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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a foggy September day in 1950, most Bay Area residents were going about their daily lives, headed to work or school. The newspapers were full of headlines about the Korean War — no one suspected that the U.S military might be testing weapons just outside the Golden Gate.[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But they were. Now known as Operation Seaspray, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s real. For eight days in September 1950, the U.S. military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area from a Navy ship offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a biological warfare experiment; \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=CLCTL4woX_4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&ots=1gbJq0C-cL&sig=mIFxFGJC_-htAI4iwTLuljzbpKI#v=onepage&q=san%20francisco&f=false\">just one of over 200 secret tests carried out nationwide from the 1940s through the 1960s\u003c/a>. The bacteria were supposed to be harmless, so the military had no medical monitoring plan in place for the experiment. That would become a point of contention in the years that followed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why this seemed like a reasonable idea back then\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1950, the Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Army spokesmen warned of a communist takeover of the world, arguing that the only intelligent move was to prepare for another global war.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1200679/\">chemical weapons research division\u003c/a> within the military. And by the late 1940s, it had begun testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062950\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062950\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III stands in his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. This secret test later led to legal action by the Nevin family. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Research on weapons goes on all the time,” Matthew Meselson, a Harvard emeritus molecular biologist and geneticist, said. “Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak, if a war broke out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGAXfKP1JLg\">The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland\u003c/a>, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange. The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless,” Meselson said, “because they certainly didn’t want to kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And [something] that could easily be detected by simple methods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, the military chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21976608/\">Serratia marcescens\u003c/a> is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people. But it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While sailors \u003ca href=\"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005321081&seq=1\">sprayed this biological aerosol along the coast\u003c/a>, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it. They found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, reaching into communities in the East Bay as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried it directly over Stanford hospital, which at that time was still in San Francisco. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Stanford doctors were baffled as to how their patients had encountered the serratia marcescens because they’d never seen an outbreak before. They even published \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/555999#google_vignette\">an academic paper\u003c/a> about the serratia outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Biological weapons tests come to light\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1969, \u003ca href=\"https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-announcing-decisions-chemical-and-biological-defense-policies-and-programs\">Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons\u003c/a> and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed onto the international \u003ca href=\"https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/biological-weapons-convention-bwc-glance-0\">Biological Weapons Convention\u003c/a> — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/details/biologicaltestin00unit/page/n1/mode/2up\">more than 200 tests\u003c/a> that had been done on them: in the New York City subway, at Greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington, D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas and the Florida Keys and of course in San Francisco.[aside postID=news_12062097 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-03-KQED.jpg']Edward Nevin III was riding the BART train to work when he read his grandfather’s name in the Dec. 22, 1976, edition of \u003cem>the San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>. His grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital due to complications from a serratia marcescens infection. Nevin III, or Eddie III as his grandfather called him, had been nine years old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by the death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him,” Eddie III said. “They didn’t want the children in there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the time Eddie III learned that a secret biochemical weapons test in the 50s might have killed his beloved grandfather, he was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. He decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His huge Irish American family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home,” Eddie III said. “I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/abs/clouds-of-secrecy-the-armys-germ-warfare-tests-over-populated-areasleonard-a-cole-totowa-new-jersey-rowman-and-littlefield-1988/9F78E0487B7B3A3FB24AE5C612A6F141\">It was action-packed\u003c/a>. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were really mad at me,” Eddie III said. “They felt like they were heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military maintained that the test was safe and the death was a coincidence. Its lawyers argued that the government had \u003ca href=\"https://www.plainsite.org/opinions/4y32hvk8/mabel-nevin-v-united-states/\">legal immunity\u003c/a> from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. They said the military should have considered that there was potential for the test to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The judge did one fine thing,” Eddie III said. “He said, ‘There’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press.’ And so they filled the jury box every day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062951\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062951\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III looks at a New York Times article from 1981 about the lawsuit at his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/696/1229/328999/\">The Nevins lost their case\u003c/a>. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Nevin said he never thought that they would win.