William and Elizebeth Friedman were husband and wife codebreakers. The Man Who Broke Purple and the Woman Who Smashed Codes: they were, and still are, cryptography’s power couple.
Some may argue that William was the more “powerful” of the two. His brilliance and his drive–the fact that he was a man in a man’s world–made him, in their lifetimes, the more celebrated of the two. It is possible to forget–or fail to realize–that the couple learned cryptography together, during their courtship and first year of marriage, 1916-1918. In fact, Elizebeth started cipher work months before William, and it was she who drew him into the Bacon project. They discovered that their interest in cryptography ranged beyond the spurious claim the Bacon had enciphered messages in Shakespearean texts. Chiles said he “turned over his genetics work” in the winter of 1916/17 to become a fulltime cryptographer. Callimahos said he became head of the department. Elizebeth said they were both “heads of this cipher staff.” [ESF Memoir 14]
In other words, it is not clear exactly how or when George Fabyan instituted his wartime cipher bureau, certainly by April, 1917, but possibly in incipient form a few months before that. Fagone makes it feel that William and Elizebeth became co-directors, to a point. Whenever Fabyan went East to work his contacts in Washington or Boston, he “always took young Friedman with him,” meaning William. [ESFMemoir 16] Elizebeth stayed home. Other opportunities closed to the wife, even as they opened wide to the husband.
When the couple struggled for weeks (months?) to crack the book ciphers of the Hindu-German conspirators, William was called to testify in both Chicago and San Francisco; Elizebeth at neither. Elizebeth allows a hint of resentment to color her retrospective account: “I had not been summoned as a co-witness with him on this matter since we had completed this task completely alone, but someone had to stay behind and oil the machinery at Riverbank.” [ESF Memoir 31]
The husband and wife wartime codebreaking team was eventually replaced by an official government cipher bureau, MI-8, once it became operational. The Friedmans were then asked (ordered?) to instruct officers in cryptography in preparation for their service in France. The couple developed their own instructional materials and methods, and somehow found time to publish seven small monographs on the science they were advancing. David Kahn said these pamphlets “rise up like a landmark in the history of cryptology.” Jason Fagone compared the productivity of their year, mid-1917 to mid-1918, to Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905.
Except Elizebeth’s authorship is unacknowledged on all but the last of the seven publications. Was William really their sole author? Was he in fact their primary author? The truth is hard to tease out and may not be knowable. Jason Fagone, who has considered this question more closely than anyone, lays out a credible case for close collaboration. Fagone emphasizes William’s reference to “our pamphlets” in his letter to Elizebeth of July 15, 1918, from France. He pointed, also, to the annotations of the original typed drafts held in the New York Public Library. Her handwriting (as well as his) was “all over them.” Fagone infers that William can take credit for the technical elements; Elizebeth for the historical content. They were coauthors, but, unsurprisingly, their contributions varied according to their different strengths.
That Elizebeth’s contributions were downplayed remains puzzling, if predictable. Sexism was more deeply entrenched than today. But how might it have influenced the thinking of the three key players involved?
First, there is George Fabyan. As underwriter of all research activities at Riverbank Laboratories, he felt entitled to take credit for its accomplishments. As publisher of the Friedmans’ cryptological pamphlets, he felt entitled to keep their names off the cover (though he allowed Williams’ to go inside) and to copyright them in his own name. “It may be egotism on my part,” he wrote to William, “but so long as I pay the fiddler, I am going to have the privilege of selecting the tunes.” [Fagone 78]
But why not William’s and Elizebeth’s names on the title page? After all, Fabyan had admired Elizebeth’s intelligence from the minute he set eyes on her in Chicago’s Newberry Library in June, 1916. He had offered her a job on the spot and would accept no response but her consent. He insisted that she return with him to Riverbank that very night. He promised he would “furnish” her with “anything” she wanted. Bright as Elizebeth was, she did not succeed in solving the alleged Baconian ciphers. Too bright, for she would not be fooled by an unscientific quest for hidden messages in Shakespeare’s First Folio. She could not decrypt ciphers that were not actually there.
Regardless, Fabyan recognized Elizebeth’s talents. He made her a kind of spokeswoman for the project, “an English literature student turned public relations activist,” she would later write. [ESF Memoir 14] For, if Elizebeth had failed to perceive a- and b-formations in Shakespeare’s plays, she succeeded in becoming a student of cryptography more broadly. When curious visitors came to Riverbank, celebrities and luminaries in whatever field, it was Elizebeth who gave them the equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation.
Fabyan admired the Bacon project’s leader, too, a Mrs. Elizebeth Wells Gallup. He gave her what amounted to a lifetime appointment as head of her own research department in control of an unusually generous budget. What with Gallup’s salary and those of more than a half-dozen young assistants, Fabyan’s annual outlay was sizeable–for almost no tangible results. In 1920, he hired an American type-designer to investigate whether encoding a bi-literal cipher with early-17th-century printing technology was even possible. [Friedmans 217] (It wasn’t.) And there was much more.
It is fair to say, Fabyan had no problem in principle supporting women and promoting their work to the public. Why didn’t he give Elizebeth the same benefit of the doubt he gave Mrs. Gallup?
Fagone believes he was reluctant even to give William credit, at first, and insisted that the copyright remain in his own name. Fagone speculates that Elizebeth, chose not to push her own claim in order to not muddy the waters for William. Fairly or not, he was the one who would claim the greater income to support them both. It was more important that his career be advanced than hers. Getting credit for the authorship of the monographs was ultimately more important for him than for her. The evidence suggests she accepted this with ore or less equanimity.
