In 1919, the Dodge name was so deeply embedded in Detroit’s daily geography that residents rarely registered it as a family name at all. Dodge Brothers Motor Car Company ranked second in American automobile sales, trailing only Ford. The plant at Hamtramck covered 24 acres and employed roughly 17,000 men and women. Net sales were moving toward $121 million on production of 121,039 vehicles.
The Dodge car was technically superior to its principal rival on every axis an engineer could measure, priced at $785 against the Model T’s $490. John Dodge had phrased the proposition with characteristic bluntness: “Someday, people who own a Ford are going to want an automobile. ”
At the head of the enterprise sat the two brothers who had built it. John Francis Dodge, born in Niles, Michigan, in 1864, was the sales-minded manager, red-haired and stocky, with a temper noted in print as often as his balance sheet.
Horace Elgin Dodge, born in the same small town in 1868, was the mechanical mind, an inventor who loved music and let his brother do the public performance of being a Dodge. Inseparable from childhood, they had opened their Detroit machine shop in 1900 with the proceeds of a bicycle business. For nineteen years, they made every serious business decision jointly. That July, the brothers sold their final connection to Ford Motor Company.
Henry Ford, attempting to starve the Dodges of capital they had been using to build their competitor, had provoked a lawsuit that produced one of the most consequential decisions in American corporate law. Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, decided by the Michigan Supreme Court on February 7, 1919, held that Ford was legally required to pay dividends rather than reinvest profits in plant expansion. Justice Russell C.
Ostrander’s opinion contained the sentence taught in business and law schools for a century: a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. Ford was ordered to distribute a $19. 3 million dividend. To end the matter permanently, he raised $75 million from a banking syndicate and bought out every minority shareholder, paying the Dodge brothers $25 million for 2,000 shares acquired in 1903 for approximately $10,000.
John and Horace Dodge were now among the wealthiest men in the United States. They were also still unacceptable to Detroit’s established society. Grosse Pointe Country Club had rejected Horace’s membership application; the Detroit Club had done the same. John responded by building a mansion directly across from one of the clubs that had snubbed him, including a twelve-car garage.
Both men drank heavily, with months of relentless work interrupted by nights of spectacular public disorder. A Detroit attorney had been beaten with his own cane by John in 1911. A bartender had been forced to dance atop a bar at revolver point after a sales convention. The publisher of the Detroit Times had been beaten at his own front door.
The fortune, growing annually by tens of millions, had produced a precise combination of economic indispensability and social ostracism. In January 1920, both brothers traveled to New York for the National Automobile Show at the Ritz-Carlton. They hosted a dinner for 200 salesmen. The next morning, both were sick.
The physician called it grippe, the polite term for what had killed more than 500,000 Americans in 1918 and 1919. John Francis Dodge died on January 14, 1920, in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton. He was 55. The official cause was pneumonia compounded by influenza.
Horace, also sick, was in the room next door and too weak to attend his brother’s funeral. John’s body was returned to Detroit by train. Sixteen factory workers served as pallbearers. Burial followed at Woodlawn Cemetery in an Egyptian Revival mausoleum the brothers had commissioned, guarded by four papyrus-topped columns and flanked by two sphinx statues.
Horace did not recover. He traveled to Palm Beach to convalesce, where he wrote a check for $50,000 to establish an isolation hospital for contagious diseases. He had written, in the weeks after John’s death, a statement preserved in the Meadow Brook Hall archives: “The passing of my dear brother John is to me personally a loss so great that I hesitate to look forward to the years without his companionship, our lives having been inseparable since our childhood. ”
His drinking accelerated.
He rarely visited the factory. Horace Elgin Dodge died in Palm Beach on December 10, 1920, at 52, eleven months and four days after his brother. The death certificate read cirrhosis of the liver. Most contemporary reporters chose to attribute his death to influenza, or as they wrote it, to sadness.
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which Horace had underwritten with at least $100,000, played a dirge at his funeral. His body was interred next to John’s. Two sphinx statues now guarded both brothers. What had existed in January 1920 was an industrial organization built entirely around the joint judgment of two brothers who had worked side by side since childhood.
