One Lodge, Six Charters / Geba Lodge No. 954
A Navy physician in World War I and an affiliated founding member of Geba Lodge, Dudley D. Schoenfeld brought psychiatry into the hospital, the criminal investigation and the public-health debate.
Few careers connect military medicine, psychiatry and Queens Freemasonry as closely as that of Brother Dudley D. Schoenfeld. A U.S. Navy physician in World War I, an early practitioner of forensic psychiatry and a founding member of Geba Lodge No. 954, he worked in fields that were changing rapidly around him.
He was born in New York City on March 24, 1893, to Mayer Schoenfeld and Dora Broody, and was raised in the city’s Jewish community. He went on to a career in medicine and mental health that would bring his name into newspapers from Miami to San Francisco. Along the way, he became a Master Mason and helped establish a new lodge in Queens.
From Paul Revere Lodge to Queens
According to the lodge research underlying this article, Schoenfeld entered Freemasonry through Paul Revere Lodge, where he was raised a Master Mason. The date of his raising has not yet been located.
He later affiliated with Geba Lodge as one of the twenty-one affiliated members who helped establish it. That distinction matters: he arrived as an existing Mason rather than receiving his degrees in the new lodge.
His Masonic affiliation belongs alongside his professional service as part of his biography. It should not, however, be treated as proof that particular medical theories or investigative methods arose from his lodge membership.
Navy Service and the Birth of a Calling
Schoenfeld earned his medical degree from University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1917, the same year the United States entered the war. His training took him to the U.S. Naval Hospital at Chelsea, Massachusetts, and through internships at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston City Hospital and Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.
As a Navy physician during World War I, he encountered the psychological as well as the physical consequences of military service. His later obituary traced his interest in psychiatry to that experience.
After the war he returned to New York and entered civilian practice, beginning a career that would eventually bring him to the position of chief psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital. His professional papers’ archival finding aid records his medical training, hospital work and subsequent involvement in child guidance and public health.
Helping Establish Geba Lodge No. 954
Geba Lodge No. 954 began while the world was still at war. The Grand Lodge granted its dispensation on October 8, 1918, and issued its warrant on May 7, 1919. The lodge was formally instituted on June 10, 1919, with Samuel A. Lando as its first Master.
Proposed by Mizpah Lodge No. 738, Geba first met in rented rooms in Jackson Heights before moving into Mizpah’s temple on Whitney Avenue in Elmhurst.
Schoenfeld was one of the twenty-one affiliated members who helped establish the new lodge, bringing his existing membership in the Craft into its founding group. Those early members supplied the experience, attendance and practical support a lodge needed before its traditions could become established.
Geba’s later history became part of the lineage of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586. Schoenfeld’s place in that founding group connects his individual story to a continuing history of Queens Freemasonry.
Mount Sinai and the New Science of the Mind
In the 1920s psychoanalysis was still regarded with suspicion by much of American medicine. Schoenfeld was among the New York physicians who brought it into hospital practice. Historical accounts place him alongside Clarence Oberndorf and Sandor Lorand among the analytic pioneers associated with Mount Sinai.
His clinical work extended beyond private practice. He served as a child psychiatrist with the Jewish Board of Guardians and as a consulting psychiatrist to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. He taught at Mount Sinai’s nursing school and at the New School for Social Research.
At Mount Sinai he headed a mental hygiene clinic that his obituaries described as the first of its kind in the city. That historical claim should be read in the context of those accounts rather than as a comparison independently established here.
He was also a public teacher. In January 1930 the Mount Vernon Daily Argus announced his lecture on the problems of adolescence before a local congregation, describing him as an authority in the field. A question period and a reception by the Sisterhood would follow. Such talks brought psychiatric ideas to families rather than confining them to professional audiences.
At the Meeting Point of Psychiatry and Criminal Law
Schoenfeld’s work also carried him into the courtroom.
In January 1922 he appeared as an alienist—the period’s term for a psychiatric expert—for the defense in the trial of Luther Boddy, a young Harlem man accused of killing two New York City detectives. The closely followed case placed the young physician at the intersection of medicine and criminal responsibility.
By 1934 he was serving as secretary of a joint commission of the New York State Bar Association and the State Medical Society concerned with revising the criminal laws.
His work addressed questions that could not be settled by a diagnosis alone:
- How should psychiatric findings inform legal judgments about responsibility?
- What could behavior and language reveal about a person’s mental condition?
- Where did medical interpretations differ from the legal standards governing a trial?
His later public prominence grew from an attempt to apply psychiatric interpretation to documents in a criminal investigation.
