Labor Day Blues

 

Subscribers to this blog will notice that I’m late with the Friday edition. That’s because I get depressed as Labor Day rolls around.

 

Since 1882, Labor Day has traditionally been a holiday to honor the American labor movement. May Day is often celebrated in other lands, but its association with democratic socialism didn’t play well in the U.S. where too many people think socialism is a synonym for communism.*

 

Labor Day’s end-of-summer date was first chosen for its closeness to the birthday of Uriah Stephens, the founder of the Knights of Labor. Don’t believe the nonsense that the first celebration was organized by New York City’s Central Labor Union; that mistake gets repeated because many people confused  Mathew Maguire with P. J. McGuire. Matthew was a socialist and P(eter) J. was a mover and shaker in the American Federation of Labor, which was for skilled workers which came to oppose the all-inclusive Knights of Labor. In addition, several cities had protest parades before the September 5, 1882, New York event often cited as the first Labor Day parade.  

 

I wrote three books on the Knights, but that’s not why I’m depressed. By academic training, I am a labor historian. I used to teach the history of the American labor movement, but by the end of the 1980s, it was fair to ask: “What movement?” I eventually began to call myself a historian of the working class, but that begs another question: “Who you calling working class?”

 

I categorically honor brave union members toiling to make things better for their comrades. The problem is that they aren’t enough followers and there is no strong federation of unions to make a political dent. Today the largest federation is the AFL-CIO with about 15 million total members across 60 unions. That’s deceptive, though, as it counts retired members. Moreover, an AFL-CIO political endorsement is about as useful as a lawn sign. It is a bureaucratic paper tiger ignored by constituent members. A whopping sixty percent of Teamsters voted for Trump in 2024, as did a majority of steelworkers, longshoremen, and fire fighters–a pattern that repeats in most unions that are male-dominated.

 

Let’s go a step deeper. Under 10 percent of Americans belong to a union of any sort. In 1960, nearly a third of workers (32 %) were unionized. As late as 1983, it remained 20 percent, but Ronald Reagan led the charge to decertify unions and the numbers have fallen ever since. Today’s numbers are even weaker when we break them down. Of the 9.9 percent, one third are government employees–assuming Trump hasn’t fired them all. The largest (2.2 million) are teachers’ unions, followed by trainees, and librarians. If we look to the private sector, fewer than six percent are organized and if you really want dire numbers, just 2.7 percent of individuals having anything at all to do with retail are unionized. Belonging to a union is often more pro forma than proactive. Teachers, for instance, are often legally forbidden to strike and 27 states have right-to-work laws, meaning a teacher can’t be forced to join a union and one can be fired for just about anything. Adding insult to injury, in most right-to-work states union members can be assigned to train those who might replace them.

 

Why do workers put up with this? The right-to-strike isn’t protected much anymore, so a lost job could mean financial hardship. Yet, 163 million Americans work, a number with the potential to bring most employers to their knees. That’s if, they aren’t lulled into consumerism submission by a barrage of commercials, tricked by wily ideologues, or convinced they are impotent. Note the old union banner above. Raise your hand if you work only eight hours a day, have eight to pursue what you wish, and get eight hours’ sleep. Yeah, right! That fight entails seeing one’s self as a member of the working class, but tell me the last time you even heard that term. U.S. = middle class right? Nope! Using objective economic date, 60 percent of all workers fail to meet middle-class standards.

 

No wonder Labor Day depresses me.

 

Rob Weir

 

* For the record, few American organizations were as virulently anti-communist as democratic socialists, whose idea of working-class heroes is more in the Eugene Debs/Bernie Sanders mold than Lenin or Mao.

 

 

Kehinde Wiley and the Last of the Lost Cause?

 

 

Rumors of War, 30' tall

 

The Last of the Lost Cause?*

*This essay/review is part of a larger in-progress project on Civil War mythology.

