Stephanie Marie Thornton On Researching Spies & The Red Scare

Todays’s guest on the blog is Stephanie Marie Thornton, author of A Most Clever Girl, which takes readers on a thrill ride inside the calculating mind of a notorious Cold War spy: Elizabeth Bentley, code name Clever Girl.

Elizabeth Bentley is notorious for her role in the Red Scare, as well as for naming the Rosenbergs - which led to their execution. Was it difficult to write about this character in a way that could build empathy within the reader?

Yes! Elizabeth Bentley is an intriguing protagonist because she made a lot of terrible choices in her life, but I got the feeling that some of those early decisions—like becoming a Communist and then joining the CPUSA underground to spy—were made because she really did want to do something meaningful during a very difficult time in American history. At first, that meant spying on America to root out fascists and later, she aimed to expose Communist spies in American government.

While many Americans at the time believed—and protested in the streets—that the Rosenbergs were not guilty, the top secret VENONA Project confirmed and gave indisputable evidence that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were involved in the Soviet spy ring that sent atomic secrets to Moscow. The FBI and J. Edgar Hoover had also used VENONA to confirm the identities of spies that Elizabeth Bentley informed on even before the Rosenberg trial. They couldn’t oust the project, but they could—and did—get Bentley to provide circumstantial evidence at the Rosenberg trial to ensure a guilty verdict. Unfortunately for Bentley, VENONA wasn’t declassified until 1995, so she died with many Americans believing she was a full-blown liar. To me, this ultimately made her overall story sympathetic even if there were moments where it was difficult to empathize with her choices. 

Bentley's reputation is somewhat tarnished, and much of her testimony at the time was called into question, whereas her male counterparts were often awarded for their service. Can all of this be laid at the feet of sexism, or is there reason to doubt some of her motivations?

I don’t think all of Elizabeth’s tarnished reputation can be blamed on sexism, but a fair chunk can. Whereas men like Joseph McCarthy and Whittaker Chambers were taken seriously when they made accusations of Communist spies hiding in American government, when Elizabeth Bentley named similar names—which the FBI had secretly corroborated with Project VENONA—she was pilloried in the press. Part of that came from Bentley’s appearance—she had encouraged early newspaper bylines claiming that a blond spy queen had exposed a Red spy ring, but when she showed up to testify, everyone discovered she was actually a brunette of a certain age. Later, she’d be called hysterical and menopausal, descriptions that never would have leveled at either Chambers or McCarthy.

Elizabeth Bentley was no saint—she initially told the truth during her testimony to the FBI and Senate, but as time went on and there were no guilty verdicts for the spies she named, she felt pressured to give up even more names. This is when she started relying on hearsay, which in fact, helped lead to the convictions of the Rosenbergs, who were in fact guilty. So, while sexism was a large contributing factor, Elizabeth also hammered a few nails into her own coffin.

What was it like researching such a divisive time in American history? Did you find any unexpected walls while researching?

I was actually incredibly lucky that Project VENONA had already been declassified—without that backing, this story could have been written much differently as it would have been nearly impossible to ascertain the extent to which Elizabeth Bentley was telling the truth during her many testimonies. The same goes for the Rosenbergs—there are still people who maintain they were not guilty, although we now have declassified information to prove their guilt.

The most difficult walls I discovered came up when I was researching Russian spy agencies during World War II and the Cold War. While the FBI and CIA have published a lot of material on their spies and agencies and techniques, the KGB and its predecessors don’t seem too keen on sharing that information, (go figure!), which meant I sometimes had to extrapolate.

Given the current environment, did you find parallels between the Cold War, and modern day?

Absolutely! (As they say, history does tend to repeat itself.) First, I was struck by the fact that regardless of the era, most Americans truly want what is best for their country. Second, many of those same Americans have polar-opposite visions of what is best the country and how to go about achieving it, which often results in division. For example, Elizabeth Bentley believed fascism was a threat to America, so she joined the Communist Party of the United States. Many other Americans at the time—and today—would have seen that as the least patriotic move she could have made.

The other parallel that stood out was about spying itself. While researching Soviet Cold War assassination techniques, (Elizabeth Bentley may have crossed the wrong people at one point), I came across KGB cyanide-spraying guns and other poisoning techniques reminiscent of the 21st century poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko and Alexei Navalny, not to mention North Korea’s poisoning of Kim Jong-nam. No matter the decade, it’s always dangerous to cross the wrong people!

Why World War II Fiction Is More Popular Than WWI Fiction

by Lecia Cornwall

At the moment, novels set during the Second World War (1939-1945) are hugely popular. Many books use dual timelines that include events from the war-torn past and secrets left behind that must be uncovered by a modern character in the novel, offering two stories in one.

People often ask why I chose to write about the First World War (1914-1918), a far less familiar setting for many readers. World War I was the jerky black-and-white war, our great-grandparents’ war, the ugly war fought in the mud-filled trenches of France and Belgium in a combination of modern, mechanized weaponry, and older hand-to-hand fighting techniques. It was a war of terrible wounds, endless stalemates, mud, rats, lice, horror, and misery.  And those are just the first things that spring to mind when the First World War is mentioned. So why would anyone want to create a story set amid all that? How could anyone make all that worth reading about?

