Alina 5 pages

David Starr Jordan

Finally we arrive at the last Stanford University figure we can trace to California’s forced sterilization program: president David Starr Jordan. In contemporary literature, it is often mentioned in passing that Jordan was a supporter of the forced sterilization program. And while some evidence exists to suggest that Jordan was a supporter the program, it is not entirely clear what exactly his opinions on forced sterilization was. 

Jordan did certainly know Lewis Terman and Paul Popenoe. Popenoe was Jordan’s student in 1908, when Popenoe had transferred to Stanford for his junior year (although he had to drop out due to his father’s ailing health, and ultimately was granted an honorary degree from Occidental College in 1929). Jordan in fact refers to him as “one of his disciples” in his autobiography. Lewis Terman was a professor in psychology department and, as a fellow eugenist, he and Jordan were involved in many similar societies. It was Lewis Terman who—on instructions from ES Gosney—asked David Starr Jordan to join the Human Betterment Foundation.

Jordan’s membership in the Human Betterment Foundation is the biggest piece of evidence of his support for the forced sterilization program, and the basis of many of contemporary historians’ claims of his belief in sterilization. Jordan was one of the incorporating members and remained on the board of trustees until his death in 1931. 

But what remains unclear is Jordan’s actual involvement in the Human Betterment Foundation. When E.S. Gosney instructed Lewis Terman to ask Jordan to join the Foundation in 1928, Jordan was 77. He initially declined to join the Foundation on account of his health; he was “having serious trouble with one eye and cannot read any book at present, calling in a student to read for me where it is necessary.” Gosney immediately wrote back to Terman instructing him to tell Jordan that “there is no financial or personal responsibility attached to the position of member or a trustee, and we will allow [Jordan] to resign from the Board of Trustees and as a member.” Indeed, the only reason Jordan may have joined at all, as Gosney put to Terman rather awkwardly, was that “we [the Human Betterment Foundation] took the liberty to place [Jordan’s] name in our articles of incorporation as one of the trustees and if he does not sign . . . [the articles] will have to be re-written and all of the signatures again obtained . . . and I think these explanations would necessarily call out in some cases references to Dr. Jordan’s health which the family would wish to avoid.” 

Jordan did, obviously, end up signing and remained a member of the Board of Trustees. But the question remains as to how supportive Jordan actually was. Popenoe’s report of a Trustee meeting in 1930 does not mention Jordan as being present, even though all other listed Trustees were. And although Popenoe thanks Jordan among others for his review of the 1928 book 28 Years of Forced Sterilization, Jordan had previously written to him, “As to reading the book, I have the greatest confidence that Mr. Popenoe knows all I know or think or a great deal more and unless you wish me to examine it as a matter of form, it would not be worth while to send it.” Popenoe and Gosney also included a photo of David Starr Jordan in a report about the Foundation in 1928, despite the fact that he did not appear to have contributed to the publication in any way nor was his work quoted. It does appear, to some extent, that the two men were trying to use David Starr Jordan’s reputation in order to boost the legitimacy of their own organization in its initial years. It is unclear how much Jordan—old, busy and in failing health—was aware of their activities. 

There are some things that one can conclude definitively about Jordan’s opinions on heredity. He was a eugenist, a founding member of the Eugenics Commission of the American Breeders Association. He did believed that human breeding affected the character of the human race; but this belief—rather than causing him to advocate for sterilization—lead him to become a leading crusaders for pacifism and peace throughout his life. Jordan wrote three books—The Blood of a Nation, The Human Harvest, and War and the Breed—numerous articles and countless speeches about how war destroys human society through eugenic means. He explains “In the herd of cattle, to destroy the strongest bulls, the fairest cows, the most promising calves, is to allow those not strong nor fair nor promising to become the parents of the coming herd. Under this influence the herd will deteriorate . . . Such a process is called race degeneration.” Using the same logic, Jordan argued that the same in wartime humans were essentially slaughtering the best cattle by sending the youngest and fittest to die and allowing the less fit to stay home and reproduce. For example, Jordan explains, “There is today in Aosta an asylum for the care and culture of idiots . . . [who] are exempt from military service. He remains at home to be the father of the family.” War, then, was deteriorating the human race. Jordan was through his whole life an ardent pacifist, especially up to and during the first World War, even when he was vilified and faced much political pressure for his beliefs.