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But we still had to tell the story,” he said.” To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over. And that today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians,” he said. “And who knows where it could lead? It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> It’s a foggy September day in 1950s San Francisco. For most Bay Area residents, it’s a normal day…people get up and head out to work or school…just like any other day. The San Francisco Examiner is full of news about the Korean War and a reminder that daylight savings ends soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the ocean, just outside the Golden Gate, floats a Navy boat. On deck, men hold up what look like big metal hoses and point them at San Francisco. There’s a long, low cloud over them that could be mistaken for part of the area’s usual fog, but it’s not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two days later, Stanford hospital, which was located in San Francisco at the time, started noticing something odd. Doctors started seeing some patients complaining of serious chest pain, shortness of breath, chills and fever — symptoms of what’s called serratia marcescens infection. Doctors had never seen this bacteria at the hospital before, and certainly not in so many patients at one time. Eleven people got sick, and one would die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is it possible that the U.S. military was testing biological weapons on its own citizens? That’s what one Bay Curious listener wants to know. We’ll get into it right after this. I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The question we’re answering today is whether it’s possible the U.S. government was spraying bacteria over its own citizens to learn more about how to stage a biological attack on an enemy. And it’s true. In 1950, the military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area for eight days, with no medical monitoring plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was just one of hundreds of experiments that the military carried out in secret across the nation from the 1940s through the 1960s. These tests would affect people’s lives and help shape our country’s policy on biological weapons. Reporter Katherine Monahan takes us back to that time to help us understand how and why this happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of archival newsreel static\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The U.S. was obsessed with the threat from the Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> \u003cem>In 1950, men throughout the world learned to look at the brutal face of communism…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Only a few years out of World War II, people feared a World War III was on the horizon. And Army spokesmen said the only intelligent move was to prepare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 1: \u003c/strong>For many years, information has been needed about the effects of a biological warfare attack on man.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 2: \u003c/strong>Because today the threat cannot be ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 3: \u003c/strong>If we adopt a pacifist attitude the end can only be a communist dictatorship of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a chemical weapons research division within the military. And in the late 1940s, it began testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>A very small circle of people knew anything about this. After all, it certainly wasn’t public knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Matthew Meselson is a Harvard molecular biologist and geneticist who served as a government consultant on arms control. He was instrumental in changing our nation’s policy on biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Research on weapons goes on all the time. Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak. If a war broke out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless because they certainly didn’t wanna kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And that could easily be detected by simple methods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>So the Army used substances that would disperse like a biological weapon, but weren’t actually harmful, as far as they knew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, they chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. Serratia marcescens is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people, but then it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has a unique property that makes it easy to track.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>It’s bright red, and that’s why the Navy decided to use it, because when you plate a sample from the air on a petri dish, there’s only one thing that makes nice red colonies and they’re very easy to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>While the testing team sprayed the bacteria along the coast, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it, and found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, covering the East Bay as well. The Army summarized its findings in a report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over: \u003c/strong>Every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5,000 or more fluorescent particles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That’s per minute. The test, Meselson said, showed that it was indeed possible to attack a coastal city by spraying a biological weapon from a boat offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Presumably, of course, if it was a real war, you’d use something like anthrax that would kill people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But this supposedly harmless bacteria may have killed someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music featuring chimes\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried the spray directly over Stanford hospital. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died, when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Its source was a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson would be one of the first members of the public to connect Edward Nevin’s death to the military’s experiment. But not until 15 years later, when a lab assistant shared a secret with him. Her boyfriend had worked at the Navy’s Biological Laboratory Facility in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Her boyfriend told her that one day the commander of this naval base called a meeting of everybody and told them that a recent test they had just done, probably was responsible for the death of a man, and if anyone ever talked about that publicly, that the Navy would make sure that that person could never find a job anywhere in the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson was already gravely concerned about the U.S. biological weapons program because he’d worked for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1963. He had high security clearances and was given a tour of Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the biological weapons were developed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> At Camp Detrick, a National Guard airport near Fredrick, Maryland, requisitioned for this purpose, a new chapter in an uncharted adventure was to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>We came to a seven-story building. So I asked the Colonel. What do you do in this building? And he said, we make anthrax spores there. So I said something like, well, why do we do that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel: \u003c/strong>The aim: defensive and offensive protection against this new weapon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>And he said, because anthrax could be a strategic weapon. Much cheaper than hydrogen bombs. Now, I don’t know if it occurred to me right away. But certainly on the taxi ride back to the State Department, it dawned on me that the last thing the United States would like is a cheap hydrogen bomb so that everybody could have one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Meselson began alerting members of the government that this was madness. He was friends with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was able to get the message through to President Richard Nixon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>You don’t wanna make powerful weapons very, very cheap. This would create a world in which we would be the losers. It’s obvious. It’s a simple argument and that’s what made the United States decide to get out of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>In 1969, Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed on to the international Biological Weapons Convention — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the more than 200 tests that had been done on them. And people were horrified. One of the first experiments people learned about was in the New York City subway system. Here’s a reenactment from a 1975 Senate hearing. