Word: stoddard
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...position of Keyes D. Metcalf, present director of Harvard's collection of almost 5,000,000 books and pamphlets, can be compared in name only to the job held by Solomon Stoddard, the first librarian, who in 1667 had charge of "a library and books then valued at 400lbs." In fact it was not until Gore Hall, fireproof extensions and all, was razed to make way for Widener that the job called for a tactician and administrator rather than a pioneer...
...famed child-psychologist and long time professor at the University of Iowa, in 1938, tweedy, babyfaced, middle-aged George Dinsmore Stoddard jolted his colleagues by demonstrating that I.Q.s (supposedly determined at birth) could be altered by environment. The methods: 1) planting some 300 children of feeble-minded parents and "poor stock" in good homes, where they turned out quite bright; 2) observing the "deterioration" of apparently normal youngsters in the unsalutary atmosphere of overcrowded orphanages...
...soon after becoming New York State's Commissioner of Education, pragmatic Dr. Stoddard had something more to say about mental deterioration. "Feeble in mind," he wrote in a book called The Meaning of Intelligence, "are the persons whose intact brains, giving the highest promise up through childhood, . . . have been so systematically drugged with the vapors of dogma, superstition and pseudo logic. . . . Man-made concepts, such as devils, witches, taboos, hellfire, original sin . . . and divine revelation . . . have distorted the intellectual processes of millions of persons...
Last week a group of Illinois churchmen, led by conservative Roman Catholic Bishop James A. Griffin of Springfield, vehemently agreed. Said Bishop Griffin: "We want to know what we're paying for. . . . Thousands of [Dr. Stoddard's] future students believe in the objective validity of [original sin and hell]. . . . He will evidently try to dispossess his charges of their feeble-mindedness." Said the Bishop: the new president should make a profession of faith. Replied Dr. Stoddard, who will not take office until next July: "We need more religion rather than more theologies. . . . Frankly, I should be much happier...
...Board's chairman, Marriner Stoddard Eccles, is scared stiff of inflation, doubts it can be wholly avoided during the next three years. Utah Banker Eccles has thoroughly sold the Truman Administration, as he could never sell its predecessor, on the need for trimming Government expenditures and making a bold stab at trying-some day-to balance the budget...