Reading the Lindbergh Ransom Notes
Schoenfeld became nationally known through his involvement in the investigation of the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. from the family home in Hopewell, New Jersey, on March 1, 1932.
According to the period newspaper accounts cited below, his involvement began in April 1932, before the child’s body had been found. Leigh Matteson, science editor of the International News Service, urged him to examine the case.
Reading the first ransom note, Schoenfeld and Matteson concluded that the kidnapper had not intended to keep a living child. They tried to reach Colonel Henry Breckinridge, the Lindbergh family’s attorney, and Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf of the New Jersey State Police to urge a search near the house. The child’s body was found in May, a few miles from the Lindbergh home.
Through Breckinridge, whom newspapers described as his friend, Schoenfeld obtained an opportunity to study the ransom letters closely. He worked with Captain John Oliver and Lieutenant James Finn of the New York Police Department.
On November 10, 1932, he set down his conclusions in a written report addressed to those officers.
The Portrait in the Report
As reproduced in the newspapers in 1935, Schoenfeld’s report proposed that the writer:
- Was German, judging from phrasing, word order and the use of “Herr.”
- Was between thirty and forty years old, and nearer forty.
- Lived in the Bronx.
- Worked at an occupation requiring mechanical aptitude.
- Had at some time been confined in an institution.
- Acted alone and was not a professional criminal.
- Would become less careful as publicity faded.
These were investigative interpretations, not independently established facts about an identified suspect at the time they were written.
The Details Behind the Interpretation
Schoenfeld paid close attention to the letters’ wording and alterations.
He observed that the increase in the ransom was explained almost apologetically. He interpreted a carefully drawn box as suggesting a feel for depth and dimension.
He believed that “Gay Head,” written in one letter, showed signs of having first been written as “Gun Hill,” the name of a road near the cemetery where the ransom was paid.
He also reported that, in a note promising to reveal the child’s whereabouts, the writer appeared to have begun with “the boy is on the road” before altering the final word to “boad.”
He attached particular importance to the use of “Herr” when addressing officials. At a time when some investigators considered a Scandinavian suspect, Schoenfeld argued for a German writer.
The value and limitations of those deductions must be considered separately. They show how he approached the documents; they do not establish that every inference was reliable or that document analysis alone solved the crime.
From the Bronx to Flemington
In September 1934 police traced a ransom gold certificate to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German-born carpenter living in the Bronx.
Hauptmann was in his mid-thirties, had served a prison sentence in Germany and worked with his hands. Contemporary commentators noted the resemblance between those circumstances and parts of Schoenfeld’s earlier report.
Walter Winchell reminded readers that Schoenfeld had drawn attention to the altered “boad” in 1932 and that the International News Service had published his principal conclusions that year.
After the arrest, Schoenfeld told reporters that Hauptmann’s manner under questioning seemed consistent with the tone he had identified in the letters.
During the trial at Flemington in January and February 1935, Schoenfeld followed the proceedings and commented on the difference between medical and legal concepts of insanity. He also discussed details in the handwriting. After the trial, he expressed a wish to examine the condemned man for scientific purposes.
Columnists including Heywood Broun and broadcaster Edwin C. Hill praised his deductions. When Winchell printed extracts from the report in January 1935, he thanked Schoenfeld and Matteson for their assistance.
That reception forms part of the history of the case. Praise in contemporary columns should not be confused with a modern scientific validation of the method.
The Crime and the Criminal
In 1936 Schoenfeld published The Crime and the Criminal: A Psychiatric Study of the Lindbergh Case, issued in New York by Covici-Friede.
The book presented:
- His psychological interpretation of the ransom notes.
- His reasoning for a single-perpetrator theory.
- His broader views on psychiatry’s contribution to criminal investigation.
Reviewers treated the work as an important contribution to discussion of the case. A Buffalo News review reported that police had used his analysis in planning their investigation.
The book is part of the early history of attempts to infer an offender’s characteristics from the available evidence—a practice later associated with criminal profiling. Its historical significance does not require treating all its conclusions as settled.
His reputation brought further requests for comment. In January 1937, after the kidnapping and death of ten-year-old Charles Mattson in Washington State, the International News Service again sought his opinion. He saw similarities to the Lindbergh case and favored a lone-offender explanation.
Decades later, Winchell continued to refer to his book when discussing subsequent accounts of the Lindbergh investigation.
The Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana
Another part of Schoenfeld’s career depended less on interpreting a few extraordinary documents than on gathering observations systematically.
He served on the New York Academy of Medicine subcommittee reviewing the scientific literature on marihuana. In January 1939 Mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed the group as the Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana.
