Dr. David Starr Jordan

BARNEY MULLINS AND DAVID STARR JORDAN

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project David Starr Jordan HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1851

January 19, Sunday: David Starr Jordan was born.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

David Starr Jordan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1872

June: Professor Asa Gray went to California, where among other things he would meet John Muir and tour Yosemite.

David Starr Jordan graduated in the initial graduating class of Cornell University, his degree in Botany (Professor Agassiz would inspire him to change over to Ichthyology).

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project David Starr Jordan HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1885

David Starr Jordan became the nation’s most youthful university president when, at the age of 34, he was appointed to head Indiana University (he would be the first president of this institution who was not a reverend).

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

David Starr Jordan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1887

April 9, Saturday: From an essay “Thoreau and John Brown” by David Starr Jordan on pages 453-457 of The Current (Volume VII, No. 173) published by Edgar L. Wakeman:

...Two sorts of people read Thoreau, his admirers and his critics. To the one class he is the prophet of the fields and woods, the interpreter of nature, and his every word has to them the deepest significance.... They resent all criticism of his life or his words. They are impatient of all analysis of his methods or of his motives, and a word of praise of him is the surest passport to their good graces. The critics miss the inner harmony which Thoreau’s admirers see, and discern only queer paradoxes and extravagances of statement where the others hear the voice of Nature’s oracle. With most literary men, the power or disposition of those who HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

know or understand their writings is in some degree a matter of literary culture. It is hardly so in the case of Thoreau. The most illiterate man I ever saw, who had ever heard of Thoreau, Mr. Barney Mullins, of Freedom Centre, Outagamie County, Wisconsin, was a most ardent admirer of Thoreau, while the most eminent critic in America, James Russell Lowell, I think, does him scant justice. To Lowell, the finest thoughts of Thoreau are but strawberries from Emerson’s garden, and other critics have followed back these same strawberries through Emerson to still older gardens, among them that of Sir Thomas Browne. But, setting the critics aside, let me tell you about Barney Mullins: Twelve years ago I lived for a year in the northern part of Wisconsin. The snow is very deep in the winter there, and once I accepted a chance to ride into town through the snowbanks on a sled drawn by two oxen and driven by Barney Mullins. Barney was a genuine bog-trotter from the banks of Killarney, and he could scarcely be said to speak the English language. He told me that before he came to Freedom Centre he had lived in a town called Concord, in Massachusetts. I asked him if he had happened to know a man there by the name of Henry Thoreau? He at once grew enthusiastic, and he said, among other things: “Mr. Thoreau was a land surveyor in Concord. I knew him well. He had a way of his own, and he didn’t care naught about money, but if there was ever a gentleman alive, he was one.” Barney seemed much saddened when I told him that Mr. Thoreau had been dead a dozen years, and, on parting, he asked me to come out some time to Freedom Centre, and to spend a night with him. He hadn’t much of a room to offer me, but there was always a place in his house for a friend of Mr. Thoreau. Such is the feeling of this guild of lovers of Thoreau, and some of you may sometime come to belong to it.... DAVID STARR JORDAN

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project David Starr Jordan HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1891

March: Dr. David Starr Jordan was approached by railroad magnate Amasa Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford, while they were traveling through Indiana, and offered the presidency of a new university they were scheming to set up in Palo Alto, California, that they were intending to name in honor of their deceased child Leland Stanford, Junior. His name had been suggested by Andrew White, president of Cornell University. He accepted on the spot.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project David Starr Jordan HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1892

March: Dr. David S. Jordan delivered an address “The Last of the Puritans” before the California State Normal School at San Jose part of which was printed as “Thoreau and John Brown” on pages 235-242 of The Pacific Coast Teacher (Vol. 1, No. 6):

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

County, Wisconsin, was a most ardent admirer of Thoreau, while the most eminent critic in America, James Russell Lowell, I think, does him scant justice. To Lowell, the finest thoughts of Thoreau are but strawberries from Emerson’s garden, and other critics have followed back these same strawberries through Emerson to still older gardens, among them that of Sir Thomas Browne. But, setting the critics aside, let me tell you about Barney Mullins: Twelve years ago I lived for a year in the northern part of Wisconsin. The snow is very deep in the winter there, and once I accepted a chance to ride into town through the snowbanks on a sled drawn by two oxen and driven by Barney Mullins. Barney was a genuine bog-trotter from the banks of Killarney, and he could scarcely be said to speak the English language. He told me that before he came to Freedom Centre he had lived in a town called Concord, in Massachusetts. I asked him if he had happened to know a man there by the name of Henry Thoreau? He at once grew enthusiastic, and he said, among other things: “Mr. Thoreau was a land surveyor in Concord. I knew him well. He had a way of his own, and he didn’t care naught about money, but if there was ever a gentleman alive, he was one.” Barney seemed much saddened when I told him that Mr. Thoreau had been dead a dozen years, and, on parting, he asked me to come out some time to Freedom Centre, and to spend a night with him. He hadn’t much of a room to offer me, but there was always a place in his house for a friend of Mr. Thoreau. Such is the feeling of this guild of lovers of Thoreau, and some of you may sometime come to belong to it.... DR. DAVID S. JORDAN

