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What they learned to do, better than anyone in the world, was reveal the written secrets of others. They were codebreakers, people who solve secret messages without knowing the key. Puzzle solvers.
And there is the prompt!
Her father didn’t want Elizebeth to go to college. She defied him and sent applications to multiple schools, vowing to pay her own tuition; a friend later recalled that she was full of “determination and energy to get a college education with no help or encouragement from her father.” (John Smith did end up loaning her some money—at 4 percent interest.) After being rejected from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a top Quaker school, she settled on Wooster College in Ohio, studying Greek and English literature there between 1911 and 1913. Then her mother fell ill with cancer and Elizebeth
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How is it possible that she went to both Wooster and Hillsdale and my family is connected to both?
Viewed through Shannon’s theory, intimate communication is a cryptologic process. When you fall in love, you develop a compact encoding to share mental states more efficiently, cut noise, and bring your beloved closer. All lovers, in this light, are codebreakers.
Elizebeth took her daughter to hear FDR’s inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, a viciously cold morning. They walked to the Capitol from their house. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” FDR said, focusing on his plans to restart the economy. He did not mention Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party, who had taken power that January, deploying mobs of men in brown uniforms and swastika armbands to crush dissent. The international press covered him like a normal leader. Many Germans did not think he would really do the things he had said he would do.
Eighteen days later, in Germany, in a vacant gunpowder factory northwest of Munich, the Nazis opened the first concentration camp, Dachau. The occasion was announced by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, at a press conference.
he began to write his own alternate history of the events and concepts Yardley had described, inside Yardley’s book, in the margins: “A lie! Which can be so proved to be. See papers attached. Exhibit 1.” He attached exhibits to another man’s book. He underlined sentences, bracketed paragraphs, tagged words with asterisks, spangled pages with exclamation marks.
Not content with his own annotations, he then circulated the copy of Yardley’s book among four of his colleagues in the army and MID, and they added their own annotations in their own handwriting, a chorus of jeers and boos. William created a numbered key in the front of the book so that future readers could keep track of the different voices.
