Free Evil Breeding by Susan Conant Page B

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 naive 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