In the Garden of Beasts Read Online Free PDF

firsthand understanding of Germany had obvious value.
    Berlin, moreover, was not yet the supercharged outpost it would become within the year. There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler’s government could not possibly endure. Germany’s military power was limited—its army, the Reichswehr, had only one hundred thousand men, no match for the military forces of neighboring France, let alone the combined might of France, England, Poland, and the Soviet Union. And Hitler himself had begun to seem like a more temperate actor than might have been predicted given the violence that had swept Germany earlier in the year. On May 10, 1933, the Nazi Party burned unwelcome books—Einstein, Freud, the brothers Mann, and many others—in great pyres throughout Germany, but seven 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