forgottennewsmakers

CORNELIA CONNELLY (1809 – 1879) Mother & Nun Who Founded a Religious Order

In Catholic Church, Italian History, Victorian Women on July 25, 2011 at 10:44 AM

Mother Cornelia Connelly

When someone tried to tell Cornelia Connelly what to do, she responded with stubborn determination, choosing what she knew was right for her.  The primary guiding force of her life was her faith, and she was willing to obey God and sacrifice whatever He asked of her.  When she made that promise, however, she had no idea how heartbreaking that sacrifice would turn out to be.

Connelly was born into a prominent Philadelphia Episcopalian family.  Her father died when she was nine years old and her mother died five years later. The fourteen year old girl and her five siblings were not orphaned, however, as several relatives incorporated them into their families.  Connelly was adopted by a half sister, Mrs. Montgomery, and was given classes in music, painting, modern languages and the social graces.

Mrs. Montgomery took seriously her responsibility to prepare her charge for a proper suitor, but she was no match for the curate of St. James Church.  Pierce Connelly was charming if not handsome, intelligent and an ambitious, charismatic minister.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Montgomery did not think his family was of worthy social standing, and she forbade Connelly to marry him.  That wasn’t a compelling enough reason for Connelly to stop seeing him, and   she ran away to live with her sister, Adeline Duval, who was much more sympathetic to matters of the heart.

Connelly was 22 years old and Pierce was 27 when they got married in December 1831.  The groom undoubtedly promised to love his bride until death separated them, and the bride in turn promised to obey her husband.  Whether he kept his promise or not depends on a definition of love, but she obediently followed him until it conflicted with her commitment to God’s will.

As newlyweds, the couple moved to Natchez, Mississippi where Pierce became the rector of Trinity Church.  One year later a son, Mercer, was born followed by a daughter, Adeline, in early 1835.

A CONVERSION EXPERIENCE                         In August, Pierce had a crisis of faith and renounced his Anglican Orders in order to study Roman Catholicism, which in his mind necessitated selling their property and going to Rome.  Connelly believed in the sincerity and integrity of her husband’s calling and found virtue in converting to Catholicism herself.  She followed her husband’s lead, but she did it her way.  Pierce was adamant about waiting to take the sacraments in the holy city, but his wife was ready immediately.  When the voyage from New Orleans was delayed several weeks, Connelly was received into the Catholic Church and took her First Communion before leaving the States.

After 60 days at sea and a stop in southern France, the Connellys final reached Rome in February 1836.  Pierce was received into the Catholic Church on Palm Sunday.  As a married couple with two children coming all the way from America to join the Church, the Connellys were a novelty.  They quickly integrated into local society, had an audience with Pope Gregory XVI and were frequent visitors of the influential Borghese family.  A son, John Henry (“Harry”), was born while they were in Europe.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR                        About a year later, the Connellys had to return to Louisiana to take care of a financial crisis, and Pierce got a job as an English professor, giving them a place to live on campus.  Another daughter was born, but she died after only a few weeks.  For a couple of years the family lived an idyllic life, and Connelly blissfully filled her days teaching with the nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.  One day while watching the children play outside, Connelly prayed, “My God, if all this happiness is not to Thy greater Glory and the good of my soul, take it from me.  I make the sacrifice.”1  The next day while Harry was playing with the dog, he fell into scalding liquid in the sugar boiler and subsequently died in Connelly’s arms.

To further deepen his faith, Pierce went on a retreat in October 1840 and had another epiphany: he was being called into the priesthood.  He revealed his decision to his pregnant wife, and she dutifully accepted it as God’s will, although the implications for the family were drastic.  He made it clear that for them, following God’s will would require immediate celibacy, and eventually they would have to live separately.  Connelly was heartbroken but willing to make whatever sacrifices God required of her.  In January she went into retreat where she reaffirmed her commitment to her own spiritual journey, and in March her son Frank was born.

The following year Pierce had an opportunity to work in England as a tutor and to give Mercer an English education.  He and his son left in May 1842, and Connelly and the two younger children joined the Sacred Heart community, living in a very small cottage next to the convent.

Because he was married, approval for Pierce to become a priest had to come directly from Rome, and Connelly had to accompany him there to sign a petition for separation.  Before leaving Louisiana, conflicted Connelly offered her husband an opportunity to change his mind and reconcile the marriage.  He remained steadfast in his desire to join the priesthood even if it meant splitting up the family.

