Who was Virginia Whittingham?

One of the gems held by the Green County Historical Society is Edith May’s day planner, which she used during her 1920 Ziegfeld experience. This small booklet (3 by 4 inches) served a number of roles, including that of her account ledger/address book/diary, and it offers unique insights into what the seventeen year old was doing and thinking. The day planner— which is entirely undated— paints a very different picture of what happened to the story constructed by Edith May’s ‘chaperone’ Zoe Beckley for her syndicated newspaper column.

One such discrepancy is that Edith May had dinner with a mysterious “Mr. Young” twice during what appears to be her second week of working for Ziegfeld. I suspect this “Mr. Young” was fellow Monroe native and newspaper-editor/British intelligence asset William Wesley Young; I will expand on Will Young’s career in further posts, but an overview is available here. My reasons for believing this are that Will served as editor for Good Housekeeping which employed National Salesgirl Beauty Contest judge Neysa McMein; and he ran in the same circles as Ziegfeld and John Freuler. In addition, in the second installment of ‘Edith May’s’ column, she makes political pronouncements reminiscent of Young’s pre-WWI work managing New York City’s socialist movement through demagogue Mischa Appelbaum’s “Humanitarian Cult”— this will have a post of its own.

If I’m correct about “Mr. Young”, it almost certainly means Edith May’s win was stacked, which in turn raises questions about the extent to which she understood this when she agreed to go to New York. Promotion was something of a family business for the Leuenbergers: years prior to Edith May’s win, the Young family and her uncle (the proprietor of the Waffle Shop where Edith May was a ‘salesgirl’) worked closely together founding “Cheese Days”, a long-weekend celebration of cheese producers which is our area’s big biannual event and a remains a major tourist attraction in Southern Wisconsin.

For today, I’ll leave “Mr. Young” with images of Edith May’s record of their meeting— at least he paid for the meals!

Entry from Edith May Leuenberger’s booklet, undated. LHS page contains entry “New Week. dinner [Sun/crossed out] Mon. with Mr. Young”.

Entry from Edith May’s booklet, undated. This page follows from the previous image. LHS page begins “lunch Fr. $1.80; dinner Fri with Mr. Young.”

What I’d like to focus on today is “Virginia Whittingham” and “Milbourn” and “New Jersey”. These three items are shot through the diary in a number of places, and seem to have been almost an obsession with Edith May. For example, the image below is from the inside of the booklet’s back cover:

Edith May’s booklet, final page and inside of back cover. LHS: “Milbourn” floats between a jumble of New York City addresses and random expense entries. RHS: “Milbourn” seems to be associated with “New Jersey” and the surname Whittingham haunts the background in pencil.

During her New York City stay, when Edith May’s book-keeping becomes increasingly erratic, she reminds herself to “call Whittinghams” after “see about room”:

Edith May’s booklet, undated.

Near the end of her diary entries is a list of people to whom Edith May intends to write; the only New York addresses are that of Zoe Beckley, her handler, and Mrs. Whittingham.

Edith May’s booklet penultimate entry, undated.

And finally, in the address section, the “Virginia Whittingham” address on New York City’s Upper West Side— not the most exclusive neighborhood, but a respectable Brownstone at a respectable address with no apartment number. Whomever they were, the Whittinghams were well-off.

Image from the address section of Edith May’s booklet.

Below is a photograph of 60 West 70th Street today— it’s a block of five co-operative apartments on the Upper West Side. Short of finding an entry for Virginia at this address in the 1920 Census, there’s no easy way to confirm that she lived there without traveling to NYC. For a while it seemed to me that the trail was cold…

Virginia Whittingham’s Queen Anne style Brownstone: 60 West 70th Street, NYC. Courtesy of ilovetheupperwestside.

… until I found this genealogy website maintained by Christine Emerson, which documents a “Virginia Whittingham” who appears to pull all the threads of Edith May’s diary together:

Virginia Whittingham, aka GMa, was Mark's maternal grandmother. She came from a long Quaker ancestry (Stablers, Millers, Janneys, Hartshornes) and from highly effective people, many of whom left their mark on history (Whittinghams, Condits, Rollinsons, and more).

Born in New York City on 11 Oct 1903, was the only child of William Rollinson Whittingham II and Anna Miller Stabler.

William and Anna had married later in life; William was 42 and Anna was 40. Virginia was born the following year. Based on the information I've found, William had been a manager and then became an electrician, soon to be manager of an electric company. Anna had been a clerk and later in life became a real estate broker. They seem to have lived between New York City and Millburn, New Jersey.

Virginia was a beautiful little girl and, from the looks of these two photographs, was their little darling. She was highly intelligent and, from what I've heard, had strong passions and opinions.

Virginia Whittingham and mother.

If Ms. Emerson’s Virginia is Edith May’s Virginia, it would put both girls at precisely 17 years old in 1920— which may explain why Edith May hit it off with her so well. This friendship raises addition questions though, for example, what was a family like the Whittinghams— descended from the Fourth Episcopal (Church of England) Bishop of Maryland— doing around the seedy Ziegfeld troupe?

Some answer might be found in the political activity of Virginia’s ancestor, the bishop, who propagandized from his position as head of the Episcopal Church in support of the Union during the American Civil War— Washington D.C. was part of his diocese. The bishop alienated much of his congregation but made a special effort to seek out new African American converts. As to be expected, after the Civil War things went well for Bishop Whittingham, just like they went well for Otto Kahn’s employer, and unlike they went for D.W. Griffith’s family. Perhaps because of this the bishop wasn’t buried in Maryland, he was buried in Millburn, New Jersey. (There is no Millbourn, NJ though in fairness to Edith May there is no reason to believe she ever saw it written down prior to her diary entries.) Millburn is just a few miles from Manhattan island.