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

David Starr Jordan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1897

August: Dr. David Starr Jordan, President of Leland Stanford Junior University: “Evolution: What it is and What it is Not,” in The Arena (Vol. XVIII, No. 93, pages 146-159).

EVOLUTION, IS AND IS NOT HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1899

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s CONTEMPORARIES, consisting of thumbnail sketches of his fellow Transcendentalists, abolitionists, etc. He and another fellow co-founded an association to be known as the Anti-Imperialist League, as a protest against the manner in which the US military forces were suppressing the Philippine independence movement.

In California, a granite marker was placed at the mountain gravesite of Owen Brown: Owen Brown, Son of John Brown, the Liberator, died Jan. 9, 1889

The 1st doctoral dissertation on Henry Thoreau.

According to David Starr Jordan’s “The Last of the Puritans,” an address delivered during 1892 before the California State Normal School at San Jose and published in this year in IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY (NY: Appleton, page 280), Barney Mullins of Concord had informed him that: ...To Thoreau’s admirers, he is the prophet of the fields and woods, the interpreter of nature, and his every word has to them the deepest significance.... They resent all criticism of his life or his words. They are impatient of all analysis of his methods or of his motives, and a word of praise of him is the surest passport to their good graces. But the critics sometimes miss the inner harmony which Thoreau’s admirers see, and discern only queer paradoxes and extravagances of statement where the others hear the voice of Nature’s oracle. With most literary men, the power or disposition of those who know or understand their writings is in some degree a matter of literary culture. It is hardly so in the case of Thoreau. The most illiterate man I know who had ever heard of Thoreau, Mr. Barney Mullins, of Freedom Center, Outagamie County, Wisconsin.... He told me that before he came to Freedom Centre he had lived in a town called Concord, in Massachusetts. I asked him if he had happened to know a man there by the name of Henry Thoreau. He at once grew enthusiastic, and he said, among other things: “Mr. Thoreau was a land surveyor in Concord. I knew him well. He had a way of his own, and he didn’t care naught about money, but if there was ever a gentleman alive, he was one.” .... Here is a test for you. Thoreau says: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on the trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken to regarding them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind the cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.” Now if any of you, in your dreams, have heard the horse, or seen the sunshine on the dove’s wings, you may join in the search. If not, you may close the book for Thoreau has not written for HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

you. IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1901

May: Dr. David Starr Jordan’s THE BLOOD OF THE NATION: A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF RACES THROUGH SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT first surfaced as an article in Popular Science Monthly. SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT EUGENICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1902

The Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS: A ROMANCE OF THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN. Racial conflict is an epic struggle with the future of civilization at stake. Maybe we can’t have human slavery anymore but American blacks cannot be allowed to be politically equal with American whites as that would lead to social equality, and social equality would lead to miscegenation, and miscegenation would lead to the destruction of the family, and the destruction of the family would lead to the destruction of civilized society. Everything we admire and respect would fall like a row of damn dominoes, you fool.

Woodrow Wilson’s multi-volume HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE was greeted warmly by reviewing scholars.

(deathmask) When the film The Birth of a Nation would be shown in the White House, it would be the 1st film ever to be shown there, and President Woodrow Wilson the national historian’s reaction to the screening was “it is like writing history in lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” It is reported that Wilson’s scandalously tendentious history book has now been cited in the background material for Hollywood’s Amistad film, as academic support for its historical accuracy! (I cannot vouch for this, and it may very well be a mere urban legend.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

However, I must add that President Wilson’s ethos would not be found attractive, by Dr. Sigmund Freud: When a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible.1

