Stanford University History
From Palo Alto Wiki
Leland Stanford Junior University was built by Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop Stanford in honor of their son, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died from typhoid.
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[edit] Founding the University
As Menlo Park grew and spacious mansions sprouted up, Leland Stanford arrived who later was to buy himself a town--740 vacant acres that he named Palo Alto.
When Stanford settled on his Palo Alto Farm, he had already achieved distinction as a merchant, governor of California during the Civil War and president of the Central Pacific Railroad (now part of the Southern Pacific). A year before the railroad was completed, his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, gave birth to their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr.
But to the tremendous grief of his adoring parents, Leland Jr. was stricken with typhoid fever while the family was traveling in Turkey and died in 1884 at the age of 15. His parents then decided that they would dedicate their fortune to educational pursuits and Leland Stanford proclaimed, "The children of California shall be my children."
So in 1885 the founding grant for Leland Stanford Junior University was executed. Construction began in 1887, and the university opened its doors to students four years later.
When the university first opened, faculty members rode the train to work, debarking at either Menlo Park or Mayfield. Between the two stretched fields broken only by the oaks and the tall spire of a redwood tree.
[edit] Building Palo Alto
Leland Stanford soon decided that his faculty and students needed a nearby town in which to reside, but he wanted one free of the saloons that thrived in Menlo Park and Mayfield. So, through Timothy Hopkins, believed to be the son of railroad mogul Mark Hopkins, Stanford bought some 740 acres of land between Menlo Park and Mayfield for roughly $300,000. Except for a barn and three houses dating from the 1870s, the land was vacant.
The original site extended from San Francisquito Creek south to Embarcadero Road, and from El Camino Real to a ragged eastern boundary on the bay side. The new town was originally known as University Park, but Stanford preferred "Palo Alto," so he bargained to get the name from the area that is now College Terrace.
University Avenue was ankle-deep in mud in winter and dust in summer, but businesses soon began to spring up along it, with the first being a real estate office erected by L.D. Henry. By the time Stanford University opened in 1891, Palo Alto's population was up to 76 and the town hummed with activity. By 1892 the population had grown to 318 permanent residents with 400 students living there during the school year.
On April 9, 1894, Palo Alto's residents, on a vote of 98 to 21, decided to incorporate. Official papers making Palo Alto a city were filed on April 16, 1894. The Midpeninsula communities thrived, with the arrival in 1906 of the Toonerville Trolley that linked the new town of Palo Alto to the Stanford campus, and the continuing growth of the Menlo Park residences.
[edit] Early 1900s
At Stanford in the early part of the century, faculty and administrators were just emerging from a period jocularly referred to as "the stone age," when much of Stanford's sandstone walls were cut and erected. In 1906, the university was still under the leadership of its first president, David Starr Jordan. But by 1909, Jordan was spending more and more time on the cause of world peace and took a series of leaves of absence. He became the university's first chancellor in 1913 when geologist John Branner took over the presidency for two years.
By 1916, enrollment at Stanford was more than 2,000 and Ray Lyman Wilbur had become Stanford's third president. Wilbur worked toward making Stanford a major university, promoting faculty research, expanding graduate study and developing professional schools.
[edit] Sports
[edit] Rugby replaces football
In 1906, Stanford University canceled its football program. President David Starr Jordan, reported in the fall after the great quake that the campus's major sport would no longer be football. Instead the game would be rugby.
The news startled a student body that had grown attached to its gridiron rivalries, especially given that the Indians were coming off an undefeated season in which they outscored their opponents 138-13.
But Jordan and other members of the faculty were concerned that the sport prevented medium-sized men from playing, too few men were involved in athletics and students were too preoccupied with winning a game that was too competitive.
"The closed formations favored by the present rules make possible unfair and brutal playing which cannot be detected," said Frank Angell, chairman of a faculty athletic committee, in a report on football. "The game...has become a business rather than a sport."
Students and alumni protested. But the protests fell on deaf ears.
In 1909, 261 men went out for rugby under new coach George Pressly, who in the next five years made Stanford a national force in the sport, forging a 30-8-1 record in the process.
Stanford continued to play rugby until after the war in 1919, when it returned to football.
[edit] Track and Field
"If football held first place in college interest and affection, track and field sports clearly came next," wrote Orrin Elliott, Stanford's first registrar.
One athlete who excelled in both was the pigeon-toed, bowlegged John O. Miller, who became known for his fleet feet and for being Stanford's first Olympian, along with pole vaulter Sam Bellah, in 1908. Miller qualified for the 400- and 800-meter runs and was expected to win a medal, but he injured himself and was not able to travel to London.
