Waitstill wrote,
I proceeded to College Park, Maryland, for four weeks’ training, and flew June 28th to Cairo via Miami, Belem, Ascension Island, Accra, Maiduguri and Khartoum.
This was a paradoxical year. It was rewarding for a lifetime as an experience in world travel and social observation; the Mediterranean World—Egypt, Palestine, Italy—came alive with all its poverties, its diseases and its promise.
Promise there is in the Middle East, if reason and conscience can gain a foothold, first for education, social service and the formation of labor unions, and then for a social revolution.
As an administrative experience, the year in this vast, cumbersome, paper-cluttered machine called “Middle East Mission, UNRRA,” was as deep a disappointment as could follow two such exciting and rewarding adventures as were 1939 in Central Europe and 1940 in the Iberian Peninsula and Southern France. The Middle East Mission was bedeviled by months of idleness, the oversupply of personnel, black market corruption with supplies, drunkenness, the result of frustration and boredom, and hatreds and rivalries between Americans and Americans and between British and Americans.
The prince of devils was the British military intent to prostitute the whole UNRRA program in the Middle East to serve Churchill’s political enterprises in Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania. Scores of us did not accomplish one single act in that whole year; we sat about rustling papers, or ran about wangling military orders for travel to see refugee camps (and also Palestine). This was my first intensive experience with the species bureaucrat, the little man with the glossaries of official lingo and his eyes on the next stage of the climb up the administrative chart; he shines apples for the higher brass the while he plants flyspecks on the names of his competitors for the next salary level. The female of this species is more deadly than the male.
Martha arrived in Lisbon for her final USC assignment on February 11, 1945. Before she returned home that September, she worked hard to help Republican “illegals” who had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and now faced imprisonment and death if they returned home. She managed to help twenty of them immigrate to Venezuela and helped another seventy-five immigrate to Mexico. She also saved the life of Albert Assa, a Jewish language teacher from Turkey who was under sentence of death in Spain. She organized an international, interfaith protest, including through her connection to Eleanor Rathbone, MP, one of her contacts during the mission to Czechoslovakia. With the help of the British Foreign Office, Assa’s sentence was commuted, and he and his family eventually immigrated to Mexico.
Waitstill joined Martha in Lisbon on May 29 after finishing his one-year commitment to UNRRA. He was on hand to watch the first twenty Spanish Republicans sail off to freedom, and he spent six weeks in Lisbon with Martha before sailing for New York in late June. On July 13, he sent her a postcard from Washington, DC. “I miss you with all my heart,” he wrote, “on this my 17th wedding day! Love even greater, Waitstill.”
Martha completed her assignment on September 3, then traveled to Czechoslovakia for an eleven-day visit before flying into LaGuardia on September 15. The family was reunited in Wellesley Hills for just eight days before Waitstill would depart aboard the Queen Elizabeth for yet another extended deployment abroad. He had accepted a position as field director for AmRelCzech and was on his way to Prague to oversee a program for re-equipping Czech hospitals that had been bombed and looted by the Nazis.
Hastings and Martha Content, now thirteen and seven, had seen their father just three out of the previous sixteen months. They would not see him again until the spring of 1947, another eighteen months away.
In Prague, Waitstill found echoes of the dangerous days of 1939 in an exhausted city, with the country trapped in the shadow of yet another foreign conqueror, the Soviets. Jan Masaryk had returned to Prague to continue serving as foreign minister, now in the coalition National Front government formed the previous April.
Karl Haspl had replaced his murdered father-in-law as minister at Unitaria. Ruzena Palantova had survived the Nazis too. Most everyone else the Sharps had known had either perished or escaped abroad.
One exception was the young woman dressed in a British Royal Air Force uniform who approached Waitstill one afternoon as he was having tea in the lobby of the Hotel Alcron. “You don’t remember me,” she said. “You couldn’t. But I remember you because after an interview you gave me ten thousand korunas that made it possible for me to escape.”