Nor did she feel the need for recognition that William did. Reflecting on the rise of celebrity in the 1920s, Elizebeth concluded, “Whatever quality it is which is possessed by those who love adulation and star-worship seems to be, in my case, supplanted by an intense reach for freedom from observation–and for privacy.” [Fagone 51] This aspect of her nature was corroborated by an archivist at the George C. Marshall Foundation library, holder of the Elizebeth Smith Friedman papers, as well as her husband’s: “Mrs. Friedman had a tendency to see that the record made little or no mention of her contribution to a number of their joint efforts.” [Fagone 78] She was comfortable playing the woman-behind-the-man so long as she had her career, too. “I want, oh, so much, for us both to ‘achieve,'” she had written to him during their courtship. And they both did.
Had he lived later in the century, William might have been called a “sensitive man.” But the noun is still the operative word. As a man, he appears to have felt a responsibility to provide and a compulsion to accomplish. When he wrote to Elizebeth from France about postwar plans, William considered not “us both,” but himself alone: “Perhaps it will be Genetics. …my ambition to know one little thing better than any other person, to be a pioneer in that field and to blaze new trails for the rest to follow. Why I feel that way, I don’t know–it’s just in me and will have to come out in some form or other.” [Fagone 96] And for all William’s sensitivity, as we might say, and his being “gentle, considerate, polite,” as Elizebeth did say [ESF Memoir 13]; he was no less a man of his times than the rest of us. Writing to Elizebeth from France on the last full day of the war, he allowed a hint of backhanded sexism to taint his otherwise sincere compliment: “You have ability and more brains than any other woman I have known. You can fill any job a woman can and many jobs that men fill.” [Fagone 107]
After the war, he looked for work in “business,” probably in genetics. It is unclear to me what business in 1919 would have employed a plant geneticist, but there would have been none at all looking for a cryptologist. Whatever the case, William wrote to fellow-codebreaker Herbert Yardley, that he found it “inadvisable” to go into business “on account of unsettled [postwar] business conditions.” [Clark 71-72]
The tension between a push-me obligation to make a steady income and pull-you enticement of mental challenge, all leavened with a self-professed ambition to be the best in his field, made for a potent combination–all of which Elizebeth had to accommodate. She had watched her husband enlist as Army cryptographer, gain valuable wartime codebreaking experience, make important contacts with practitioners in the field, and otherwise open a professional gap between them that she might never close. As she wrote, looking back, “By the end of the war I was more or less known as a military cipher expert, but I was better known as the wife of my husband [who had] made a reputation so startling that I regarded the task of catching up to him as altogether hopeless.” [Fagone 114-115]
Elizebeth begrudged William none of it. She accepted her role as supportive wife to a more public husband. She accepted that he possessed ability she did not. As she explained later, adopting a curious distance in her narrative style: “William Friedman’s brilliant mind had leaped forward. In less than a year, he had developed methods of decipherment in systems which had hitherto been considered completely indecipherable.” [ESF Memoir 31] If she resented the limitations imposed on her as a woman–which I think she did, to an extent–she was happy not to have the traditionally male hang-ups that William did: the pressure to provide for a future family, the need for recognition. The private Elizebeth was content to labor in obscurity.
It is ironic, then, that by 1930, it was Elizebeth who took on the more public face of the two. Working for the Coast Guard (as part of the Treasury Department), her codebreaking helped to bring Prohibition-era rumrunners to justice. She testified at a highly charged trial in New Orleans where she turned heads with her combination of authoritative demeanor and (alas) feminine good looks. She was featured in Reader’s Digest and in Margaret Santry‘s radio series, “First Ladies of the Capitol.” Asked how she “solve[s] the business of running a home” while smashing codes for the government, Elizebeth simply credited her housekeeper, adding, “I never really made any definite plans for a career, Miss Santry–it just happened.” [Fagone 164]
Such words, even in a spirit of self-deprecation, would not have come from William, who by this time was the government’s acknowledged authority on cryptanalysis. On the other hand, codebreaking was a covert activity so any recognition was kept as tightly guarded as possible. William labored in secrecy, as did Elizebeth most of the time. But when she had her moments of fame, William took pleasure in them, telling Elizebeth, “When people introduce me and then say that my wife is also etc & is really better at it, I invariably assent, with a real smile.” [Fagone 169] No longer working together, bouncing ideas off of each other to solve cryptograms, the Friedmans were nevertheless a kind of team, America’s first couple of codebreaking.
Sources:
Chiles, James R. “Breaking Codes Was This Couple’s Lifetime Career,” in “The Friedman Legacy: A Tribute to William and Elizebeth Friedman.” Sources in Cryptologic History, no. 3, Fort Meade: NSA, 2006, 195-204.
Clark, Ronald. The Man Who Broke Purple: The Life of Colonel William F. Friedman, Who Deciphered the Japanese Code in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977.
Fagone, Jason. The Woman Who Smashed Codes: a True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies. New York: Harper Collins, 2017.
Friedman, Elizabeth S. Memoir, complete, 1966. George C. Marshall Foundation Library, Elizebeth S. Friedman Collection.
Friedman, William F. and Elizebeth S. The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: an Analysis of Cryptographic Systems Used as Evidence that Some Author Other than William Shakespeare Wrote the Plays Commonly Attributed to Him. Cambridge: University Press, 1957.
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