POVERTY, CHASTITY & OBEDIENCE                       In the fall of 1843 Connelly and her husband presented their petition to Pope Gregory XVI, and the following spring they were granted a Deed of Separation.  Pierce began his ecclesiastical studies, and Connelly, who had become a postulant in America, remained true to her calling and entered the Sacred Heart convent.  Mercer and Adeline were at boarding school, but Connelly was able to keep young Frank with her.

Pierce visited his family weekly, and when he was ordained, he said his first mass at his wife’s convent.  It was a very emotional experience for Connelly to receive Holy Communion from her husband and for Adeline to receive her First Communion from her father.

In the 1840s there was a sectarian movement whose aim it was to influence Britain toward being a united Catholic state.  It seemed logical that raising children with a Catholic education would be a good place to start.  Because of her talent for teaching and compassion for children, Connelly was handpicked to start a convent school in Derby, England.  By now she was accustomed to following God’s orders for her life, so she packed up the children and went to Derby.

“Sister Connelly” started wearing a habit in December 1846, and some months later she took her temporary vows.  Rather than join an established order, it was Connelly’s mission to found a new order which she called the Society of the Holy Child Jesus (SHCJ).  As Superior, she and the nuns that joined her opened a boarding school for girls with a full curriculum including English, foreign languages, social studies, arithmetic, music, art, and needlework.

Connelly devoted her full energy to the success of the school until Pierce became dissatisfied with his status again and swept up his wife into another drama.  Pierce had gone to England to resume his work as tutor, but that didn’t last.  Money was tight, and he wanted to be more integrated into Connelly’s life and work.  On March 4, 1847 Pierce showed up unannounced to Connelly’s convent and demanded to see her.  For the first time, she did not acquiesce to his demands and refused to see him.  Her decision was supported by the bishop, but Pierce was not amused.

TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS                                Pierce tried various ways to regain control of Connelly.  She had submitted the Rules for her new order to Rome, modeling them after St Ignatius.  Pierce went back to Rome and made an attempt to get the Vatican to support his efforts, insisting that she use St. Francis de Sales as the model.  Then, he began writing to her directly, requesting a personal visit.  When she didn’t reply, Pierce convinced himself that Bishop Wiseman was manipulating her.  He could feel his wife slipping out of his grasp and claimed he feared for the future of his children.

In October, Pierce’s next move was to demand that Connelly not take her final vows on the grounds that since they were still legally married, he would be responsible for any debts she or her order might incur.  Connelly’s religious journey stayed its course, however, and she took her final vows in December, becoming Mother Connelly.

Pierce retaliated against his wife’s defiance by assuming custody of the three children and taking them to Italy without her permission.  This left her with two choices: give up her religious life to be with her children or give up her children.  In the face of the ultimate sacrifice, Connelly prayerfully refused to submit to her husband’s ploy, writing in her diary, “I Cornelia vow to have no future intercourse with my children and their father, beyond what is for the greater glory of God, and is His manifest will through my director, and in case of doubt on his part through my extraordinary [confessor].”2 She never saw Mercer again.

This was not the decision that Pierce anticipated, and he couldn’t accept it.  He went back to Derby a few months later and demanded to see Connelly.  Again she refused.  He flew into a rage and would not leave the waiting room for six hours, trying every way he could think of to get to his wife, to no avail.

This left Pierce with only one card left to play.  In January 1849, Connelly received a subpoena to appear in English court.  Pierce was suing her for restoration of conjugal rights.  Connelly was not only concerned about the outcome of the trial, but also that Pierce would exhaust his ability to provide for the children in attorney’s fees and that he would mislead the children away from the Catholic Church.  By now he had renounced his vows and reverted to Protestantism.

Connelly vs. Connelly came before a judge in May, but the defendant did not appear.  With her life’s work at stake, her counsel cited the legal separation granted them in Rome.  The judge ruled in favor of Pierce saying that the decree of separation from Rome did not hold up legally in English court.  Connelly’s attorneys filed an appeal which went to court in 1851.  This time a Judicial Committee ruled in Connelly’s favor, and since Pierce had no further financial means to pay his legal bills, he was forced to drop the case.  Connelly was able to continue her mission, but the children stayed with their father.

Connelly was able to compartmentalize the heartbreak she felt at losing her family and focus her outward attention on her mission.  The Society of Holy Child Jesus expanded, establishing convents with schools in other English towns, France and Philadelphia.  Connelly wrote the Book of Studies in 1863 as the basis for her curriculum, which emphasized compassion, imaginative teaching, the importance of the arts, and lots of outdoors activities for developing youngsters.

