World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseEleanor Martha Hadley was born in Seattle, Washington, United States in 1916 to engineer Homer Hadley and educator Margaret Hadley. In 1934, she graduated from Franklin High School in Seattle and studied at Mills College in Oakland, California, United States, followed by a student fellowship at Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) in Japan. In 1936 and again from 1938 to 1940, she traveled in Japan and China; her trip to China made her one of the first westerners to visit the Chinese capital of Nanjing after the brutal conquest of the city. In 1943, taking a break from her doctorate studies at Radcliffe University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, she joined the US State Department as a research economist focusing on Japan. After the war, she worked in Tokyo for the occupation administration. She played a role in the break up of the zaibatsu financial-industrial combines, as well as the drafting of the new Japanese Constitution. After the war, returned to Radcliffe and completed her doctorate. She had planned to join the newly created Central Intelligence Agency, but her security clearance had been withdrawn for unknown reason (she would later found out that it was because she was accused by Major General Charles Willoughby of being a communist). She became a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and George Washington University in Washington DC, United States, and then worked for the US Tariff Commission and the General Accounting Office. She retired in 1984. In 1986, she was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure of Japan. She passed away at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle in Jun 2007.

Eleanor Hadley Timeline