Authors: Susan Conant
The third picture was the one that inspired me to buy the hat. It was printed in 1973 with one of the stories about the legal battle over her will. It was a studio portrait taken about 1940, a close-up of her head and shoulders. Her features were large and heavy. To her dogs, she must have looked beautiful. I, however, felt no desire to change faces with her. No, all I wanted was her hat, which was a cloche, I guess, worn at a jaunty angle, with the brim turned up. Fastened to it was a tiny pin that represented a dog. The original hat probably came from a smart Fifth Avenue shop. In the newsprint, the hat looked black. It might actually have been a dark shade of blue, green, purple, or crimson. Its material was anyone’s guess. My guess was velvet. That’s what I bought in a shop in Harvard Square: a black velvet hat with a brim. I put it on at that memorably jaunty angle. I turned up the brim. Although I had no tiny pin of a dog, I added Mrs. Dodge’s strong smile and the bold expression of her dark eyes. The pin would come later. Hers had probably been gold or platinum. With unpaid bills sitting at home, I shouldn’t have
bought the hat. I would wait for the pin. Maybe one of Mrs. Dodge’s dogs had won hers. Maybe Rowdy or Kimi would win one for me.
Having illustrated the intensity of my wishful identification with Geraldine R. Dodge, I will move on to reveal the disenchanting discovery I made late that Monday afternoon while fiddling around on the World Wide Web. I was using what are called “search engines,” super-duper indexes that find things on the Web. Imagine that the Web is an old-fashioned library with thousands of books, newspapers, and periodicals. To find what you’re looking for, you don’t use a catalog that consists of file cards arranged alphabetically by author, title, and subject. Rather, you use a miraculous device that hunts through every word in every piece of printed matter in the library. Yes, you can search for authors, titles, and subjects by the trillion. You can also search for individual words and phrases, not just in titles, but anywhere in the text of anything in this astronomically gigantic library known as the World Wide Web.
Like many other miracles—birth, death—search engines are actually quite simple. One minute the baby’s inside, the next she’s out and breathing for herself. One minute the person is alive, the next she isn’t. Okay? One minute, you’re at your computer typing “Geraldine R. Dodge.” The next, you’re seeing a long list of Web sites—screens of information, Web pages—that have something to say about her. And all it takes to visit one of those sites is a click of the miraculous gadget known as the mouse.
As usual, I found dozens of bothersome references to grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and page after page about the Dodge Poetry Festival. The on-line catalog of The Outdoor Book Store was selling old auction catalogs from Sotheby’s. For fifteen dollars, I could have ordered
Magnificent Jewelry and Gold Coins
—
The Collection of the Late Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge.
The jewelry and coins had been auctioned on October 15, 1976. I wondered whether the collection had included the hatpin. The catalog I longed for, however, was
The Contents of Giralda
—
From the Collection of the Late Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge.
That auction had
lasted from October 7 through October 11, 1976, and had consisted of 1,804 lots. I’d have loved to own almost anything that had been hers. At twenty-three dollars, the catalog alone was beyond my means.
The American Kennel Club Library’s page popped up. The library, at AKC headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, has a tremendous collection of periodicals, newspapers, videos, and dog books, including special collections of famous dog people. Geraldine R. Dodge was one of them. So, I was pleased to see, was Alva Rosenberg, who was, according to everything I’d heard and read, the greatest dog-show judge of all time. In a world in which titles were almost exclusively canine, Alva Rosenberg was one of the few human beings to earn one; he was universally known as the Dean of American Judges. Rosenberg’s influence was still evident: He was the mentor of some of today’s best judges. Mrs. Dodge must have shared the esteem for him. She had repeatedly hired him to judge at Morris and Essex. I wanted nothing more than to don my black velvet hat, stand at ringside at Giralda, and watch the Dean, Alva Rosenberg, pick the best.
So it was that the Web pages about eugenics hit me hard. What I remembered about eugenics was a name, Francis Galton, and the vague sense that eugenics had been a naïve movement aimed at breeding better people. My memory of the name was correct. Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, invented the word
eugenics.