STAY CALM AND CARRY ON                           It seemed that Connelly was destined to have nothing come easy for her, and getting her Rules for the SHCJ approved by the Vatican was a lesson in patience and steadfastness.  Twenty-seven years after Connelly submitted her first draft, Bishop Danell summoned representatives from each convent to convene for the purpose of debating the Rules and electing a Superior General.  Connelly was respected by most of the nuns in her order, but there was some dissension in the ranks which she was totally unaware of.  At the gathering, Reverend Mother Connelly was elected as Superior by a majority vote, but Bishop Danell appointed himself as Bishop Superior of the Institute, rendering Connelly’s authority ineffective.  In addition, he substituted some rules that he concocted for those that the sisters had been living under for almost three decades.  Connelly had no choice but to accept them.  Until Connelly’s Rules were approved, the nuns were restricted to only taking the temporary vows and were not able to fulfill their spiritual commitment with final vows.

Connelly’s health was another nagging issue over many years.  She suffered from rheumatic gout, and bronchitis.  She became bedridden and was given last rites in January 1878.  She managed to hang on another 15 months, and the reward for her endurance was that in January 1879, Bishop Danell allowed her novices to take their perpetual vows.

Three months later Connelly was given Last Rites again, and on April 18, 1879 she died, 33 years to the day after she left Rome to start her order.  She was given a Requiem mass and was buried at the convent in Mayfield, England.  Eight years after the death of their founder, in August 1887, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus was informed that the Pope had approved their Rules as Connelly had written them.  Today, Connelly’s legacy through the Society of the Holy Child Jesus has established convents and schools in the United States, Europe and Africa.

QUESTION:  What would you be willing to sacrifice to stand up for something you believe?

©2011 Debbie Foulkes All Rights Reserved

1Mother Marie Therese,p. 27

2Wadham, p. 114

Sources:

Mother Marie Therese, Cornelia Connelly, A Study in Fidelity.  Great Britain: The Newman Press, 1963.

Wadham, Juliana, The Case of Cornelia Connelly: Wife, Mother, Nun-Saint.  New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1957.

http://www.shcj.org/society.html

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CLARENCE KING (1842 – 1901) White Geologist, Black Husband

In adventure, African-American women, American History, Civil War, Geology on June 17, 2011 at 10:15 AM

Clarence King

Clarence King’s ancestry went back to Alfred the Great, the Magna Carta, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  There was no doubt about King’s Anglo roots.  But people believe what they want to, and pale, blue-eyed King lived a double life as a white man and a black man, which spanned the breadth of New York society.

King’s mom was only 15 years old when she got married, and her 21 year old husband was already an established businessman.  King was born while his father was in China on business, and he was raised with the help of a colored nanny.  When King was only six his dad died in China.  The family also lost two baby girls leaving only mother and son.

A pattern of financial troubles and sickness that would follow King for the rest of his life started in 1856 in Canton, China when the family business was destroyed by mobs who hated foreign-owned businesses, and King’s mom was left almost destitute.  Three years later, 17-year-old King dropped out of high school before graduating, giving the vague reason as “illness.”  He moved to Brooklyn to work for a flour merchant.  He and his mother always remained close, but she remarried a widow and had a second family.

King might have been considered bi-polar.  He was prone to depression, a source of future illness, and yet very sociable.  His friends characterized him as smart, compassionate, well read, an excellent conversationalist and story teller, and a good writer.  Politically he was a staunch abolitionist.

THE CALL OF THE WILD             With the financial help of his step father, King went to Sheffield Scientific School which offered the best scientific training in the country.  He received a Bachelor’s degree in 1862.  After graduation, he and some buddies immediately set off for Lake Champlain to row from New York into Canada.  Not realizing that a draft had been instituted to fulfill the Union quota for soldiers, they were surprised to be stopped at the border as suspected draft dodgers.  They managed to convince the inspector that they were not avoiding the draft and finished their trip.  King was adamantly against slavery, but he was also a pacifist.  When the adventurers returned home, King headed to California to do some mountain climbing and feed his curiosity about geology, conveniently escaping his need to enroll in military service.

King, along with two friends, may have avoided the dangers of war, but he had some harrowing experiences that were equally as life threatening.  Near Fort Kearney, Nebraska King hired a guide to take him on a buffalo hunt.  After chasing a bull for almost two miles, King shot the animal, and it turned and charged King’s horse which fell on top of him.  A buffalo herd a mile and a half long rushed by him, parting just enough to avoid the horse which had King pinned to the ground, keeping him from being trampled.