 

If you don’t follow the art world carefully, you might not know the statue above. It is a work that subverts one of the biggest lies of the past 160 years. The sculptor is Kehinde Wiley. If you can’t quite place the name, I’ll bet you know his presidential portrait of Barack Obama, but first things first. 

 

Wiley portrait of Barack Obama

 

 

Wiley’s equestrian statue is titled “Rumors of War” and is meant to shock. Instead of a wig-topped noble or a dashing solider, Wiley’s defiant figure is a black man with his dreadlocks tied back suggestive of a crown or an Indian sachem’s topknot. The figure is also wearing high-top sneakers, blue jeans, and a warm-up jacket. You can find this statue outside the main entrance to Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VMFA).

 

Wiley based “Rumors of War” on a statue of J.E.B. Stuart that once sat atop a similar pedestal on the city’s Monument Avenue where it shared company with other “heroes” of the Confederacy. You might recall that those came down during Black Lives Matter protests in 2017. There is but one statue remaining, that of tennis great Arthur Ashe. CSA president Jeferson Davis was among those that pulled down and defiled. Wiley’s statue suggests that the real “war” was/is that of black freedom. That’s not the way the story is usually told.

 

Jefferson Davis vandalized; Stuart statue in storage

   
 

 

The Confederacy was defeated, but you’d hardly know that from the way the Civil War was retold before all the bodies were put to rest. The so-called “Lost Cause” was the ideological precursor to legal and customary segregation that sought to strip newly emancipated enslaved peoples of their political, economic, and human rights. The so-called “Jim Crow” era was the order of things until most of its vestiges were outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Even then, the “war” Wiley wants you to ponder still rages: the one for black equality and dignity.

 

The Lost Cause did as much, perhaps more, to ingrain racism deeply into American culture. It claimed that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and invented a host of specious and nonsensical alt.realities. You name it and it was tried: tariffs, the interference of Northern radicals, states rights, attempts to subvert the Southern agricultural system, a Northern political power grab, Southern honor…. Some of these have validity, but it’s simply impossible to fashion an explanation for the Civil War that doesn’t have black slavery at its core. (Tariffs are rising today, but I don’t detect a serious call to arms!) The Lost Cause created myths: the genteel South vs. the money-grubbing and unkempt North, a war of Northern aggression foisted upon the South, Scarlett O’Hara-like plantations marked by easy-going relations between white and blacks, kindly Southern “massas,” illiterate” slaves better off in bondage, evil abolitionists, etc. Some of that has a kernel of truth as well, but it all rests upon a worldview in which all whites were viewed as better than any black person. 

 

Currently in garden by Valentine Museum. Soon to be reinstalled at the Ironworks. 

 

When this statue was placed in front of the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, howls of protest erupted and white people committed acts of vandalism against it. Ditto the Arthur Ashe monument. Do we presume they did so genteelly?

 

Looking down Scarlet's stair case

 

For the record, Southern charm is not my thing, but parts of the South retain an air of grace. I might have been just as happy to have some barbecue and listen to the blues, but we had lunch one day at the Jefferson Hotel in down Richmond and it’s quite a place. Scarlett O’Hara even sashayed down its staircase in Gone with the Wind. There are tons of plantation homes below the Mason-Dixon Line that ooze with elegance as long as you don’t think about who and what sustained them.

 

As Bob Dylan put it, though, “the times they are a changing...” (Okay, he dropped the final “g.”) A Richmond friend and I visited the “Southern White House,” where Jefferson Davis quartered during the war. In many ways it’s more democratic that the one in Washington DC. It belonged to a bourgeois doctor who made it a home. Davis did all of his serious presidential duties at the state capital building a block away. The dining room picture is about the biggest thing in the house. Make no mistake, though; Davis was a Confederate and a racist. The good news is that guides no longer try to whitewash that. Nor do they fail to tell you that the house “staff” was comprised of wage-earning whites and white indentured servants, but the vast majority of workers were enslaved black folks. 

