Stanford University's First President Was An Important Leader In The Eugenics Movement

Palo Alto reports:

On Feb. 9, the Palo Alto Unified School District board decided to form a committee to review whether Jordan Middle School should be renamed, given the eugenics background of its namesake, David Starr Jordan. While talking to Palo Alto residents and community organizations, it became clear to me that a more complete picture of who Jordan was is needed. With this column, I hope to introduce readers to Jordan based on his own writings and that of various historians and Stanford University resources.

There's more:

Jordan's obsession with the "survival of the Anglo-Saxon/Nordic race" was fueled by his deep-seated racism. In his book, "David Starr Jordan: Prophet of Freedom," historian Edward McNall Burns dedicates chapter 3.1, "Superior and Inferior Races," to Jordan's racism, attributing this assertion to Jordan: "To say that one race is superior to another is merely to confirm the common observation of every intelligent citizen."

Even Jordan's "much admired" pacifism was rooted squarely in his eugenics beliefs. Jordan did not reject war on grounds of morality; instead, he feared that during war the nation's strongest die, leaving room for the unfit to reproduce and decay the Anglo-Saxon/Nordic race, according to historian Garland E. Allen. Jordan forcefully argues his "pacifist" convictions in his 1899 newspaper article, "Anti-Imperialism," six months after victory in the Spanish-American War, as the U.S. was about to annex the Philippines: "There is no objection to national expansion, but colonies are not national expansion; slaves are not men. Wherever degenerate, dependent or alien races are within our borders today they are not part of the United States. They constitute a social problem, a menace to peace and welfare."

David Starr Jordon.