For me, I grew up learning that World War I was Canada’s war. Robert Greenwell, my grandfather, was an Englishman who arrived in Canada as a boy, and when war was declared, he was eager to do his bit for King and Empire. He served as a gunner, and his older brother Matthew joined the infantry. They were both at the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917. Robert was behind the lines with the artillery, and Matthew was at the front, where he was killed in the earliest hours of fighting.

Robert died at the age of 96, and was buried in his Legion uniform, proud of his service until the end. When I was fifteen, he made me promise to go to France and find Matthew’s war grave near Vimy Ridge, which I did, with my own children in 2009 (my daughter was also fifteen that summer). Being immersed in the places where the war was fought, standing on the steps of the magnificent Vimy monument, and most importantly, finding my great-uncle’s grave, our soldier, an ancestor with a face and a name we knew, surrounded by thousands of others remembered only by their grave markers, was a striking moment. I knew then that I wanted to write a book about my grandfather’s war.

America’s experience of the first World War is different from that of Britain and Canada, where the First World War began in 1914. In Canada, immigrants with British roots signed up enthusiastically to answer the call from their mother country to join the fight for King and Empire. The United States resisted a fight that wasn’t their own, and didn’t enter the war until 1917, when German U-boats began targeting American merchant ships. American troops arrived in Europe in force in early 1918, the last year of the war, bringing fresh and much-needed manpower and materials to the exhausted armies that had been fighting for four years. For the Americans, active participation in the First World War was of a much shorter duration.

Photo by Daniel Eledut on Unsplash

The precise causes of the First World War are murky to most people. By contrast, World War II offered a defined menace in the Nazis, a solid, understandable reason to fight, a battle of good versus evil. Thanks to front-line reporting, and Hollywood, war propaganda reached into every corner of popular culture and created a strong home front awareness of the events of the war, which was far more extensive than was the case in World War I. We know the names of the heroes and villains of the Second World War far more readily than we know those of the first war.

Women played wider roles in World War II—they served as reporters, nurses, doctors, mechanics, pilots, worked in factories, and were among the most resourceful and courageous resistance fighters. While women did most of those things in World War I as well, far less is said about them. Many World War II stories are about the diverse and courageous roles of women.

The Second World War, while no less brutal (in fact the death toll in World War II, including civilians, was far, far, higher), was far more technologically advanced. Aircraft had played an increasingly important role in the World War I, and by the end of that conflict, it was recognized that future wars would largely be decided by attacks deployed from high above the battlefields. Aircraft offered a new way of fighting, certainly less hand-to-hand, yet even more deadly than trench warfare.

For me, there are many interesting aspects of World War I, in addition to my family history. I have a fascination for war medicine in every time period from the Napoleonic Wars to Viet Nam. I also wanted to tell my story from a female point of view, so I began to research nurses. That changed when  discovered that while women were allowed to serve in France as nurses, ambulance drivers, and volunteers, female doctors were not permitted to work at military posts on the Western Front by the British. There was the germ of my story, the hook. My protagonist became a female doctor who breaks the mould, goes to France, and experiences the war from the front lines. Yes, there’s mud and blood and misery, but there’s also love, and hope, and courage.  

Researching the medical services of World War I was fascinating. Mechanized warfare led to many advancements. There were no antibiotics available in World War I. Fighting on ground that had once been farmer’s fields, the manure used to fertilize those fields left deadly bacteria in the soil which invaded wounds and cause gas gangrene. Doctors had to find new ways to deal with the infections. They pioneered new antiseptics and anesthetics, improved surgical techniques, and developed plastic surgery methods to restore damaged faces. Nurses found better ways to treat shock. The war led to a new understanding of shell shock. Nobel-winning scientist Marie Curie designed mobile X-ray trucks that saved time, limbs, and lives. Stretcher bearers went from being mere porters to the first army medics, with advanced first aid training that ensured more casualties survived.

Both wars changed the entire world. One led directly to the other, and civilization failed to learn the lessons of the first war. Both eras have their heroes and villains and shining examples of innovation, courage, and love. It’s those stories that fascinate me. In any war, heroes are needed, and they reveal themselves in fascinating ways. Storytellers are lucky enough to be able to bring those stories and those ordinary and extraordinary people to life for our readers.

Originally from Ontario, Lecia Cornwall now calls the foothills of Canada’s Rocky Mountains her home. She is the author of fifteen novels. The Woman at the Front (October 2021) is her first historical fiction title. She writes full time, loves gardening (though many plants come to her house just to die), knit (and purl!), adopt stray creatures (usually cats), and create magical worlds from cardboard, paint, and glue.

Writing About the Great Depression in the COVID Era with Liza Nash Taylor

Writing about the depression era is certainly timely, with the pandemic, lockdowns, and shutdowns across the country, not to mention shortages. What similarities do you see, and how do you hope that your book could bring hope to those struggling today? 