 

Not exactly the State Dining Room

 

To circle back to art, Kehinde Wiley is far from the first artist of color seeking to put African Americans back in the historical narrative. He is, though, one of the most successful and clever. He’s a lot of things the hardshell right hates: black, gay, has an Ivy Legree degree (Yale), and possess an impressive grasp of art history. If you wonder what’s up with the flowered backdrops of his portraits, know that his role models are precisely those Old Masters (and Mistresses) venerated by white cultural elites. The VMFA has a Wiley painting titled “Willem van Heythusen Posing with a Sword.” Why the Dutch name? It’s based on Frans Hals painting done in 1625. He has done the same with religious paintings and most of his portraits. Things look a bit different when we replace white bodies with black ones and update the drapery, doesn’t it? 

 

Frans Hals

Wiley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Native Idenity, Boarding Schools, and Historical Damage

 

 

 

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools

To be published April 22, 2025

By Mary Annette Pember

Penguin Random House, 304 pages.

★★★

 

Native Americans have been called America’s “forgotten minority.” Discussions of discrimination and racism often focus on other groups, yet if one looks at negative social data (poverty, poor housing, substance abuse, poor health, infant death, unemployment, etc.) indigenous Americans are at the bottom of most of them. Mary Annette Pember, an Ojibwe*, argues this is by design, not an unfortunate twist of history.

 

Many books have been written about white land grabs, Indian wars, and broken treaties, but Pember cuts to the quick by noting that indigenous history is where the Great Commission–the command for Christians to evangelize the globe–meets the Great Chain of Being, a biological taxonomy that ranks living things from simple to complex. At the height of the eugenics movement, the latter view extended the rankings to humankind. The eugenics movement merely reiterated older ideals. When the U.S. Constitution was approved, enslaved Africans were counted as 3/5^th of a person; Indians were not counted at all.

 

Pember’s book is at once a sweeping historical account, a family history, and a personal memoir. There is an extensive historiography of Native American history, but Pember adds detail to the lesser discussed tale of Indian boarding schools, a topic that often goes no deeper than mentions of the Carlisle Indian School to give context for the prowess of famed athlete Jim Thorpe during the early 20^th century. Pember notes that by the 1920s, a startling 76 percent of Indian children were sent to boarding schools.  “Sent” is the operative word, as many of them were judicial and legislative kidnappings undertaken to “assimilate” indigenous children into mainstream society. That meant  bans of native languages, dress, customs, and rituals.

 

This is a personal issue for Pember, whose mother Bernice attended St. Mary’s Catholic Indian School in Odanah, Wisconsin, to the chagrin of her mother Cece, an early Ojibwe activist. In many ways Bernice bought into assimilation; she adopted a prim image as if to prove wrong a nun who called Indians “dirty.” Pember, however, presents boarding schools in a Dickensian light, institutions marked by body-numbing hard work, food deprivation, authoritarian regimentation, and corporal punishment. Her descriptions call to mind Irish laundries for unwed mothers, and the treatment of Māori in New Zealand and Aborigines in Australia. To cite just one impact of poor conditions, in 1925, 87 out every 100,000 individuals in the United States contracted TB; among indigenous peoples the level was nearly seven times higher.

 

What Bernice missed–as did Pember in her youth–was deep immersion in Ojibwe language and culture. The band to which Pember belongs lives in northern Wisconsin along the shores of Lake Superior. Much of their land and that of some Sioux and Ho–Chunk was grafted away by lumber interests in 1837,  but roughly 125,000 acres plus the right to conduct rituals on Madeline Island were guaranteed by an 1854 treaty. It is today land belonging to the Medicine River reservation**.