The committee’s [published introduction](La Guardia Committee Report on Marijuana - Introduction
La Guardia Committee Report on Marijuana - Introduction
records Schoenfeld’s responsibilities. He actively directed the sociological study and trained six police officers to work as social investigators.
Their task was to observe how the drug was obtained and used, the social circumstances surrounding its use and its possible relationship to criminal or antisocial conduct.
Schoenfeld prepared the sociological report. The findings appeared in 1944 as The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York, commonly called the La Guardia Report.
The study challenged sensational claims about marihuana and became a significant document in American drug-policy history. Its conclusions belonged to a particular study and period; the report should not be treated as a substitute for current medical evidence.
A Collaboration With David Wechsler
The same report identifies Dr. David Wechsler as director of the psychological part of the clinical study. It also credits him with revising the psychological reports.
Their collaboration is documented. A further lodge connection remains provisional: Geba’s early membership record names a David Wechsler, but his identification with the psychologist still requires confirmation.
That distinction is explored in the companion article, David Wechsler of Geba Lodge No. 954: The Man Behind the Wechsler Intelligence Scales. The shared scientific work should not be used as proof of shared lodge membership.
A Voice in Wartime and in Letters
When the United States entered the Second World War, Schoenfeld also addressed the psychology of public communication.
In interviews published early in 1942, he objected to language that he believed suggested defeat or hardship. He questioned the term “rationing” for the sugar program and criticized military announcements using words such as “admitted” and “acknowledged.”
Not everyone agreed. A New Jersey editorial answered that Americans preferred plain truth to clever phrasing. The exchange showed both his interest in the effect of language and the resistance his proposals could encounter.
His interests extended to literature. In April 1949 the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences presented him at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in lectures on the influence of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis on contemporary writing.
Newspaper interest in his earlier forensic work continued as well. As late as 1953, accounts were still retelling his interpretation of the Lindbergh ransom notes.
Home, Family and Final Years
Schoenfeld’s wife, Helen, was active in public life. In 1939 she was one of three chairwomen of the arrangements committee for the New York City League of Women Voters convention at the Hotel Commodore.
In 1941 the couple leased a sixteen-acre estate in Port Chester, Westchester County, with several houses and a swimming pool. They later lived at 320 Central Park West.
Schoenfeld died at Mount Sinai Hospital on December 26, 1971, at seventy-eight. His New York Times obituary identified him as a former chief psychiatrist at the hospital.
A United Press International obituary recalled his role in the Lindbergh investigation and named his surviving wife, Helen, and son, Richard.
His family gave his professional papers to the American Psychiatric Association’s archives in 1974. The collection’s finding aid lists material on juvenile drug addiction, the Mayor’s Commission on Marijuana, the Lindbergh case and medical jurisprudence.
A Legacy Worth Reading Carefully
Schoenfeld’s life connected several forms of service: military medicine, hospital practice, child guidance, criminal-law consultation and public-health research.
His lodge history adds another dimension. As an affiliated founding member of Geba Lodge No. 954, he helped establish an institution whose lineage continues in Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586.
His professional record also invites a distinction between influence and certainty. His interpretation of the Lindbergh letters attracted extraordinary public attention. His work on the La Guardia study left a more systematic record of observation, investigation and collaboration.
Both deserve examination on their own terms.
For the brethren who inherit Geba’s history, his example is not a demand to accept every conclusion he reached. It is an invitation to read carefully, serve beyond the lodge room and bring knowledge to public questions while remaining honest about the limits of the evidence.
Endnotes and Sources
Archival and Professional Sources
American Psychiatric Association Foundation, Melvin Sabshin Library and Archives, finding aid for the Dudley D. Shoenfeld Papers. Includes birth date, medical degree, internships, child-guidance work, teaching posts, service on the Mayor’s Commission and the family’s donation of papers in 1974. The finding aid uses the spelling “Shoenfeld.”
“Dudley D. Shoenfeld, 78, Dies; Chief Mount Sinai Psychiatrist”, The New York Times, December 27, 1971.
United Press International, “Lindbergh Kidnap Case Expert Dies,” San Francisco Examiner, December 27, 1971. Includes survivors Helen and Richard.
Geba Lodge No. 954 dispensation, warrant and institution dates, founding membership information and first Master, from lodge lineage records of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586.
Lectures, Court Appearances and Early Professional Work
Mount Vernon Daily Argus, January 1930, announcement of a lecture on the problems of adolescence.
The Evening World, January 27, 1922, coverage of the Luther Boddy trial.
Leigh Matteson, International News Service, “Says Hauptmann’s Answers Indicate Dual Personality,” Springfield Daily Republican, September 26, 1934. Also identifies Schoenfeld as secretary of the joint bar and medical commission on criminal-law revision.
