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Hoover's personality began to be felt in Stanford's affairs soon after he built the spacious, flat-roofed house hard by the campus where in 1928 he was to receive the news of his election to the Presidency. In 1912 he went on Stanford's Board of Trustees. By that time Ray Lyman Wilbur was dean of the Medical School.
In 1913 Dr. Jordan, vigorous and powerful at 62 (he had played first base on the faculty baseball team until his 98th year), was not due for retirement for three years. The trustees offered him the chancellorship of the university. In his autobiography he tells how, abruptly on Commencement Day, his new appointment was announced: "The audience . . . was plainly dazed. . . . Hoover now rose and proposed 'Three cheers for the chancellor!' But few understood why they should cheer at what seemed (to most, at least) a painful separation, and he got only a slight response."
Dr. John Casper Branner, the geology professor in whose laboratory Bert Hoover first met Lou Henry, was promoted from the university's vice-presidency to succeed Dr. Jordan. Dr. Branner lived less than three years and in 1916 Ray Lyman Wilbur stepped up. That year Dr. Jordan became chancellor emeritus.
Fish & Peace— "I would rather be president of Stanford than emperor, and so would I again if I had my life to live over," said Dr. Jordan on his retirement. Buthiskicking-upstairs could be attributed partly to his increasing absorption in two other pursuits, his two other lives, Ichthyology and Peace. To the hall that the trustees had named for him he repaired with all good grace to revise and add to his tremendous output of books and monographs (more than 6,000 of them). As Chancellor he could sally forth freely on his fish-collecting trips all over the world. No man ever caught and classified so many fish as he.
His passion for Peace was aroused when he found cause to suspect that the Spanish-American War was promoted for private profit (see p. 63). His scientific, nature-loving mind was shocked by the realization that "war takes the best men that nations produce. It kills them off and leaves the inferior ones to perpetuate the race." Familiar throughout the land became the tall, fine old figure, black-hatted and garbed in loose-fitting clothes, of Jordan the Peace-Maker, chief director (1910-14) of the World Peace Foundation, onetime (1915) president of the World's Peace Congress, vice president of the American Peace Society. When the World War came, he toured the country urging pacifism. In New Haven, Yale students hooted and jeered him. At the Baltimore Academy of Music in April 1917 he was almost mobbed by rioters who sang: ''Hang Dave Jordan on a Sour Apple Tree!" After the U. S. entered the War, however, he made no more speeches. And ten years after the Baltimore incident he received a letter from one Carter G. Osburn, who said he had led the Baltimore mob: "No apology is possible for such an act. ... I was at the time 20 years old. . . . In these ten years I saw something of the actuality of war. . . . You were motivated by the principles of civilization, while I was motivated by ... barbarism."