MARTHA
SHARP COGAN and WAITSTILL HASTINGS SHARP
(1905-1999)
(1902-1984)
UNITARIAN SERVICE COMMITTEE PIONEERS
by Ghanda Di Figlia, Harvard University,
author of Roots and Visions
The family of British immigrants to which Martha Ingham
Dickie was born worshipped at historic First Baptist Church
in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded by Roger Williams in
1638 after he fled persecution in Massachusetts Bay Colony,
the Church’s legacy included religious free-thinking,
respect for diversity, and world service. They were values
that seeped into the soul of the young girl who attended
services there from the age of three. She learned from the
catechism of her day that the mission of the Church was
"to proclaim the gospel to all mankind, to exalt the
worship of God and to labor for the progress of knowledge,
the promotion of peace and the realization of human brotherhood."
A focal point in the Sunday School was a picture of the
church connected by red, white and blue ribbons to places
on a world map where missionary activity, supported by First
Baptist, was taking place. Missionaries from such places
as Burma, Japan and Africa spoke frequently at church gatherings.
By the time she was in high school, the idealistic young
woman felt drawn to the life of a medical missionary.
After
graduating from Pembroke College, Martha’s inclination
toward service led her to seek a career in social work.
She entered Northwestern University’s Recreation Training
School centered in Hull House, the Chicago settlement house
founded by social worker Jane Addams in 1889. Upon completion
of the course, she became Director of Girls’ Work for
the Chicago Commons settlement house with care for some
500 young women of 26 different nationalities. She reveled
in the diversity and the challenges of social work, thinking,
with her marriage in 1927 to Waitstill Hastings Sharp, that
she had taken only temporary leave of the profession. Although
it was a career to which she never returned, Martha used
many of its skills in other spheres of activity including
her work some twelve years later for the Unitarian Service
Committee.
Her husband had fulfilled his family’s expectations
by graduating from Harvard Law School although he had as
a boy dreamed of a career in the foreign service. During
his third year of law school however he came to know Dr.
Eugene Shippen, minister of Second Church in Boston. He
became part-time director of religious education at Second
Church and, later, through the support of Dr. Shippen, National
Director of Religious Education for the American Unitarian
Association (AUA). Several years later, he was ordained
a Unitarian minister and in 1933 took the pulpit of a small
church in Meadville, Pennsylvania. His wife noted that his
sermons brought together his interest in international affairs
and Unitarian theology. While it was a truism at the time
that a church paid for one minister but got two, with Martha,
the church was at least three-times blessed. She facilitated
much of the youth work, religious education activities,
and women’s meetings, to say nothing of innumerable
church suppers and, to use her own words, providing the
“sympathetic listening and behind the scenes facilitating”
that came with the territory. Waitstill, she noted, was
incapable of “small talk” even with children,
so that her amiability and ease with people of all kinds
and all ages gave balance to their ministry.
Martha
Dickie on the day of her wedding to Waitstill Sharp,
1927
While
in Meadville, Martha also worked with local internationalist
and peace groups, the world situation having become an ever-increasing
source of concern for her and for her husband. By the time
of their next pastorate, in April 1936, at the Unitarian
Church of Wellesley Hills, Hitler had consolidated his control
of Germany and and was a few months away from securing the
alliance with Mussolini in Italy. Spain was on the threshold
of civil war. With an eye on these and other events, the
Sharps started an International Relations Club. At the November
1938 meeting of the club, following the ceding of the Sudetenland
to Hitler through the Munich Agreement, the Sharps led a
discussion on “The Rape of Czechoslovakia.” They
had no way of knowing that within three months they would
be on their way to Czechoslovakia as emissaries of Unitarian
intervention in the tragic history of that beleaguered country.
The way toward that intervention was paved by the AUA leadership
immediately after the capitulation at Munich. There was
at the time a Unitarian movement of some 3,500 souls in
Czechoslovakia, with a main church, Unitaria, in Prague
that had been nurtured by Unitarians in the U.S. and Britain.