She was a Czech Jew who’d followed the underground escape route through the coal mines, under the border into Poland, then up to the Baltic Sea, and onto a British submarine that took her to England. It turned out that she possessed both a fine mind for math and an encyclopedic memory of southern Bohemia and Moravia, as well as Slovakia.
Within an hour of arriving in England, she told Waitstill, she had been put to work in an RAF calculating room, helping British fliers calibrate their bombing attacks on military targets in these regions.
She found the work both satisfying and redemptive. Of eighty-eight people in her family, she was the only one to survive. “I’ve just been back,” she explained. “Nobody can find them.”
As Waitstill prepared that autumn to go back to Prague as a field agent for AmRelCzech, that organization offered Martha a position in Prague too. The USC also asked her to coordinate a medical mission to Czechoslovakia. She and Waitstill thus had the opportunity to team up again, as they had often discussed, possibly placing their son and daughter in Swiss boarding schools so they could be near. It might have been a way to resume family life and recapture the shared responsibilities they had executed so ably a few years ago. But again Martha and Waitstill went their separate ways, as she decided to stay in the United States to work in support of Hadassah. This decision contravened all the plans they had made for reuniting the family and is inexplicable except in terms of Martha’s commitment to Youth Aliyah. Perhaps she felt, as she had when she had stayed on in France to complete the children’s emigration, that to abandon the work would be like watching children drown and doing nothing. Martha watched Waitstill board the Queen Elizabeth in New York to begin his trip to Prague at eight on Sunday evening, September 23, 1945, then immediately threw herself into an exhausting public-speaking tour.
It began the next morning with a five-day trip around New Jersey, after which Martha returned to Wellesley Hills in time for a Saturday night dinner with the children. She then left immediately for a National War Fund meeting in New York and then was off on a five-week tour that took her to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa. Her speaking schedule eased through the Christmas holidays, when she spent as much time as possible with her children. Since she had given up their rented house when she flew to Lisbon in February of 1945, there was no “home” for the three of them. In December, she would rent an apartment at 31 South Russell Street in Boston, but until then Martha and Martha Content stayed with friends and Hastings boarded at the private Fenn School in Concord, Massachusetts, where he was now an eighth grader.
It is hard to imagine that the irony of her situation—devoting herself to the cause of displaced children while neglecting her own—was entirely lost on Martha. On the other hand, as she had written, she was providing perks like private schools that the children could not have had on a minister’s salary, and she might have told herself, as she did in the letter to Hastings from France in 1940, that her children were being well cared for and well educated while thousands of others were in desperate need of her help.
In mid-November she wrote to Waitstill that family finances were now firmly in the black. There was $4,500 in the bank, and she intended to invest $4,000 of it “as soon as the market goes down” at the end of the year, she said. She also said that she’d received eighteen speaking invitations in the mail on the same day. Eight were from Hadassah, which paid Martha $50 per appearance, plus expenses. But she was exhausted. “I just feel I can’t refuse them,” she wrote, “but really I am at the end of my rope.” She
reiterated the complaint to him a few days later. “I need a rest dreadfully. I find that my mind is so tired that I can’t remember anything.” But she didn’t stop.
In Concord, Hastings earned four A’s, four B’s, and three C’s that term. French, Latin, and Conduct were not his strengths. “Examination marks weren’t as good as we had hoped they would be,” wrote Hastings’s housemaster, Mr. Frothingham, “but I feel somewhat encouraged, having the impression that Hastings is reaching out a little more in some directions. He is getting along better socially, having largely dropped his habit of making caustic remarks about personalities.”
“My chief impression right now,” he wrote, “is that Hastings has surprised himself once or twice by really learning a Latin lesson. I hope the experience will be like the olives in a bottle. Now that the first has been finally pried out, the rest will come easily in a steady stream.”