Lindbergh Investigation and Contemporary Commentary
Walter Winchell, “On Broadway,” The Post-Star (Glens Falls) and The Buffalo News, September 28, 1934. Discusses the “boad” alteration and the 1932 International News Service disclosure.
Walter Winchell, “On Broadway: Lindbergh Case History,” Miami Tribune, January 30, 1935. Describes Matteson’s April 1932 approach and reproduces extracts from the November 10, 1932 report to Captain Oliver and Lieutenant Finn.
“Psychiatrist’s Synthetic Photo of the Kidnaper,” Times Herald Record (Middletown), February 2, 1935.
Edwin C. Hill, “Will Psychiatrists Be Crime Chasers of the Future?” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, February 7, 1935.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 1935, trial commentary; New York Daily News, February 13, 1935; Heywood Broun column, February 1, 1935.
Dudley D. Schoenfeld, The Crime and the Criminal: A Psychiatric Study of the Lindbergh Case (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936); review in The Buffalo News, 1936.
International News Service, “Psychiatrist Points Similarity in Lindbergh, Mattson Cases,” Springfield News-Leader, January 12, 1937.
Family and Public Life
- Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 21, 1939, League of Women Voters convention committee; The Daily Reporter (White Plains), January 10, 1941, Port Chester estate lease.
The La Guardia Report
- Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana, The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York (1944). Read the introduction, which identifies Schoenfeld’s direction of the sociological study and Wechsler’s direction of its psychological component. Browse the report’s contents.
Wartime Commentary and Later References
“Fight Fuehrer by Psychology,” Edgerton Earth (Ohio), February 5, 1942; “Adolf Can Have It,” Bayonne Times, January 29, 1942.
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Academy Calendar, April 1949; The Star-Ledger (Newark), October 22, 1953.
Walter Winchell items in The Post-Star, September 7, 1961, and Buffalo Courier-Express, February 28, 1962; Miami News, February 16, 1964, review of the Ogburns’ Shakespeare-authorship book.
Journal literature on the history of psychoanalysis at Mount Sinai Hospital, discussing Schoenfeld alongside Clarence Oberndorf and Sandor Lorand. Exact articles and page references should be added before this entry is used to support a specific claim.
A Note on the Sources
- His surname appears as both Schoenfeld and Shoenfeld. The APA archival finding aid, the La Guardia Report and the New York Times obituary use Shoenfeld. Other newspaper accounts and the research notes use Schoenfeld. This article follows the lodge’s spelling.
- October 8, 1918 was the date of Geba’s dispensation, not its charter. The warrant followed on May 7, 1919, and the lodge was instituted on June 10, 1919.
- The lodge initially met in Jackson Heights before moving to Mizpah’s temple in Elmhurst.
- Schoenfeld’s date of raising in Paul Revere Lodge has not yet been located. His earlier lodge affiliation and place among Geba’s affiliated founding members should be supported by the original membership or charter records when reproduced.
- The November 10, 1932 report, as printed in 1935, was addressed to New York police officers. It should not be described without qualification as a report commissioned by Schwarzkopf’s New Jersey authorities.
- The profile in this article follows period newspaper reproductions of that report. Its age estimate was thirty to forty, nearer forty. More specific descriptions appearing in later summaries should not be substituted without a source.
- Contemporary praise for the profile does not establish the scientific validity of every deduction or show that the profile alone led to Hauptmann’s arrest.
- The La Guardia Report documents Schoenfeld and David Wechsler working on the same study. It does not establish Wechsler’s membership in Geba Lodge. That identification remains provisional.
- The 1971 obituaries name a son, Richard, correcting an earlier version that said no children had been identified.
- Interpretations connecting his professional work to Masonic values are editorial themes, not documentary proof that lodge membership caused or shaped a particular medical theory.
Continue the Story
Explore other people and institutions connected to Geba Lodge and its Queens lineage.
- David Wechsler of Geba Lodge No. 954: The Man Behind the Wechsler Intelligence Scales — Read about Schoenfeld’s collaborator on the La Guardia study and the unresolved identification of the psychologist with Geba’s early member.
- Bernard Berkley of Geba Lodge No. 954: The Mason Who Ran Fairyland on Queens Boulevard — Follow a later Geba brother whose amusement park became the setting for a children’s outing.
- Mizpah’s Watchtower in Old Newtown: The Story of Mizpah Lodge No. 738 — Explore the lodge that proposed Geba and provided its later Elmhurst meeting place.
Explore the Original Sources
View the finding aid for Schoenfeld’s professional papers
Read the introduction to the 1944 La Guardia Report