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado is questioning Charles Senseney, a physicist at Fort Detrick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>How was the study or experiment conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney: \u003c/strong>Well, there was one person that was the operator — if you want to call it an operator — who rode a certain train, and walking between trains, dropped what looked like an ordinary light bulb, which contained biological simulant agent. And it went quite well through the entire subway system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>Were the officials of the city of New York aware that this study was being conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> I do not believe so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart:\u003c/strong> And certainly the passengers weren’t?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> That is correct.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The public was appalled. Even more so when a subsequent hearing and report revealed more tests — in greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas, and the Florida Keys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Edward Nevin III remembers when he first learned about the San Francisco experiment, now known to the public as Operation Seaspray.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III:\u003c/strong> I was on the BART train going into my office in San Francisco for Berkeley, where I lived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>He was reading the San Francisco Chronicle, as he usually did on his way to work, and saw that his grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I was reading it with sort of an upset that the government would do something like that. And, uh, I turned to the back page and it says, ‘The only person who died was Edward Nevin.’ That’s how I learned it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III, as his grandfather used to call him, had been 9-years-old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, uh, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him. They didn’t want the children in there. So I have absolute memory of that moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III by 1976 was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. And he decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He called his huge Irish American family together to discuss it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>One aunt, God love her, said, uh, ‘Eddie, you’re pretty young, are you sure we shouldn’t get someone that’s been around a while, you know?’ I said, ‘I don’t think anyone will do it. There’s no real money in it.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home. I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive. I’m sure he would’ve said no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But Eddie III was determined, and his family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was action-packed. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>People were really mad at me. They, they were, they felt like they were quite a heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The military maintained that the test was safe, and the death was a coincidence. And that, anyway, the government had legal immunity from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision like this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. And that they should have considered that there was potential for it to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>The judge did one fine thing. He said, there’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press. And so they filled the jury box every day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That is where the real trial took place, Nevin figures, in the minds of the American people. He says every day he was interviewed outside the courthouse, and the story ran in newspapers across the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan in scene: \u003c/strong>Did you ever think that you were gonna win?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>No. But we still had to tell the story. To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Nevins lost their case. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson, who campaigned to ban chemical weapons, is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson:\u003c/strong> This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians. And that’s not a very good thing to do in a war. Who knows where it could lead. It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED reporter Katherine Monahan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thank you for listening and donating and being members. We appreciate it so much. Thank you, and have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Operation Seaspray was a military experiment that tested biological weapons over San Francisco in the 1950s. While meant to be harmless, the bacteria used may have killed someone.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a foggy September day in 1950, most Bay Area residents were going about their daily lives, headed to work or school. The newspapers were full of headlines about the Korean War — no one suspected that the U.S military might be testing weapons just outside the Golden Gate.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But they were. Now known as Operation Seaspray, it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s real. For eight days in September 1950, the U.S. military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area from a Navy ship offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a biological warfare experiment; \u003ca href=\"https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=CLCTL4woX_4C&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&ots=1gbJq0C-cL&sig=mIFxFGJC_-htAI4iwTLuljzbpKI#v=onepage&q=san%20francisco&f=false\">just one of over 200 secret tests carried out nationwide from the 1940s through the 1960s\u003c/a>. The bacteria were supposed to be harmless, so the military had no medical monitoring plan in place for the experiment. That would become a point of contention in the years that followed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Why this seemed like a reasonable idea back then\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1950, the Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Army spokesmen warned of a communist takeover of the world, arguing that the only intelligent move was to prepare for another global war.