King and his best friend James Gardiner found ways to earn just enough money to make their way to San Francisco, and King joined the California State Geological Survey as an unpaid assistant geologist.  King and the others on their expeditions worked in the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite and Lake Tahoe, and named Mount Tyndall, Mount Whitney, Mount Gardiner and Mount Clarence King after themselves.

NOT FOR LOVE OR MONEY             After a trip to Nicaragua in 1865, where King got malaria, he stayed at mom’s house to recover before going west again.  He returned to New York a year later when his stepfather died, leaving his mom with three children to raise, several servants to support and no money.  King borrowed money from Gardiner to help with the immediate needs.

In 1867, King was appointed U. S. Geologist-in-Charge of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, and he successfully lobbied for federal funds to conduct his survey.  His salary was $250 a month, and he hired Gardiner as a member of his crew.  Despite the rugged environment, King preferred to dress the part of boss by wearing linen with silk stockings and low shoes.  During their first season, King and his team surveyed 12,000 square miles and collected over 3,000 specimens of rocks, minerals and fossils.

In Virginia City, Nevada, both King and Gardiner fell in love, and in April 1868 King announced his engagement to Ellen Dean, a teacher.  But in September when Gardiner married Josie Rogers, something was wrong, and King didn’t even show up to his best friend’s wedding.  A few months later when they all convened back in Washington D.C. King was acting despondent.  He wrote in a journal that loyalty to mother and God trumps passion.

After a third season surveying along the Fortieth Parallel, King earned his reputation as a captivating storyteller.  He had essays published in the Atlantic Monthly, and in 1872 he published Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, tales of his adventure peppered with social commentary.  It was so popular that it went through nine printings in two years.

The book may have made King popular, but apparently it did not make him rich.  He needed money to help his family, so he testified as an expert witness for a California mining company for $5,000.  Then in late 1873, he ended up back in New York to set up the survey laboratory.  He was resigned to being city bound and would express his restless in a different way, the beginning of his double life.

AS DIFFERENT AS NIGHT AND DAY             By day King worked hard at the tasks at hand, but at night, either alone or with a friend, he went “slumming” around the neighborhoods of the poor and ethnically diverse.  He was not looking for sexual experiences or to gawk or assert his superiority.  King saw especially the African American neighborhoods as a frontier to explore, and in the cover of darkness he could experience cultures forbidden to him in his mainstream life.

King was recognized for his contributions in geology when the United States Senate confirmed his nomination as the first director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in April 1879, a position he held for almost two years.  In 1881 King resigned in order to oversee several mining interests.  When most of them became losing propositions, he went to Europe to find investors.  He was nominally successful, but he did amass an impressive art collection which he either lent to friends or placed in storage in New York.

When he returned to New York in 1884, he rented rooms in various elegant residential hotels and belonged to several social clubs.  This arrangement allowed him the maximum freedom to come and go for long periods of time, often without telling his friends when he was leaving.  Although he had embedded himself in New York society, he was not at all attracted to the women of that class.  He preferred more “natural” women who were not obsessed with fashion, as he put it, with whom he could have a deeper conversation.  On one trip to California he had a relationship with a Native American named Luciana who came very close to his ideal.  Back in New York, King was haunted by her memory, and his friends gave up trying to find dates for him.

TO LOVE AND TO CHERISH             Sometime in late 1887, King met a woman named Ada Copeland, probably while he was slumming around New York at night.  There is no record of their meeting or courtship.  She was an African American who had migrated from Georgia to New York as a single woman and lived with a widowed aunt doing laundry in their home until she got a job as a nanny.  She was probably in her mid to late 20s when she met King, but she didn’t have a birth certificate to confirm her age.

The couple fell in love, but since interracial marriage was still illegal in most of the country, King introduced himself as James Todd, a Pullman car porter from Baltimore.  This was the only identity she ever knew.  King’s proficiency at storytelling served him well, and Copeland never doubted his veracity.  Despite his light complexion and eyes, by choosing that profession, it was assumed that he had black blood in him, and the presence of any amount of black blood, despite appearances, was enough to be considered Negro.

Ada Copeland became Mrs. James Todd in September 1888 in a small religious ceremony at Copeland’s aunt’s home.  Since they did not get a civil marriage license, they only had a common law marriage which had legal ramifications later in life.  There were only a few guests at the ceremony, and none of the groom’s family or friends attended or even knew about it.

