But they drew very different lessons from their experiences, which in time would help push them in different directions. They would never lose the intensity and commitment that carried them through all adversity in Prague and France, but their bond began to fray and ultimately broke.
Waitstill returned home from France disillusioned, in part by the shabby treatment from a trusted friend, Bob Dexter, but also more broadly at the appalling rise of barbarism and collapse of civil society across Europe. “It is almost certain,” he wrote to Livingston and Edna Stebbins in a long, introspective letter from Lisbon,
that I’m going to consider this summer’s trick at the wheel the last one until something like civilized order arises here in Europe.
This is a lot worse than Prague in some ways, because it is wartime, and everything is out of joint. At least in the Prague experience we were able to leave the region of lawlessness and find a stable area outside, a place in which promises meant what they said and letters were delivered when they were posted. But here all the rules are off. This is the end of the Europe that we of this generation have known and loved and hoped would continue and would save itself by gradual reform, the liberal tradition. Now the revolution of nihilism has swept over all but this hospitable, generous little land [Portugal].”
For the time being, at least, Waitstill wished only to take up his old life in Wellesley Hills. Despite the bare-knuckle treatment he and Martha had received from the AUA, and the bitter estrangement from Dexter, Waitstill had not lost his calling, and he never would.
Martha, for her part, kept trying to rescue more Kulturträgers and other victims of the Nazis, such as Eva Feigl’s parents, whom she and Waitstill had been unable to help while in France.
Martha was no less affected than Waitstill by the chaos, misery, and danger that had surrounded them in Czechoslovakia and France, yet she derived considerable satisfaction and self-assurance from what she had accomplished, much of it by herself. “I developed a sense of my own power,” she explained. “I had been an extension of Waitstill. Here were things I could do on my own.”
What had begun for her in early 1939 as an acquiescent errand of conscience and mercy—if she did not go, Waitstill would not go—would now evolve into a more personal agenda and inevitably a political one. In Prague, she’d been forcefully exposed to the ghastly plight of the Jews, and she’d made imperiled children her core concern in France. Not surprisingly, when she returned to the United States, Martha not only worked hard through the AUA—whose board she joined in 1941—to extend and consolidate what she had achieved in Europe. She presented papers at academic and policy conferences and wrote articles on refugee issues for the popular press. As well, she soon was out fund-raising for Youth Aliyah, a program of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist movement founded by Henrietta Szold. Youth Aliyah was founded by Recha Freier in 1933 to rescue European Jewish children from the Nazis and bring them to Palestine.
Martha was especially adept at accessing an audience’s wallets through their hearts, as evidenced by a memorable fund-raising excursion in Flint, Michigan, in the early 1940s, with Hadassah executive Annabelle Markson. Asked to address a roomful of well-to-do men, Martha proceeded to tell them about the orphaned Holocaust survivors she had seen in Europe. With a rare gift for storytelling, she brought the children to life, making their suffering palpable to the audience. By the time she finished, Mrs. Markson and some of the men were in tears.
One man rose to ask, “How much do the children cost?”
Mrs. Markson answered, “Three hundred and sixty dollars apiece, and we hope to leave here today with fifteen children.”
The leader of the group promised that “the men of Flint will do their duty,” and that Youth Aliyah would have its fifteen children.
The next day, Annabelle and Martha met with the leader and some of the men who had been unable to attend the previous day’s meeting. They wanted to hear some of Martha’s stories. The women left Flint with enough money to rescue thirty children.
Martha proved just as skillful in front of Unitarian audiences. In May of 1941, Helen Ansley, a Unitarian living in Cleveland, wrote to USC president Emerson after attending one of Martha’s presentations. According to Ansley, their guest speaker hadn’t appealed for money during her remarks, but the crowd of 250 had anted up $275 anyway. “A group of women entirely unconnected with the Church offered her their services,” she reported.
I write you all of this so you may know of what inestimable value to the Unitarian Service Committee Martha Sharp’s trip to Cleveland was.
Martha would be the ideal person to coordinate all the women’s work for the Committee.... I feel sure that all the women of the denomination and many others as well would be grateful for the opportunity to rally under her splendid leadership.
To the women of Cleveland, therefore, the Unitarian Service Committee will be symbolized by Martha Sharp, and the question will come many times in the future, as it did to me last week, “What does Mrs. Sharp want us to do?” I hope you can persuade her to accept some title or office that would give her the right to answer this question and direct this splendid enthusiasm which she engenders whenever she speaks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Family
Thirteen-year-old Catherine Vakar, newly arrived from France aboard the Excambion with her little sister, was hired at five dollars a week in the summer of 1941 to serve as a mother’s helper at the Sharps’ vacation house on Lake Sunapee. Despite her growing list of commitments, Martha was determined to begin work at the lakeside house on the memoirs she would never manage to complete.
The pace that summer was hectic, Vakar later recalled. She found Martha “full of Yankee ingenuity and thrift.” Catherine learned how to put up preserves that summer and also how to light the Sunapee house’s balky kerosene stove, which was apt to explode if not treated with care.