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a \u003ca href=\"https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1200679/\">chemical weapons research division\u003c/a> within the military. And by the late 1940s, it had begun testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062950\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062950\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-01-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III stands in his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. This secret test later led to legal action by the Nevin family. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Research on weapons goes on all the time,” Matthew Meselson, a Harvard emeritus molecular biologist and geneticist, said. “Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak, if a war broke out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGAXfKP1JLg\">The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland\u003c/a>, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange. The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless,” Meselson said, “because they certainly didn’t want to kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And [something] that could easily be detected by simple methods.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, the military chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. \u003ca href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21976608/\">Serratia marcescens\u003c/a> is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people. But it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While sailors \u003ca href=\"https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005321081&seq=1\">sprayed this biological aerosol along the coast\u003c/a>, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it. They found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, reaching into communities in the East Bay as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried it directly over Stanford hospital, which at that time was still in San Francisco. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, Stanford doctors were baffled as to how their patients had encountered the serratia marcescens because they’d never seen an outbreak before. They even published \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/555999#google_vignette\">an academic paper\u003c/a> about the serratia outbreak.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Biological weapons tests come to light\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>In 1969, \u003ca href=\"https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-announcing-decisions-chemical-and-biological-defense-policies-and-programs\">Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons\u003c/a> and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed onto the international \u003ca href=\"https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/biological-weapons-convention-bwc-glance-0\">Biological Weapons Convention\u003c/a> — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the \u003ca href=\"https://archive.org/details/biologicaltestin00unit/page/n1/mode/2up\">more than 200 tests\u003c/a> that had been done on them: in the New York City subway, at Greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington, D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas and the Florida Keys and of course in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Edward Nevin III was riding the BART train to work when he read his grandfather’s name in the Dec. 22, 1976, edition of \u003cem>the San Francisco Chronicle\u003c/em>. His grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital due to complications from a serratia marcescens infection. Nevin III, or Eddie III as his grandfather called him, had been nine years old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by the death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him,” Eddie III said. “They didn’t want the children in there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the time Eddie III learned that a secret biochemical weapons test in the 50s might have killed his beloved grandfather, he was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. He decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His huge Irish American family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home,” Eddie III said. “I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/abs/clouds-of-secrecy-the-armys-germ-warfare-tests-over-populated-areasleonard-a-cole-totowa-new-jersey-rowman-and-littlefield-1988/9F78E0487B7B3A3FB24AE5C612A6F141\">It was action-packed\u003c/a>. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were really mad at me,” Eddie III said. “They felt like they were heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military maintained that the test was safe and the death was a coincidence. Its lawyers argued that the government had \u003ca href=\"https://www.plainsite.org/opinions/4y32hvk8/mabel-nevin-v-united-states/\">legal immunity\u003c/a> from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. They said the military should have considered that there was potential for the test to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The judge did one fine thing,” Eddie III said. “He said, ‘There’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press.’ And so they filled the jury box every day.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12062951\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12062951\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/11/251104-OPERATIONSEASPRAY-03-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edward Nevin III looks at a New York Times article from 1981 about the lawsuit at his home in Petaluma on Nov. 4, 2025. His grandfather, Edward J. Nevin, is tied to the 1950 Operation Seaspray experiment in San Francisco, in which the U.S. military released bacteria over the city. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/696/1229/328999/\">The Nevins lost their case\u003c/a>. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Nevin said he never thought that they would win.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But we still had to tell the story,” he said.” To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over. And that today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians,” he said. “And who knows where it could lead? It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> It’s a foggy September day in 1950s San Francisco. For most Bay Area residents, it’s a normal day…people get up and head out to work or school…just like any other day. The San Francisco Examiner is full of news about the Korean War and a reminder that daylight savings ends soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the ocean, just outside the Golden Gate, floats a Navy boat. On deck, men hold up what look like big metal hoses and point them at San Francisco. There’s a long, low cloud over them that could be mistaken for part of the area’s usual fog, but it’s not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two days later, Stanford hospital, which was located in San Francisco at the time, started noticing something odd. Doctors started seeing some patients complaining of serious chest pain, shortness of breath, chills and fever — symptoms of what’s called serratia marcescens infection. Doctors had never seen this bacteria at the hospital before, and certainly not in so many patients at one time. Eleven people got sick, and one would die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Is it possible that the U.S. military was testing biological weapons on its own citizens? That’s what one Bay Curious listener wants to know. We’ll get into it right after this. I’m Katrina Schwartz, and you’re listening to Bay Curious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/strong>The question we’re answering today is whether it’s possible the U.S. government was spraying bacteria over its own citizens to learn more about how to stage a biological attack on an enemy. And it’s true. In 1950, the military sprayed bacteria over an unsuspecting Bay Area for eight days, with no medical monitoring plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was just one of hundreds of experiments that the military carried out in secret across the nation from the 1940s through the 1960s. These tests would affect people’s lives and help shape our country’s policy on biological weapons. Reporter Katherine Monahan takes us back to that time to help us understand how and why this happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sounds of archival newsreel static\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The U.S. was obsessed with the threat from the Soviet Union.