 

Pember traces a legacy of harm and cultural damage done by boarding schools. It is a powerful story, though it must be said that the book occasionally stumbles by trying to do too much. Particularly noticeable are its tonal shifts. Pember is didactic when reviewing history, personal in discussing her family saga, and righteously angry at some of her own experiences. Because she often crams history and memoir into the same chapters, it is easy to get lost chronologically and thematically. Chapter 2, for instance, begins with an incident in Bernice’s life, jumps back to Pope Nicholas V (1447-55) and wends its way forward, cuts away to Ojibwe culture, and returns to Bernice. Most of the material on boarding schools is found in chapters 5-8 of the book’s 10 chapters and even then, Pember shifts between broader and personal history.  Although it was published before Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) became President Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous History of the United States (2014) is an easier read for anyone looking for a survey of Native American history. Then again, Dunbar-Ortiz devotes but six pages to boarding schools.

 

I recommend Medicine River, but take your time.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

*Ojibwe references an Algonquian dialect. Tribal members are properly called Anishinaabe, meaning “True People,” though many whites called them Chippewa.

 

** In a telltale etymological shift, white French traders called the stream emptying into Lake Superior, “Bad River.”

 

 

Samuel Slater Experience is Goes Down Easy History

 

 

 

The Samuel Slater Experience

31 Ray Street

Webster, Massachusetts

 

You’ve probably seen dozens of individuals tagged as “The Father of X” or “The Mother of Y.” Generally that’s as much hype as reality, but Samuel Slater (1768-1835) was indeed the “Father of the American Industrial Revolution.” Depending on your point of view, he was either a boy genius or a thief. In Britain, he’s “Slater the Traitor.” 

 

Arkwright waterframe

 

 

Young Slater might have been brilliant, but his low stature as an indentured servant in an English textile factory meant he could never be a mill owner or superintendent. In response, he memorized the designs for the Arkwright water frame and an automatic spinning machine that propelled Britain to the fore of European industrial production. In 1789, just a year after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Slater risked imprisonment to slip out of England and sail to the United States. He went into partnership with Moses Brown (of Brown University fame) and after a few false starts, set up the first successful textile factory on American soil at Pawtucket Falls, Rhode Island. 

 

Slater’s model of small-scale factories employing children and families was dubbed the “Rhode Island System” and dominated textile production until it was surprised by the larger investment capital mills of the “Waltham System.” (The latter shifted to the giant mills in Massachusetts–Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke–and New Hampshire cities such as Nashua and Manchester). But until 1814, American industrialization was centered in Blackstone River mill villages such as Slatersville, RI and Dudley, Oxford, and Hopedale, MA. Not coincidentally, Slater made a fortune.  

 

One of Slater’s most successful ventures was launched in Webster, MA hard by the Connecticut line. Early textile mills depended upon water and Webster sports a large lake the Nipmuc called Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. It’s still officially called that, but you try saying it! Most just say Lake Webster. 

 

 

The Samuel Slater Experience (SSE) tells his story and the industrial history of Webster. It departs from other similarly-themed museums in that it’s more interactive. After an opening gallery that displays an Arkwright frame and a hand spinning machine, one follows a path to various stops where holographic figures appear. Early we see Slater in conversation with his master, Jedediah Strutt, who tells Sam to be happy with his lot. Another display takes us to a mock ship’s deck fronted by rolling waves. A seasick Slater walks to the front of the hold, the waves swell to wild storm pitch and (small) sprays of water “splash from the ceiling. 

 

Slater's Office

 

From there it’s a series of animations that tell of his rise to fortune and influence. As is generally the situation in museums dedicated to successful individuals one can get a bit tired of perseverance and glorification; those who have studied industrial history sometimes take umbrage with theme park-like hokeyness. Yet, it’s wise to remind yourself that a majority of Americans don’t have college educations and need a bit of Disneyesque flash to hold their attention. 

