ABSTRACT
On June 8, 1933, in the office of a professor of American history at the University of Chicago, the phone rang. William E. Dodd came to leave the classroom where he was turning graduate students into teachers, and the study where he was writing of the Old South, to journey into the jungle of Nazi Germany. For Dodd was no banker-minded appeaser, intent on wangling a few financial concessions from the Nazis and paying for them with American self-respect. AMerica’s minister to Belgium when there was a Belgium, Mr. Cudahy, was granted an interview by Goebbels. The Nazi propaganda lord assured our greatly impressed statesman-reporter that Americans need not fear German intentions. The technicians are, to be sure, in control in Germany, but the economic system is potentially explosive unless the business groups, the army groups, and the government bureaucrats are all at least marginally satisfied.