Dr. David Starr Jordan’s THE BLOOD OF THE NATION: A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF RACES THROUGH SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT (Boston: American Unitarian Association). Rome fell because of the degeneration of its people. What the empire of the United States of America needs in order to avoid what happened to the Roman empire, and take over the whole world and run it right, according to this Unitarian Universalist author who was a biological scientist and therefore an evolutionist, is government compulsory sterilization of the less fit among us. We don’t really need to go all the way to AdolfHitlerland, we don’t need to poison anyone, for we can get this accomplished over a period of generations without actually going all the way to extermination. We could eventually recreate ourselves as a nation of 100% makers, with 0% takers and mooches to drag us down: Our Republic shall endure so long as the human harvest is good, so long as the movement of history, the progress of science and industry, leaves for the future the best and not the worst of each generation. SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT EUGENICS

1. Freud would spend his final years, while dying of cancer in England, in the writing of a Presidential biography in which his observations may now be generalized from President Wilson into remarks about a President not yet born, George W. Bush. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1903

September 12, Saturday: From an essay “Thoreau. A Little Study of a Great Man” by T.J. Chapman, on page 196 of Forest and Stream magazine: President Jordan, of Leland Stanford University, characterizes Thoreau as the chief prophet of the “Order of Saunterers.” Thoreau described himself as belonging to the “Church of the Sunday Walkers.” He had an intense love of nature, and of home. Concord was everything to him. “Nothing can be hoped of you,” he said, “if this bit of world under your feet is not sweeter to you than any other in this world — in any world.” The admirers of Thoreau form an order of themselves. They resent all criticism of his life or his words. They are impatient of all analysis of his methods or of his motives. President Jordan says that the most illiterate man he had ever known who had ever heard of Thoreau was an Irishman, Mr. Barney Mullins, of Northern Wisconsin, with whom he had once ridden on an ox sled through the deep snows of that region. In the course of conversation Barney stated that he had lived at one time in Concord, Massachusetts, before coming to Wisconsin. “I asked him,” says Dr. Jordan, “if he had happened to know a man there by the name of Henry Thoreau. He at once grew enthusiastic, and he said, among other things: ‘Mr. Thoreau was a land surveyor in Concord. I knew him well. He had a way of his own, and he didn’t care naught about money, but if there was ever a gentleman alive, he was one.’” And so great was his affection for Thoreau, though it was many years since he had lived in Concord, that he urged the Doctor to accompany him to his house and spend the night with him. “He hadn’t much of a room to offer me,” says he, “but there was always a place in his house for a friend of Mr. Thoreau.” “Here is a test for you,” adds President Jordan. “Thoreau says: ‘I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on the trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken to regarding them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind the cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.” “Now if any of you, in your dreams,” says Dr. Jordan, “have heard the horse, or seen the sunshine on the dove’s wings, you may join in the search. If not, you may close the book for Thoreau has not written for you.” PRESIDENT OF STANFORD U. HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1905

January 14, Saturday: Strychnine was discovered in a bottle of mineral water in the Nob Hill, San Francisco, California mansion of Mrs. Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford. A maid was dismissed and Mrs. Stanford quitted her mansion, vowing never to return.

February 15, Wednesday: Mrs. Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford sailed for Hawaii and then Japan. Attending her was trusted personal secretary Bertha Berner, who had been present during the attempt to poison Mrs. Stanford in her mansion in San Francisco, California with strychnine but was not a suspect.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

February 28, Tuesday: Dr. David Starr Jordan had been having his problems with the widow Mrs. Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford. There were fears she would remove him as president of Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto, California. While vacationing on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, during this night the widow died by strychnine poisoning in her room at the Moana Hotel. Attending her was trusted personal secretary Bertha Berner, who had also been present during the attempt to poison Mrs. Stanford in her mansion in San Francisco. Whodunnit? Sailing to Hawaii, President Jordan spearheaded a new medical investigation that discarded the local coroner’s report and discovered that rather than having been poisoned with strychnine, Mrs. Stanford had merely succumbed to a heart problem. There’s nothing here, folks, so just go about your business. Was the President of Stanford acting to prevent the investigation of a murder, or was he acting to protect the reputation of an institution that was just then floundering for reasons of finance? –Well, one thing we know is that he had written to his colleagues at the California university to offer them several options, as to the medical reason that was to be declared to the general public for the demise of Mrs. Stanford.