William Rollinson Whittingham, courtesy of the Library of Congress, which describes him: “William Rollinson Whittingham (1805-1879) was the fourth Episcopal bishop of Maryland. He was a leading Unionist in a diocese where many were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. “

Google Maps image of Millburn, New Jersey, which is outlined in red and highlighted. (It’s by “South Mountain Reservation”.) Note Millburn’s relation to the tip of Manhattan. The Whittingham home was on the lower half, LHS of Central Park, about opposite the words ‘Upper East Side”— which has always been the really tony neighborhood.

Millburn’s geographic relation to New York City, and Otto Kahn’s role in the art world there, is key to another part of this mystery. Young Virginia was a noted pianist at the time of Edith May’s visit and would on occasion give concerts in New York and New Jersey. If Kahn is remembered for anything, it is his generous charitable contribution to New York City’s music scene— his biographer Theresa M. Collins credits Kahn with building NYC into a music capital on par with the European greats. This may be an exaggeration, but in the context of 1920s New York a young, politically connected and aspiring girl like Virginia would have sought to promote herself through public concerts such those Kahn subsidized.

It is also probable that Mischa Appelbaum, whose “Humanitarian Cult” membership worked as a voting block which Mischa peddled between the Republican and Democratic parties, also relied on Kahn for patronage. Mischa would attract attendees to his cult meetings with the promise of free concerts from some of the most noted musicians of the day— precisely the type of artists who benefited from Kahn’s largess. The cult’s backers were part of Kahn’s social circle too: although superficially a socialist charitable organization, the Humanitarian Cult was clandestinely sponsored by the uber-wealthy Seligman family (NYC business partners of the Vanderbilt clan), and had the support of men like Theodore Roosevelt and Samuel Untermyer. Last but not least, Otto Kahn was a business partner of Monroe, WI native John R. Freuler, too, and had more than a little to do with D. W. Griffith’s leaving Freuler’s company.

While Ms. Emerson’s genealogy website makes it sound as if Virginia was born a Quaker, this doesn’t appear to be true. Virginia converted, or perhaps ‘augmented’ her religious beliefs, by joining a Quaker meeting in Washington D.C. after her husband Lawrence Apsey started some sort of work for the US government in Toledo, OH during WWII. In D.C. as a Quakeress, Virginia was very involved in “peace activities”.

In the late 1970s, CIA and FBI files documenting these organizations’ interest in Soviet-backed groups inside the USA were released on the heels of internal political turmoil at the CIA. “The Nation” magazine, on March 11, 1978 printed this information (which was made available online by the CIA in 2011):

Since the early 1920s, AFSC [American Friends Service Committee— a Quaker organization] has engaged not only in providing relief for the Russians during their post-World War I famine but also in such suspicious things as helping refugees during the Spanish Civil War. It is noted in a House Un-American Activities Committee report, and repeated in several FBI and other files thereafter, that AFSC's work with Spanish refugees in 1939 included aid to some Communists due to the committee's “failure to apply any political tests to needy persons who asked assistance.”

In World War II AFSC aided European refugees, conscientious objectors and interned Japanese-Americans. During the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Quakers became more actively involved in anti-draft and anti-war activities, while continuing to provide medical aid to all sides in the conflicts. Throughout these decades, AFSC increasingly engaged in social action and social justice programs that attempted to expose and root out, rather than gloss over, the bases of conflicts...

In the 1950s it did not take much to make a group suspect. The inspector General at Lowry Air Force Base, for example, reported his concern about a series of seminars in 1953 at the Washington, D.C. Lenten School of Christian Living, where “extremely controversial subjects” were discussed. One of these was “Segregation in Washington,” at which an AFSC staf member expressed anti-racist views that shocked the Air Force officer.”

The early history of the CIA is a fascinating subject and what one quickly learns is that young, left-leaning, well-to-do New Yorkers were the primary recruiting group for those British and Roosevelt interests which set up the organization. The CIA’s (arguably) most famous head, Bill Colby, who got his start working at the ACLU and who quashed investigations into his own Soviet intelligence connections, is a shining example of this recruiting policy. Virginia and her young husband Lawrence Apsey would have been prime targets.

As pointed out by “The Nation”— a magazine famous for its own controversial intelligence connections— this recruiting policy created problems after WWII when a number of sensitively-positioned intelligence operatives— including Julia Child’s husband— were forced to resign their cover positions because of their links to Soviet espionage.

Bearing this in mind, consider that Virginia’s husband, Lawrence Apsey, was the author of a non-violent political action manual titled “Transforming Power for Peace”, wherein he writes about techniques Mahatma Gandhi used against the Raj government in India. (Gandhi was a favorite at the CIA.) Apsey also describes how Quakers used non-violent political action against Hitler, injustice, intolerance and slavery. (I feel I ought to point out this is only half the story, and that Quakers were a disproportionately high percentage of slave owners in the North American colony prior to the British government’s adoption of an anti- Atlantic slavery policy in order to do economic harm their French competitors.)

So, all that being said, I think I’ve scratched the surface on who Edith May’s “Virginia Whittingham” likely was; though I’m confident that readers will have more questions now than when they started this installment— for instance: “Was the proto-starlet winner of a contrived beauty contest being groomed for political work by a friend of her uncle’s?” — Watch this space.