Hastings, who had turned nine the previous November, could vaguely recall bits of his boyhood dating back to the days of his father’s first ministry, at the Unitarian Church in Meadville, Pennsylvania. For example, he remembered a huge Mayflower moving van coming for their furniture and how his father joked about Mayflower taking them back to New England.
But Hastings’s active memory, like that of his little sister, Martha Content, who turned four in September 1940, dated to the return of their parents from France in 1940.
Brother and sister recalled that their mother was away giving speeches much of the time. The household refrigerator was always full of orchids and corsages that she brought home from her various speaking engagements. There often wasn’t much else in the fridge, barely enough from which to make a meal.
“I would say our parents were so caught up in what they were doing, what they felt had to be done,” Martha Content recalled, “that we were sort of incidental.”
She recalls the great care that Martha took with her personal appearance. “Mother was always very elegant,” she says. “I can remember seeing an upper shelf full of hats with feathers, hats with veils, hats with bows. She stood up straight and was always very well dressed. She was an excellent seamstress and made many of her own clothes, as well as mine. Her shoes were immaculate. She had a dressing table with three mirrors. She really enjoyed what little she did to make herself up.”
Waitstill treated the children in the manner he was raised by his own stern mother and in much the same way he managed parishioners: he was precise, judgmental, and unyielding. His children remembered him for the most part as a rigid, remote, and often forbidding figure in the household. He did not read to Hastings and Martha Content, unless it was from the Bible at breakfast around the kitchen table. Waitstill rarely hugged or touched them with affection. Martha Content recalled that he always shook hands with her. Waitstill was one of those Victorian fathers who was restrained in his ability to express his feelings directly to his children. But, as in many of his love letters to Martha, he was easily able to write out those feelings. In a person
al letter of August 12, 1940, from Lisbon to friends Helen and Curtis (no last names are given), he writes:
The news about your talk with Martha Content was reassuring. Since her two illnesses I can hardly get enough news of her, to know that she is recovering enough to go through with the tonsillectomy as soon as Lyman Richards [the doctor] says she is ready. Do spread the good word to all who write that they try to insert some news of that darling child. The very thought of her purity and grace just keep me on the job and make everything worth the effort here.
Hastings would recall attending Boston Braves games with his father and only a handful of occasions when they ever played catch, usually “to humor Mother,” as Waitstill would tell him.
Martha Content and Hastings remembered how each Saturday the Reverend Sharp worked at home, polishing and practicing his sermons. The next day, Waitstill would expect them to discuss his message after church, over Sunday dinner at the parsonage. Martha Content frequently forgot what the sermon was about, which would earn her a stern lecture.
Neither would ever forget their father’s injunction: “What have you done today to justify your existence?”
Casual familiarity was not the Sharp way either. “It was always ‘Father’ and ‘Mother,’ never ‘Daddy’ and ‘Mommy,’” Martha Content remembers. “No diminutives. Their personal love was really sublimated too. It was never allowed to shine. I think I’ve seen one picture of my mother and father holding hands. We never saw them in the bedroom. We never saw them wild, running around the house after each other. We never heard giggles. It was all very formal.”
Martha Content particularly resented that she was sent to stay with friends or neighbors whenever her mother was away—that is to say, frequently—and retaliated by embarrassing Martha with temper tantrums. One of these families was the Beckers, members of Waitstill’s congregation. When Martha came to fetch her at the Beckers after being away for a long time, Martha Content hid under the piano.
“Where’s my little girl?” her mother asked.
“I’m not your little girl,” Martha Content insisted. “I love Mrs. Becker. She’s my mother.”
Hastings got into considerable mischief too. When Martha Content was quite young, he eviscerated all her plush toys (on the pretext that they were made in Japan) and tried to push her, with the toys, in a box out the second-floor window of the parsonage. Another time, at Sunapee, he had to be prevented from shoving a dish mop down her throat. “It’s just as well we were apart so much,” Martha Content reflected. “He would have killed me.”
Hastings also had what he called “numerous failures” with his chemistry set, and he once shot out a few streetlights on Washington Street in Wellesley Hills with his BB gun.
Sometimes the children worked as a team. The family dog, an Airedale named Mack, suffered from eczema, which was treated with what Martha Content described as a “nasty, creamy purple silver nitrate.” Once or twice while their father performed a wedding, Hastings and Martha Content brought Mack into the back of the church, slathered him with the ointment, then let him go, knowing that Mack would make a tail-wagging beeline for the altar, smearing everyone with globs of the purple gunk as he brushed past them.
When Martha later reflected on these years, she acknowledged that she had been forced to make sacrifices. She explained, “This kind of life work for a woman has its very expensive side in the home.” But she also felt that her children’s reproaches were not entirely fair.
I was away for two weeks of every month, and spent a minimum of four to six weeks abroad every summer. In some ways, I feel that I concentrated more on my children when I was at home and tried not to neglect anything which had meaning for them.
