Ruth was born in 1885 in Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, the daughter of Alexander Bielaski, a Methodist minister, and Roselle Woodward. After spending her early childhood on the Maryland farm of her paternal grandfather, a Polish immigrant, Bielaski moved with her family to Washington, District of Columbia.
Following her graduation from Western High School and a short stay at business school, Bielaski passed a competitive civil service examination.
Shipley was hired as a clerk in the United States Patent Office in 1903. When Shipley's husband became ill in 1914, the family returned to Washington. In order to support her child and invalid husband, Shipley took a position in the Records Division of the State Department, where one of her duties was to keep an index of American citizens living abroad.
Her husband died in 1919, and the following year Shipley was made special assistant to Alvey Augustus Adee, the second assistant secretary of state, a legendary figure who disposed of the formal and routine business at the State Department for more than three decades. Under Adee's tutelage, Shipley became one of the most able of her generation of bureaucrats. Accordingly, in 1921 she was promoted to drafting officer and three years later to assistant chief of the Office of Coordination and Review, which checked and corrected all outgoing State Department correspondence.
In 1928, Shipley was appointed chief of the Passport Division by Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg. Though the secretary of state was technically responsible for issuing passports, all secretaries from Kellogg to John Foster Dulles came to rely upon Shipley, the acknowledged department expert on matters of citizenship. She upgraded passport fraud investigations by employing new detection techniques and obtaining cooperation from other government agencies.
The outbreak of war in Europe complicated Shipley's work. She was charged with preventing foreign travel instead of facilitating it. Shipley invalidated all old passports in 1939, designed a lengthy set of application procedures, saw that all applicants were fingerprinted, and decreed that new passports be issued only on special counterfeit-proof paper. With few exceptions, Shipley denied citizens passports to belligerent countries and the combat zone demarcated by the Neutrality Act. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she ordered that Japanese-American fishermen on the west coast be blocked from fishing offshore without passports. Although she had no authority to give the order, it was allowed to stand.
By the end of the 1940's, travel was nearly back to normal and Shipley was at the peak of her power. Her influence reached to the granting of visas and immigration. Her office kept voluminous files that, by 1953, contained detailed information on some 12 million individuals. She also was highly respected in Congress because her division, unlike most federal agencies, made money. Shipley's last years in office were the most difficult and controversial of her long career.
She seemed to crack down even harder on left-wing travelers after 1951, when a United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee report criticized the Passport Division for allowing eighteen alleged subversives to obtain passports and travel to Moscow. By 1952, liberal critics were accusing Shipley of blatant political bias and of denying passports without due process.
Saying she was "tired in a way I have never experienced before, " Shipley politely rejected the plea of Secretary of State Dulles that she stay on and retired from her post on April 30, 1955. She died in Washington, District of Columbia.
Ruth Bielaski Shipley was the first woman to head a major division of the State Department. She became the first American woman plenipotentiary as a delegate to the Conference on the Codification of International Law at The Hague. She led a successful campaign over the objections of some at the State Department, to prevent a magazine's advertising campaign from using the word "passport" to identify its promotional literature. She also altered the Passport Division's policies and began issuing passports in a married woman's maiden name alone if she requested it, no longer followed by the phrase "wife of". The American Jewish League Against Communism, one of whose officers was Roy Cohn, gave her an award for "a lifetime of service to the American people. "
A staunch anti-Communist, she assisted in the preparation of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which gave the secretary of state the authority to deny passports to members of alleged Communist organizations listed by the attorney general.
Quotes from others about the person
President Franklin D. Roosevelt said admiringly, "Mrs. Shipley is a wonderful ogre. " In 1945 Fortune called her "redoubtable" and in 1951 Time described her as "the most invulnerable, most unfirable, most feared and most admired career woman in Government. "
In 1909 she married Frederick William van Dorn Shipley, an administrative assistant with the Panama Canal Commission, and went to live in the Canal Zone; they had one child. Her husband died in 1919.
