Defying the Nazis
Page 23
Expressing pride in the land, in the new life that it was giving to child survivors of the Holocaust, and in the promise that Jew, Muslim, and Christian could live together in peace, the film reflects much of Martha’s faith that the new country would become a beacon of democracy and interfaith cooperation. Its closing phrase, “The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man,” could not be more Unitarian.1
During this trip, Martha visited Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza. Quakers working there asked her to bring the plight of the refugees to the attention of Israeli government officials. In the Quaker tradition of “speaking truth to power,” she raised the issue with Moshe Sharett, the foreign minister. As she recalled the meeting, Sharett, one of the more dovish members of the government, was “interested” but “overwhelmed” by the need to deal with the tidal wave of immigration unleashed by the establishment of the Israeli state. She called his attention to international sympathy for the displaced Arab population, and he agreed to increase the number of Arabs allowed to stay in their own homes in Gaza. He could do no more, she wrote, because of the housing shortage that was relegating thousands of new arrivals to crowded transit areas where tents were the only shelter available.
Another of Martha’s projects was to supply the Youth Aliyah settlements with games and sports equipment. Working through Children to Palestine, Martha had persuaded Mel Allen, the legendary New York Yankees radio play-by-play announcer, to act as honorary chairman of Operation Sports, a campaign to collect the equipment, both new and used, with the help of children in American Sunday schools. In all, several tons of balls, sticks, gloves, helmets, nets, and other gear were shipped from the United States to Israel.
She wound up her visit to Israel in mid-August, but this time there was an additional stop on the way home: Iraq. The USC, which had made health and medicine its major international aid priorities at the close of the war, wished to open a dialogue with Iraq and asked Martha to visit the country as their representative.
Her four-day visit to Baghdad, the capital, and Basra, a major river port city to the south, began on August 27. Discussions with Iraqi doctors and state health officials led to plans for a cooperative campaign against a debilitating parasitic disease called bilharzia (also known as schistosomiasis, or snail fever). Martha also spent time quietly gathering information on the plight of oppressed Iraqi Jews, who were forbidden to travel.
Some of Martha’s meetings with secret informants were conducted at night on the roof of her hotel, a page out of her clandestine days in Prague and the south of France. She would report on her mission directly to Abba Eban, then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Ultimately, a deal was worked out whereby 124,000 Iraqi Jews—practically the country’s entire Jewish population—were allowed to immigrate to Israel as long as they left all their material possessions behind.
Hastings and Martha Content spent that summer of 1949 in Chicago with their father. Hastings would begin his senior year at Hackley, a private college prep school located in Tarrytown, New York. Hastings was by then serious about his schooling, or at least serious enough to be accepted the following year at Harvard, where he would study chemistry.
On Labor Day, September 5, Waitstill and the children drove the current incarnation of Lizzie, the name the Sharps gave to all their cars, to Midway to meet Martha’s plane. The next morning, Martha escorted Martha Content to her first day of eighth-grade classes at a local public school. By September 12, however, Martha was back in New York. According to her diary, she did not return to Chicago until October 4.
Life in Chicago was hellish for Martha Content, she recalls. With her big brother Hastings away at boarding school and her mother only occasionally in the house, she had to contend with more than any thirteen-year-old should have to face.
The house, located in a marginal neighborhood, had a large backyard, where she and her father kept a couple of ducks as pets. Martha Content mowed the grass for a dollar a week. Waitstill had no domestic skills and apparently no intention of acquiring any. His daughter remembers serving as de facto cook, laundress, and maid.
She clashed with him on questions of makeup and wardrobe. Sharp saw no need for the former and sought to severely circumscribe the latter. Oxfords and dresses to the ankle were his idea of appropriate teen fashion. Martha Content finally resorted to petitioning him in writing. When that didn’t work, she took her case to their church, where elders counseled the reluctant Sharp to let his daughter dress and look like other girls her age.
The neighborhood could be dangerous, and her father’s work was perilous as well. The council against discrimination was focusing much of its attention on fair housing issues for blacks, who were then excluded from much public as well as private housing in Chicago.
There was violence. Waitstill twice came home covered in blood. On the second occasion, Martha Content had to drive him to the hospital at night in Lizzie the car, struggling to operate the unfamiliar standard transmission. Afraid for her well-being in the neighborhood and at school, Waitstill enrolled her in a private school, the Faulkner School for Girls, in Chicago, which she attended from 1950 until her graduation, in 1954.
The four Sharps spent the Christmas holiday together in Chicago. Martha appears to have been ill most of the time. Her notes indicate that she took a painful fall down a staircase, requiring X-rays, which showed no broken bones. Then she came down with one of her frequent acute upper respiratory infections before leaving, January 5, for Los Angeles, where in just under three weeks she would raise approximately seventy-five thousand dollars.