But Miller was best remembered for his many clutch victories on campus. When Sam McDonald, Stanford's popular superintendent of athletics buildings and grounds from 1908 to 1957, was asked about the most exciting moment in Stanford's sports history, he quickly noted the 1909 "Big Track Meet". In that, Miller, running the anchor leg of the final event, the mile relay, came from behind to win and gave Stanford the victory.
Bellah returned to the 1912 Olympics, but not with Miller. This time he brought with him a high jumper named George Horine, a Palo Altan who had already made a name for himself with his controversial jumping style.
In the back yard of his Channing Avenue home, Horine developed a technique known as the "Western Roll" and later perfected it at Stanford. He used it one day at the Angell Field track to break by half an inch the long-standing world record of 6 feet, 5 5/8 inches. He later shattered his own record by jumping 6 feet, 7 inches in the Olympic trials, only to place a disappointing third at the Olympics in Stockholm.
But track officials wanted to outlaw the style because they said it constituted diving over the bar.
At the 1920 Olympics trials, another Stanford athlete, Dink Templeton, who became Stanford's track coach a year later, used Horine's "Western Roll." The officials ruled that he dove over the bar and he was disqualified. But the "Western Roll" eventually became the standard technique used by high jumpers worldwide until the development of the backward "Fosbury flop" in the late 1960s.
Templeton would later coach another great high jumper from Palo Alto - Les Steers who, with an adaptation of the "Western Roll," would break many prep records at Palo Alto High School and would set a world record of 6 feet, 11 inches while at the University of Oregon. That record would last from 1941 to 1953.
[edit] Effects on Menlo Park
The major effect Stanford had on its northern neighbor, Menlo Park, during the early part of the century had very little to do with higher education. It mostly had to do with lower behavior at saloons, where Stanford's students would congregate. Palo Alto remained a dry city in accordance with Governor Stanford's instruction.
But despite the number of saloons, Menlo Park before World War I was a quiet town where life revolved around agriculture and the railroad.
[edit] 1920s
During the 1920s, construction of sports facilities surged. In 1921, 100 teams of horses and mules pulling scrapers moved 232,000 cubic yards of earth to create Stanford Stadium. Construction was finished in time for the annual Big Game against California. Encina Pavilion was built for basketball in 1922 and the Sunken Diamond, for baseball games, was finished in 1925 in the pit left after a stadium project.
In between sports facility construction projects, university President Ray Lyman Wilbur pushed Stanford toward becoming a true, outward-looking university instead of the fairly insulated, regional school it became during the hard years after Mrs. Stanford's death. Wilbur expanded graduate study at the university, reorganized the independent departments into schools and promoted faculty research.
[edit] Herbert Hoover and Stanford
When Herbert Hoover became the 31st president of the United States, he became Stanford's most famous alumnus.
Hoover's ties to Stanford University were strong enough that he once aspired to be Stanford's president, and when he was nominated for the nation's presidency by the Republicans in l928, he gave his acceptance speech from his campus residence. That residence, known as the Hoover House, is now home to Stanford presidents. He also established a library for the study of war, revolution and peace at Stanford.
Hoover also has a claim to being Stanford's very first student. He was part of the "pioneer" class that enrolled in 1891. He later said he was the first student to sleep in the men's dormitory (Encina Hall) before the university was formally opened "and so may be said to be its first student."
Hoover biographer David Burner notes that Hoover, a geology student, was class treasurer and financial manager of the athletic association. As such, he arranged Stanford's first football game with Berkeley and helped build a baseball diamond and stands. He was also involved with various money-making ventures as a student, partially because he was an orphan without much money.
Hoover's post-Stanford career included a successful stint as manager of a gold mine in Australia and of mines in China and South America, along with involvement in a company that explored for oil deposits.
His organizational bent and his Quaker background were instrumental in catapulting him to international prominence during World War I when he organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which supplied food to the German-occupied country.
His work in Belgium led to his selection to President Woodrow Wilson's War Council in 1916 as United States Food Administrator, and his political career was off and running - until it was derailed by the events of 1929.
[edit] Post-WWII
By the mid-'40s returning soldiers and newcomers were swelling the ranks of Stanford University, bringing undergraduate enrollment from a bit more than 3,700 in 1945 to 8,200 in 1947. Although facilities jammed, construction on campus was limited by continuing material shortages. But in 1945, Stanford established its first Planning Office to study space, soon figuring out that it could eke out more space in classrooms, labs and dorms, just in time to meet the post-war demand from discharged veterans.
Realizing there simply wasn't room on campus for students, the university snatched up the Dibble Hospital site in Menlo Park, renaming it Stanford Village and providing 300 apartments for married students as well as 1,500 dorm beds.
[edit] 1950s
In 1956, the $15 million Stanford Shopping Center opened with 47 new stores. The center began to drain the life from the downtown Inner Circle shopping area, located at the west end of University Avenue. Several downtown stores, including Roos Bros., Chandler's, the Travel Service and LaMontagne & Co., closed up and moved to the new center, principally to avoid a coming downtown shopping slump. The new shopping center even boasted a Slenderella reducing salon, a true sign that the era of scarcity had ended.