The denomination felt a strong connection as well to the
700,000 member Czech National Church, founded after World
War I by religious liberals who withdrew from the Czech
Catholic Church. The Executive Committee of the AUA, led
by Dr. Frederick May Eliot, president and Dr. Robert Dexter,
head of the Department of Social Relations, invited a delegation
of Quakers to join a Commission for Service in Czechoslovakia.
In early November, Dr. Dexter and the Quaker representative,
Richard Wood, sailed for Europe on a fact-finding mission.
Dexter and Wood made contacts in London, Paris, and Geneva
with British Friends and Unitarians, government officials
and refugee aid groups through which rescue efforts and
relief operations could be coordinated. The task was formidable:
by November 16, Dexter and Wood sent back a preliminary
report estimating that of the 200,000 refugees from the
Sudetenland now crowded into Prague, between 22,000 to 26,000
needed immediate emigration assistance.
February
4, 1939: Rev. Waitstill and Martha Sharp depart for
their mission to Czechoslovakia.
In
their absence the Unitarian leadership set about fundraising
and searching for suitable “commissioners” who
would carry the Unitarian witness to the Czech people. At
a meeting in mid-January with the Reverend Dr. Everett Baker,
the Sharps agreed to be those witnesses. In later years,
both Martha and Waitstill recalled grave misgivings about
leaving their children, 7-year-old Hastings and 2-year old
Martha Content “without any parental supervision or
befriending,” as Waitstill put it. Convinced, however,
that the children would be well cared for by family friends
who agreed to live in the parsonage and that the church
would be in the capable hands of Dr. Baker, they set out
for London via New York on February 4. They carried $12,000
in Unitarian relief funds and $29,000 from a Czech relief
committee formed in New York by Nicholas Murray Butler,
president of Columbia University. They spent a couple of
weeks meeting with the contacts Dexter had made in London,
Paris, and Geneva. These were the people who would be trying
to get jobs, fellowships, or invitations of any kind that
would enable the Sharps’ clients in Czechoslovakia
to get out. The Sharps arrived in Prague on February 23.
They immediately made contacts with personnel at the U.S.
Consulate, with Czech government officials and with heads
of voluntary agencies like the Red Cross and the Salvation
Army and with leaders of the Czech churches. Because the
money from the Butler committee was specifically earmarked
for large scale Sudenten refugee resettlement projects,
they worked with government representatives to discern how
best the money could be used. From rooms in the former Ministry
of Health, given to them by the Czech government and with
the help of some bilingual Czech students, the Sharps processed
dossiers of people needing to escape. On February 27 Martha
had a sufficient number of dossiers to warrant a four-day
sojourn in London for a meeting with members of the contact
groups. These activities continued as planned until March
15 when the German army marched into Prague. Shielded by
Waitstill’s cover as a visiting minister, the pair
stayed on until August. Because they had come to Czechoslovakia
before March 15, their exit visas allowed them to reenter
the country after taking short trips abroad so that between
March 15 and early August they made six separate trips to
their various European contacts. On one of those trips,
Martha led 35 refugees, including two children whose parents
had committed suicide, to safety in England. Waitstill estimated
that they had about 3,500 clients, mostly journalists, writers
and artists, other professional men and women, political
leaders, and students. Many of these were Jewish and, therefore,
doubly in danger. The Sharps were unable to keep records
so who those people were and what percentage of them actually
did escape and—beyond that—survive the war, is
unknown.
Sudeten refugees displaced after the Munich pact take
shelter in a school on the Czech-German border in 1938.
The
other part of the Sharps' mission, refugee relief, was easier
to document. For Unitaria, the Unitarian congregation in
Prague, they bought supplies of food, medicine, and wool
which were secreted under the the great heavy tiles of the
church floor. With the long term optimistically in mind,
they gave money to Unitaria to pay down the mortgage. They
helped the Czech National Church with a publication project
and assisted the Salvation Army in its feeding program.
Over a period of four months, they provided dinners and
suppers for 350 German and Austrian refugees. Waitstill
reported that by summer's end, 284 of them had escaped.
