Ninety-two years ago today, our 2nd cousin 4x removed (on the Green branch), Rufus Lot Green, died in Palo Alto, California. Born in Rush County, Indiana, in 1862, he married Hoosier Emma Edwards in 1886, and the couple had three children—Helen (1887), Hazel Elizabeth (1890), and Thomas Edwards (1900).
After studying mathematics at Indiana University, he began teaching there in 1891. Two years later he moved west to Leland Stanford Junior University, which had just been founded. One of his first students was Herbert Hoover, a geology major, with whom he maintained a friendship. (Hoover is our 10th cousin 4x removed on the Cross branch.)
Rufus Green wasn’t afraid of letting his opinion be known, even if he sometimes sounded like a crank. In December 1905, as chair of the Faculty Committee on Student Body Affairs, he went to war with the rowdier elements of the Stanford student body—in particular, the residents of Encina Hall, known on campus “The Madhouse.” The committee expelled several students for public drunkenness, hazing, and theft, as well as the editor of the school paper who spoke out against its plans to reform Encina, which included putting “watchmen” in the hall to keep the peace.
Sound excessive? A little background from the Sep/Oct 1998 issue of Stanford Magazine:
The Bad Boys of Encina Hall
It was the grandest dormitory in the country—an imposing four-story sandstone edifice with a stately lobby, huge dining hall and the luxury of electricity and hot running water. Opened on October 1, 1891, the University’s first day, Encina Hall was modeled on a resort at Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland. . . .
But when the students arrived, their frontier manners elbowed out any old-world pretensions. Many of them had grown up in the rural West, and this was their first taste of independence. Within a month, Encina students had freed a freight car from a nearby rail spur, threatening a wreck on the main line. It took hours, a newspaper reported, to calm Leland Stanford.
Orrin Leslie Elliott, the first registrar, later wrote in his University history: Encina men were proud . . . that student activities, student plans, student leadership [were] centered in the Hall. But this pride did not seem to include a personal feeling for the building itself. Its noble architecture, its amplitude, its great dining hall, its furnishings, were not thought of as personal possessions to be cherished and jealously cared for. Accordingly, as time went on, everything that could be abused was abused. Roughhousing spared nothing. Encina was . . . known to outsiders as the ‘madhouse.’ . . .
One student wrote home about the popular trick of “turning up a room.” A resident would come home to find “all but the walls of his room inverted, with the inkstand crowning unsteadily the sorry pile.” University furnishings in that pile usually included two bronze-trimmed iron bedsteads, one or two wardrobes, a large study table, four high-backed oak chairs, a mirror, two rugs, electric lights, and a washstand. . . . In 1893, someone stole the cigars and whiskey that Jane Stanford provided for former U.S. President Benjamin Harrison [our 16th cousin 7x removed on the Standiford branch], who was staying at Encina while teaching law on campus.
Encina’s long, wide halls and cavernous stairwells encouraged student rambunctiousness. Throwing things into the lobby, from trays full of dishes to heavy furniture, became a favorite game. Freshman Henry Boutelle wrote his mother on November 22, 1891: “At 11:30 p.m. the lights went out, and the fellows ‘fired’ a chair, a spittoon, and several other things downstairs . . . the chair came pretty nearly hitting Professor Swain on the head as he walked by.” When Boutelle and his roommate went down the hall to investigate, “we saw three streaks of fire shoot out and heard three shots, so Fred and I concluded that we were in a dangerous locality and quietly went back to our room.” . . .
The administration responded to the growing turmoil with tighter management. It assigned student monitors in 1896, and eventually watchmen were put on patrol. But trouble persisted. As frosh-soph rivalry developed, so did hazing. One common practice was “tubbing”: holding a freshman’s head under water in a bathtub until he “bubbled”—that is, opened his mouth in desperation and gasped for air. [For more on this, see “Nowadays We’d Call It ‘Waterboarding’” in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Stanford Magazine.]
In spring 1905, two students were expelled for “shooting fireworks and revolvers and flooding the place with water” and breaking “nearly all of the lights in the hallways,” in the words of watchman Robert Slattery. Another was evicted for smashing furniture but came back one night to stir up trouble. Slattery—who came under fire himself for carrying a gun—wrote to police authorities on September 29, 1905 about the student’s return: I had just come on duty when I noticed that there was something up. The lights in the Club Room were turned out, chairs were broken and tables turned over. . . . I went into the Club Room and began to place the chairs in their right places; then they started to throw rocks and beer bottles, shaving cups, spittoon boxes, chairs, and wooden boxes . . . two men stayed and threw rocks at me for at least 15 minutes.