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> \u003cem>In 1950, men throughout the world learned to look at the brutal face of communism…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Cold War was in full swing, and the Korean War had just begun. Only a few years out of World War II, people feared a World War III was on the horizon. And Army spokesmen said the only intelligent move was to prepare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 1: \u003c/strong>For many years, information has been needed about the effects of a biological warfare attack on man.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 2: \u003c/strong>Because today the threat cannot be ignored.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip 3: \u003c/strong>If we adopt a pacifist attitude the end can only be a communist dictatorship of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>During WWII, the U.S. government had created a chemical weapons research division within the military. And in the late 1940s, it began testing on human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>A very small circle of people knew anything about this. After all, it certainly wasn’t public knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Matthew Meselson is a Harvard molecular biologist and geneticist who served as a government consultant on arms control. He was instrumental in changing our nation’s policy on biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Research on weapons goes on all the time. Otherwise, you’d be caught with your pants down, so to speak. If a war broke out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The program was centered at Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the Army produced, tested, and stockpiled pathogens like anthrax and botulism, as well as defoliants like Agent Orange.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The military wanted to know how these substances could be used to attack different populated areas. For example, whether a small boat offshore could spray a biological weapon to cover a coastal city like San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>They needed something that was, first of all, thought to be harmless because they certainly didn’t wanna kill everybody in San Francisco or Oakland. And that could easily be detected by simple methods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>So the Army used substances that would disperse like a biological weapon, but weren’t actually harmful, as far as they knew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the San Francisco experiment, they chose two bacteria: bacillus globigii and serratia marcescens. Serratia marcescens is found naturally in water and soil, and it’s not normally dangerous to healthy people, but then it’s not normally sprayed into the air in large quantities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It has a unique property that makes it easy to track.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>It’s bright red, and that’s why the Navy decided to use it, because when you plate a sample from the air on a petri dish, there’s only one thing that makes nice red colonies and they’re very easy to see.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>While the testing team sprayed the bacteria along the coast, monitors at 43 sampling stations around the Bay Area held up little cones to collect it, and found that it had traveled as far as 23 miles, covering the East Bay as well. The Army summarized its findings in a report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice over: \u003c/strong>Every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5,000 or more fluorescent particles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That’s per minute. The test, Meselson said, showed that it was indeed possible to attack a coastal city by spraying a biological weapon from a boat offshore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Presumably, of course, if it was a real war, you’d use something like anthrax that would kill people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But this supposedly harmless bacteria may have killed someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Music featuring chimes\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The winds carried the spray directly over Stanford hospital. Eleven patients developed serratia marcescens infections. And one of them — a 75-year-old Irish American named Edward Nevin — died, when the bacteria made its way into his heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Its source was a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson would be one of the first members of the public to connect Edward Nevin’s death to the military’s experiment. But not until 15 years later, when a lab assistant shared a secret with him. Her boyfriend had worked at the Navy’s Biological Laboratory Facility in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>Her boyfriend told her that one day the commander of this naval base called a meeting of everybody and told them that a recent test they had just done, probably was responsible for the death of a man, and if anyone ever talked about that publicly, that the Navy would make sure that that person could never find a job anywhere in the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Pentagon declined to interview for this story, but said in a statement that it is “committed to safeguarding our nation and our citizens.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meselson was already gravely concerned about the U.S. biological weapons program because he’d worked for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1963. He had high security clearances and was given a tour of Fort Detrick in Maryland, where the biological weapons were developed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel:\u003c/strong> At Camp Detrick, a National Guard airport near Fredrick, Maryland, requisitioned for this purpose, a new chapter in an uncharted adventure was to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>We came to a seven-story building. So I asked the Colonel. What do you do in this building? And he said, we make anthrax spores there. So I said something like, well, why do we do that?