Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

At first, I thought the envelope was empty. It wasn’t. It contained a long, narrow strip of paper with a blob of dry glue on one end. The glue, I soon realized, had originally fastened the strip of paper to a bottle of pills. An anonymous someone, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, had sent me a pharmaceutical company’s informational material about Soloxine, a drug commonly prescribed to treat hypothyroidism in dogs. Although I already knew what Soloxine was, I read the little brochure, mainly because I had no idea what else to do with it. Soloxine—levothyroxine sodium tablets—was a trademark of Daniels Pharmaceuticals, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida. I sure could have used an all-expenses-paid week under a palm tree, but the uninformative envelope was now empty. A picture of the structural formula of the drug told me nothing. As I knew, Soloxine was indicated for thyroid-replacement therapy in dogs. Primary hypothyroidism, the common kind, was caused by atrophy of the thyroid gland. Hypothyroidism sometimes appeared in young large-breed dogs, but was more typically found in middle-aged and older dogs of all sizes. I’d read the characteristic signs of hypothyroidism dozens of times in articles in dog magazines. About half of the articles said that the condition was overdiagnosed; the other half claimed it was underdiagnosed. The classic picture was of an overweight, lethargic dog with a poor coat and a sad expression. The brochure didn’t mention some of the relatively subtle behavioral signs of hypothyroidism. Some hypothyroid dogs hated to be brushed. Aggressive dogs sometimes sweetened up once hypothyroidism was diagnosed and treated. The pharmaceutical company dutifully listed contraindications, precautions, and adverse reactions, and went on to discuss dosage. The main point was to monitor thyroid levels in the blood and adjust the dosage accordingly. The big risk was thyrotoxicosis, in other words, thyroid poisoning, hyperthyroidism caused by an overdose.

  Fine. But why me? I wasn’t overweight or lethargic, and neither were my dogs. My hair wasn’t styled like Rita’s, but there was nothing pathological about it, and Rowdy and Kimi had beautiful coats. Tracker? Hypothyroidism is common in dogs, both purebreds and mixes, but the characteristic thyroid problem of cats is exactly the opposite, hyperthyroidism. Tracker was not hyperthyroid. If she had been, so what? She was a spayed pet. Furthermore, I’d adopted her recently. Most people didn’t even know I owned a cat. And who cared about my hormones? Steve, of course, but if he’d thought there was something wrong with my libido, he wouldn’t have responded by mailing me a brochure about Soloxine. Besides, I was a dog writer and a dog person. The cryptic message of the Soloxine leaflet simply had to have something to do with dogs.

  Yes, but what? A possibility came to mind. It concerned Rowdy’s and Kimi’s successes in the show ring. As I knew, or in some cases merely suspected, there were exhibitors who administered small doses of thyroid medication in an effort to improve the dogs’ coats. Like many other hairy breeds, Alaskan malamutes “blow coat,” as it’s said, about twice a year; all of a sudden, they shed massive amounts of undercoat and guard hair. Last month’s perfect show dog becomes today’s perfect fright. Furthermore, some dogs simply have showier coats than others, and an alarming number of malamute judges act as if they’re hired to adjudicate at fluffiness contests. Consequently, a dog with a pretty coat and not much else sometimes takes the ribbons and the points from competitors with superior structure and movement. I had never tampered with Kimi’s female hormones to prevent the unhappy effects of her heat cycles on her coat. Not for a million ribbons would I have dosed a dog with any of the toxic coat enhancers thrust down the throats of show dogs: not thyroid medication, not steroids, not human birth-control pills, not arsenic. Arsenic? An old favorite. My dogs’ water gets run through a Brita filter. Meanwhile, I drink what comes straight out of the faucet. If I wouldn’t jeopardize my dogs’ health by giving them tap water, for heaven’s sake, I wasn’t about to fool around with thyroid medication. One of these shows, Kimi would finish her championship, but she was no big threat. Rowdy, however, was serious competition. What’s more, genetic good fortune combined with robust health, excellent veterinary care, an ideal diet, and careful grooming had given him an outstanding stand-off coat. Was a jealous competitor attributing Rowdy’s wins to Soloxine? If so, I couldn’t imagine who.

  A second, remote possibility concerned an agreement I’d made to let Rowdy’s breeder use him at stud. Although the data aren’t absolutely clear, hypothyroidism seems to be especially common in Northern-breed dogs. To complicate matters, there’s disagreement about what should be considered normal thyroid levels in malamutes and their Arctic kin. One point of almost universal agreement, however, is that no ethical person knowingly uses a hypothyroid dog in breeding. Some people do it, of course. Rowdy’s breeder was not among those people. Neither was I! Rowdy and his proposed mate had both been screened. But had the condition ever occurred in Rowdy’s lines? Yes. Now and then, it cropped up in every malamute line I’d ever heard of, just as it did in other breeds and in random-bred dogs. Even so, maybe someone without the guts to ask direct questions was suggesting that Rowdy should not be bred.

  Once again, I upended the envelope and shook it. Nothing fell out. I tore it fully open. It was completely empty. Nothing linked that leaflet to the death of Christina Motherway.

  Chapter Seven

  I HAD SEEN DOZENS of photos of Geraldine R. Dodge. Three were my favorites. The first showed her with Rin Tin Tin. She and the famous dog faced each other. Their eyes met. Both wore relaxed smiles. He was sitting up, fore-paws in the air. She was kneeling. Her right hand was raised. Her index finger was pointing. At first glance, the gesture suggested that Mrs. Dodge had just told the shepherd to sit up and was now signaling him to keep on performing the trick. If you followed the direction of her finger, however, it became apparent that my soul mate, my kindred spirit, America’s First Lady of Dogs, was pointing Upward with a capital U. What’s more, close, emphatic study revealed that Mrs. Dodge was not kneeling in the ordinary, secular sense. Rather, with religious fervor akin to my own, she was genuflecting before God and Rin Tin Tin.

  The second of my favorites must have been taken when Mrs. Dodge was very old. She sat outdoors. Tall trees and low shrubs rose in the background. To the right of her chair stood two of her beloved shepherds. Two more sat on her left, and, beyond them, another rested on the lawn. What drew me into the picture wasn’t just the obvious health and happiness of the beautiful and well-loved dogs. All five dogs were smiling, I admit. So was Mrs. Dodge. But what reached out and seized me were those six startlingly identical pairs of eyes. Mrs. Dodge had seen the world through the eyes of her joyful dogs. They, in turn, gazed with delight at the perfect world she had created for them. When Mrs. Dodge was in her early eighties, her court-appointed guardians applied for legal permission to reduce the amount of money allotted to feed her dogs. Why the guardians? She had been declared mentally incompetent. Her husband had died the previous December. Although she paid $90,000 a year in taxes on her Fifth Avenue mansion, the house was never used and had been boarded up. In terms of dog ownership, she had hit what must have been the low point of her adult life: She shared the five hundred acres of Giralda with a mere forty-nine dogs. Her guardians applied to have the dogs’ annual food allotment drastically reduced from $50,000 to $14,000. On June 24, 1964, in Newark, New Jersey, Superior Court, Judge Ward J. Herbert ruled against the guardians. Mrs. Dodge’s dogs, he decreed, were entitled “to live in the style to which she had allowed them to grow accustomed.” That’s what the New York Times said. Gee, no wonder her shepherds had happy eyes. I said that.

  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?

  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, 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 internatio
nal 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.