Twenty “incorrigible rioters” were evicted as a result.
The earthquake of April 18, 1906, imposed its own abrupt discipline. Two large chimneys collapsed through to the basement, killing one student and injuring several others. Encina was repaired within five months, but its ambience had changed. The earthquake “did something to clear the local atmosphere,” Registrar Elliott wrote 30 years later. “The larger aspects of the University life resumed their proper place. In the presence of the great disaster there was a disposition to let bygones be bygones and to find a reasonable basis for faculty-student relations in matters of conduct and discipline.”
Wellll, not entirely. By September, Green and four other faculty members were driven from the committee. On hearing the news, according to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle (9-22-1906):
Students Celebrate Passing of Green
Band Heads Big Parade on the Stanford Campus
Stanford University, September 21—An extraordinary demonstration of feeling occurred on the campus last night when it became known that Chairman Rufus Lot Green of the faculty committee on student affairs had tendered his resignation. The rejoicing of the men of the university knew no bounds, and they gave expression to their joy in the most noisy manner. A large portion of the band gathered their musical instruments, and, falling into line, headed a great parade of wildly excited collegians up and down the streets of the campus. Professor Green resides on Salvatierra Street, and the procession stopped in front of his house and yelled and cheered wildly. Professor Green did not make an appearance. Never before in the history of the university has there been such a strong demonstration against a member of the faculty.
Though he lost the battle, Green continued the fight against the forces of drunkenness and immorality. In January 1926, he made the papers by speaking out against corruption in the Anti-Saloon League. At the time, he was vice president of the California Anti-Saloon League, and gave a lecture at the First Congregational Church of Palo Alto titled, “Why the Large Sums of Money Given the Anti-Saloon League Are Not Yielding More Results,” and called for Dr. Arthur H. Briggs, president of the national League, to resign. (Visalia Daily Times, 1-25-26) Briggs remained, but Green was forced out.
Then, a year later, Green reappeared in West Coast newspapers in an academic dust-up. That May, a high school teacher from Seattle named Bertice C. Hastings claimed he had discovered how to trisect an angle using “geometric processes,” a riddle that had baffled mathematicians for 2,000 years. Hastings said he’d solved it one morning before breakfast.
Green thought the claim dubious: “‘The fact that an angle cannot be trisected by Greek or geometric process—a process using only straight edges and a pair of compasses—is settled,’ he asserted. ‘It was first raised by the Greeks. . . . but it is now definitely established as impossible. We can approximate the result as close as we please, but we cannot actually do it.’” (Peninsula Time Tribune, 5-5-27) The Redwood City Tribune (5-6-27) claimed Green and fellow Stanford professor Robert E. Allardice “hooted” at the claim and said, “It’s all nonsense,” and “It can’t be done.” Indeed, it never has, and this time Green was not forced to resign for his impassioned advocacy.
The Green family were Stanford people, through and through. Daughter Helen (class of 1910) met and married Robert Cross (no relation to the Cross branch) in 1913, and the couple settled in Berkeley, where he had a job at Chase Bank. They had two children: Stuart (1918) and Rosemary (1922). Helen later became director of the Stanford University Museum and Art Gallery (today the Cantor Arts Center).
Daughter Hazel graduated from Stanford in 1914 (pledging Kappa Alpha Theta) with a degree in economics. She first worked for the YWCA in New York, but returned to California where she was employed at the juvenile court in San Jose. She never married, worked in advertising for a department store, and died relatively young at the age of 43.
Son Thomas graduated from Stanford in 1923. Above is a photo of his company in the Students’ Army Training Corps outside—wait for it—Encina Hall! I don’t know which cadet is Thomas, but he’s wearing a hat. In 1924 he married Doris Maude Stevenson (another Stanford grad) at Camp Curry in Yosemite—a favorite hiking spot of the Greens.
Rufus Lot Green eventually retired from active teaching. In
1928, he and Emma visited his old student Herbert Hoover at the White House,
one year before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. He died at the Green home at 541
Salvatierra Street in 1932. Daughter Hazel died there a year later, and wife Emma
in 1946. The home currently houses Stanford Law School’s Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, ironic considering how conflict seemed to follow Rufus Lot Green.
Rufus, Emma, Hazel, and Thomas are all interred in the same
crypt at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, the same cemetery where you can
find Shirley Temple and Steve Jobs. (I do not know the identity of Patricia Davidson, listed on the crypt, but she is not Thomas's spouse or child.)
No comments:
Post a Comment