Erik Larson: In the Garden of Beasts

He did not, however, get his wish. Martha fell in love with a different man, a Chicagoan named James Burnham, who wrote of “kisses soft, light like a petal brushing.” They became engaged. Martha seemed ready this time to go through with it, until one evening every assumption she had made as to her impending marriage became upended. Her parents had invited a number of guests to a gathering at the family house on Blackstone Avenue, among them George Bassett Roberts, a veteran of the Great War and now vice president of a bank in New York City. His friends called him simply Bassett. He lived in Larchmont, a suburb north of the city, with his parents. He was tall, full lipped, and handsome. An admiring newspaper columnist, writing about his promotion, observed, “His face is smooth-shaven. His voice is soft. His speech inclined to slowness…. There is nothing about him to suggest the old-fashioned hard-shell banker or the dry-as-dust statistician.”

At first, as he stood among the other guests, Martha did not think him terribly compelling, but later in the evening she came across him standing apart and alone. She was “stricken,” she wrote. “It was pain and sweetness like an arrow in flight, as I saw you anew and away from the rest, in the hallway of our home. This sounds perfectly ridiculous, but truly it was like that, the only time I knew love at first sight.”

Bassett was similarly moved, and they launched a long-distance romance full of energy and passion. In a letter on September 19, 1931, he wrote, “What fun it was in the swimming pool that afternoon, and how cute you were with me after I had taken my bathing suit off!” And a few lines later, “Ye gods, what a woman, what a woman!” As Martha put it, he “deflowered” her. He called her “honey-bunch” and “honeybuncha mia.”

But he confounded her. He did not behave in the manner she had grown to expect from men. “Never before or since have I loved and been loved so much and not had proposals of marriage within a short time!” she wrote to him years later. “So I was deeply wounded and I think there was wormwood embittering my tree of love!” She was the first to want marriage, but he was uncertain. She maneuvered. She maintained her engagement to Burnham, which of course made Bassett jealous. “Either you love me, or you don’t love me,” he wrote from Larchmont, “and if you do, and are in your senses, you cannot marry another.”

At length they wore each other down and did marry, in March 1932, but it was a measure of their lingering uncertainty that they resolved to keep the marriage a secret even from their friends. “I desperately loved and tried to ‘get’ you for a long time, but afterwards, maybe with the exhaustion of the effort, the love itself became exhausted,” Martha wrote. And then, the day after their wedding, Bassett made a fatal mistake. It was bad enough that he had to leave for New York and his job at the bank, but worse was his failure that day to send her flowers—a “trivial” error, as she later assessed it, but emblematic of something deeper. Soon afterward Bassett traveled to Geneva to attend an international conference on gold, and in so doing committed another such error, failing to call her before his departure to “show some nervousness about our marriage and impending geographical separation.”

They spent the first year of their marriage apart, with periodic come-togethers in New York and Chicago, but this physical separation amplified the pressures on their relationship. She acknowledged later that she should have gone to live with him in New York and turned the Geneva trip into a honeymoon, as Bassett had suggested. But even then Bassett had seemed uncertain. In one telephone call he wondered aloud whether their marriage might have been a mistake. “That was IT for me,” Martha wrote. By then she had begun “flirting”—her word—with other men and had begun an affair with Carl Sandburg, a longtime friend of her parents whom she had known since she was fifteen years old. He sent her drafts of poems on tiny, odd-shaped slips of thin paper and two locks of his blond hair, tied with black coat-button thread. In one note he proclaimed, “I love you past telling I love you with Shenandoah shouts and dim blue rain whispers.” Martha dropped just enough hints to torment Bassett. As she told him later, “I was busy healing my wounds and hurting you with Sandburg and others.”

All these forces coalesced one day on the lawn of the Dodd house on Blackstone Avenue. “Do you know really why our marriage didn’t turn out?” she wrote. “Because I was too immature and young, even at 23, to want to leave my family! My heart broke when my father said to me, while fussing with something on our front lawn, shortly after you married me, ‘So my dear little girl wants to leave her old father.’”

And now, in the midst of all this personal turmoil, her father came to her with an invitation to join him in Berlin, and suddenly she confronted a choice: Bassett and the bank and ultimately, inevitably, a house in Larchmont, kids, a lawn—or her father and Berlin and who knew what?

Her father’s invitation was irresistible. She told Bassett later, “I had to choose between him and ‘adventure,’ and you. I couldn’t help making the choice I did.”

The following week Dodd took a train to Washington, where, on Friday, June 16, he met Roosevelt for lunch, which was served on two trays at the president’s desk.

Roosevelt, smiling and cheerful, launched with obvious relish into a story about a recent visit to Washington by the head of Germany’s Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht—full name Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht—who held the power to determine whether Germany would repay its debts to American creditors. Roosevelt explained how he had instructed Secretary Hull to deploy gamesmanship to defuse Schacht’s legendary arrogance. Schacht was to be brought to Hull’s office and made to stand in front of the secretary’s desk. Hull was to act as if Schacht weren’t there and “to pretend to be deeply engaged in looking for certain papers, leaving Schacht standing and unobserved for three minutes,” as Dodd recalled the story. At last, Hull was to find what he’d been searching for—a stern note from Roosevelt condemning any attempt by Germany to default. Only then was Hull to stand and greet Schacht, while simultaneously handing him the note. The purpose of this routine, Roosevelt told Dodd, “was to take a little of the arrogance out of the German’s bearing.” Roosevelt seemed to think the plan had worked extremely well.

Roosevelt now brought the conversation around to what he expected of Dodd. First he raised the matter of Germany’s debt, and here he expressed ambivalence. He acknowledged that American bankers had made what he called “exorbitant profits” lending money to German businesses and cities and selling associated bonds to U.S. citizens. “But our people are entitled to repayment, and while it is altogether beyond governmental responsibility, I want you to do all you can to prevent a moratorium”—a German suspension of payment. “It would tend to retard recovery.”

The president turned next to what everyone seemed to be calling the Jewish “problem” or “question.”

FOR ROOSEVELT, THIS WAS treacherous ground. Though appalled by Nazi treatment of Jews and aware of the violence that had convulsed Germany earlier in the year, he refrained from issuing any direct statement of condemnation. Some Jewish leaders, like Rabbi Wise, Judge Irving Lehman, and Lewis L. Strauss, a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Company, wanted Roosevelt to speak out; others, like Felix Warburg and Judge Joseph Proskauer, favored the quieter approach of urging the president to ease the entry of Jews into America. Roosevelt’s reluctance on both fronts was maddening. By November 1933, Wise would describe Roosevelt as “immovable, incurable and even inaccessible excepting to those of his Jewish friends whom he can safely trust not to trouble him with any Jewish problems.” Wrote Felix Warburg, “So far all the vague promises have not materialized into any action.” Even Roosevelt’s good friend Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor whom he later named to the Supreme Court, found himself unable to move the president to action, much to his frustration. But Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany’s persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression. The isolationists added another dimension to the debate by insisting, as did Hitler’s government, that Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.