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Archival newsreel: \u003c/strong>The aim: defensive and offensive protection against this new weapon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>And he said, because anthrax could be a strategic weapon. Much cheaper than hydrogen bombs. Now, I don’t know if it occurred to me right away. But certainly on the taxi ride back to the State Department, it dawned on me that the last thing the United States would like is a cheap hydrogen bomb so that everybody could have one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Meselson began alerting members of the government that this was madness. He was friends with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and was able to get the message through to President Richard Nixon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson: \u003c/strong>You don’t wanna make powerful weapons very, very cheap. This would create a world in which we would be the losers. It’s obvious. It’s a simple argument and that’s what made the United States decide to get out of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>In 1969, Nixon ended U.S. research into biological weapons and ordered all offensive toxins destroyed. And in 1972, the U.S. signed on to the international Biological Weapons Convention — still in effect today — in which almost all nations agree not to develop or stockpile biochemical weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around this time, the public started to find out about the more than 200 tests that had been done on them. And people were horrified. One of the first experiments people learned about was in the New York City subway system. Here’s a reenactment from a 1975 Senate hearing. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado is questioning Charles Senseney, a physicist at Fort Detrick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>How was the study or experiment conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney: \u003c/strong>Well, there was one person that was the operator — if you want to call it an operator — who rode a certain train, and walking between trains, dropped what looked like an ordinary light bulb, which contained biological simulant agent. And it went quite well through the entire subway system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart: \u003c/strong>Were the officials of the city of New York aware that this study was being conducted?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> I do not believe so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Gary Hart:\u003c/strong> And certainly the passengers weren’t?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice actor for Charles Senseney:\u003c/strong> That is correct.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The public was appalled. Even more so when a subsequent hearing and report revealed more tests — in greyhound bus stations in Alaska and Hawaii, in the national airport in Washington D.C., on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in Texas, and the Florida Keys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Edward Nevin III remembers when he first learned about the San Francisco experiment, now known to the public as Operation Seaspray.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III:\u003c/strong> I was on the BART train going into my office in San Francisco for Berkeley, where I lived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>He was reading the San Francisco Chronicle, as he usually did on his way to work, and saw that his grandfather was the man who died in Stanford hospital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I was reading it with sort of an upset that the government would do something like that. And, uh, I turned to the back page and it says, ‘The only person who died was Edward Nevin.’ That’s how I learned it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III, as his grandfather used to call him, had been 9-years-old when his grandpa went into the hospital for a simple surgery, with a full recovery expected. His family had been stunned and puzzled by his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>I remember sitting in a ‘41 Chevy, my family’s car, uh, outside, waiting for my parents who went in to see him. They didn’t want the children in there. So I have absolute memory of that moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Eddie III by 1976 was a trial lawyer in his early 30s. And he decided to sue the United States government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He called his huge Irish American family together to discuss it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>One aunt, God love her, said, uh, ‘Eddie, you’re pretty young, are you sure we shouldn’t get someone that’s been around a while, you know?’ I said, ‘I don’t think anyone will do it. There’s no real money in it.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The family was reluctant at first. They didn’t want the publicity. And they knew Eddie’s grandfather, a proud immigrant who loved America, would not have wanted to sue his country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>He had his citizenship papers on the wall of the living room in the home. I truly believe he would’ve told me not to do it if he were alive. I’m sure he would’ve said no.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>But Eddie III was determined, and his family came to see it as the only way to find out what had truly happened to their loved one. So in 1981, the trial of the Nevin family — all 67 of them — vs. the United States began.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was action-packed. At one point, an army general challenged Eddie III to a fistfight outside the courtroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>People were really mad at me. They, they were, they felt like they were quite a heroes themselves for doing this hard work, you know? And so they were upset that I would even imagine bringing a case like that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The military maintained that the test was safe, and the death was a coincidence. And that, anyway, the government had legal immunity from being sued by a citizen for a high-level planning decision like this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the family’s side, Dr. Meselson and other scientists argued that the serratia found in Edward Nevin’s blood was likely the same serratia the military had sprayed over the city. And that they should have considered that there was potential for it to cause disease.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>The judge did one fine thing. He said, there’s no jury in this case. I will give the jury box to the press. And so they filled the jury box every day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>That is where the real trial took place, Nevin figures, in the minds of the American people. He says every day he was interviewed outside the courthouse, and the story ran in newspapers across the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan in scene: \u003c/strong>Did you ever think that you were gonna win?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Edward Nevin III: \u003c/strong>No. But we still had to tell the story. To have a citizen submitted to that kind of risk is awful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>The Nevins lost their case. They appealed, lost again at the 9th Circuit, and appealed again to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back on it all, Dr. Meselson, who campaigned to ban chemical weapons, is relieved that the era of secret chemical warfare testing on the public is over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Meselson:\u003c/strong> This kind of weapon is really useful only if you want to kill civilians. And that’s not a very good thing to do in a war. Who knows where it could lead. It’s turning our knowledge of life against life. It’s a bad idea.