In the Garden of Beasts Read Online Free PDF

word—with other men and had begun an affair with Carl Sandburg, a longtime friend of her parents whom she had known since she was fifteen years old. He sent her drafts of poems on tiny, odd-shaped slips of thin paper and two locks of his blondhair, tied with black coat-button thread. In one note he proclaimed, “I love you past telling I love you with Shenandoah shouts and dim blue rain whispers.” Martha dropped just enough hints to torment Bassett. As she told him later, “I was busy healing my wounds and hurting you with Sandburg and others.”
    All these forces coalesced one day on the lawn of the Dodd house on Blackstone Avenue. “Do you know really why our marriage didn’t turn out?” she wrote. “Because I was too immature and young, even at 23, to want to leave my family! My heart broke when my father said to me, while fussing with something on our front lawn, shortly after you married me, ‘So my dear little girl wants to leave her old father.’ ”
    And now, in the midst of all this personal turmoil, her father came to her with an invitation to join him in Berlin, and suddenly she confronted a choice: Bassett and the bank and ultimately, inevitably, a house in Larchmont, kids, a lawn—or her father and Berlin and who knew what?
    Her father’s invitation was irresistible. She told Bassett later, “I had to choose between him and ‘adventure,’ and you. I couldn’t help making the choice I did.”

CHAPTER 4
Dread
    T he following week Dodd took a train to Washington, where, on Friday, June 16, he met Roosevelt for lunch, which was served on two trays at the president’s desk.
    Roosevelt, smiling and cheerful, launched with obvious relish into a story about a recent visit to Washington by the head of Germany’s Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht—full name Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht—who held the power to determine whether Germany would repay its debts to American creditors. Roosevelt explained how he had instructed Secretary Hull to deploy gamesmanship to defuse Schacht’s legendary arrogance. Schacht was to be brought to Hull’s office and made to stand in front of the secretary’s desk. Hull was to act as if Schacht weren’t there and “to pretend to be deeply engaged in looking for certain papers, leaving Schacht standing and unobserved for three minutes,” as Dodd recalled the story. At last, Hull was to find what he’d been searching for—a stern note from Roosevelt condemning any attempt by Germany to default. Only then was Hull to stand and greet Schacht, while simultaneously handing him the note. The purpose of this routine, Roosevelt told Dodd, “was to take a little of the arrogance out of the German’s bearing.” Roosevelt seemed to think the plan had worked extremely well.
    Roosevelt now brought the conversation around to what he expected of Dodd. First he raised the matter of Germany’s debt, and here he expressed ambivalence. He acknowledged that American bankers had made what he called “exorbitant profits” lending money to German businesses and cities and selling associated bonds to U.S.citizens. “But our people are entitled to repayment, and while it is altogether beyond governmental responsibility, I want you to do all you can to prevent a moratorium”—a German suspension of payment. “It would tend to retard recovery.”
    The president turned next to what everyone seemed to be calling the Jewish “problem” or “question.”
    FOR ROOSEVELT, THIS WAS treacherous ground. Though appalled by Nazi treatment of Jews and aware of the violence that had convulsed Germany earlier in the year, he refrained from issuing any direct statement of condemnation. Some Jewish leaders, like Rabbi Wise, Judge Irving Lehman, and Lewis L. Strauss, a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Company, wanted Roosevelt to speak out; others, like Felix Warburg and Judge Joseph Proskauer, favored the quieter approach of urging the president to ease the entry of Jews into America. Roosevelt’s