[edit] The Vietnam Era
Student activism in the Vietnam era at Stanford University, as in other places, began as an outgrowth of civil rights activism. In the summer of 1964, known as "Freedom Summer," thousands of college students from all over the country volunteered to travel to Mississippi to register black voters. Stanford had the largest contingent of any university there, according to Bob Beyers, who was head of the Stanford news service at the time.
Among the Stanford contingent was David Harris, who was later talked into running for Stanford student body president in the spring of 1966, who won by the largest margin and drew the biggest voter turnout ever at Stanford.
The Vietnam War would change both Harris and Stanford - sending the young man to jail as a nationally prominent draft resister and converting the formerly quiet academic institution into a focal point for demonstrations, building occupations, arson fires and street fights with the police.
Before 1966, the vast majority of students had been silent on the issue of the war. But that year brought a dramatic escalation in the fighting, an increase in casualties, and perhaps most importantly, an end to automatic student deferrals from the draft.
Stanford made national news on Feb. 20, 1967, when some students shouted at Vice President Hubert Humphrey after he made a speech at the university. According to Beyers, the incident was distorted by a wire story and then picked up by other media.
In the eyes of the nation, however, Stanford was suddenly a hotbed of anti-war radicalism. It was a reputation the university wouldn't truly deserve until a few years later.
In November 1967, a protest was staged against CIA recruiting on campus. Later that month there was an all-night peace vigil at Memorial Church, and more than 2,000 students attended.
As at other universities, the debate within the movement often focused on tactics. Often student groups publicly disagreed. When seven students were suspended for their role in the anti-CIA demonstration, 200 to 300 students occupied the Old Union to protest the suspension. But at the same time more than 1,500 students gathered outside the Old Union and--on a close vote--rejected the sit-in tactics of their fellow students.
That protest led to what former Stanford President Richard Lyman remembered as the largest and most acrimonious meeting ever of the Stanford faculty. Lyman, then provost, listened as a badly divided faculty narrowly voted in favor of amnesty for the seven students, overturning President Wallace Sterling's recommendation for suspension.
Lyman went home that night and wrote a letter of resignation. "The faculty was ungovernable," he recalls thinking at the time. The next morning he tore up the letter because he didn't want to leave Sterling "the ensuing chaos" of his resignation.
As the anti-war protests continued, the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps building burned down in a suspected arson fire. In another incident, Sterling's own office was torched.
By 1969, the protesters began focusing on war research being carried out at Stanford. That spring, the focus narrowed to classified research, which began what observers recall as a tumultuous six weeks.
A large meeting on April 3 served as the birthplace of what was called the April 3 Movement or A3M. It galvanized the students into action against war research. On April 9, several hundred students began a nine-day occupation of Stanford's Applied Electronics Laboratory.
During the occupation, the Faculty Senate voted to consider guidelines that would prohibit classified research. But the occupation of the lab didn't end until the students agreed to attend an all-campus meeting called by student body president Denis Hayes.
Hayes, now best known as founder of Earth Day 1970 and 1990, recalled that the all-campus meeting drew 8,000 people to Frost Amphitheater, where students and faculty almost universally agreed that classified research should end, said Hayes. A few days later, that's how the Faculty Senate voted.
Two weeks later, Stanford trustees voted to sever the university's ties with the Stanford Research Institute. This move actually turned out to be a defeat for the students, who preferred that the university bring SRI under tighter faculty control.
By 1969, campus sentiment against the Vietnam War was nearly unanimous, Hayes recalled. "People were desperately trying to figure out what to do about it," he said. Building occupations, rallies and confrontations with the police continued.
But on May 1, 1969 occupation of Encina Hall did have the potential to turn bloody. When faculty members saw students removing administration files from the building, Lyman felt he had to call in the police. "When I called the police, I thought I could lose my job," he recalled.
Violence was averted when the students voted to leave, just before police began streaming into the building.
[edit] H. Bruce Franklin
Like other universities across the nation, Stanford had its own newsmaking rabble-rouser, H. Bruce Franklin.
A self-proclaimed Maoist, the feisty, free-thinking English professor, science fiction expert and Menlo Park resident led demonstrations, taught classes in Marxism and became a leader in the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, a Marxist-Leninist organization that espoused the violent overthrow of the government.
On Feb. 12, 1971, Stanford University dismissed Franklin for inciting "occupation of the university computer center, urging defiance of a police order to disperse, and calling a nighttime rally for violent action."
After seven years of violence that included race riots, anti-war demonstrations and three painful assassinations, America was a society sickened, but not yet chastened, by violence. More years of turmoil were still to come.