Being married allowed Todd to move up in status and it allowed King to have a real home somewhere.  He set her up in an apartment in Brooklyn giving her an unusual amount of independence and privacy for a black woman.  But for King, supporting his mother’s household and a wife became very expensive, and the demands on his wallet were exacerbated when he and Todd had children.  There was a boy, Leroy, who was born only a year after they married and then died when he was about two.  By 1897 the family had grown to two girls and two more boys.  All of the children were called “colored” on their birth certificates.

Children made for a happy family, but it added to his burden of debt.  King borrowed money from John Hay, one of his dearest friends he met when he worked in Washington, D.C.  When they met, Hay was the assistant secretary of state, and then became President Lincoln’s private secretary.  King appealed to Hay for a loan, something he would do many times, and within the first year and a half of his marriage, King was $43,000 in debt.

FOR RICHER OR POORER, IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH             Both King’s private and professional lives were very full.  He received an honorary doctorate from Brown University, but he was unable to attend the ceremony because he was in Europe dealing with mining projects.  He had perfect alibis for whenever he wasn’t around.  His wife believed he was traveling across the country on a train working as a porter.  While he was gone, he wrote passionate love letters to her, and there were joyful reunions upon his return.  His friends and business colleagues thought he was with his mother or had disappeared for a while because of his depression.  When he did visit his mother, he kept the truth about his indebtedness from her.  When he confided his fears and feelings about life to his friends, particularly Hay, he talked about everything except his family.  He kept that a well guarded secret.

King’s financial situation continued to worsen.  In 1886 he had organized the national Bank of El Paso and, as the main stockholder, he appointed a friend as the bank president.  In 1893, the friend’s bad management caused the bank to fail, and King lost everything.  The burden of living a double life and increased debt started taking its toll.  That fall, a disheveled, bearded King was arrested at the Central Park zoo for disorderly conduct.  He had gone into a wild rage, but he was released on bail posted by a former classmate who worked at the facility.  King was then examined by two doctors who diagnosed him as exhibiting acute symptoms resulting from a non-specific mental disturbance.  The doctors and three friends sought help in dealing with King, and a judge committed him to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane.  The cost of his treatment was paid for by two friends who visited him almost every day.

In January 1894, after two months in Bloomingdale, King was declared “recovered” from “Acute Melancholia.”  He had had no contact with his wife while he was institutionalized, and then almost immediately left for a business trip to the Caribbean.  He didn’t arrive back in New York until May before heading out to California again.  To help alleviate some of his financial burden, King started selling off some of f his art collection.

Life for the “Todd” family got easier while it got worse for King.  Todd spent the money she received on the family, moving up the ladder into more middle class neighborhoods and adding a nanny, music teacher, cook, maid and laundress to the payroll.  King had a mild heart attack in 1897 while in Colorado.  Perhaps he suspected that something would happen because in his correspondence to his wife he admonished her to keep their relationship a secret and to burn his letters.

King went to Arizona next where he contracted whooping cough, and the doctor found a spot of tuberculosis on his lung.  He kept traveling, exacerbating the condition, and when he went back to New York to visit his family and his mother, there was a feeling that it might be the last visit.  King told Todd to move the family to Toronto and to buy a house with the money he had gotten from friends, which she did.

Again King went to Arizona for the climate.  He had another heart attack and ventured to Pasadena, California to find a doctor who could help him.  He had lost 40 pounds and was plagued by headaches caused by fever.  Hay continued to send money to support his friend.  King, sensing the beginning of the end, started to evaluate his life, wondering why someone as intelligent as himself was such a financial failure, a question his friends had been asking themselves for a long time.

TIL DEATH DO US PART             King went once more to Arizona in a desperate attempt to recover.  He admittedly knew that was impossible, so he finally unburdened himself and wrote a letter to Todd revealing his true identity and the deception he had kept from her for 13 years.  He suggested she write his real name in her Bible in case she forgot it.

On December 23, 1901, Todd celebrated her 41st birthday in Toronto.  On December 24, King died in Arizona, one month before his 60th birthday.  He had told his wife that he had provided for the family after his death, but the only will he had was written before he got married, making his mother the beneficiary.  Because King and Todd only had a common law marriage, she was not entitled to anything.

For all of King’s accomplishments and failures, his life choices were a living illustration of what he believed: “People are looked at in only two ways, with the brain and with the heart.  If you take the former method you initially classify and judge people by their differences with other people usually yourself.  If you see them with the heart you have your conceptions on the similarities between them and some other people usually yourself.”1

QUESTION:  What do you believe in so strongly that you would have it influence your life choices?