You know, when I began this book in 2018, none of us could have imagined a sequence of events that would lead to shortages of necessities like toilet paper, or massive layoffs. I think that in the early 1930s Americans couldn’t have imagined enduring years of extreme drought, or that their life savings or homes might be lost overnight in a stock market crash or bank failure. I think what we’re facing is similar, as you mention, in that hard-working people have lost jobs, or farms, or homes through no fault of their own. There is frustration with the government, as there was during the Great Depression.

The Veteran’s Bonus March of 1932 came from a grass-roots uprising of frustrated citizens. It’s an event in our history that we don’t hear much about. I know I wasn’t taught about it in school. In May of 1932 a group of eight destitute veterans left Oregon, determined to walk, hitchhike, or ride the rails across the country, intending to petition President Hoover to demand early payment of their war bonuses (slated to be paid in 1945). As they made their way across the country they gathered support and notice in the press. By July, there were 20,000 vets and their families camping out around Washington, D.C. In a huge publicity fail, Herbert Hoover refused to meet with them. IN ALL GOOD FAITH is set during that summer, and I think the themes of resilience, adaptation, and survival are relevant to where we are in the summer of 2021.

The Great Depression tried our country and citizens, and I think that anyone who lived through it or grew up in that time was changed forever, with a hard-won sense of gratitude for the most basic things, like a floor under one’s feet or having enough to feed one’s children. I chose to tell a story about two women surviving and succeeding in this era by working together and adapting.  

Anxiety plays a large role in the main character's journey, but she's struggling with it at a time when mental health - especially for women - wasn't a subject that could be talked about, let alone treated. How does your character cope with her situation?

When I was researching this novel I sent a list of medical questions to my family doctor. He loaned me a physician’s reference from 1934 called The Modern Home Physician Illustrated, by an aptly named Dr. Wise. I decided to use that book as my sole source for medical opinions and treatments of the era. The category Mental Disease is allotted three pages of small print. According to Dr. Wise, “Heredity, State of bodily health, poverty, bad sanitary conditions increase incidence. Sex is another important factor. To mate with a member of the opposite sex is the natural destiny of the sexually mature individual, and the frustration of this design may occasion mental disorder. The incidence of insanity is considerably greater among the unmarried . . . Insanity is also more common among those who have been widowed . . .”

You just can’t make this stuff up, right?

Dorrit’s anxiety attacks are something I can write about from personal experience. I gave her a set of strategies—or really—rituals, that she uses to cope during panic attacks. She uses a sequence of self-calming distractions, such as counting tiles on the floor, and she keeps a list of triggers in her journal. She escapes into books, especially Nancy Drew mysteries, and Nancy is sort of her fantasy alter-ego. Her mother has always encouraged her to find solace in prayer, but that brings her no relief and she doubts the faith she was raised in. Being thrust into a situation—The Bonus March—where avoidance and isolation are not options, Dorrit conquers many of her fears through surviving unanticipated trigger experiences.

Perseverance and resilience are major themes in the book as well. Do you think the struggles in these arenas were different for men and women, historically?

Absolutely. In the 1930s men were expected to be the providers while women stayed home. An unmarried woman was labeled a spinster and was generally disregarded by society. During the Depression, some institutions like railroads and the Postal Service laid off all of their female employees in order to make those jobs available to men who had families to care for. So I think that for men, the struggles of that era were tied to their self-esteem as bread winners. Some men left their families in search of work and never returned, as Kristin Hannah writes about so eloquently in her recent novel about the Depression, THE FOUR WINDS.

Women learned to adapt and make do with less, and then with nothing. Women entered the workforce where they could find jobs, like picking crops, and proved that they could work as hard as men. My character May Marshall is conflicted by the pushback she gets in attempting to revamp her family business to adapt to hard times. She struggles with being a working mother and her position in her marriage. She decides to act on her own intuition without her husband’s consent, and in 1932 that was a big deal. When we read history about the Great Depression we hear statistics, and we can see the devastation in photographs by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. It’s the photographs of those dust bowl mothers that resonate with me most.

Friendship is key to survival and health in this book. How do you think those themes translate in today's world?

In the past year and a half many of us have come to define our “pod” of close friends to quarantine with. That implies a level of mutual trust and concern that we’ve never had to qualify before. We’ve worried over sick friends and kept each other afloat in many ways we never anticipated. I think these times have increased our empathy and patience. I know it has mine, and I hope those small positive outcomes stay with us.

In my story, Dorrit is forced to ask for help and to trust strangers. She pools resources and works with new friends toward a common goal. This takes her out of her shell, somewhat, and she finds strengths she didn’t know she possessed. When she finds herself physically helpless, coping strategies that have worked for her in the past won’t help her. May finds a level of empathy with Dorrit that opens up some painful parts of her past that she’s shut away. In helping her friend survive, May is also healing herself. I like to think those themes are as relevant today as they were in 1932.

Liza Nash Taylor was a 2018 Hawthornden International Fellow and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. The 2016 winner of the San Miguel Writer's Conference Fiction Prize, her work has appeared in Microchondria II , Gargoyle Magazine , and Deep South , amongst others. A native Virginian, she lives in Keswick with her husband and dogs.