What existed on December 11, 1920, was the same organization minus both brothers, with the combined inheritance sitting in the hands of their two widows. Matilda Dodge, a 37-year-old Presbyterian former secretary, and Anna Dodge, a 54-year-old former piano teacher from Dundee, Scotland, were immediately two of the wealthiest women in the United States. Neither had built the company. Neither was expected to understand how to run it.
Frederick Haynes, a longtime employee, was installed as president. Production continued, but the rankings began to slip as the brothers’ particular combination of mechanical judgment and sales instinct proved not to be replicable. Within five years, the widows sold the entire enterprise to the investment banking firm Dillon, Read & Co. for $146 million in cash, the largest cash transaction in American history to that date.
Dillon, Read retained voting control and issued bonds. Within two years, Dodge had fallen to thirteenth place in American sales, and Dillon, Read was looking for a buyer. In 1928, Walter Chrysler acquired Dodge Brothers in a stock transfer valued at $170 million, wanting the factory network and dealership system to compete against Ford and Chevrolet. Within a year, Dodge had climbed back to seventh place.
What the two widows did with the $146 million was, in structural terms, identical. Both built palaces. Both did so with guidance from figures who understood that the fortune could be converted through architecture and art collecting from commercial vulgarity into civic prestige. Matilda married Alfred G.
Wilson in 1925 and built Meadow Brook Hall on a 1,400-acre estate near Rochester, Michigan, an 88,000-square-foot Tudor Revival mansion with 110 rooms. The housewarming in November 1929 drew 850 guests. Anna married Hugh Dillman in 1926 and, under the guidance of art dealer Lord Joseph Duveen, demolished her first Rose Terrace and replaced it with a 42,000-square-foot Trumbauer-designed palace completed in 1935 at a cost of $9 million. Duveen sold Anna between $2 million and $3 million of European furniture and art and advised her to convert her investments to government bonds in the late 1920s, allowing her to sidestep the 1929 crash intact.
The next generation consumed itself. John Duval Dodge, the disinherited son who had been reduced to $150 a month from a $50 million estate for marrying a Catholic, litigated against his father’s will for two decades before dying at a Detroit police station in 1942 after a fall, under circumstances never formally investigated. Daniel George Dodge, John and Matilda’s only son and the heir expected to carry the name forward, married a Canadian telephone operator against his mother’s wishes. Thirteen days into the honeymoon, he was experimenting with dynamite at the family lodge on Manitoulin Island when an explosion fractured his skull.
Rushed across stormy waters by speedboat, he went over the side and drowned. His widow received $1. 25 million in settlement. Matilda’s only son was entombed at Woodlawn next to the uncle and father who had preceded him.
Delphine Ione Dodge, Horace’s daughter, died in 1943 at 43, the physical ravages of acute alcoholism. Her brother, Horace Elgin Dodge Jr. , married five times, drove his Palm Beach house into foreclosure, borrowed $1. 5 million from his mother, and died in 1963 with claims of $12.
3 million against his estate and actual assets of $718,000. His estate was summarized as consisting of $2 million, a photograph of a nude, and nine cars. His fifth wife, a former showgirl who had reinvented herself as Greg Sherwood, extracted roughly $20 million from the Dodge family across various settlements, pleaded guilty in 1979 to three counts of grand larceny for looting her own son’s trust fund, and died in 2011. Her obituary ran under the headline: “From riches to rags.
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Anna Dodge died on June 2, 1970, at 103, having outlived her husband by fifty years, her daughter by twenty-seven, and her son by seven. Rose Terrace was demolished in 1976. The city of Detroit received $2 million for a memorial to her late husband and son, an abstract stainless steel fountain that opened at Hart Plaza in 1978. Matilda Dodge Wilson had died three years earlier, in 1967.
In 1957, she had donated Meadow Brook Hall and 1,500 acres to Michigan State University to establish a branch campus that became Oakland University, where the estate operates today as a museum and national historic landmark. No member of the Dodge family had any operational role in the company bearing their name after 1925. The Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck was demolished and replaced by a General Motors facility that was itself scheduled for closure. The name on American automobiles passed through Chrysler, Daimler, Cerberus, Fiat, and Stellantis.
The brothers were right about the mausoleum. They were simply wrong about how much of the family would end up underneath it, and how quickly.