 

To the SSE’s credit, it does display an older Slater as more ruthless in his business decisions. One display of actors-in-role gives various take on life in Webster. These include several workers, a female Polish immigrant, a child laborer, residents of Webster, admirers, and a few Slater detractors. These, of course, are somewhat sanitized because, once again, the audience is not academia. You could say, with merit, that the SSE is melodramatic in places and historically inaccurate in others. For instance, many of the photos used to call attention to child labor are from Lewis Hine in the early 20^th century, not from Slater’s time on earth. (There were no American photographs until four years after Slater died.) 

 

 

 

On another level, one could make the case that such images are justified as they hold the essence of the industrial system that Slater unleashed and portend what developed in the city of Webster. This is grounded in some truth; places such as Webster and Lowell were atypical. Thomas Jefferson held the view that machines should remain forever in Europe. He lost that debate, but agrarian ideals reigned for most of the 19^th century and it wasn’t until 1920 that a census revealed more individuals making their living in something other than agriculture. 

 

 

The last part of the SSE is dedicated to the history of Webster. It celebrates the era of trolley cars, movies, thriving retail trade, and nightlife–most of it fueled by industrial dollars. If it is a romanticized version of the past, why not? Webster still has a nice lake, but it’s a toss-up if a postindustrial Webster is an improvement.

 

Rob Weir

 

Witchcraft: More Than Just Salem

 

 

 

Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (20230

By Marion Gibson

Scribner, 261 pages + back matter.

★★★★

 

Many people think “Salem” the moment the word “witch” is uttered. There is little doubt that the events in 1692 Massachusetts are a stain upon the pages of American history, Yet they are a mere blip on the far bigger, older, and ongoing global scapegoating record. That’s why Marion Gibson, a professor at the University of Exeter in England, devotes just one of her 13 chapters of Witchcraft to Salem.

 

Scholars have long known that the persecution of witches runs deep in the veins of Western history, hence Gibson begins her study with the 1485 trial of Helena Scheuberin in Austria. It’s not even close to being the oldest witch accusation in the West­–the Old Testament sanctions killing witches­–but it was a watershed in leading to mass witch hysteria. Scheuberin was acquitted, but her case fired the zeal of demonologists and led to the publication of guides on how to identify witches (and male wizards), the most infamous being Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, which held sway for centuries.

 

Untold numbers of women suffered in the post-Scheuberin period. An estimated 35-50,000 were executed between 1450-1750. Gibson recounts the toll in North Berwick, Scotland in the 1580s-90s–one tale of which influenced Shakespeare’s MacBeth–and those in Europe’s “colonial edge” of northern Scotland, Scandinavia, and North America. These tragic details are known to scholars, but there is a lesser-discussed synthesis involved in Gibson’s readable account. She reminds us that witchcraft upheavals through the ages take place for many of the same reasons across time–religious disputes, non-scientific speculation, political manipulation, fear of outsiders (Jews, travellers, the Sami people), the Reformation­, offshoots of warfare–but also that the very definition of witchcraft has been malleable.

 

The Bible indeed mentions witches, but how do we explain the rarity of accusations in Europe prior to the 15^th century? Gibson argues that witchcraft has undergone cycles in which it was superstitious to believe or to not believe in it. In the 1620s, Joan Wright became America’s “first” witch. She was a respected healer, herbalist, and midwife in Virginia, but because she wasn’t always successful in her ministrations and the colony was starving, she came under suspicion. As far as we know, Wright survived but the transformation from healer to witch planted the very idea of Satan loose upon North American soil.

 

Gibson detected “echoes” of witchcraft paranoia after Salem and the rise of Enlightenment thinking–during the French Revolution, homophobia outbreaks, attacks on indigenous beliefs, and during sensational murder trials– but the prevailing norm in the West shifted to associating malevolent witchcraft with archaic superstition. In chapters set in Sub-Saharan Africa Gibson reminds us, though, that the Western norm is not universal. Nor does the Western ideal always have salutary effects. In her final chapter on Stormy Daniels Gibson shows how rejection of the power of witches can be manipulated for political advantage. She speculates that Donald Trump’s charge that his detractors and accusers are engaging in a “witch hunt,” is an attempt to tar them with ideological superstition.