©2011 Debbie Foulkes All Rights Reserved

1Sandweiss, p. 173.

Sources:

Sandweiss, Martha A., Passing Strange, A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.

http://books.nap.edu/html/biomems/cking06.pdf

http://www.summitpost.org/mount-clarence-king/150502  (A description of Mount Clarence King)

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ELIZABETH BENTLEY (1908 – 1963) Communist Spy & FBI Informant

In American History, Cold War, Espionage, Feminists on April 25, 2011 at 9:13 PM

Elizabeth Bentley

For Elizabeth Bentley, with the Great Depression came the demise of the American Dream.  As a young woman caught up in spying for the Russians, she idealistically believed that the security of communism offered hope for restoring opportunity and creating a future for American citizens.  Since the USSR was an ally of the United States during World War II, handing over secret documents to Moscow was really advancing the common mission.  But after the war, the Soviet Union became the enemy, and Bentley’s idealism turned to fear.  She saved her life by ruining the lives of others, but she couldn’t save herself from her personal demons.

Bentley’s parents were a dry goods merchant and a teacher in Connecticut, and they had only one child.  They were staunch Republicans and Episcopalians, and her father founded a temperance newspaper that promoted the evils of alcohol.  It was a strict and sheltered childhood for the young girl whose unscrupulous life as an adult belied her upbringing.

After high school, Bentley got a scholarship to Vassar where she majored in English and minored in Italian and French.  Being an only child did not give Bentley a sociable personality.  She was primarily a loner, but she mingled for the first time with people who thought radically differently from how she was raised.  Her mother died while she was in college, and when she graduated, Bentley used her inheritance to travel to Europe.  She had her first romance on the ship en route.

When she returned to the States, the only thing Bentley was qualified to do was teach, and she got a job at Foxcroft School, a prep school for girls in Virginia.  She left Foxcroft in 1932 and attended Columbia University Graduate School until she got a fellowship to the University of Florence.  Her dad died before she left for Italy, but he didn’t leave her any money.

Perhaps to compensate emotionally for being orphaned in her 20s, Bentley became very promiscuous.  She soothed her depression with alcohol and had to borrow money for her expenses.  All of these distractions affected Bentley’s academic standing.  She failed a course and was suspended twice.  While she was researching her thesis she had an affair with her professor who ordered his assistant to write Bentley’s paper for her, although she claimed she had written it herself.

During the summer of 1934 Bentley returned to New York and enrolled in business courses at Columbia.  She lived down the hall from a woman who used the name Lee Fuhr, a Communist who invited Bentley to go to meetings of the Communist Party.  Jobs were scarce during the Depression, and Bentley couldn’t find work.  The tenets of communism were more attractive in light of this dire situation, and Bentley eventually embraced the new political point of view

As a new member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), Bentley had to go to four meetings a week, take classes in Marxism and Leninism, hand out fliers and go to rallies, and she served in several leadership roles.

I SPY             Bentley was able to work at a few part time jobs, but none of them had long term potential.  Her life opened up in 1938 when she decided to step up her involvement in the Party, and she met “Timmy” on a street corner.  “Timmy” was a Soviet operative.  His cover was the head of the World Tourists travel agency, but he actually supplied U.S. passports and other documents for Soviet spies.  Bentley knew “Timmy” for six months before she accidentally learned that he was really Jacob Golos (formerly Jacob Raisin), a Russian Jew who had survived a Siberian labor camp and, after becoming a United States citizen, helped found the CPUSA.  He was in charge of a network of spies and reported directly to the Soviets.  Golos was 18 years older and several inches shorter than Bentley.  He had a common law wife and son in Russia and was living with another woman when they met.  Even though operatives weren’t allowed to socialize together, it wasn’t long before they became intimate.  For the first time in her life, Bentley was in a real relationship and had meaningful work.

When Bentley was unemployed again, Golos decided she was ready for the next step and taught her how to be a spy.  He showed her how to properly use a pay phone, how to store important documents in her apartment, how to rig a book behind the door to detect a break in, how to burn or flush down the toilet important documents so they couldn’t be found, and how to lose a tail.

In April 1941, Golos had a heart attack.  He recovered, but the FBI was watching him, and he didn’t have much stamina.  Having been groomed to take over for Golos when the time came, Bentley was ready to step into his shoes.  A new cover company was formed, United States Service and Shipping Corporation (USS&S), and she became the vice president earning $200 a month, with frequent raises up to $800 a month and a very generous expense account.

