100 Years Ago (1908)
After spending the evening at Menlo Park’s notorious Meyer saloon, W. M. Cooley, a junior in electrical engineering, missed his Emerson Street house by a block and entered the wrong house in Palo Alto. The drunken student was mistaken for a burglar and shot dead—and the events inadvertently triggered Stanford’s first major student protest: the “Liquor Rebellion.” The tragedy capped months of campus tension over unruly behavior resulting from “beer busts.”
President David Starr Jordan had been asking county authorities to close down Meyer’s and the Wunder (later Rossotti’s and now the Alpine Inn Beer Garden). The faculty Committee on Student Affairs had declined to prohibit liquor on campus, instead trying moral suasion. But after Cooley’s death, the Academic Council took a stand against drinking in student residences, and the student affairs committee issued a warning against campus drunkenness that some interpreted as an outright ban on liquor. Three hundred students protested with a noisy “parade,” complete with banging instruments and discharge of firearms, to the committee chairman’s College Terrace house. Not finding him home, they lingered with catcalls and insulting remarks.
Within days, the committee suspended a dozen protest leaders. Outraged, 247 men signed a petition claiming they had participated in the demonstration and should receive the same penalty, but also asking for reinstatement of the suspended students. Unexpectedly, the committee said it would set hearing dates for each petitioner.
The campus exploded, newspapers carried banner headlines, and alumni got involved with meetings and letters. In the end, the committee suspended 41 men for the remainder of the semester and added units to the graduation requirements of many others. By the 1908-09 school year, the breach between faculty and students was largely healed and campus drinking noticeably reduced.
75 YEARS AGO (1933)
Returning in March from four years as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Hoover, Stanford President Ray Lyman Wilbur found the institution reeling from the full force of the Depression. The Students’ Employment Bureau was dubbed the “Unemployment Bureau.” A revolving emergency loan fund was out of cash. Enrollment had slipped to levels not seen since 1924. Soon after Wilbur’s return, trustees imposed a 10 percent salary reduction on faculty members and on staff earning more than $1,000 a year, thus avoiding layoffs. They restored half the cut the following year.
50 YEARS AG0 (1958)
Physicist Robert Hofstadter reported obtaining measurements of the shape of the neutron, one of the basic particles of all matter, using the 700 million-volt Mark III linear accelerator at the High Energy Physics Laboratory on campus.
25 YEARS AG0 (1983)
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip dined at Lou Henry Hoover House with 92 guests, including students, faculty and staff. The Stanford Band serenaded the queen as hundreds milled about the area, hoping for a glimpse of her.
KAREN BARTHOLOMEW, ’71, writes this column on behalf of the Stanford Historical Society.
