In the Garden of Beasts

hundreds of great families of newly rich folk, handed their properties over to the Crown, condemned thousands to death because they resisted him.… The recalcitrant landed aristocracy was everywhere subdued, parliaments were not allowed to assemble.” Autocratic rule persisted in France until 1789, the start of the French Revolution, when “with a crash and a thunder” it collapsed. “Governments from the top fail as often as those from the bottom; and every great failure brings a sad social reaction, thousands and millions of helpless men laying down their lives in the unhappy process. Why may not statesmen study the past and avoid such catastrophes?”
    After a few more allusions, he came to his ending. “In conclusion,” he said, “one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse.” To fail to learn from such “blunders of the past,” he said, was to end up on a course toward “another war and chaos.”
    The applause, Dodd said in his diary, “was extraordinary.” In describing the moment to Roosevelt, Dodd noted that evenSchacht “applauded extravagantly,” as did “all other Germans present. I have never noted more unanimous approval.” He wrote to Secretary Hull, “When the thing was over about every German present showed and expressed a kind of approval which revealed the thought: ‘You havesaid what all of us have been denied the right to say.’ ” An official of the Deutsche Bank called to express his own agreement. He told Dodd, “Silent, but anxious Germany, above all the business and University Germany, is entirely with you and most thankful that you are here and can say what we can not say.”
    That these listeners understood the true intent of Dodd’s speech was obvious. Afterward, Bella Fromm, the society columnist for the
Vossische Zeitung
, who was fast becoming a friend of the Dodd family, told him, “I enjoyed all these nicely disguised hints against Hitler and Hitlerism.”
    Dodd gave her an arch grin. “I had no delusions about Hitler when I was appointed to my post in Berlin,” he answered. “But I had at least hoped to find some decent people around Hitler. I am horrified to discover that the whole gang is nothing but a horde of criminals and cowards.”
    Fromm later chided the French ambassador to Germany, André François-Poncet, for missing the speech. His response encapsulated a fundamental quandary of traditional diplomacy. “The situation is very difficult,” he said, with a smile. “One is at once a diplomat and must hide one’s feelings. One must please one’s superiors at home and yet not be expelled from here but I too am glad that his Excellency Mr. Dodd cannot be subverted by flattery and high honor.”
    Dodd was heartened by the response from his audience. He told Roosevelt, “My interpretation of this is that all liberal Germany is with us—and more than half of Germany is at heart liberal.”
    The response elsewhere was decidedly less positive, as Dodd quickly found. Goebbels blocked publication of the speech, although three large newspapers published excerpts anyway. The next day, Friday, Dodd arrived at Foreign Minister Neurath’s office for a previously scheduled meeting, only to be told Neurath could not see him—a clear breach of diplomatic custom. In a cable to Washington that afternoon, Dodd told Secretary Hull that Neurath’s action seemed “to constitute a serious affront to our Government.” Dodd finally got to see Neurath at eight o’clock that night. Neurath claimed to have been too busy to see him during the day, but Dodd knew that the minister had been free enough from pressing obligations to havelunch with a minor diplomat. Dodd wrote in his diary that he suspected Hitler himself might have forced the postponement “as a sort of rebuke for my speech of yesterday.”
    To his greater surprise, he also sensed a groundswell of criticism from America and took steps to defend himself. He promptly sent Roosevelt a verbatim copy and told the president he was doing so because he feared “that some embarrassing interpretations may have been put out at home.” That same day he also sent a copy to Undersecretary Phillips, “in the hope that you, acquainted with all the precedents, may explain to Secretary Hull—i.e., if he or anybody else in the Department seems to think I