Galton and his successors had not, however, been concerned with the betterment of humankind in general; rather, Galton had wanted to improve “the inborn qualities of a race.” Hitler and his followers, of course, loved the idea of what was called “racial hygiene.” What I hadn’t known was that Nazi compulsory-sterilization laws were modeled on U.S. sterilization laws passed in twenty-five states. Unconstitutional? In 1916 and in 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that compulsory sterilization was legal. Between 1907 and the mid-1960s, more than 60,000 people in the United States were involuntarily yet legally sterilized. The idea behind the eugenics movement, especially so-called negative eugenics, was that bad genes
caused mental deficiency, which in turn caused poverty, crime, and other social ills. Good genes, in contrast, made people smart and rich. Another phrase from college: oh yes, Social Darwinism. Tooth and claw, the fittest fight to the top of the economic heap! The stock-market Crash and the Depression had cast some doubt on the validity of the theory. Did the Crash that overnight turned paper millionaires to paupers simultaneously turn good genes to bad? Eugenics prospered nonetheless. The Nazi sterilization legislation adopted in Germany in July of 1933 was explicitly called an “American Model” law. It was a small step from eugenics to genocide.
Throughout the twenties and thirties, American and German eugenicists had traveled back and forth between the two countries, shared ideas, and supported one another’s aims. Dog breeders had, of course, done the same. But who had belonged to the American Eugenics Society? John D. Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a Patron of the society. Percy A. Rockefeller. Helen Hartley Jenkins had been a member of the Second International Congress of Eugenics that met in New York in 1921. From 1923 to 1930, she served on the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society. In 1929, she chaired its Finance Committee. Helen Hartley Jenkins was Marcellus Hartley Dodge’s aunt.
Who else had been a member of the Eugenics Society of America? Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge. As deeply as anyone on earth, she’d been devoted to breeding better dogs. The step from eugenics to genocide? Had it been an equally small step from better dogs to better people?
O
NE OF THE BOOKS
I’d read about the Rockefeller family claimed that the death of M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., had impelled his heartbroken mother to seek solace in dogs. Nonsense! Mrs. Dodge was breeding and showing her Giralda Farms German shepherd dogs by 1923, seven years before the accident that killed her only child. She started with imports and continued to import German and Austrian breeding stock, including two famous bitches, Arna aus der Ehrenzelle, the 1926 Siegerin of Germany, and Pia von Haus Schutting, the Siegerin of Austria.
Siegerin:
the top female from the working class at the Sieger Show, which was and is the show of shows for the breed.
The
Sieger show is the one in Germany, but other countries may hold their own Sieger shows, too. In brief, Mrs. Dodge bought the top GSD females from Germany and Austria. Even today, some breeders fail to understand the need to start with the best females as well as the best males. In that respect, Mrs. Dodge was ahead of her time. I suppose I have to admit that she understood the eugenics of dog breeding.
For Morris and Essex, she imported people as well as dogs. Forstmeister Marquandt, who judged dachshunds in 1937, and Gustav Alisch, who judged the breed a year later, were both from Germany. But she’d been mad for dozens of breeds! One of her Dobermans, Ch. Ferry v. Rauhfelsen of
Giralda, won Westminster in 1939. Doberman. Okay. But Ch. Nancolleth Markable, a pointer also owned by Giralda Farms, won Westminster in 1932. Mrs. Dodge was the president of the English Cocker Spaniel Club of America. It was under her direction that the club conducted the research on cocker pedigrees that made it possible to separate American cocker lines from those of purely English descent. Oh, my. Purity. Racial purity. But her Morris and Essex judges came from countries other than Germany. Johnny Aarflot, who judged elkhounds in 1935, was from Norway. Some of her judges were from England, where the dog-show game started: William McDerment, Scotties, 1935, and Lady Kitty Ritson, shepherds and elkhounds, 1933.
In an era when international travel was slow and expensive, Geraldine R. Dodge had time and money. Now, because of the Internet, I had friends all over the world who shared my love of the Alaskan malamute. Before exchanging e-mail with a malamute fancier in a foreign country, did I send a preliminary questionnaire about the nation’s politics and human-rights policies? Of course not. Mrs. Dodge couldn’t be expected to have done the equivalent. As to her membership in a eugenics organization, I reminded myself of what I’d learned on the Web: Appalling though the thought was, eugenics had not been some fringe movement supported by a little coven of lunatics; rather, in the United States and in many other countries, it had been mainstream policy. My suspicions turned to Helen Hartley Jenkins, chair of the Finance Committee of the American Eugenics Society, Mrs. Dodge’s aunt by marriage. Here we have this racist, eugenicist Jenkins woman in charge of raising money for her evil cause. To whom does she turn? To her nephew’s rich wife, to the eccentric heiress too wrapped up in dogs to ask astute questions before writing a check.
