lulu miller is more writer than historian. this book—and history—suffers for it.
this book is structured in a strange way. each chapter peels back a different facet of jordan's life analogized to her own, though neither are told chronologically. the first half of the book paints jordan as a quirky but sympathetic character, until a sudden descent into covering up jane stanford's murder and advocating for forced sterilization.
here's the problem: jordan was a eugenicist and white supremacist the whole time. from his first academic job at IU to his presidency at stanford, jordan railed against "unfit genes" polluting "the Anglo-Saxon race." even seemingly redeeming or innocuous aspects, like his religion or his pacificism, ultimately served his white supremacy: jordan disliked war because it decimated the "fittest" of the white male genes.
miller's storytelling requires her to first humanize jordan to the reader, aside from his obsession with categorizing fish, then show how this desire for Order caused his eugenicist views. even in the later part, she describes his distaste for the "unfit," but conveniently skips over his stance that the white race was the fittest. but this is ahistorical: centuries before jordan was born, the taxonomies of western science were invented to justify europeans' mental and physical superiority over those they colonized. jordan's racism doesn't prove the flaws with this scientific approach; rather, both phenomena stemmed from the same root cause (centuries of white supremacy). thus, she sacrifices historical accuracy for the sake of a character arc.
this book was also incredibly whitewashed. the chapter on his eugenicist views somehow barely mentioned race, and when it did, just suggested that discrimination against the "unfit" just happened to have racially disproportionate effects. yet eugenics was always a movement about race. racism was the motivation, not the consequence, of these beliefs. and the framing of "how could a little boy become so evil?"—plus the way miller compared jordan's childhood quirks to her own depression—reminded me of how mental health is always used to solicit empathy for white mass shooters. by framing his life this way, she turns systemic problems—the collusion of western racists and scientists—into psychological ones—jordan's refusal to accept that "we don't matter."
i was looking forward to this book a lot as a story of someone whose sins have disappeared into the shadows—his name was emblazoned across the stanford psych building until 2020. instead, i'm disappointed that this book is how he'll live in the popular consciousness.
(jan 22, 2021)
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