Margaret Dodge Garrett, 1917-1995

By Andrew I. Killgore

Margaret Dodge Garrett, who died at her Washington, DC home on March 20, was a member of the distinguished and generous Dodge family so indelibly associated with the American University of Beirut. Originally established in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College, AUB is regarded correctly as America's greatest cultural legacy in the Middle East.

Margaret Dodge was born in Beirut, where she lived until she went to the United States to study at Vassar College. Six years after she was born, her father, Dr. Bayard Dodge, became president of AUB, a position he held from 1923 to 1948. That 25-year-period generally is considered the university's golden age, as attested by the quality of its graduates.

At the founding sessions of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, more delegates had studied at AUB than at any other university in the world. The optimism and practical idealism of the Dodges and like-minded Americans who had built the university through the decades from its founding had imbued many of AUB's graduates with the same work ethic, imagination and idealistic force. This spirit certainly influenced the creation and direction of the United Nations which, in spite of its many failures, still represents the hope of the world for breaking the cycles of wars, social disintegration and poverty that have been the antithesis of the orderly progress and civilization represented by AUB.

Starting with the founding of Israel in 1948, however, other forces were unleashed in the Middle East to negate much of what AUB stood for. As the Arabs sought to apply in their European-dominated homelands the liberal political principles they had studied at AUB and other Western institutions, Israel's American supporters began working assiduously to shift American economic and educational beneficence in the Levant away from Lebanon and toward Israel. Identifying AUB as the locus of U.S. influence in the area, they began in the 1950s and 1960s to slander the institution as "Terrorism U," while also negatively stereotyping AUB's Christian missionary founders, their Arabist educator-successors and the Arabs among whom they worked.

That unworthy campaign has had at least temporary success. AUB has been buffeted successively by Arab nationalist and Islamist opposition in the Middle East, and Zionist-inspired opposition at home in the United States. The final outcome remains in the balance. If AUB no longer is America's unrivaled, premier educational showcase, it remains at least a stepping-stone, and for many students of modest means the only possible entrée, to a U.S. education.

Since her death, friends and family have tried to capture in words the spirit of Margaret Dodge Garrett, known to them as Margie, with a hard "g" as in McGee. Former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Lucius Battle came close in a touching eulogy at her memorial service.

He had known her many years ago in Paris where she and her husband, Johnson Garrett, from a wealthy Baltimore family, lived for nearly 20 years. While Johnson Garrett worked as an assistant secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Margie directed multinational American, British and French projects focusing, in the tradition of her own family, on international student exchanges and on assistance to students who needed it. She was decorated for her activities by the governments of both the United States and France.

In describing her many activities in this field, the Washington Post had called Mrs. Garrett a "volunteer." Her sister Grace Dodge Guthrie, who has written a history of AUB entitled Legacy to Lebanon, described her as a "philanthropist." Ambassador Battle chose the word "participant." Indeed, she was all of these things, and more.

The "Protestant Ethic"

She was in fact a product and exemplar of the "Protestant ethic." Fired in the early 19th century by Christian idealism and tempered over the decades by American pragmatism and optimism, it produced educational systems and medical institutions that have functioned effectively throughout the 20th century from the Middle East to China and Latin America.

It has been fashionable in recent decades to put down the individuals and families associated with these remarkable accomplishments as anachronistic "WASPs." But at their best these American originals wrote not only some of the finest chapters in U.S. history, but also in the story of America's relations with the world at large.

Margie's mother was a member of the Bliss family, which had arrived in the Middle East 60 years before her birth and actually started the university. Margie's grandfather, Daniel Bliss, was the institution's first president. He had brought creativity and selfless dedication rather than money to the enterprise that eventually provided Middle Easterners not only a window on America, but also living examples of the American "volunteers," "philanthropists" and "participants" who became role models for many of the leaders of an awakening and resurgent Middle East.

For example, I first knew David Dodge, Margie's brother, in the mid-1950s in Beirut, where he worked as a petroleum company executive and, in a voluntary capacity, served AUB and other Middle East-oriented U.S. institutions in a variety of roles. He and his wife, Doris, lived very modestly in a house close to the AUB campus where he had grown up. Only later did I learn from others that even then they were supporting several AUB students out of their own private resources, a practice they continued for many years. They still were living in that house 20 years later when, in the mid-1970s, David was kidnapped and held for a year by Iran-backed Lebanese terrorists. But, characteristically, he has never written or spoken publicly about his experiences as one of the very first "American hostages."

So Margie Dodge Garrett might be called an archetype of "the last WASP," in the same positive sense in which philosopher/poet George Santayana described "the last Puritan." This gives rise to a question. When members of Margie's generation no longer are around to "participate," who will replace them in the Middle East? The answer, hopefully, lies in the lives of the Middle Eastern graduates of the venerable educational institutions with which the Blisses, the Dodges, and all of their distinguished colleagues have been so intimately associated.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.