David Starr Jordan (1851 - 1931)

Born 19 Jan 1851 in Gainesville, Gainesville, Wyoming, New York, United States

Husband of Jessie Louise (Knight) Jordan — married 10 Aug 1887 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States

Died 19 Sep 1931 at age 80 in Stanford, Dutchess, New York, United States

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Biography

David Jordan is Notable.

David was born in 1851.^[1]

In 1860, David was living at Gainsville with his parents.^[2]

David gave himself the middle name Starr.

The Dark Side: David Starr Jordan was a loud, highly visible, and highly credentialed proponent of the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement was one of the darkest chapters of American medical history. Thus, David Starr Jordan's image and scientific legacy was forever tarnished and sullied by his leading role in the eugenics movement.

David married Susan Bowen (1845-1885), a biologist and a graduate of Mount Holyoke College (whom he had met at Louis Agassiz’s Pekinese island Summer School of Science), in her hometown of Peru, Massachusetts on March 10, 1875. She died at age 39, after 10 years of marriage, following a brief illness. Bowen was six years Jordan’s senior.

They had three children: the educator Edith Monica (1877–1965), Harold Bowen (1882–1959), and Thora (1884–1886).

David later married Jessie Knight (1866–1952) in 1887. At the time of their marriage, two years after his first wife’s death, Knight was 21 years old and Jordan was 36. They met while he was serving as president of Indiana University. He and his second wife had three additional children: Knight Starr (1888–1947), Barbara (1891–1900), and Eric Knight (1903–1926).

In 1900, David was living at Brooklyn, New York with his wife.^[3]

He passed away in 1931.

Why Fish Don't Exist

Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life Hardcover – April 14, 2020 by Lulu Miller

A “remarkable” (Los Angeles Times), “seductive” (The Wall Street Journal) debut from the new cohost of Radiolab, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.​

National Book Review

Miller holds to the beauty and generosity in Darwin’s vision of the world. But there’s a dark side to Jordan’s understanding of Darwin. Even as he embraced the idea of evolving species, he clung to an old belief that even a changing world was still governed by hierarchy. Some creatures were better than others; some humans better than others.

These ideas—half Darwin, half hierarchy—led Jordan and his peers into the sorry embrace of eugenics and, in their misplaced confidence that they knew best what a human future should be, into the cruel practice of eugenic sterilization.

That's the dark side to Miller’s story of David Starr Jordan, the man revered at Stanford, but pretty much forgotten everywhere else. Those dark conclusions don’t really capture the feel of the book’s hungry curiosity. Nor does what I’ve written explain how she recruits disappearing “fish” into a carefully targeted act of revenge against Jordan and his over-confident white man friends.

• https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2020/7/9/xye1ulwo3axcnzkyri9ykwf9c7j4n0

Jane Stanford Murder Cover-up

Jane Elizabeth (Lathrop) Stanford, the wife of Leland Stanford and one of the richest women in California, was the co-founder of Leland Stanford Jr. University (Stanford University), which was a monument to their dead son. In 1905 she ingested strychnine twice within six weeks. The second dose at the Moana Hotel in Hawaii, where she had gone to flee her murderer, killed her.

Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford President David Starr Jordan and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked.

Who Killed Jane Stanford shows us the lengths to which the university's first president David Starr Jordan, working alongside Jane's brother Charles Lathrop, pulled every possible lever in corrupt San Francisco to make sure the police investigation into her death petered out and the newspapers dropped the murder story. Both men wanted to foreclose challenges to her bequests that a murder charge could trigger.

Just as Mr. White is un-sympathetic to Stanford, he's equally searing in his treatment of David Starr Jordan and Lathrop. San Francisco detectives "wanted to eliminate the murder, not the murderer," observed the sheriff in Hawaii who first oversaw the case.

They succeeded, as did David Starr Jordan, who had been about to lose his post as university president. Stanford's death meant that didn't happen: Jordan remained in leadership at Stanford University for another 11 years, White declares him an "accessory after the fact."^[4][5]

Jane Stanford died February 28, 1905 in Honolulu, Hawaii at age 76 from strychnine poisoning.

Stanford University president David Starr Jordan traveled to Hawaii and escorted Jane’s body back to California. At a press conference, Jordan stated that Jane Stanford had not died of poisoning but of heart failure, and that is the story in most history books.^[6]

Sources

1. ↑ "United States Passport Applications, 1795-1925," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QKDF-MZX6 : 16 March 2018), David Starr Jordan, 1913; citing Passport Application, California, United States, source certificate #7806, Passport Applications, January 2, 1906 - March 31, 1925, 186, NARA microfilm publications M1490 and M1372 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).
2. ↑ "United States Census, 1860", database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MCQW-J2Z : 18 February 2021), David Jordan in entry for Hiram Jordan, 1860.
3. ↑ "United States Census, 1900", database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MSFC-3HC : 7 January 2022), David Jordan, 1900.
4. ↑ Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University, Norton, 2022.
5. ↑ Julia Flynn Siler, The Case of the College Widow, The Wall Street Journal, May 14-15, 2022, pg. C9.
6. ↑ The Wilitree profile of Jane Elizabeth (Lathrop) Stanford

See Also:

• Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/111602973/david-starr-jordan: accessed 08 January 2023), memorial page for Dr David Starr Jordan (19 Jan 1851–19 Sep 1931), Find a Grave Memorial ID 111602973, citing Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, California, USA; Maintained by Kris 'Peterborough K' Peterson (contributor 46537737).
• https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2020/7/9/xye1ulwo3axcnzkyri9ykwf9c7j4n0
• Radiolab, G: Unfit, July 17, 2019. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/projects/radiolab-presents-g
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr_Jordan
• https://www.dailypress.com/news/dp-xpm-19890208-1989-02-08-8902040137-story.html
• May 13, 2020, Radiolab, Lulu Miller - Why Fish Don't Exist - David Starr Jordan
• https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538884/radiolab