Why Fish Don’t Exist – Eugenics and the First President of Stanford
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I just finished listening to Lulu Miller’s memoir, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss Love and the Hidden Order of Life. This book is educational, entertaining and thoughtful. In these pages, Miller takes a deep dive into her own life while teaching us all about David Star Jordan, a fish taxonomist who became the first President of Stanford University. Jordan was one of the loudest proponents of Eugenics in the United States – a true white supremacist.
A brief bio – David Star Jordan was born in 1851 in Gainesville, New York and was educated at Cornell University and received a medical degree from Indiana College. At the young age of 34 he was appointed as the President of Indiana State University. When Leland and Jane Stanford decided to create a university in Palo Alto (1891), they enticed Jordan away from Indiana with a large salary to become the President of this new university. He and his second wife, Jessie, moved across the country, settling into life at Stanford for the next 40 years.
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[Photo: David Starr Jordan]
I had heard of David Star Jordan before – on a Radio Lab episode about a lawyer who was trying to overturn Bell v. Buck, a Supreme Court decision written at the height of the Eugenics movement in the United States. Coining the famous phrase “three generations of imbeciles is enough,” this case sanctions forced sterilization. I wrote a blog post about it in August of 2019. According to this Radio Lab interview, this Supreme Court Case has never been overturned.
Eugenics is Greek for good birth and was coined by a British scientist, Francis Galton – cousin to Charles Darwin. This “scientific” theory took hold here in the US around the turn of the 20th century – well before Hitler picked it up and ran with it. The idea is this – we should actively select the best traits and breed humans to pass them along. Those with traits we do not want should be sterilized so they can’t pass their unwanted traits along to future generations. Guess which traits were the wanted ones – right those of well-educated, upper class white folks. In one of David Starr Jordan’s most famous speeches to his students at Stanford University is “The Republic will endure only as long as the human harvest is good.”
In her book, Miller devotes quite a bit of ink to the history of Eugenics and David Star Jordan. Jordan created organizations and fostered laws that allowed for the selection of the best human traits through compulsory sterilization. He was chair of the Committee on the Eugenics of the American Breeders Association, which advocated for forced deportations and sterilization. He also served on the horribly named Human Betterment Committee. All over our country colonies were created to house epileptics and “feeble-minded” people – to keep them from procreating and passing on their inferior genes. Those forced to live there included people of color, immigrants, promiscuous women, “morons,” “idiots” and “imbeciles.” Miller describes her visit to one such colony (no longer operational) created by Jordan and her interview with two women who were incarcerated there, one of whom was forcibly sterilized. The description of these women and the suffering is both moving and disturbing.
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I appreciate Miller’s writing about Jordan and the Eugenics movement in the United States because I believe that many don’t know of this dark chapter in our history and how this “science” influenced Hitler to murder the “unwanted” people. Before Hitler got going killing Jews, he and his team of doctors gassed 70,000 German children and adults who had physical or mental “deficiencies,” lest these bad traits continue their evolutionary march. I wrote about these early Nazi murders as they relate to the Church and as well as a powerful memorial to the T4 Euthanasia Program.
Speaking of memorials – there is a long overdue reckoning happening in our country around monuments and memorials to those who believed, as Jordan did, that people with white skin were better than the rest and we should actively shape our society to reflect this superiority. The Wikipedia article on David Starr Jordan includes a long list of buildings and schools named to honor this particularly well remembered racist. The psychology building at Stanford University is named the David Starr Jordan Hall. Just three months ago, in April, a request was made to rename the building. I found an article in the Stanford Daily discussing the issue. Then I found a by a student saying the University had decided to rename the building Michael Jordan Hall. Wonder how David would feel about that?
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Next week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, you can hear more about Lulu Miller’s book and the Eugenics movement in my 60 second podcast, Gratitude in a Minute. You can listen on Alexa or your favorite podcast provider.
