In the Garden of Beasts

days later Hitler declared himself committed to peace and went so far as to pledge complete disarmament if other countries followed suit. The world swooned with relief. Against the broader backdrop of the challenges facing Roosevelt—global depression, another year of crippling drought—Germany seemed more an irritant than anything else. What Roosevelt and Secretary Hull considered the most pressing German problem was the $1.2 billion that Germany owed to American creditors, a debt that Hitler’s regime seemed increasingly unwilling to pay.
    No one appeared to give much thought to the kind of personality a man might need in order to deal effectively with Hitler’s government.Secretary Roper believed “that Dodd would be astute inhandling diplomatic duties and, when conferences grew tense, he would turn the tide by quoting Jefferson.”
    ROOSEVELT DID TAKE Roper’s suggestion seriously.
    Time was running out, and there were far more pressing matters to be dealt with as the nation sank ever more deeply into economic despair.
    The next day, June 8, Roosevelt ordered a long-distance call placed to Chicago.
    He kept it brief. He told Dodd: “I want to know if you will render the government a distinct service. I want you to go to Germany as ambassador.”
    He added, “I want an American liberal in Germany as a standing example.”
    It was hot in the Oval Office, hot in Dodd’s office. The temperature in Chicago was well into the nineties.
    Dodd told Roosevelt he needed time to think and to talk with his wife.
    Roosevelt gave him two hours.
    FIRST DODD SPOKE with university officials, who urged him to accept. Next he walked home, quickly, through the intensifying heat.
    He had deep misgivings. His
Old South
was his priority. Serving as ambassador to Hitler’s Germany would leave him no more time to write, and probably far less, than did his obligations at the university.
    His wife, Mattie, understood, but she knew his need for recognition and his sense that by this time in his life he should have achieved more than he had. Dodd in turn felt that he owed something to her. She had stood by him all these years for what he saw as little reward. “There is no place suitable to my kind of mentality,” he had told her earlier that year in a letter from the farm, “and I regret it much for your sake and that of the children.” The letter continued, “I know it must be distressing to such a true and devoted wife to have so inepta husband at [a] critical moment of history which he has so long foreseen, one who can not fit himself to high position and thus reap some of the returns of a life of toilsome study. It happens to be your misfortune.”
    After a brisk bout of discussion and marital soul-searching, Dodd and his wife agreed he should accept Roosevelt’s offer. What made the decision a little easier was Roosevelt’s concession that if the University of Chicago “insists,” Dodd could return to Chicago within a year. But right now, Roosevelt said, he needed Dodd in Berlin.
    At two thirty, half an hour late, his misgivings temporarily suppressed, Dodd called the White House and informed Roosevelt’s secretary that he would accept the job. Two days later Roosevelt placed Dodd’s appointment before the Senate, which confirmed him that day, requiring neither Dodd’s presence nor the kind of interminable hearing that one day would become commonplace for key nominations. The appointment attracted little comment in the press. The
New York Times
placed a brief report on page twelve of its Sunday, June 11, newspaper.
    Secretary Hull, on his way to an important economic conference in London, never had a voice in the matter.Even had he been present when Dodd’s name first came up, he likely would have had little say, for one emerging characteristic of Roosevelt’s governing style was to make direct appointments within agencies without involving their superiors, a trait that annoyed Hull no end. He would claim later, however, that he had no objection to Dodd’s appointment, save for what he saw as Dodd’s tendency to “get out of bounds in his excess enthusiasm and impetuosity and run off on tangents every now and then like our friend William Jennings Bryan. Hence I had some reservations about sending a good friend, able and intelligent though he was, to a ticklish spot such as I knew Berlin was and would continue to be.”
    Later, Edward Flynn, one of the candidates who had turned down the job, would claim falsely