In the Garden of Beasts

world—particularly easy America—with anti-German propaganda—I strongly advise you to resist every social invitation.”
    Dodd partly embraced Crane’s notion that the Jews shared responsibility for their plight. He wrote to Crane later, after arriving in Berlin, that while he did not “approve of the ruthlessness that is being applied to the Jews here,” he did think the Germans had a valid grievance. “When I have occasion to speak unofficially to eminent Germans, I have said very frankly that they had a very serious problem but that they did not seem to know how to solve it,” he wrote. “The Jews had held a great many more of the key positions in Germany than their numbers or their talents entitled them to.”
    Over dinner, Dodd heard Crane express great admiration for Hitler and learned as well that Crane himself had no objection to how the Nazis were treating Germany’s Jews.
    As the Dodds left that evening, Crane gave the ambassador one more bit of advice: “Let Hitler have his way.”
    AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK the next morning, July 5, 1933, the Dodds took a taxi to the wharf and boarded their ship, the
Washington
, bound for Hamburg. They ran into Eleanor Roosevelt just after she had bid bon voyage to son Franklin Jr., who was sailing to Europe to begin a sojourn abroad.
    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.

CHAPTER 5
First Night
    M artha 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 CharlieChaplin.” 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