The care of children was a primary concern. They gave money
to children's homes and summer camps, to a refugee maternity
pavilion sponsored by the Czech Red Cross and to a children's
relief project in Brno. Finally, there were subventions
for students who were planning to leave by way of a secret
route through Poland and then to England. While having lunch
in a Prague cafe after the war, Waitstill was approached
by a young Jewish woman to whom he had given ten thousand
crowns for that journey. She had spent the war in the service
of the British army as a cartographer, the only one of a
family of 88 to survive.
The Unitarian mission did not escape Nazi suspicion. On
April 13 their offices were rifled and on the 17th, while
Waitstill was outside the country, Martha came to work to
find that the furniture had been tossed out into the street.
She moved the operation to a student bungalow until it was
closed down entirely on July 25. They stayed on, gathering
loose ends until August. Waitstill left first on August
9, planning to return after attending a meeting of liberal
religious youth in Arcegno, Switzerland. He was not allowed
back into Czechoslovakia. Martha left on August 15, three
weeks after the Nazis closed down all foreign refugee offices,
and, as she learned after the war, a day before she was
to be taken to Gestapo headquarters for questioning. They
left from Cherbourg for New York on August 30. Before the
boat landed, Germany had invaded Poland, and World War II
was underway.
August
1940: Unitarian Service Committee distributes milk donated
by the Nestle company for refugee children in southern
France. Martha Sharp is second from right.
The
tragic moment coupled with the denomination’s pride
in the Sharps’ work led to the realization of what
may have been a long-standing dream of at least a few members
of the Unitarian leadership, especially of Robert Dexter:
the establishment of a Unitarian counterpart to the widely-respected
American Friends Service Committee. In the fall of 1938,
at the first meeting called in response to the Munich treaty,
Dexter noted that Quaker charitable works had "done
more to create respect and admiration for a particular religious
body and a particular religious point of view than any publications
they have ever printed, than any buildings they have ever
built." Waitstill Sharp and Robert Dexter were two
of a seven-member committee that worked toward the formation
of the Unitarian Service Committee, established in May 1940
as a standing committee of the American Unitarian Association.
Today, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee is a
respected international agency funding grassroots development
projects abroad and addressing social justice issues in
the United States.
Prior
to sending representatives to continue the work begun by
Martha and Waitstill, the denomination sent Dr. Dexter and
his wife, Dr. Elisabeth Dexter, on another fact-finding
mission. They returned with a plan to establish a center
in Paris with a $20,000 a year budget from which Unitarian
representatives would provide relief to Czech refugees and
act as liaison with their separated families in Rumania,
Hungary, or wherever in still-free Europe they might be.
This plan and the sending over, by June 15, of representatives,
preferably the Sharps, to carry it out was ratified by the
Unitarians after the Dexters returned home in May. By that
time, the area of possible operation in Europe was steadily
narrowing. The Nazis had invaded Denmark and Norway in early
April. As May unfolded, they occupied Luxembourg and the
Netherlands, invaded France and took control of Belgium.
Despite these conditions, the Unitarians proceeded with
their plans. Martha and Waitstill accepted the new commission,
although with reluctance at leaving their children for a
second time. On June 14, a day before the Sharps could board
the ship that was to take them to France, the Nazi army
invaded Paris. While the upheaval caused the original plans
to be scuttled, it didn’t deter the Sharps or anyone
else at the AUA from proceeding with the mission. Percival
Brundage, a member of the AUA Board, secured air tickets
to Lisbon for the Sharps. Brundage was also a member of
the Committee for the Care of European Children, newly-created
to bring children from war zones to safety in the United
States. He asked Martha to find French children whose parents
might want them to emigrate to the United States for the
duration of the war. His suggestion led to Martha’s
major endeavor during the fall of that year: the emigration
of 29 children from Vichy France to the United States.