However, I realized that they felt neglected because they heard it from others and used my absences from home to excuse whatever went wrong in their personal lives. Thus I became the scapegoat for their own failures.
They were proud of my achievements. They were thrilled by the publicity in the papers. But they really gave me a hard time when I came home. Psychologically, this caused me to be always apologizing at home. No matter what I did, I was always wrong. But the work I did underwrote private schools, camps, clothes for the children and, for myself, a housekeeper, and many other privileges which otherwise would not have been ours.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Back to Europe
In the spring of 1942, the USC sent Martha on a West Coast speaking tour. She also was tasked by her fellow directors to report on the impact of President Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066 of February 18, 1942, signed in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and over the objections of both Mrs. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover, the unlikeliest of allies, that empowered the US Army to relocate those of “foreign enemy ancestry” to assembly centers and then internment camps.
The practical effect was to uproot approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans—more than 60 percent of whom were US citizens—and ship them to prison camps in the name of national security. It is one of the sorriest blots on America’s human rights record. Nearly half a century later, President George H. W. Bush signed legislation that authorized reparations of $20,000 apiece to the surviving internees, plus an apology to each.
Martha visited a Japanese American “assembly center” at the Puyallup, Washington, fairgrounds and similar facilities set up at the Tanforan and Santa Anita horse-racing tracks in Northern and Southern California. “Race tracks and fairgrounds have been the easiest to adapt,” she noted in her report of the trip, “since they usually comprise wide areas surrounded by barbed wire fences.”
There were seven thousand internees crammed together at Santa Anita. Martha noted that hymnals printed in Japanese were forbidden, that one seventy-year-old disabled person had a quarter-mile walk to the nearest toilet, and that in one case five hundred people shared a single shower.
Her report, published in the Christian Register, described how
hysteria and suspicion of the Japanese rose to such heights ... that the order for evacuation came as a relief to all on the Pacific Coast. A local clergyman told me, “Right after Pearl Harbor there was no widespread antagonism against Japanese-Americans here. It was not until two weeks later when the Fruit Growers Association organized a campaign for deportation of their Japanese competitors that feelings began to rise.”
Irresponsible radio commentators jumped on the bandwagon with stories of suspect sabotage. Politicians, catering to mass prejudice, added their fuel to the fire. Extremists of all kinds, led by the Hearst newspapers, raised apprehension to such a pitch that bewildered, and honest, patriots felt forced to join them.
Two Filipinos made violent attacks on Japanese. Loyal and disloyal alike became fearful for their lives. Until it was too late, the mass of intelligent people never believed the evacuation would take place. When it did, they deeply regretted their inactivity in not following down rumors and acting on their own findings.
Unitarians as a group responded to the internments with aid and support to the hapless victims. Some of the Pacific Coast Unitarian congregations provided ministry to the camps. Churches collected books, equipment for nursery schools, layettes for babies, and other supplies. Teenagers provided a shopping service, and ministers made regular visits to the assembly centers to see where the churches might be useful as well as to give spiritual comfort.
Toward the close of the war, the USC opened hostels in Boston and New York where relocated Japanese Americans could find transitional housing, hospitality, and help with making their way around a new city. The opening of the hostel in New York, jointly sponsored by the USC and Community Church (Unitarian), was celebrated by an intercultural and interracial open house that reflected the neighborhood’s melting pot. It was organized by one of the people USC had helped emigrate from Lisbon in 1941.
Martha returned to Boston in June 1942 and prepared to deliver a comprehensive presentation on her seven-week trip before the AUA’s annual board meeting. Instead, Bob Dexter limit
ed her to a ten-minute summary. She was furious and denounced Dexter’s “unconcealed ill will” in a letter to President Eliot, prime mover behind the Sharps’ two commissions to Europe.
Dr. Eliot responded with much the same argument he had used dispatching Waitstill and Martha to France over their stated objections. The “job is so big and so important,” he wrote Martha, “that even wholly justifiable feelings of having been unfairly and discourteously and unreasonably dealt with are beside the point.”
Martha henceforth kept her own counsel, but another threshold had been crossed. In 1944, she accepted a temporary USC posting to Lisbon, but by the end of that year she would resign from the committee altogether. Aside from a single special mission to Iraq in 1949, she was finished with the USC.
So too was Waitstill. Proud as they were to have successfully launched the committee, which would enjoy a vital and exciting future, henceforth neither of the Sharps would be part of it.
By 1944, Martha’s speaking and travel schedule—for USC, Youth Aliyah, and the National War Fund (a kind of United Fund, administered by the US government, which helped support about twenty agencies, USC among them)—took her further and further away from the life of the Wellesley Hills Church.
On May 7, 1944, one month before the D-Day landings at Normandy, Waitstill resigned from the pulpit at Wellesley Hills to accept a yearlong commission with the Displaced Persons Division of the Middle East Mission of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). The division had been established the previous autumn by the Allies to manage the repatriation of refugees once the war was concluded. It was another decisive moment for the Sharps. With the exception of brief interludes, the four of them would not reside together under the same roof again for three years.
Defying the Nazis Page 20