San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Asparagus With Bacon & Sambal-Lime Vinaigrette
Historian digs into the 1905 death of the university’s co-founder
4 servings
A delicate blanch, a punchy spicy-sweet vinaigrette and a lot of rich bacon lardons dress up asparagus for lunch, dinner or a potluck.
1½ pounds of thick asparagus spears
6 to 8 ounces slab of bacon (without skin)
or pancetta
Kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil plus more, if needed
2 small shallots, finely chopped 1½ tablespoons sambal
Zest from 1 lime
¼ cup lime juice
2 tablespoons brown sugar
¼ cup chopped dill
Slice or snap tough bottoms off the asparagus spears and discard (or keep to make veggie broth). Slice the bacon into lardons, pieces about ½-inch thick, and set aside. Fill a large bowl with ice water and set it near your stove.
FIll a large skillet (preferably 10 to 12 inches wide with high sides) with 1½ inches of water and bring to a rapid simmer. Season with enough salt so that you can taste it, but it’s not salty. Add half of the asparagus spears in the water and cook them until crisp-tender, about 45 seconds to 1 minute and 15 seconds. With tongs, quickly transfer the blanched asparagus to the prepared ice water bath and swish them around; repeat with the remaining asparagus. Let excess water drip off the spears and transfer them to a serving platter.
Discard the water in the pan, wipe it dry and then heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the bacon lardons and cook, stirring regularly until they are golden and crispy, with some chew left so don’t get them too, too crispy. Turn off the heat and transfer the lardons to the platter with the asparagus. Make sure there are 4 tablespoons of fat in the pan; discard any excess or add more olive oil, if needed, to equal 4 tablespoons.
Turn the heat back on to medium, stir in the shallots and cook until softened, about 1 minute. Turn off the heat and stir in the sambal, lime zest, lime juice and brown sugar until the mixture melts together. Taste and season with salt, if needed. Spoon the sauce over the asparagus, sprinkle the dill over and serve.
Graduation season is once again upon us as is the time-honored tradition of the commencement speech. While some are more inspiring than others, these headlining events often do not age well. Speakers have long mixed their platitudes with justifications of terrible things, from racism to disastrous wars, but rarely have they celebrated covering up murder.
In 1905, David Starr Jordan, the president of Leland Stanford Jr. University, may have done precisely that.
In doing research for my book on the death of the co-founder of Stanford University, Jane Stanford, I spent several years going through the university’s archives, the Hawaiian archives, collections of private papers, newspapers in California and Hawaii, and such police records that survive. I found that Jordan was a master of what Gilded Age Americans called “inwardness.” By inward they meant something whose appearance belied its deeper meaning. Jordan’s posthumous celebration in speeches, articles and books of Jane Stanford as the “Good Woman” was deeply inward. It hid the reality that he and Stanford had come to hate each other.
His 1905 commencement speech was similarly inward.
Before her sudden death in Hawaii by strychnine poisoning a few months earlier, Jane Stanford had decided to fire Jordan. Without a dead Jane Stanford, Jordan would not have delivered his address to 250 Stanford graduates. After the death, Jordan went to Honolulu as a representative of the university and Jane Stanford’s estate, ostensibly to bring home her body but really to discredit the findings of a coroner’s jury and the Honolulu police that she had met death at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
Jordan created a counter narrative. He hired a doctor who concluded that although the autopsy found her stomach to be empty, eating a large lunch had created considerable gas, which created pressure on her heart. This prompted hysteria and triggered a heart attack.
She presumably could have been saved by a fart.
That the autopsy showed no evidence of a heart attack did not deter Jordan. He slandered the doctors present at her death and those who had conducted the autopsy. He dismissed the investigation by the Honolulu police. And he persuaded the San Francisco police, who were easily persuadable, to accept his conclusions.
In Honolulu, an outraged High Sheriff William Henry later said Jordan came to Honolulu for the sole purpose of making it seem “that Mrs. Stanford died from natural causes and was not murdered.”
Henry predicted rich people would not leave large sums to universities “when they think they thereby risk having the term of their natural days shortened for the purpose of getting at the money left in their wills.”
The sheriff thought Stanford University was nearly bankrupt (which was not true) and that it had need of money Jane Stanford still controlled, which was true. Stanford was always about money. Harvard University President Charles Eliot told Jordan that the general feeling was that the Stanfords had “tried to raise a personal monument by the good use of ill-gotten money.” Jane Stanford acted as if she owned the place. And, for all practical purposes, she did.
By praising her so effusively, Jordan tried to mask their quarrels and his cover-up.
Until this day, the Stanford administration has maintained Jordan’s portrait of Stanford as a university founded on love: the love of a mother for her child, her husband, and ultimately all the children of humanity. No one had any reason hate her, let alone kill her, unless they were deranged.
But in 1905 it was all too apparent that Jane Stanford had numerous enemies who, because of her control of their personal lives, her termination of their positions, and her taking of money they thought was rightfully theirs, hated her. Jordan was hardly the only one with a motive for murder. And there were widespread rumors that it was Stanford rather than the killer who was deranged. If Stanford University was her child, then she often seemed ready to abandon it by turning it over to the Catholic Church, refusing to admit women students as required by its charter or withdrawing her funds from its support. Jordan thought that a murder trial would bare issues that would not benefit the university. Many agreed with him.
It was a relief that the Good Woman was gone.
When on May 24, 1905, Jordan gave his “final words” to men and women receiving degrees, he may not have intended the speech to sound like a justification of his own actions in the Stanford case, but it did. Everything they had learned, he told them, “should be an impulse to action ... If you have planned somewhat, then carry out your plans. If you have learned the nature of something, then turn your knowledge into execution. If you have gained aspirations these count for nothing except as you try to make them good . ... There is no virtue in knowledge, in training, in emotion or in aspiration except as you use them in the conduct of life. And the conduct of life is not a negative thing — to commit no crimes, to keep out of jail and to wait until things come to you. This is not righteousness. To do nothing wrong is not to live aright. For living is a most positive matter, moving things, changing things, using man and matter to accomplish the results which seem to you worth while.”
Jordan had taken command of events; he moved things, changed things, and used “man and matter to accomplish the results that to him seemed worth while.” By his standards, he lived aright. And he had stayed out of jail. Jordan was an advocate of science, pacifism, conservation and co-education. He stood up to Jane Stanford when she tried to close the university to women. But he was also a eugenicist and that has led to his posthumous downfall. The university recently stripped his name from Jordan Hall, and, lamenting the lack of memorials to Jane Stanford on campus, renamed the road in front of the Quad as Jane Stanford Way.
Once the entire campus was a memorial to the Stanford family — from the Memorial Arch to the statue of the family that stood at the approach to the original Memorial Church dedicated to Leland Stanford. The 1906 earthquake destroyed the arch and the church. It brought Annie Stanford, the widow of Leland Stanford’s brother Asa, grim satisfaction. The earthquake was “almost an act of just retribution” for Jane’s cruelty, pitilessness and vengefullness. Jane had told Asa, then old and sick, “When your brother died, our relations were severed. I don’t know you.”
In eliminating one problematic figure, the university now celebrates another.
This year when you listen to the pieties of the prominent, consider that they may be inward. Their prose may be attempts to obscure and not to educate.