David Starr Jordan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1907

Formation of the Eugenics Education Society that in 1926 would become the Eugenics Society. Charles Davenport of the Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island institute for “eugenics research” hired Harry Laughlin to determine which Americans were unfit because of their “germ-plasm” (curiously, the fact that Laughlin was himself epileptic didn’t slow him down one bit in his eagerness to eliminate the unfit). The State of Indiana put in place the 1st law in the USA for mandatory sterilization of “the unfit” (“Hoosier” is short for “Who’s your father, little boy?”). According to Harry Bruinius’s THE SECRET HISTORY OF FORCED STERILIZATION AND AMERICA’S QUEST FOR RACIAL PURITY (Knopf, 2006), Indiana’s law was “the first law in human history allowing doctors to operate on otherwise healthy citizens against their will.” In all, 15 states would follow this lead before the 1917 Internationale Gessellschaft fuer Rassenhygiene. Subsequently, some 15 more states would enact such legislation. Indiana and California would lead the nation in involuntary sterilizations until the setting up of the eugenic courts of Nazi Germany from 1934 onward would lead to gradual abandonment of such practices among Germany’s potential military opponents. ASSLEY

Dr. David Starr Jordan’s THE HUMAN HARVEST: A STUDY OF THE DECAY OF RACES THROUGH THE SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT (American Unitarian Association). Our Republic shall endure so long as the human harvest is good, so long as the movement of history, the progress of science and industry, leaves for the future the best and not the worst of each generation. THE HUMAN HARVEST EUGENICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1910

The family of Margaret Louise Higgins Sanger and William Sanger relocated from Hastings into New York because the husband was dissatisfied with his architectural work as a draftsman and was seeking to become a painter (the wife returned to nursing to help support the family). The Sangers would become immersed in Greenwich Village culture, joining a circle of intellectuals, activists, and artists that included Max Eastman, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman.

Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor.

Charles Davenport’s HEREDITY IN RELATION TO EUGENICS.

In “Contribution to the Theory of Periodic Reaction,” Alfred J. Lotka initiated the Lotka-Volterra predator- prey logistic model that has proven so useful in ecology.

Dr. David Starr Jordan’s suspicion that Rome had fallen because of the degeneration of its people, plus his Unitarian Universalist conviction that the United States of America needed, in order to avoid what happened to Rome, to install government compulsory sterilization of the less fit among us, plus, on the basis of a similar reasoning process founded in the scientific fact of evolution, a fear that the tendency of war was to remove from the human gene pool the strongest rather than the weakest among us, led to his being chosen as president of the World Peace Foundation. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY WAR RESISTERS LEAGUE

“Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war, I get so bored I could scream!” —Scarlet O’Hara HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

Republication, by the Unitarian Universalists, of Dr. Jordan’s 1901/1902 THE BLOOD OF THE NATION: ASTUDY OF THE DECAY OF RACES THROUGH SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT. SURVIVAL OF THE UNFIT EUGENICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1913

In London, a baby was born that was the product of careful eugenic breeding. She was given the name “Eugenette.”

The Mental-Deficiency Act.

Deutsche Gessellschaft fuer Rassenhygiene.

Dr. David Starr Jordan’s “The Eugenics of War: Its Effect Principally on Heredity, and Wholly Pernicious – Military Training Cannot Compensate Because It Has No Effect on the Germ Plasm” appeared in Journal of Heredity (Vol. 4, No. 3, page 140).

Dr. Jordan’s WAR AND WASTE: A SERIES OF DISCUSSIONS OF WAR AND WAR ACCESSORIES (Doubleday, Page & Company). EUGENICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

1915

August 6, Friday: Dr. David Starr Jordan’s “The Long Cost of War” appeared in Science (Vol. 42, No. 1075, New Series: 189-190).

With the debarkation of new troops in Suvla Bay on the west of the peninsula, Britain’s Gallipoli Peninsula campaign entered its 2nd stage. WORLD WAR I

Eighteen Armenians were publicly hanged in the town of Everek near Kayseri. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

1931

September 19, Saturday: David Starr Jordan died in Stanford, California. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

2003

Dr. Robert W.P. Cutler’s THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF JANE STANFORD (Stanford UP). Dr. Cutler was an emeritus Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University and had for many years been a senior associate dean of faculty affairs at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Jeremiah Duggan, a Jewish student from the United Kingdom who had been attending a conference and “cadre school” organized by the Schiller Institute and LaRouche Youth Movement in Germany, died in mysterious circumstances in Wiesbaden. A British court, ruling out suicide, determined that the young man had died while “in a state of terror.” LYNDON LAROUCHE

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project David Starr Jordan HDT WHAT? INDEX

DAVID STARR JORDAN BARNEY MULLINS

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: July 30, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

BARNEY MULLINS DAVID STARR JORDAN

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.