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katherine Monahan: \u003c/strong>Today, so far as we have evidence for, no country in the world is developing new biological weapons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by KQED reporter Katherine Monahan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is produced by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale and me, Katrina Schwartz. With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thank you for listening and donating and being members. We appreciate it so much. Thank you, and have a great week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003cbr>\nFounded in 1885, Stanford University is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities, not to mention its 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003cbr>\nThis manicured institution on the San Francisco peninsula isn’t necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to harbor a century-old murder mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But 120 years ago this year, the university’s co-founder, Jane Stanford, died suddenly one winter evening. And although the official verdict was natural causes, the original coroner’s report indicated something far more sinister: poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what really happened to Jane Stanford in 1905? It’s a question that preoccupies Richard White, Stanford University history professor emeritus and author of \u003ca href=\"https://history.stanford.edu/people/richard-white\">\u003cem>Who Killed Jane Stanford\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several years ago, White was teaching his students how to use the Stanford University archives. He asked them to research the curious history of Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061787\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1594px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061787\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1594\" height=\"2500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg 1594w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-160x251.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-979x1536.jpg 979w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-1306x2048.jpg 1306w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1594px) 100vw, 1594px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Portrait of Jane Stanford with her son, Leland Jr., before he died of typhoid in 1884. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When his students kept hitting roadblocks in the archives, an intrigued White couldn’t resist looking into the story himself — and soon found himself baffled that the death of Jane Stanford wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially since Stanford Medical School physician Robert Cutler had \u003ca href=\"https://www.sup.org/books/history/mysterious-death-jane-stanford\">already published a 2003 book\u003c/a> concluding that she did not die of natural causes, but had instead been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack,” White said. “And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university — but it hadn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.stanford.edu/about/history/\">The university’s history webpage\u003c/a> doesn’t mention the death of Jane Stanford at all, let alone the fact that she may well have been murdered. (Stanford University didn’t respond to our request for official comment on their co-founder’s death.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But one thing is certain: strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die. When this white powder gets into the body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to a person’s muscles, inducing waves of painful spasms. The jaw locks tight and the limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but is odorless, making it a notoriously popular way to poison a person in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also an ingredient in rat bait — and even some medicines — making it easy to obtain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence,” White said. And after much research, he has a theory about who ended Jane Stanford’s life.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A ‘personal fiefdom’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was born Jane Lathrop in 1828 in upstate New York. At the age of 22, she married Leland Stanford, a railroad baron, who briefly served as governor of California from 1862 to 1863, and then a U.S. senator for almost a decade starting in 1885.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 39, Jane Stanford gave birth to \u003ca href=\"https://stanfordmag.org/contents/about-a-boy\">her only child, Leland Stanford Jr\u003c/a>., but Leland Jr. died from typhoid in his teens. “She never gets over that,” White said. “She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.”[aside postID=news_11893685 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/10/RS39771_4.34-qut.jpg']In their grief, the Stanfords sought ways to honor Leland Jr.’s memory. At this time, “California has great ambitions beyond just being a sort of outpost of wealth in the West,” White said. “It wants to become a cultural leader, an industrial leader. And so, founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened their university on the San Francisco Peninsula, called Leland Stanford Junior University. But Leland Stanford Sr would only live two more years before he too died, in 1893.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 65, Jane Stanford found herself in charge of the new university — a heavy responsibility compounded, White said, by Leland Sr’s financial mismanagement of both the university’s funds and the Stanfords’ own money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the next several years, Jane Stanford was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t further tank her considerable fortune. But her methods of managing the university’s affairs swiftly made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once she gets power, she uses it ruthlessly,” White said. “She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power — so much so that she makes a great many enemies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but then treated those same students poorly. The women in her personal life found this out firsthand — chief among them her longtime companion and secretary, Bertha Berner, “who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061782\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061782\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1387\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-1536x1065.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Stanford women’s basketball team circa 1896. Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, insisted that women be admitted from the school’s inception in 1891. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While running the university as what White called “a personal fiefdom,” Jane Stanford butted heads often with the institution’s president, David Starr Jordan. While “devoted” to the university, Jordan knew “that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford’s religious beliefs were also a major headache for Jordan. She was a Spiritualist: a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. Like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Stanford was motivated by the losses in her own life: the death of her son and husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the Victorian era, the sheer prevalence of death through disease and infant mortality meant that virtually everyone was surrounded by tragedies like Stanford’s. But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time, and quite another for the leader of a major university. Not least because Stanford told people that she was using those seances to receive instructions on how to run the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan and his Stanford University colleagues lived in fear of their boss’s Spiritualism becoming common knowledge, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s going to endanger all the legal documents she signs,” he said. “It’s very hard to uphold a legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Jordan, things soon got even worse, White said – when he realized “that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this leads us to 1905, when 76-year-old Jane Stanford was poisoned not once but twice. She did not survive the second attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A cover-up across an ocean\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first poisoning attempt in January 1905, inside Jane Stanford’s San Francisco mansion, was unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of Poland Spring water and called out for her household staff, including her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner. After vomiting, Stanford recovered — and when the water was tested, strychnine was found.