Technically, Arlington Hall was a military base, known as Arlington Hall Station. Dot could see that there were thousands of people working here, in an operation fashioned after an assembly line. The ranks included a small number of Army officers and enlisted men, and some male civilians including older professors and young men with disabilities—some severe, such as epilepsy—that disqualified them for military service. But by far the majority were female civilians like Dot, and most of those, like Dot, were ex-schoolteachers.
Already, teachers were turning out to be well suited for code-breaking work, for a number of reasons beyond their level of education. Around the time Dot was hired, a harried employee of Arlington Hall was working up a memo that would spell out the qualities that made for a good code breaker. These were hard to know. Administrators were finding to their chagrin that there often was not a correlation between a person’s background and how well that person would do at breaking codes. Some PhDs were hopeless, and some high school dropouts were naturals. There was a stage actress who was working out wonderfully, as was a woman with little formal education who had been a star member of the American Cryptogram Association, a membership group for puzzle and cipher enthusiasts. Code breaking required literacy, numeracy, care, creativity, painstaking attention to detail, a good memory, and a willingness to hazard guesses. It required a tolerance for drudgery and a boundless reserve of energy and optimism. A reliable aptitude test had yet to be developed.
Thus far, Arlington Hall officials had found that problems based on “reasoning” and “word meanings” provided some insight into who might do well, but only in the sense that people with low scores would have “difficulty in following simple directions and understanding the simpler techniques.” Those who scored high on arithmetic tests often did well.
Hobbies, especially artistic hobbies, were emerging as a good sign. “Those who have had some creative outside interest or hobby generally work out very well in comparison with those whose interests are movies or similar entertainment,” the memo concluded.
Temperament mattered, and here, too, was where the schoolteaching advantage came in. Officials were finding the best code breaker was a “mature and dependable” person with a “clear, bright mind”—but someone “young enough to be alert, adaptable, able to make adjustments readily, willing to take supervision,” and “able to withstand inconveniences of Washington.” This description fit many schoolteachers, including Dot Braden, to a T.
There were a few truths emerging with regard to women. Married women were problematic, the memo observed, through no fault of their own but because they tended to move to follow their husbands. This was another reason schoolteachers like Dot were perfect: They were almost always unmarried. In America in the 1940s, three-quarters of local school boards (like telephone companies and other employers of female labor) had enacted a “marriage bar,” which required that married women not be hired and that a teacher must resign when she did marry, in accordance with the prevailing belief that a wife’s place was at home. By definition, then, many female schoolteachers were single.
Schoolteachers were smart, educated, accustomed to hard work, unused to high pay, simultaneously youthful and mature, and often unencumbered by children or husbands. In short: They were the perfect workers.
“The proverbial ‘old maid’ schoolteacher finds the adjustment hard from the complete ‘ruler of the roost’ to ‘one among many,’” the memo noted. “However, many of our best workers come from this profession.”
Before Dot Braden’s arrival, the U.S. War Department had dispatched investigators to Chatham and Lynchburg. The investigators contacted her references and looked at police and birth records to see whether she was foreign-born; whether she had undesirable qualities like emotional instability, erratic behavior, poor work habits, or communist sympathies. The high constable of Lynchburg reported that he had known Dot for fifteen years and that she was of “above average intelligence and could be depended on in any position of trust.” Clement French, a dean at Randolph-Macon, called Dot a “very conscientious, hardworking girl whose efforts to help herself thru college showed her real stamina.” The Lynchburg schools superintendent said she was a “fine young woman who has fought against difficulties, especially financial and succeeded well.”
All agreed Dot had never been fired; she did not use intoxicating liquors; she had not had brushes with the law. Dr. A. A. Kern, head of Randolph-Macon’s English Department, wrote that Dot “stood for the better things in college life.”
Based on these inquiries, investigators had submitted a “loyalty and character report” on Dot Braden. The report noted that she had a good college record and was of “the Anglo-Saxon race and of normal appearance.” She was found to be “native born,” as were her parents. The investigators noted that her parents were separated—her father was living at the Lynchburg YMCA—but said that they were “loyal citizens of middle-class.” The report concluded that Dot was “dependable and honest and of sober habits,” that she was “single and boards with her mother in a desirable section” of Lynchburg, and concluded that there was no reason to question her loyalty.
It remained for Dot to be assigned a permanent code-breaking duty. At Arlington Hall there were no unimportant jobs, but some tasks were harder than others. There were typists and keypunchers, as well as people working on the codes themselves, with titles that included “starter” and “overlapper” and “reader.”