Martha Content, now a third grader at Kingsbury Elementary in Wellesley Hills, had been staying with the Becker family. “It has been a very trying experience for me, as well as her,” Martha wrote to Waitstill on November 18. “I wish you would come home,” Martha Content wrote her father. “I see all the other fathers home, so you can come home. Couldn’t you come home, please? You should have been here this Sunday. Yes, you should have. I cannot write any more.”
She enclosed a sketch she’d done of herself and Waitstill. “Picture of you and me,” she wrote, signing the letter simply “Martha.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A Run for Congress
Martha celebrated the first postwar Christmas with the children in 1945. All that was missing was Dad. She took them shopping and to a performance of the Ice Capades. Christmas Day was spent with the Dickies, her paternal aunt and uncle who lived in Providence, Rhode Island.
Then on January 12, 1946, she dropped what she later called a “bombshell” in a letter to Waitstill, announcing that she’d been approached to run for Congress by leaders of the state Democratic Party. The Republican candidate in Massachusetts’s 14th District would be eleven-term incumbent Joseph W. (“Joe”) Martin Jr., a hard-line conservative and adamant foe of most New Deal measures. Martin was in line to replace Texas Democrat Sam Rayburn as Speaker of the House if, as was widely expected, the GOP won a majority in the lower house for the first time since 1932.
The run for the popular Martin’s seat would be one of the key races in the 1946 congressional campaign and among the sternest challenges for the Democratic Party. Martha looked like cannon fodder.
Martha explained to Waitstill that John Cahill, chairman of the state Democratic Party, had promised her full support. “Mr. Cahill has asked me to come to the Jackson Day dinner tonight,” she wrote. “There I am to sit with Mrs. Louis McHenry Howe of Fall River, who is Postmistress, and to meet Mr. Hannigan, Postmaster General. If they agree tonight, I have the nomination. I have not yet decided to run. But they are lining up money and people, and if I am offered the CIO PAC [political action committee], and the Citizens’ PAC and the nomination of the Independent Voters of Mass., I think it is my duty to do it. But I shall cable you beforehand and ask you. It is a great honor and a great responsibility.”
She signed the letter, “Love, Martha.”
Electoral politics was a natural next step for Martha. She had seen how Neville Chamberlain’s failure of political will in Munich in the autumn of 1938 had led inevitably to the Einmarsch of the following March. Martha and Waitstill had been appalled in 1939 by the failure of the US Congress to enact the Wagner-Rogers legislation that would have granted asylum to twenty thousand German Jewish children. Three years later, Executive Order 9066, which incarcerated thousands of Japanese Americans, amply demonstrated to Martha, as she said, how critical vigilance is to protecting and preserving the ideals of a free society.
Joe Martin, sixty-one, was just the sort of politician whose voice Martha would have liked to supplant in the national political dialogue. FDR had mockingly lumped Martin and two co-isolationists, New York congressmen Bruce Barton and Hamilton Fish, as “Martin, Barton, and Fish” at the 1940 Democratic convention. Barton and Fish lost their seats in 1941 and 1945 respectively, but Joe Martin persevered, even thrived, while nearly every other Roosevelt foe was steamrolled by the FDR political juggernaut.
Now the war was over, however, and FDR was dead. The Republicans were on the rise, and Joe Martin had all the advantages of incumbency. He worked his district tirelessly and enjoyed high name recognition plus the support of an ascendant national party eager to retake the House. The GOP would strive at all costs to make certain its Speaker-apparent was victorious. Joe Martin also was Catholic in heavily Catholic District 14.
Martin was an indifferent orator, however, while Martha was an articulate speaker who might offer energy, youth, and glamour to the race. Her liberal politics might not go down easily around Wellesley, in the far northern precincts of the 14th district, but the fact that she spoke French and some Portuguese (which she had studied in her short stay in Lisbon, in 1945) would serve her well in the industrial areas, the working-class, ethnic southern cities, such as Fall River, which made up the bulk of the 14th.
Waitstill did not respond to Martha’s letter of January 12 until February 23.