Martha and Waitstill reached Lisbon on June 20 with no particular
instructions save a mandate to see what the new situation
required and to do it as best they could. Through contacts
they had made the previous year, the Sharps learned that
there was a critical need for food in southern France, now
crowded with hundreds of thousands of refugees. Children,
especially, were at grave risk. For $5,400, the Sharps bought
a twelve-ton carload of condensed and powdered milk and
Nestogen, a farina and milk product. They planned to send
it to the village of Pau in the Basses Pyrenees where Donald
and Helen Lowrie, Paris contacts during their mission to
Czechoslovakia, were acting as relief agents for the YMCA,
the American Red Cross, and a Czech refugee group. The French
Red Cross in Portugal provided a second carload of clothing
and additional food which the Sharps arranged to send to
Perpignan and Montpelier where it would be met by Red Cross
representatives. Preceding the milk train, the Sharps reached
Marseilles in mid-July where Richard Allen, representative
of the American Red Cross, facilitated the customs requirements
by designating the milk an official Red Cross shipment.
At that point, Waitstill and Martha divided responsibilities.
Waitstill would return to Lisbon to set up the Unitarian
rescue and relief center and Martha would stay in France
to wait for the milk shipment and set about finding children
who could emigrate.
A
valley in the Sudetenland, the region of Czechoslovakia
annexed by Germany as part of the Munich agreement.
Although
Waitstill tried to arrange for more food to be sent from
Lisbon to France, his efforts were unsuccessful. The British
blockade, imposed immediately after the declaration of war
against Germany, curtailed Red Cross and other relief shipments.
In addition, AUA leaders, especially Robert Dexter, were
completely supportive of the blockade, and gave no support
to Waitstill’s efforts to bring relief supplies into
France. He had more success, and more official AUA support,
for his work in setting up an emigration service in Lisbon
and linking it to the efforts of Varian Fry of the Emergency
Rescue Committee (ERC). Formed in June 1940, the ERC’s
mission was to rescue intellectual and political leaders
trapped in southern France. Among those on the ERC’s
list were noted physiologist Otto Meyerhof, the writers
Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Heinrich Mann and his nephew,
Gottfried Mann, son of the writer Thomas Mann. Fry came
to Waitstill and members of other rescue and relief organizations
operating in Lisbon at the time for information on how to
carry out his mission. Waitstill gave him the lay of the
bureaucratic land and other tips. In addition, he agreed
that USC would be the Emergency Rescue Committee’s
liaison in Lisbon, helping to maintain those who were able
to get out of France and facilitating their passage to other
places. This connection, which persisted throughout World
War II, is one of the little known facts about USC’s
early years. Waitstill made one more trip into France, coming
back into Portugal with the writer Lion Feuchtwanger in
September. By that time the Reverend Charles Joy had arrived
to continue the work of the Lisbon office. Using Martha’s
ticket, Feuchtwanger sailed for New York with Waitstill
on September 28.
While Waitstill was in Lisbon, Martha and Helen Lowrie worked
with midwives in towns around Pau to identify children under
the age of two who would be most in need of the milk. On
August 20, at a ceremony presided over by the mayor of Pau,
they distributed a month’s worth of milk for about
800 children.
By that time, Martha had begun to gather children for the
emigration project. The task would have defeated many of
less energy and determination. The children needed medical
certificates, vaccinations, photos and affidavits from relatives
and financial guarantors. The governments of four countries
required documents allowing entry into, exit from and passage
through their borders. For twelve weeks, Martha dueled with
bureaucrats, many of whom were uncooperative, some of whom
were cruel, for the precious pieces of paper that, given
the flow of history, would be lifesavers for those few lucky
ones, especially for the 9 Jewish children in the group.
Finally, on November 26 a convoy of 29 children and 9 adults
left the railroad station in Marseilles for Spain, Lisbon,
and, then, the United States. Martha sailed to New York
in early December with two of the children and four of the
adults. She was at the dock to welcome the rest when they
arrived on December 23.
