In the Garden of Beasts

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 lookedlike—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 believedthat 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