CLEVER GIRL             Bentley also took over as supervisor for Golos’ network, and the Soviets gave her the code name umnitsa, meaning “Clever Girl.”  She became a handler supervising individuals, including William Remington who worked at the War Protection Board.  She was also in charge of the Silvermaster Group, one of the biggest spy networks in America.  Members of Silvermaster Group included her direct contact Nathan Silvermaster who worked in the Agriculture Department, and others who worked at the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury, the most influential being Harry White, the undersecretary of the Treasury.

Golos died Thanksgiving night 1943, and Bentley comforted herself by drinking, most often to excess.  The following year the Silvermaster Group and an additional one, the Perlo Group, were taken away from her, and the Soviets weren’t quite sure what to do with her.  She was told to report to a new contact, “Al,” Anatoly Gorsky, the first secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. and the local head of KGB operations.

In 1945, Gorsky ordered Bentley to relinquish all her contacts and to quit working at USS&S.  Since some of the contacts knew her phone number and address, she had to move for security reasons.  She obeyed orders but then defiantly went back to USS&S because her replacement was doing a terrible job and she needed work.  She was acting hostile toward Gorsky, and he tried to get her to go to Moscow. She refused to go without the proper legal documents because she knew that if she did, she would never return.  Gorsky’s last attempt at calming Bentley down was to order her to take a vacation, and he started looking for an acceptable husband for her.  He appreciated her need for income, so he patronizingly gave her $2000.

Bentley could feel her life getting more difficult, and the intrinsic rewards for spying weren’t feeling so rewarding.  It was dawning on her that the Soviet priority was not to create more social equality in the United States, and the FBI was starting to investigate USS&S.  Bentley’s life was falling apart, so she took the recommended vacation in Connecticut.

As she later described a life changing experience, Bentley was walking around one day and stopped into a church to pray for guidance.  She heard a voice in her conscience that said “You must make amends.”  However, Bentley’s habit of exaggerating the facts for effect made fear and revenge more plausible explanations for her change of heart than a voice in her head.

CHANGING ALLEGIANCE             In August 1945, Bentley walked into the office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Connecticut using a fabricated reason for being there to test the waters.  The agent listened to her for two hours sensing that there was an underlying motive for her visit.  Bentley returned to New York and USS&S, and it wasn’t until October that she talked to the FBI again, continuing to misrepresent her intent.

During several subsequent interviews, Bentley finally revealed her story of espionage and named her contacts.  During the month of November she worked at USS&S during the day and talked to the FBI at night which resulted in a 107-page statement revealing 87 U.S. citizens and Russians who were spies in the U.S.  J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was thrilled with Bentley’s report, and by December there were 72 special agents working to verify Bentley’s claims.  The only evidence Bentley had to support her accusations was the $2000 Gorsky had given her, and she surrendered it to the FBI.

The FBI gave Bentley the code name “Gregory,” but NKGB intelligence found out about her defection.  To minimize the damage she was doing to their networks, all espionage was stopped immediately and all Russian nationals were called home.  Now the Soviets wanted revenge, and Gorsky was part of the discussion about the best way to eliminate Bentley permanently.  He suggested poisoning her food, but the NKGB never did try to kill her.

One immediate effect of Bentley’s confession was that 24 of the 27 people she named who were still working in the federal government were no longer employed.  Then, after two years, the FBI got a lucky break in the investigation.  Army code breakers on a top secret decryption project called Venona were finally able to decode Soviet cables that detailed their spying activities in the United States.  When the names of the spies in the cables were cross referenced with Bentley’s statement, the FBI finally had the documentation they were looking for.  Although the existence of the cables remained secret, the agency had specific information to justify continuing their investigation.

While she was acting as an FBI informant, Bentley continued to work at USS&S until the president, John Reynolds, closed it down in early 1947.  Then she got some clerical jobs and started testifying in Grand Jury investigations.  Looking for work and testifying would be major preoccupations for the rest of her life.

DAMNING TESTIMONY             Bentley testified in front of grand juries, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and she was the first woman to appear on the television show Meet The Press.  Her testimony was responsible for indicting or convicting many alleged spies, and she was an important witness in two high profile cases.  Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine, confessed to HUAC that he and Alger Hiss, a lawyer who worked in the State Department and helped establish the United Nations, practiced espionage as members of the Communist Party.  Chambers had immunity, but Hiss was convicted of perjury.   Bentley corroborated his story.  Bentley also testified at the trial of Julius Rosenberg, who was ultimately convicted along with his wife for passing information to the Soviets about the atomic bomb.  She said that, although she had never met him, she had received phone calls from him.  The judge in Rosenberg’s appeal trial said that it was Bentley’s testimony that connected the Communist Party to the Soviet Union.