 

This is both an enlightening and entertaining book, though it has its flaws. I appreciated Gibson’s attempts to globalize witchcraft fears, but she is open to the charge of having written a Eurocentric book that’s merely a drive-by peek at the rest of the world. This, in my estimation, is fair commentary. There would have been nothing wrong with confining her study to the West and, having heard her speak, she had plenty of material to have expanded Western examples.

 

Gibson sometimes draws distinctions too sharply. In later chapters she presents modern-day witchcraft as a return to the standards before Joan Wright’s trial; that is, that witches are either benign or engage in healing arts. That depends on who you ask! If she’s right, Trump’s evocation of a witch hunt is a political gamble. There are plenty of evangelicals and cultural conservatives who continue to demonize homosexuals, witches, spiritualist mediums, astrologists, those holding non-Christian beliefs, and (paradoxically) scientists. Some ministers and priests would happily append Malleus Maleficarum to the New Testament.

 

I wish to emphasize that I’m one of the scholars who has delved into the topic at hand and thus my eye is more critical than that of the average reader. You need not wade in academic waters to enjoy Gibson’s short volume. You’ll learn a lot if you do.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Epiphany Tale

Two of six

 

Today is Epiphany, symbolically Jesus’ introduction to the Gentiles. It’s January 6 in a non-Leap Year. Therein lies several tales, including my Christmas cactus (officially a Schlumbergera).

 

As I’ve noted before, it’s unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25. Unless you’re a Biblical literalist–nobody know for certain what happened at Bethlehem or when. One thing is clear, though. Despite those manger scenes you see at churches during the Christmas season of “Wise Men/Three Kings” bearing gifts–gold, frankincense and myrrh–manger scenes neglect the observation that the Wise Men came from “the east.” (Garrison Keillor once speculated that myrrh was a tuna casserole!) The “east” was Persia and would have been Zoroastrian Magi with a reputation for practicing alchemy, astrology, and astonishing tricks. The word “magic” derives from them.

 

Most manger scenes are now back in storage. That’s odd because there were no Ubers or airflights back in first century, so it would have taken the Magi around 12 days to get to the manger via camels. That span of time was the inspiration for the many, many versions of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

 

Here’s where it gets weirder. December 25 to January 6 = 12 days. Except, December 25 and January 6 weren’t always December 25 or January 6. Huh? In what Westerners  call 45 B.C. Julius Caesar instituted a solar calendar, which was inaccurate by roughly 11 minutes per year. In 1582, some places converted to the more accurate Gregorian calendar (though it’s off by about 26 seconds each year, hence leap years). It wasn’t put in place in Britain until 1752, which meant 11 days needed to be lopped off the calendar.

 

In legend, there were riots in which crowds chanted “Give us our 11 days.” That might not be true; some believe it was a joke embedded in a William Hogarth painting–he a bit of a trickster in his own right. That said, not everyone was happy about matters. For some in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, today is the “real” Christmas. This brings me to my Christmas cactus, which gets bright pinkish red blooms in the winter. Ahh, but when?

 

Years ago, I was in Glastonbury, England. It has associations with King Arthur, but never mind that. In legend, one hawthorn–“holy thorn”–tree bloomed in the spring and again at Christmas. In the tale, it first sprouted from part of the staff of Joseph of Arimathea. (He was the man who gave the crucified Christ his tomb.) Move forward to 1752. Villagers descended upon the tree on December 25, but no blooms. They returned on January 6 and it did so. A sign from above? For many years Glastonbury celebrated Christmas on January 6.

 

My cactus didn’t bloom for about five years. This fall we re-potted it and began to see red buds on the tips of several fronds. On December 25, there was one that opened. Today, there are six. Just sayin’.