Jordan was also a believer in the effects of positive eugenics, or measures that would encourage the intelligent classes to breed. He once entertained the notion of becoming the director of an organization created by eugenicists in Colorado that would host and promote Better Baby Contests. Better Baby Contests, which had become incredibly popular in Colorado, allowed eugenically fit mothers to show off their children and were intended to “educate the public on the importance of heredity and better breeding.” Jordan wrote to Charles Davenport for his thoughts about the idea; Davenport responded “I, for one, fear that if a national society were to start out with the burden of primary association and promotion of baby shows that it would be unduly handicapped…I should bid them God Speed in their undertaking, but for myself would not enter into it.” (Perhaps it was better for his scientific credentials that the Stanford president would not be remembered for organized what were essentially baby beauty pageants.) Jordan was also a support of the Cummins-Vaile bill, a proposal put forth by the Voluntary Parenthood League which would remove decriminalize distributing information about contraception. While his “greatest objection to the movement for birth control is that those who should most profit by it will never hear of it,” Jordan still maintained that there was “no reason why our government should not permit knowledge of any kind to be obtained. Everyone should be his own judge on his own knowledge.”

Indeed, the argument about the fallibly of government is an argument that Jordan put forth in 1911 against forced sterilization government programs. In his book The Heredity of Richard Roe, Jordan writes: “The public must give the individual the benefit of every doubt, for its own machinery of police officers, Justices of the Peace, and guardians of the poor is not above reproach. The defective has, at least, the right to be judged by a jury of his peers, before he is condemned to celibacy or to the quasi-sterilization known as vasectomy. In these matters, the state cannot take a radical position until its own methods are assured to be the methods of impartial science.” Jordan seemed to be cautious of implementing government programs to sterilize citizens because of potential flaws in the implementation and the underlying science. 

On the other hand, Jordan does not discount entirely the possibility of preventing births among “defective” individuals. Indeed, some of his travels seemed to have imparted on him the wisdom of such prevention measures: for example, he wrote in his autobiography Days of a Man of his experience with the cretins of Aosta. Cretins were, as Jordan described them, individuals in the Alpine regions who were “a type of idiot . . . always associated with goiter, a swelling of degenerated thyroid glands . . . [a condition which] seems to be hereditary.” After visiting this region several times in the late 1800s and noting the burden these cretins imposed on the community, Jordan returned twenty years later in 1910 to discover that the cretins had completely disappeared. Jordan describes: “To my astonishment I was informed that all the cretins and many of the goitrous had been then gathered into the asylum, which complete segregation of the sexes. Every child in a near-by orphanage was bright and alert, with no touch of the taint. I inspected the beggars standing in a row at the railway station—weak, inconsequential, but not cretins. Cretinism, like other forms of feeblemindedness, is descended from its own. Its plain remedy lies in segregation, the guarantee that each individual shall be the last of his generation.” 

This anecdote implies that Jordan did see value in negative eugenics—that preventing certain people from reproducing could have positive effects on the general population. But here Jordan advocates, like many other eugenicists, for segregation and not sterilization. However, in the years between this publication and the Human Betterment Foundation’s work, Paul Popenoe may have indeed convinced Jordan that sterilization was the proper way to deal with “mentally defective” individuals. 

But what is abundantly clear from Jordan’s writings and his works is that sterilization, no matter what his views on it, did not take up much of Jordan’s time. Popenoe and Terman both dedicated significant amounts of their studies and energy to the question of sterilization; Jordan, on the other hand, was more concerned with pacifism, ichthyology, the running of Stanford University, and his other scientific pursuits. In 1928, his eye infection and poor health were at the forefront of his mind, and not the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. While Jordan may have cautiously supported sterilization, he was not a pioneer nor a crusader of the field—so the footnote to the Stanford president’s life about being a proponent of sterilization may not have been entirely deserved.