Part of Bentley’s personality that made her a good spy also served her well on the witness stand.  She stayed very calm and confident under intense scrutiny, often contradicting a cross-examiner if she felt it was necessary.  As valuable as she was to the FBI, however, she had no friends or reliable income.  She was characterized as a psychopath in rumors around Washington and received death threats.  Underlying her strong public persona was a woman who needed to self medicate her insecurities with alcohol, and the bottle became the most reliable thing in her life.

Bentley tried to mitigate her financial circumstances by writing her autobiography.  She holed up in a rented room in Westport, Connecticut while she poured her life out onto paper.  She reinvented herself as she wanted people to think of her: a woman who worked as a spy because she was in love with Golos and blindly idolized and obeyed him.  She conveniently failed to mention her own idealistic drive, the alcoholism and her numerous affairs.  The book, called Out of Bondage, was serialized in McCall’s magazine before it was released.  The magazine articles were more popular than the book, and the fabrications and unsubstantiated allegations made it difficult to determine what was fact and what was fiction.

SEEING THE LIGHT             In 1948, Bentley discovered another form of relief.  She had a religious awakening, and on November 5 she was baptized into the Catholic Church by Monsignor Fulton Sheen.  She considered this her ultimate break with communism.  Not everyone believed that Bentley’s new found faith was sincere, however, since there were many people in the Catholic Church who were anticommunist and could help her.

Monsignor Sheen did, in fact, help Bentley.  She never got paid for giving testimony for the FBI, so she needed a job.  Sheen got her a teaching job at Mundelein College, a Catholic women’s college in Chicago, for $3,500 a year.  Openly living with a man out of wedlock and alcoholism did not make her a good role model for her students, and she agreed to resign.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD             For Bentley there were other jobs, more boyfriends, and new opportunities to testify, but nothing could make her happy or pay her bills.  She knew how much the FBI valued her in exposing and bringing down Communist infiltrators, and she used that to her advantage.  She created reasons for them to continue to need her by embellishing her stories with new facts and allegations, and when she got really desperate she would threaten to stop cooperating.  In order insure that Bentley would continue to be a favorable witness, the FBI would capitulate to her demands by giving her money, driving her to appointments, reducing a hit and run traffic violation and getting rid of a violent suitor.  When she owed the Internal Revenue Service $3,700 in taxes for creative distribution of her book royalties, she threatened to “blow the lid off the administration” if she didn’t get help.  Once again her contacts rallied and she got her IRS debt reduced to $1,000, the U.S. attorney got her reinstated to a teaching job, and the FBI chipped in $100. In return for their generosity, the government agents had to deal with an increasingly irrational and ungrateful woman,

Bentley had a hard time making the connection between her behavior and reputation and losing teaching jobs, and in a disillusioned moment, she left the Catholic Church.  She desperately turned again to the only source she could trust.  Bentley wrote a letter directly to J. Edgar Hoover essentially asking for a character reference to help her get another job.  He responded with a letter that simply confirmed that the testimony Bentley had given was true, not a glowing recommendation.

In the fall of 1959, Bentley did get one more opportunity to work, at the Long Lane School in Middletown, Connecticut.  At this reform school for girls, Bentley had more in common with this population of misfits than any previous student body.  She continued to write directly to Hoover, and he answered her letters not as a friend, but in case the FBI needed her to testify in the future.

In 1960, while teaching at Long Lane, Bentley received a master’s degree in education from Trinity College.  For three years her life was the most stable it had ever been, and she enjoyed her privacy away from public scrutiny.  The week before Thanksgiving 1963, Bentley went to the doctor complaining of severe stomach pains.  On December 2 she had exploratory surgery, and the surgeons found her abdominal cavity was so full of cancer there was nothing they could do.  They closed her up, and she died the following day, one month before her 56th birthday.  Even though there were lengthy obituaries written about her in the New York Times and the Washington Post recounting her valuable contribution to the government’s effort to eliminate communism in its ranks, only a handful of colleagues and FBI agents attended her funeral.

QUESTION:  Have you ever done something you really regretted later?  How did you deal with it?

©2011 Debbie Foulkes All Rights Reserved

Sources:

Kessler, Lauren, Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Sy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

Olmsted, Kathryn S., Red Spy Queen, a Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/who.html

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Bios/Rosenberg.shtml

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