When he did, Waitstill detonated a couple of bombshells of his own. He broke his response into two parts:
(1) Practicality—probability of winning. Can you?
(2) Desirability—propriety of winning. Do you want to?
Given the political climate and the opposition, he began, “I should rate your present chances at about 3 out of 100. This may sound like a rather austere calculation, when one figures that you have succeeded so far at practically everything you have ever tried. But this man is Joe Martin of the famous trio ‘Martin, Barton and Fish.’ Just recall that FDR successfully ‘put away’ two of those three men, but one survived even the landslides.”
Waitstill then went on at length on how Republican demagoguery over the issue of American troops still garrisoned overseas (“All the Boys Home—Now” was one slogan he said came to mind) could “sweep the House from stem to stern, women voting their anxiety and loneliness and compassion for their men.”
Waitstill saw it as part of a gathering conservative assault on internationalism, a return to the politics of the thirties, and warned: “If that gets going, you will not be able to stop it. You won’t get a rational vote. You won’t be able to face a single pre-primary or pre-election crowd without having to come clear on that in the first five minutes.”
Regarding the other issue, the “desirability” of Martha’s running for office, Waitstill opened his heart, uncharacteristically. It must have been an agony for him to write.
“Suppose you could sweep the District?” he began.
Do you want to? Apparently you do. OK by me, if that is the thing you want to do. I would help in any way I could, with as much of our small hoard as you wanted to chuck into the pool—and a candidate is expected to do a very generous part himself—and in any other ways.
As for me, I am beginning to wish to put down roots again....
I want to go on, for what there is left of life, with you. Either here, or in the USA, with you. Not in either place in a house or a job whence you will fly whenever you can escape.
Waitstill had put it on the line.
“Seven years ago tonight we stepped off the train into Wilson Station—and into a new world,” he concluded and signed the letter, “Love, Waitstill.”
In Martha’s response to Waitstill’s cri de coeur, a surviving March 25, 1946, letter, she told him that “after you wrote me that you approved of my running I began seriously to work in the district.” Their friend Marcia Davenport, who had visited Waitstill in Prague, “comes back to report that you are not happy about my running,” Martha acknowledged. “But I can’t back out now. It is unfortunately too late.”
Waitstill would not return for the campaign.
In April, Martha reported tha
t Hastings required glasses and that Martha Content’s eyeteeth were coming in with no place for them to grow, “and her lower teeth are all severely out of place.” She’d already been fitted for braces. Most of the rest of the letter was devoted to their housing situation. The little apartment on South Russell was not working out, so Martha was looking at a three-story, four-bedroom house on Eaton Court in Wellesley Hills. The asking price was twelve thousand dollars—“an extraordinarily low price for anything in Wellesley Hills,” she wrote. A mortgage could be arranged that brought their monthly payments below the total of ninety dollars she was paying for rent and to store their furniture.
“If I win the election ... the house will be handy,” she continued. “If I lose, then we can decide if you want me to come over with or without the children, and we can rent the house. If you decide to return, you have a place to stay while you decide what you want to do. I should think it a wise move in any case, and surely no loss for the next three years.”
“Tonight,” she concluded the letter, “we sat in front of our tiny fireplace & MCS said, ‘All the family together but Daddy. How I wish he were here. He would find it too small and cramped I’m afraid, but we are happy once again to be together.’”
In June, Martha reported to Waitstill that she had won her Democratic primary handily—7,128 votes to 2,232—but that she remained a long shot in the general election. “The possibilities of winning are small,” she wrote.
Martin has done favors for 20 years. He is liked as a person, and very few people have taken the trouble to look up his record. He has the businessmen scared to come out for me, because he already has threatened some of them. The silver manufacturers need his help on silver prices, the Jews on Palestine, etc. They are scared to death to even be seen talking to me.
The big manufacturers are all for him. The local newspapers are all Republican-run. The Unitarian Mr. Reed who owns the Taunton Gazette is really very cooperative, but the Fall River Herald News and the radio station are owned by Republicans.
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