was the launch of her memoir at Macy’s, where she set a record for the number of books signed. For Evelyn Wood, it’s at a teacher’s convention in Atlantic City, where teenagers demonstrating her speed-reading techniques wowed the crowds and sent reporters racing to their typewriters. For Dr. Elizabeth Hayes, it was the raiding of her medical office by enraged mining officials who forcibly evicted her, confiscating her stethoscope, patient records, and medications.
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work
Like many Baby Boomers, I grew up thinking that all Americans pulled together on the US homefront throughout World War II. Sure, I knew about the black marketeers and other profiteers, but I thought the nation on the whole devoted itself to the war effort until V-J Day. Researching A Mighty Force, I discovered that a phenomenon called “peace jitters” was widespread. Toward the end of the war, Americans felt confident that the Allies would win, so they started jockeying for position in postwar prosperity. They quit defense jobs to seek positions in sales, for instance. Meanwhile, corporations were prematurely planning to ditch weapon-making so they could manufacture appliances instead. Alarmed, the federal government tried to enforce wartime restrictions, but there were ways around them. In other words, the Mad Men-style rat race started earlier than I thought.
Question for Pamela: If you had to recommend one biography of a woman to other biographers or aspiring biographers (not necessarily to all bio readers) what would it be and why?
You asked for one. I’m going to give you three because I think they offer different lessons. (They are all also compulsively readable.)
Nancy Marie Brown. The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women. This was one of the best books I read in 2021, and I’m recommending it to lots of people for lots of different reasons. Brown builds a possible life story for the Birka Woman—the Viking warrior remains that Swedish scholars proved were those of a woman, not a man as had been assumed for more than 130 years. The Real Valkyrie offers biographers is an object lesson in re-examining assumptions, using your imagination in looking for sources, and squeezing every drop of information out of the sources you have.
Helen Castor. Joan of Arc. Castor provides an excellent example of how to bring new life to a familiar subject, signaled in the use of “a history” rather than “a biography” as a sub-title. Instead of starting with Joan, she begins with the turbulent history of fifteenth century France, placing Joan’s achievements within the context of the bloody civil war that began with the assassination of Louis, Duke of Orleans, at the instigation of his brother, the Duke of Burgundy, in 1407. In doing so, she makes story of St. Joan more understandable, more complex, and more extraordinary.
Matthew Goodman. Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History Making Race Around the World. Eighty Days is more than an adventure story, though Goodman manages the difficult trick of maintaining suspense when the reader knows who wins the race. The lesson for biographers, though, is the way Goodman places his story in context. He does not limit himself to a step-by-step narrative of his heroines’ travels. Instead he uses the race to illustrate the social impact of new modes of transportation, a growing popular press, and new opportunities for women. The result is a social history of America on the verge of modernity. Personally, I believe this rich use of historical context is something every biographer should aspire to.
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Want to know more about Marcia Biederman and her work?
Check out her website: Marciabiederman.com
Follow her on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AMightyForce
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Come back tomorrow for a whole bunch of questions with biographer Debby Applegate.