 

Rob Weir

 

PS: Sad tale: Vandals have hacked at the Glastonbury hawthorn and it’s now officially dead, though grafts hold out hopes of renewal.

 

Code Girls: The Women Who Helped Win WWII

 

CODE GIRLS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE AMERICAN WOMEN CODE BREAKERS OF WORLD WAR II

By Liza Mundy

Hachette Books, 2017, 448 pages.

★★★★

 

 
 

Perhaps you have heard of the WACS and WAVES, but women’s contributions during World War II remain underappreciated. This is certainly true of those who worked as code breakers, like a deceased friend who was recruited when she was an undergraduate at Mt. Holyoke College. In deference to what would have been her wishes, I will refer to her  by the initial B.

 

 I did not know of Code Girls by Liza Mundy when B was alive. I sometimes wish we had known about this book earlier, though it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. B was chatty, sharp, and irreverent, but took no bait when prompted to talk about her wartime role. “I took an oath," said she, and maintained that stance even though stories about code girls had begun to surface in her lifetime and much of their once-secret mission had been declassified.

 

Mundy’s book gives an appreciation for the burden these women carried. They came from all walks of life, including those plucked from the best women’s colleges, but given that just four percent of women attended four-year colleges in 1942, the main criteria were an affinity for math, languages, and/or puzzle solving. B was highly intelligent, so I'm sure she ticked all of the boxes. The task was nothing less than breaking German and Japanese secret communications in an age in which electronic computing was in its infancy and there was no such thing artificial intelligence. Try cracking powerful mechanical encrypting machines through brainpower alone. Even if you figured out messages linguistically, what did the nonsensical words mean? That took late nights, intuition, and sweat.

 

Here's the kicker: much of what the women discovered could not be used, lest Axis powers suspect that their codes were compromised and change them. Information had to be parceled carefully and saved for crucial moments. Imagine the enormous weight of having advance knowledge that hundreds of GIs were marching toward their deaths. Many of the women had brothers and husbands in the war and their information could have prevented the slaughter of someone else's brothers and husbands. I often wonder if that's why B took her oath to the grave.

 

Mundy does a fine job of giving glimpses into the mindsets and patriotism of her subjects. Decades after the war ended in 1945, some were allowed to break their silence. Among them were a former Virginia school teacher, an African American recruit, a Smith College history major, an English scholar and champion swimmer, and a woman from a backwoods Pennsylvania town. Naturally, though, Mundy has lacunae in her story. After all, how much has been forgotten or embellished after the more than seven decades later?

 

There are common touchstones. The women spoke of their training. Those from humble backgrounds had never before ventured far from home before they reported to training facilities; several had to scrape together fare to get there. Quite a few had no idea what they had volunteered to do until they arrived. They had a sense of duty, but were also aware of the sexism of male superiors and bristled from the disrespect shown by men who were their intellectual inferiors. There were also maters of lower pay, poor work conditions, and crummy lodging. In the 1940s, what we’d today call structural sexism was the social norm. Many of Munde’s informants did not reflect upon fairness until years later; one gets the sense they were too busy and too exhausted to dwell upon it at the time. They simply figured out how to bypass inter-service rivalries, deflect personality clashes that led to inefficiencies, and cope with everyday indignities.

 

The code “girls”–and most were indeed young–were a mix of traditional and non-traditional individuals, some of whom presented in conventional feminine ways and others who embraced proto-feminist ideals. However we view the code breakers though, the stakes couldn’t have been much higher. Until the Japanese codes were broken in 1943, the United States was losing the war in the Pacific and it wasn’t much better in Europe. This alone makes the case that more attention should be cast upon those women whose names do not make the history books. They should take their place aside famous men such as MacArthur, Eisenhower, Halsey, and Patton.

 

Mundy’s is a fine early corrective. Only a lack of an index mars an otherwise stellar work.

 

Rob Weir