Erik Larson: In the Garden of Beasts

A dozen or so reporters also swarmed aboard and cornered Dodd on deck as he stood with his wife and Bill. At that moment Martha was elsewhere on the ship. The reporters threw out questions and prodded the Dodds to pose as if waving good-bye. With reluctance they did so, Dodd wrote, “and unaware of the similarity of the Hitler salute, then unknown to us, we raised our hands.”

The resulting photographs caused a minor outcry, for they seemed to capture Dodd, his wife, and son in mid-Heil.

Dodd’s misgivings flared. By this point he had begun to dread leaving Chicago and his old life. As the ship eased from its moorage the family experienced what Martha described later as “a disproportionate amount of sadness and foreboding.”

Martha wept.

Martha continued to cry off and on for the better part of the next two days—“copiously and sentimentally,” as she put it. Not out of anxiety, for she had given little thought to what life in Hitler’s Germany might really be like. Rather she wept for all she was leaving behind, the people and places, her friends and job, the familiar comfort of the house on Blackstone Avenue, her lovely Carl, all of which composed the “inestimably precious” life she had led in Chicago. If she needed a reminder of what she stood to lose, the seating at her going-away party provided it. She sat between Sandburg and another close friend, Thornton Wilder.

Gradually her sorrow eased. The seas were calm, the days bright. She and Roosevelt’s son chummed around and danced and drank champagne. They examined each other’s passports—his identifying him succinctly as “son of the President of the United States,” hers a tad more pretentious: “daughter of William E. Dodd, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States to Germany.” Her father required that she and her brother come to his stateroom, number A-10, for at least an hour a day and listen to him read aloud in German so that they would gain a sense of how the language sounded. He seemed unusually solemn, and Martha sensed an unaccustomed nervousness.

For her, however, the prospect of the adventure ahead soon pushed aside her anxiety. She knew little of international politics and by her own admission did not appreciate the gravity of what was occurring in Germany. She saw Hitler as “a clown who looked like Charlie Chaplin.” Like many others in America at this time and elsewhere in the world, she could not imagine him lasting very long or being taken seriously. She was ambivalent about the Jewish situation. As a student at the University of Chicago she had experienced a “subtle and undercurrent propaganda among the undergraduates” that promulgated hostility toward Jews. Martha found “that even many of the college professors resented the brilliance of Jewish colleagues and students.” As for herself: “I was slightly anti-Semitic in this sense: I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as physically attractive as Gentiles and were less socially desirable.” She also found herself absorbing a view that Jews, while generally brilliant, were rich and pushy. In this she reflected the attitude of a surprising proportion of other Americans, as captured in the 1930s by practitioners of the then-emerging art of public-opinion polling. One poll found that 41 percent of those contacted believed Jews had “too much power in the United States”; another found that one-fifth wanted to “drive Jews out of the United States.” (A poll taken decades in the future, in 2009, would find that the total of Americans who believed Jews had too much power had shrunk to 13 percent.)

A classmate described Martha as Scarlett O’Hara and “an enchantress—luscious and blonde, with luminous blue eyes and pale, translucent skin.” She considered herself a writer and hoped eventually to make a career of writing short stories and novels. Sandburg urged her forward. “The personality is all there in you,” he wrote. “Time, solitude, toil are the main oldtime simple requisites for you; you’ve got just about everything else for the doing of whatever you want to do as a writer.” Shortly after the family’s departure for Berlin, Sandburg instructed her to keep notes on everything and anything and to “give way to every beckoning to write short things impressions sudden lyric sentences you have a gift for outpouring.” Above all, he urged, “find out what this man Hitler is made of, what makes his brain go round, what his bones and blood are made of.”

Thornton Wilder also offered some parting advice. He warned Martha to avoid writing for newspapers, because such “hackwork” would destroy the concentration she would need for serious writing. He did recommend that she keep a diary of “what things looked like—the rumors, and opinions of people during a political time.” In the future, he wrote, such a diary would be “of liveliest interest to you and—oh my God—to me.” Some of Martha’s friends believed she was romantically involved with him as well, though in fact his affinities lay elsewhere. Martha kept a picture of him in a locket.

ON DODD’S SECOND DAY at sea, as he strolled the deck of the Washington , he spotted a familiar face, Rabbi Wise, one of the Jewish leaders he had met in New York three days earlier. Over the week’s voyage that followed, they spoke together about Germany “half a dozen or more” times, Wise reported to a fellow Jewish leader, Julian W. Mack, a federal appellate judge. “He was most friendly and cordial, and indeed confidential.”

Dodd, true to character, spoke at length about American history and at one point told Rabbi Wise, “One cannot write the whole truth about Jefferson and Washington—people are not ready and must be prepared for it.”

This startled Wise, who called it “the only disturbing note of the week.” He explained: “If people must be prepared for the truth about Jefferson and Washington, what will [Dodd] do with the truth when he learns it about Hitler, in view of his official post?!”

Wise continued, “Whenever I suggested that the greatest service he could render his own country and Germany would be to tell the truth to the chancellor, to make clear to him how public opinion, including Christian opinion and political opinion, had turned against Germany… he answered again and again: ‘I cannot tell until I talk to Hitler: if I find I can do so, I will talk very frankly to him and tell him everything.’”

Their many talks aboard ship drew Wise to conclude “that W.E.D. feels himself deputized to cultivate American liberalism in Germany.” He quoted Dodd’s last remark: “ ‘It will be pretty serious if I fail—serious for liberalism and all the things for which the President stands, for which I, too, stand.’”

By this point, indeed, Dodd had come to envision his ambassadorial role as more than that of mere observer and reporter. He believed that through reason and example he ought to be able to exercise a moderating influence over Hitler and his government and, at the same time, help nudge America from its isolationist course toward more international engagement. The best approach, he believed, was to be as sympathetic and nonjudgmental as possible and try to understand Germany’s perception that it had been wronged by the world. To an extent, Dodd agreed. In his diary he wrote that the Treaty of Versailles, so loathed by Hitler, was “unfair at many points, like all treaties which end wars.” His daughter, Martha, in a memoir, put it more strongly, stating that Dodd had “deplored” the treaty.

Ever a student of history, Dodd had come to believe in the inherent rationality of men and that reason and persuasion would prevail, particularly with regard to halting Nazi persecution of Jews.