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The next statue on the Hillsdale Liberty Walk should celebrate America’s first female codebreaker and one of its greatest cryptanalysts. Her work helped indict Al Capone and dismantle a Nazi spy ring in South America. Elizebeth Smith Friedman may be Hillsdale College’s greatest alumna and deserves a permanent place of honor on campus.
Born in 1892 to a Quaker family in Huntington, Indiana, Elizebeth Smith transferred from Wooster College in Ohio to Hillsdale in 1913 to be closer to her ailing mother. She graduated in 1915 with a degree in English literature. At the college, she was a member of the women’s fraternity Pi Beta Phi and the literary editor at The Collegian.
She began working at Riverbank Laboratories, a facility dedicated to the study of cryptography, in Geneva, Illinois, in 1916. The wealthy and eccentric George Fabyan hired Friedman to prove that Shakespeare’s works were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon. While there, she recruited a colleague, William Friedman, to help. Working together, they became convinced that the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship was nonsense. In 1917, they got married in a remarkable union based on a mutual love of codebreaking.
Because Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories was the only cryptography facility in the country until the United States entered World War I, the government asked the Friedmans to train agents.
The couple left Illinois in 1921 to work for the Department of War in Washington, D.C. Frustrated with how she was treated compared to her husband, Friedman quit her government position in 1922 to raise a family. Three years later, however, the newly established Coast Guard hired her to break the codes of smugglers during Prohibition.
By 1930, Friedman had decrypted an estimated 12,000 coded messages by hand and testified in 33 cases. Her work led to more than 650 federal prosecutions, and she was a key witness in the trial that convicted the gangster Al Capone.
By 1932, she had put together one of the foremost teams in cryptanalysis and radio intelligence. During World War II, her unit transferred to the Navy, where she tracked the Nazis in South America and intercepted their messages to U-boats in the Atlantic. Her team broke three separate Enigma machines — German devices used to encrypt messages — and decoded more than 4,000 messages transmitted across more than 48 radio channels. In 1944, Friedman also helped convict Velvalee Dickenson, a Japanese spy in the United States.
After World War II, Friedman created a security system for the International Monetary Fund based on one-time tapes, which made its communications impossible to decrypt. By 1947, she retired with her husband, who also had a long and remarkable career as a cryptanalyst.
In retirement, the Friedmans continued to pursue their love of literature. Their 1957 book, “The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined,” continued the work they had started years earlier, refuting the theory that Bacon was the secret author of Shakespeare’s works. It remains a definitive work on the subject. “To Hillsdale College, where my interest in the authorship controversy was first aroused, with greeting to all students of Shakespeare from the authors,” Friedman wrote in the inside cover. The copy of the book with this inscription is preserved in the college’s library.
Friedman also took care of her husband, who suffered from severe depression caused by the stress of his own job as a codebreaker and later several debilitating heart attacks. He died in 1969. To preserve their legacy, Friedman donated a collection of her and her husband’s papers to the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia, in 1971. Friedman died in 1980.
Because of the top-secret nature of much of her work for the government, Friedman rarely discussed her accomplishments. J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI, also failed to give her any credit when publicizing America’s success in World War II codebreaking. Some historians attribute this to sexism, others to inter-departmental rivalry because Friedman worked for the Navy. Either way, Friedman was not recognized for her contributions until 2008, when the government declassified documents outlining her involvement.
Hillsdale students released a documentary focused on her life and influence in 2022. Now, the college should do more to recognize her remarkable life. Elizebeth Smith Friedman lived out Hillsdale’s ideals in everything she did. She served her family and her country and used her liberal arts education to put criminals in jail.
It’s time to honor one of Hillsdale’s most accomplished graduates with one of our best honors. Let’s put a statue of Elizebeth Smith Friedman on the Liberty Walk.
Megan Pidcock is a senior studying history.
