Erik Larson: In the Garden of Beasts

No one appeared to give much thought to the kind of personality a man might need in order to deal effectively with Hitler’s government. Secretary Roper believed “that Dodd would be astute in handling diplomatic duties and, when conferences grew tense, he would turn the tide by quoting Jefferson.”

ROOSEVELT DID TAKE Roper’s suggestion seriously.

Time was running out, and there were far more pressing matters to be dealt with as the nation sank ever more deeply into economic despair.

The next day, June 8, Roosevelt ordered a long-distance call placed to Chicago.

He kept it brief. He told Dodd: “I want to know if you will render the government a distinct service. I want you to go to Germany as ambassador.”

He added, “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.”

It was hot in the Oval Office, hot in Dodd’s office. The temperature in Chicago was well into the nineties.

Dodd told Roosevelt he needed time to think and to talk with his wife.

Roosevelt gave him two hours.

FIRST DODD SPOKE with university officials, who urged him to accept. Next he walked home, quickly, through the intensifying heat.

He had deep misgivings. His Old South was his priority. Serving as ambassador to Hitler’s Germany would leave him no more time to write, and probably far less, than did his obligations at the university.

His wife, Mattie, understood, but she knew his need for recognition and his sense that by this time in his life he should have achieved more than he had. Dodd in turn felt that he owed something to her. She had stood by him all these years for what he saw as little reward. “There is no place suitable to my kind of mentality,” he had told her earlier that year in a letter from the farm, “and I regret it much for your sake and that of the children.” The letter continued, “I know it must be distressing to such a true and devoted wife to have so inept a husband at [a] critical moment of history which he has so long foreseen, one who can not fit himself to high position and thus reap some of the returns of a life of toilsome study. It happens to be your misfortune.”

After a brisk bout of discussion and marital soul-searching, Dodd and his wife agreed he should accept Roosevelt’s offer. What made the decision a little easier was Roosevelt’s concession that if the University of Chicago “insists,” Dodd could return to Chicago within a year. But right now, Roosevelt said, he needed Dodd in Berlin.

At two thirty, half an hour late, his misgivings temporarily suppressed, Dodd called the White House and informed Roosevelt’s secretary that he would accept the job. Two days later Roosevelt placed Dodd’s appointment before the Senate, which confirmed him that day, requiring neither Dodd’s presence nor the kind of interminable hearing that one day would become commonplace for key nominations. The appointment attracted little comment in the press. The New York Times placed a brief report on page twelve of its Sunday, June 11, newspaper.

Secretary Hull, on his way to an important economic conference in London, never had a voice in the matter. Even had he been present when Dodd’s name first came up, he likely would have had little say, for one emerging characteristic of Roosevelt’s governing style was to make direct appointments within agencies without involving their superiors, a trait that annoyed Hull no end. He would claim later, however, that he had no objection to Dodd’s appointment, save for what he saw as Dodd’s tendency to “get out of bounds in his excess enthusiasm and impetuosity and run off on tangents every now and then like our friend William Jennings Bryan. Hence I had some reservations about sending a good friend, able and intelligent though he was, to a ticklish spot such as I knew Berlin was and would continue to be.”

Later, Edward Flynn, one of the candidates who had turned down the job, would claim falsely that Roosevelt had phoned Dodd in error—that he had meant instead to offer the ambassadorship to a former Yale law professor named Walter F. Dodd. Rumor of such a mistake gave rise to a nickname, “Telephone Book Dodd.”

NEXT DODD INVITED his two grown children, Martha and Bill, promising the experience of a lifetime. He also saw in this adventure an opportunity to have his family together one last time. His Old South was important to him, but family and home were his great love and need. One cold December night when Dodd was alone on his farm, Christmas near, his daughter and wife in Paris, where Martha was spending a year of study, Bill away as well, Dodd sat down to write a letter to his daughter. He was in a gloomy mood that night. That he now had two grown children seemed an impossibility; soon, he knew, they would be venturing off on their own and their future connection to him and his wife would grow inevitably more tenuous. He saw his own life as nearly expended, his Old South anything but complete.

He wrote: “My dear child, if you will not take offense at the term? You are to me so precious, your happiness through this troubled life so near to my heart that I never cease to think of you as a buoyant, growing child; yet I know your years and admire your thought and maturity. I no longer have a child.” He mused upon “the roads ahead of us. Yours just beginning, mine so far advanced that I begin to count the shadows that fall about me, the friends that have departed, other friends none too secure of their tenure! It’s May and almost December.” Home, he wrote, “has been the joy of my life.” But now everyone was scattered to the far corners of the world. “I can not endure the thought of our lives all going in different directions—and so few years remaining.”

With Roosevelt’s offer, an opportunity had arisen that could bring them all together again, if only for a while.

Given the nation’s economic crisis, Dodd’s invitation was not one to be accepted frivolously. Martha and Bill were lucky to have jobs—Martha’s as assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune , Bill’s as a teacher of history and a scholar in training—though thus far Bill had pursued his career in a lackluster manner that dismayed and worried his father. In a series of letters to his wife in April 1933, Dodd poured out his worries about Bill. “William is a fine teacher, but he dreads hard work of all kinds.” He was too distractible, Dodd wrote, especially if an automobile was anywhere near. “It would never do for us to have a car in Chicago if we wish to help him forward his studies,” Dodd wrote. “The existence of a car with wheels is too great a temptation.”

Martha had fared much better in her work, to Dodd’s delight, but he worried about the tumult in her personal life. Though he loved both his children deeply, Martha was his great pride. (Her very first word, according to family papers, was “Daddy.”) She was five feet three inches tall, blonde, with blue eyes and a large smile. She had a romantic imagination and a flirtatious manner, and these had inflamed the passions of many men, both young and not so young.

In April 1930, when she was only twenty-one years old, she became engaged to an English professor at Ohio State University named Royall Henderson Snow. By June the engagement had been canceled. She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose. “I want nothing from life except you,” he wrote. “I want to be with you forever, to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing, nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love….”