Martha still was Hadassah’s hottest ticket, yet the work’s constant demands were getting to her. She was exhausted and more prone than ever to the wide variety of medical problems that seemed to be a routine part of travel for her. Travel itself had long before then lost most of its magic, especially the long speaking tours when the days melted into one another and the only thing she looked forward to was getting into a hotel room bed each night.
That summer of 1950 she made one final trip to Israel, with Eddie Cantor, and returned in mid-July for one last family summer vacation at Sunapee. Martha expected to hit the road for Hadassah that autumn, as usual. Then came a telephone call from India Edwards, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and a personal friend since her congressional campaign of 1946.
Edwards told her that Stuart Symington, chairman of the National Security Resources Board (NSRB), had asked her to find for him a woman with international relief experience, broad knowledge of the United States and women’s organizations, and the ability to engage in effective public speaking and writing. The NSRB was a Cold War civilian preparedness agency that Symington had taken over after stepping down as the first US secretary of the air force. The job he needed to fill, preferably with a woman, was director of civil defense for women and children.
India Edwards appealed to Martha’s patriotism, particularly the hostile unease that most Americans felt at the threat of postwar Soviet expansionism and the worldwide spread of Communism. Two years before, Josef Stalin had closed all land approaches to Berlin. In response, the United States and its allies had launched the Berlin Airlift, or Air Bridge, continuous supply flights to keep the citizens of the old German capital in everything from food to fuel, clothes, medicine, and everything else necessary for their survival. Symington, as secretary of the air force, had played an important role in the airlift’s ultimate success. Stalin lifted the land barricades in May of 1949.
Elsewhere, the Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb, and just before Martha’s return home from Israel that summer, the communist government of North Korea had launched an invasion of South Korea.
Martha flew to Washington to meet with Symington, who told her with “great gravity,” as she recalled, about her responsibilities should she become associate director of the NSRB. The job sounded demanding but interesting. The money was right. The chairman wanted her to begin at once. Martha called Waitstill.
Martha’s acceptance of a sensitive, high-level job with the federal government meant that the FBI would have another look at her—a long look. From the moment she was hired until she departed with the advent of the incoming Eisenhower administration in February 1953, the FBI would never stop investigating Martha. Its interest centered on Waitstill’s signature of an anti-HUAC petition; the Sharps’ possible 1945 membership in the National Committee of American Friends of Czechoslovakia, which had Communist ties; Martha’s connections with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, which had funded some of her refugee work in Lisbon; and whether or not she had secretly been the US Communist Party’s candidate in the 1946 congressional race.
Easily her severest critic was Ernie Adamson, the former HUAC counsel, who accused her of having run a “travel agency for communists” in Lisbon in 1945. The agent who interviewed Adamson noted, “He knows Martha Sharp to be an extremely intelligent, resourceful and politically active woman, he believes she is directly financed by Moscow.”
No detail seemed to escape the FBI. An agent in Los Angeles reported that during World War II, Lion Feuchtwanger had written for a left-wing, German-language periodical based in Mexico. The Chicago field office found a 1949 article published in the Chicago Maroon, the student newspaper at the University of Chicago, reporting on an address Waitstill had made to a “crowded student audience” at the school. The article reported that Waitstill advised students to “keep out of tension areas,” where the local housing battle sometimes turned violent. According to the agent, Sharp “had stated ‘the discrimination problem is increasing in Chicago, with the rate of increase being only six percent for Caucasians, but 47 percent for non-Caucasians’”
Given Waitstill’s weakness for such statistics, the FBI file has the ring of authenticity. The agent continued quoting the article: “This factor, plus man’s hatred of dissimilar persons, plus the frustration and boredom created by capitalism in urban life, foster Fascism in Chicago.” That sounds like Waitstill too.
It is difficult to imagine more loyal Americans than the Sharps, and this was the message the FBI heard from the dozens of friends, acquaintances, and associates they interviewed. Yet the unfounded fear that Martha and Waitstill’s sterling reputations for patriotism and civic-mindedness were simply a smoke screen to mask a communist agenda kept dozens of agents in cities all over the world busy for three years, a vast make-work project that would not cease until Martha at last left the NSRB in 1953.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Divergent Paths
After years of absentee marriage and fragmented home life, Martha’s new job inspired hope in Martha and Waitstill that they could put their family life back together. The work of planning a civil defense program for women and children, then selling her ideas to various constituencies inside and outside the government, would challenge Martha, as India Edwards had said, on multiple levels. It was useful, important work.
The job paid well, and a generous travel allowance—one of her preconditions to accepting the position—meant that Martha could fly home to Chicago regularly. For the first year, she lived in an apartment in Washington but commuted home each weekend at NSRB expense. It seemed to be working. Even as late as 1953, after she left the White House at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, Waitstill, in writing to a friend, referred to Martha as his “one in a million.”