What proved to be my final meeting with Mr. Motherway was set for the next morning, Tuesday. The last time we’d talked, I’d been unable to keep him focused on Morris and Essex or on Mrs. Dodge. I hadn’t really tried. He’d buried his wife a few days earlier; he was entitled to talk about anything he pleased. I resolved that this time I’d take charge of the
interview by focusing my questions and, with luck, his replies, on the presence of German judges at Morris and Essex and of German dogs at Giralda Farms. In the thirties, the
New York Times
had made a big deal of Mrs. Dodge’s fancy foreign judges and fancy foreign dogs. If the
New York Times
then, why not Holly Winter now?
So Tuesday morning found me once again seated in an upholstered chair in B. Robert Motherway’s study. When Jocelyn had answered the door, the black shepherd, Wagner, had been nowhere in sight. Neither she nor I had mentioned my offer to help with the dog’s unfortunate habit of growling at her. The dog’s absence had made me hope that Jocelyn had taken some initiative in the matter. Maybe she’d persuaded her father-in-law to keep the dog away from her. I doubted it. She had a touchingly downtrodden air. When she was alone with her father-in-law, he probably growled at her, too.
He didn’t growl at me. He didn’t exactly leap to obey my every command, either. I asked about Gustav Alisch and about a man named Sickinger who’d come from Germany to judge shepherds at Morris and Essex in 1935.
“Sickinger,” Mr. Motherway repeated. “Rings a bell. I knew quite a few German breeders back then. I used to escort groups of students. In the summer, you know.” Indeed, I did. He was repeating himself. I didn’t say so. “Expose them to the Continent and so forth,” he went on. “Museums, cities, the language. I’d take advantage of the opportunity to meet the breeders I’d corresponded with, take in a show or two when I could fit it in.” And then, damn it, he was off on an almost interminable tangent about the past and present differences between the judging and breeding of shepherds in the United States and in Germany. I’ll spare you the details, which, in the case of the German system, are very complicated. Among other things, the German championship system requires working titles, endurance testing, and hip and elbow X rays to evaluate soundness. It also involves the assessment of what shepherd people call “progeny groups,” that is, offspring. In contrast, to register a litter of GSD puppies with the American Kennel Club, you need do nothing but breed two AKC-registered GSD parents. Period.
“Incomparably superior,” pronounced Mr. Motherway, referring to the German system.
I nodded. Who could disagree? When it came to breeding dogs, most European countries practiced what I now thought of as canine eugenics. With good results, too. I was in no position to object; I wholeheartedly believed in that kind of planned reproduction. For dogs. But for people? Voluntary planning? Yes. Involuntary? Certainly not! There was, however, a point on which I wanted to challenge Mr. Motherway, one I’d ordinarily have raised. For decades, the man had served as an American Kennel Club judge. In that role, hadn’t he felt like a hypocrite? I held myself back.
“Americans,” Mr. Motherway continued, “are finally starting to add German dogs to their breeding programs. Long overdue. I’ve done it myself for years. Mrs. Dodge did, of course. From the beginning.”
And during the Nazi era?
I longed to ask.
Just what did Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge do and not do? Who were her friends in Germany in those days?
I do not raise sensitive topics with the recently bereaved. Mr. Motherway had been born in Germany to German parents. He’d had a sister who’d died in Germany, a sister he never spoke of. For all I knew, she’d perished in the Holocaust, a victim of Nazi eugenics. For all I knew, Geraldine R. Dodge had been oblivious to the rise of German fascism. Her tremendous wealth had bought a protected life. She had been deeply absorbed in her dogs, her horses, her art collection, her peaceful passions. I struggled to rationalize her membership in the American Eugenics Society, a group with strong ties to the German eugenics movement that culminated in the death camps. All her life, Mrs. Dodge had taken in stray animals. In 1938, she’d founded St. Hubert’s Giralda, which to this day carries on her mission of sheltering homeless dogs and cats. She’d taken animals from that shelter into Giralda itself. The Lady of Giralda had been kindness personified. It was simply impossible that she’d been anything remotely like a Nazi sympathizer. But from the edge of consciousness, something gnawed at me, some jarring bit of information. I felt plagued by the sense that Mr. Motherway
could not only supply the information, but clarify and explain it.