Evil Breeding

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?
     

Chapter Eight
     
    ONE 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, Ama 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