Then came the split.
Waitstill would recall Martha walking into the living room, sitting down on the couch opposite him, and removing one of her signature hats with a little flourish. Then Martha leaned forward on an elbow, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Waitstill, I want a divorce.”
They had seen so little of each other, and shared even less, that any sense they had of forward momentum was by now only inertia. Waitstill and Martha’s marriage had been a deep source of strength for each of them from the start of their lives together. When tempered by adversity during the war years, the bonds of that marriage grew even tighter, and the courage the husband and wife lent to each other helped them to persevere in the face of enormous challenges. But when the war was over and the relief mission they had taken on together came to a close, Waitstill and Martha’s relationship was changed in fundamental ways. The intensity and ever-present dangers around them in Europe had pulled them together as a couple, but when they returned to the United States, their wartime experiences had the effect of pulling them apart. Despite what they courageously accomplished together in the war years, it had become easier for both to simply live in the present and let the past fade away.
Waitstill was shattered. Surprised, deeply upset, and ultimately angry over Martha’s decision, he felt she had abandoned him. Martha believed that at least part of his hostility sprang from his fears of what a divorce might mean for his career in the ministry, to which he intended to return. It is true that he tried everything to protract the divorce proceedings, evidently hoping that Martha would have a change of heart.
She would not. They signed divorce papers in June of 1954.
Unsurprisingly, Waitstill’s opposition to the divorce seems to have resonated in Unitarian circles. Reverend Leslie Pennington, one of the three references Martha had listed on her NSRB job application, wrote what he called a “Statement Concerning Rev. and Mrs. Waitstill H. Sharp” in support of Waitstill’s efforts to return to the parish ministry.
“I have been very close to Mr. Sharp during these last two, difficult years,” Pennington wrote.
He has been a faithful father to his daughter, Martha Content, who has been finishing her work at the Faulkner School in preparation for college. He has done everything he could to avoid the break in his marriage. He has been much more generous and tolerant of Mrs. Sharp’s desertion of her family than many of us among his friends who have watched this situation develop.
Even after Mrs. Sharp had said that she would not discuss this matter with those of us who have known them both for many years, and we had given up hope of saving this marriage. Mr. Sharp maintained such love, trust and admiration for her that he had no thought of allowing the marriage to be broken. It was only after the realization of more than a full year of desertion, and her expressed word that the marriage could not be saved, that he acknowledged to himself and his friends the need for legal separation.
When asked which of her two parents she preferred to live with, Martha Content’s emphatic answer was “neither.” She graduated from Faulkner in the spring of 1954 and accepted a full scholarship to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Martha objected to the choice and made what her daughter called “one of those entries into the picture.” She decreed that Martha Content would attend either Radcliffe or Pembroke (the women’s college at Brown University and Martha’s alma mater), not a large public university in the Midwest. Martha Content replied that she had no money. She was working as a soda jerk at the time.
“It’s all right,” Martha said. “I will give you a bus ticket.”
So Martha Content rode a Greyhound three days to Cambridge, where she arrived at the bus station in the early morning. A few hours later, when the Radcliffe interviewer asked, “What has Beowulf meant to you?” Martha Content couldn’t take the question seriously and so took a pass on Radcliffe.
The visit to Pembroke College at Brown went more smoothly. Martha Content survived the interview, and her mother prevailed on Whitelaw Reid’s wife, an alumna too, to arrange for everything else, including a scholarship for her daughter.
Martha Content’s major would be classics. “Part of my reason for choosing classics was the romance of the past,” she says. “And much of that came from my mother, who I remember describing all the fascinating places she’d been. Plus, the past was fixed, while the present was such a goddamn mess.”
In 1953, Martha moved to New York City, where she joined
Raymond Rich Associates, a public relations firm that specialized in representing nonprofit organizations. She also took care of Hastings, who, after dropping out of Harvard and entering the army, had suffered a severe head injury in a training accident on Mount Rainier in Washington State and received a medical discharge. They lived together in an apartment at 108 West Fifteenth Street.
Waitstill meanwhile was called to the pulpit of the Unitarian church in Davenport, Iowa, in 1954 and would lead that church for nine years. In the summer of 1955 he married Monica Clark, an attractive food stylist he’d met at the First Unitarian Church in Chicago.
At Brown, in 1955, Martha Content met and fell in love with Artemis Joukowsky II, then a senior majoring in sociology. They married in June of 1956 in dual ceremonies—Russian Orthodox and Unitarian—in New York City. Waitstill came from Iowa to officiate. Uncle Livingston Stebbins (Aunt Edna had since passed on) gave Martha Content away.