In the Garden of Beasts

in October 1933, Moffat asked, “Why is it worse for him to listen to the Germans inveigh against our form of Government when he chose, at the Chamber of Commerce, to inveigh to a German audience against an autocratic form of government?”
    A pattern of leaks persisted, building public pressure for Dodd’s removal. In December 1936 columnist Drew Pearson, primary author with Robert S. Allen of a United Features Syndicate column called “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” published a harsh assault on Dodd, “attacking me violently as a complete failure here and pretending that the President is of the same opinion,” Dodd wrote on December 13. “This is news to me.”
    Pearson’s attack deeply wounded Dodd. He had spent the better part of four years seeking to fulfill Roosevelt’s mandate to serve as a model of American values and believed he had done as well as any man could have been expected to do, given the strange, irrational, and brutal nature of Hitler’s government. He feared that if he resignednow, under such a black cloud, he would leave the impression that he had been forced to do so. “My position is difficult, but under such criticism I cannot resign, as I planned, next spring,” he wrote in his diary. “To give up my work here under these circumstances would put me in a defensive and positively false position at home.” His resignation, he acknowledged, “would at once be recognized as a confession of failure.”
    He decided to postpone his departure, even though he knew that the time had come to step down. In the meantime he requested another leave in America, to get some rest on his farm and meet with Roosevelt. On July 24, 1937, Dodd and his wife made the long drive to Hamburg, where Dodd boarded the
City of Baltimore
and at 7:00 p.m. began the slow sail down the Elbe to the sea.
    LEAVING DODD ABOARD SHIP broke his wife’s heart. The next evening, Sunday, she wrote him a letter so that he would receive it upon his arrival. “I thought of you, my dear, all the way back to Berlin and felt very sad and lonely, especially to see you go away feeling so bad and so miserable.”
    She urged him to relax and try to quell the persistent “nervous headaches” that had plagued him for the last couple of months. “Please, please, for our sakes, if not your own, take better care of yourself and live less strenuously and exacting.” If he kept well, she told him, he would still have time to achieve the things he wanted to achieve—and presumably here she meant the completion of his
Old South
.
    She worried that all this sorrow and stress, these four years in Berlin, had been partly her fault. “Perhaps I have been too ambitious for you, but it does not mean that I love you any the less,” she wrote. “I can’t help it—my ambitions for you. It is innate.”
    But all that was done with, she told him now. “Decide what is best and what you want most, and I shall be content.”
    Her letter turned grim. She described the drive back to Berlin that night. “We made good time although we passed and met many army trucks—those awful instruments of death and destruction within. Istill feel a shudder run through me when I see them and the many other signs of coming catastrophe. Is there no
possible
way to stop men and nations from destroying each other? Horrible!”
    This was four and a half years before America’s entry into the Second World War.
    DODD NEEDED THE RESPITE . His health had indeed begun to trouble him. Ever since arriving in Berlin he had experienced stomach troubles and headaches, but lately these had grown more intense. His headaches sometimes persisted for weeks on end. The pain, he wrote, “spread over the nerve connections between the stomach, shoulders and brain until sleep is almost impossible.” His symptoms had worsened to the point where on one of his previous leaves he had consulted a specialist, Dr. Thomas R. Brown, chief of the Division of Digestive Diseases at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (who, at a 1934 gastroenterological symposium, noted with dead sobriety that “we must not forget it is essential to study the stool from every angle”). Upon learning that Dodd was at work on an epic history of the South and that completing it was the great goal of his life, Dr. Brown gently recommended that he quit his post in Berlin. He told Dodd, “At sixty-five one must take stock and decide what are the essentials, and lay one’s plans to complete the major work, if