The
original symbol of the Service Committee, designed by
refugee Hans Deutsch
After returning home, Martha joined USC’s Board of
Directors and lent the organization her considerable skills
as a fundraiser. She continued her role as the minister’s
right hand until 1944 when Waitstill left the Wellesley
Hills Church for a position in Cairo with the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). Martha returned
to Portugal in February 1945 to run the Lisbon office following
the abrupt resignation of its directors, Elisabeth and Robert
Dexter. When she learned that Portuguese authorities had
asked the new U.S. Ambassador to close USC’s office
as a “friendly gesture to Portugal,” she sought
ways to clarify the organization’s relationship with
the Portuguese government, especially with the police who
were arresting some of USC’s clients. She choreographed
a delicate diplomatic ballet that brought cooperation from
the head of the International Police allowing her time to
find avenues of emigration in Venezuela and Mexico for Spanish
Republican refugees who, by that time, were among the most
numerous of USC clients.
At the end of her commitment in Lisbon, Martha visited Czechoslovakia
to observe conditions in that country and how USC might
help the reconstruction effort. She continued to raise funds
for USC and for Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization
with which she was forming close ties. By December, however,
the last in a series of what would now be called blatantly
sexist slights by the USC leadership caused Martha to resign
from the organization. She had endured them since her return
from France in 1940 when her efforts to give substantial
reports on her visits with Unitarians around the country
were ignored by the leadership. Apparently, when five years
later she experienced the same indifference, she decided
she’d had enough.
Her next challenge was a campaign to unseat incumbent Joe
Martin for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
She may well have lost anyway, but her chances of winning
were completely eradicated when, in the last weeks of the
campaign, she was smeared as a communist sympathizer because
of her work with Spanish Republicans in Lisbon. Elected
office never attracted her again, and for the next several
years, she devoted her energies to the cause of Jewish refugee
children. In 1943 she and two friends, Susan Herman and
Frances Eliot Fremont-Smith, had founded Children to Palestine,
an interfaith effort to benefit Hadassah’s Youth Aliyah,
the organization that was bringing European Jewish refugee
children to new homes in what was then Palestine. Martha
had done a great deal of fund/raising for Children to Palestine,
an organization that Hadassah officers regarded as valuable
as much for its positive impact on interfaith relations
as for its financial benefits to Youth Aliyah.
In January 1947, Martha accepted Hadassah’s invitation
to travel to Palestine for a tour of Youth Aliyah settlements,
as a prelude to a three-month speaking campaign in the U.S.
This was to be the first of four trips to the country, each
one affirming her commitment to the new state which she
envisioned as a binational one with Arabs and Jews sharing
a peaceful and increasingly fertile land. Twice she stopped
off in trouble spots on the way home to do undercover work
for Jewish agencies. In 1948, she visited Morocco, where
most Jews were living in squalor, and all were at the mercy
of a capricious legal system. While the details of her visit
have not been documented, she probably passed money to Jewish
leaders who used it to facilitate the emigration process.
The next year, she participated in the Israeli government’s
ongoing efforts to document the condition of Iraq’s
Jewish population, some 130,000 souls who, especially since
the declaration of the Israeli state in 1947, had been subjected
to great repression and who were not allowed to emigrate.
On the rooftop of her hotel in Baghdad, Martha met secretly
with Jewish representatives, carrying home their description
of current conditions. These she passed on to an Israeli
representative in New York. In 1951 Israel paid Iraq a large
sum of money in return for a lifting of the ban on Jewish
emigration. Nearly 124,000 of them left, the largest emigration
of a single group to the new nation.
In 1950, Martha took a job in the Truman White House with
the National Security Resources Board, a cold war creation
designed to mobilize the nation’s resources—human
and material—in the event of an attack by the Soviet
Union. She continued to fund raise for Hadassah. She resigned
with the inauguration of the Eisenhower administration and
returned to New York where she started a public relations
business while maintaining her ties to Hadassah and Youth
Aliyah. By that time, her marriage to Waitstill had failed.
They both believed, into old age, that the separations endured
in wartime service had frayed the marital bond beyond repair.
Their shared legacy endures, however, in their works and
in the lives they saved. Both of them later remarried.
Roots and Visions:
Fifty Years of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
by Ghanda Di Figlia (Cambridge: The Unitarian Universalist
Service Commitee, 1990).