[aside postID=news_11700225 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/10/RS33251_composite_2-qut.jpg'] However, it wasn’t a pure form of the poison in the bottle. “Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people had dumped rat poison in it,” White said. Other ingredients in the rat poison had caused Stanford to vomit, which saved her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford’s inner circle advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal that could taint the university, and to get far away from San Francisco and a poisoner who might try again. So just over a month later, Stanford departed for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her attempts to evade her poisoner proved unsuccessful. On February 28, 1905, Stanford woke up in her Oahu hotel in the middle of the night and screamed out for Berner. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in,” White said — and the medical evaluation swiftly concluded she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. “Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was the story reported by the earliest newspaper accounts, like that of \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=BT19050304.2.29&srpos=10&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">the Oceanside Blade in Southern California\u003c/a> on March 4, 1905, which noted the “suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061783\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061783\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2047\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-2000x2501.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1228x1536.jpg 1228w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1638x2048.jpg 1638w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University and butted heads with Jane Stanford often. He died in 1931, outliving Jane by more than 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While Stanford’s household fell under suspicion, another person absolutely had the motive, White said: Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan. Just a few weeks before the first poisoning attempt, Jordan had not only discovered that Stanford intended to fire him, but had been working with colleagues to try to take control of the university’s finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the news of Jane Stanford’s death, Jordan jumped on a boat to Oahu: “Ostensibly to bring her body home,” White said, “but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On arrival in Honolulu, Jordan hired another doctor to deliver a verdict on the death, one who contradicted the earlier account of strychnine poisoning, “though he has not examined the body,” and “doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, an inquiry which neatly concluded that rather than being poisoned, Stanford had instead died of a heart attack. \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SRPD19051231.2.17&srpos=5&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">He also used the local papers\u003c/a> to discredit the Hawaii authorities, creating a general air of — as White put it — “There’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to look at, let’s get on with things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University: That she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A suspect in plain sight\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While Jordan certainly acted suspiciously, White said that “the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan may have had several reasons to want Jane Stanford out of the picture, but he wasn’t actually present at either poisoning attempt. He lacked the opportunity to poison her himself. “Sometimes you just get really lucky,” White said. “He wanted her killed, and she was killed.\u003cbr>\n[aside postID=news_11894939 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/11/3738571926_99e9526967_o-1020x683.jpg']For White, there’s a far more persuasive suspect hiding in plain sight: Stanford’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berner had been in Stanford’s service from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Leland Junior. She was, by all accounts, “a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman,” White said — and he believes Berner’s decision not to marry was a strategic, practical move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only would marriage have meant giving up traveling the world with Jane Stanford and access to high society, but Berner was also the sole caretaker for her sick mother. “She really cannot afford to give up this job,” White said. And Stanford knew it, even going so far as to sabotage any romantic relationships Berner dared to have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The relationship between the two women became “incredibly rocky,” White said, to the point where Berner quit Stanford’s employ several times. “But she always comes back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not convinced? How about this for motive — Berner was a beneficiary in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at the time of the second poisoning attempt, Berner’s mother became even sicker. Berner even declined to join Stanford on her Hawaii trip due to fears about her mother’s ailing health, but her employer insisted that Berner make the trip if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Stanford clearly did not harbor any suspicions that her trusted companion and secretary of many years had anything to do with the first attempt on her life, she was nonetheless aware that Berner was romantically involved with Stanford’s own butler — and that the pair had been “embezzling money from her,” White said. “She can hang that over Bertha Berner’s head.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A killer walks free?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To White, when added together, Berner’s motives are convincing. Her trusted position meant she also had the opportunity to poison Stanford, and she was present at both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White’s research shows Berner also had the means to kill Jane Stanford. By the time Berner left for Hawaii, she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist. This association provided “a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine,” White said. “Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061780\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061780\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1362\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-160x109.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-1536x1046.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, bats in a faculty versus student baseball game, a tradition on campus. Jordan often butted heads with Jane Stanford over how to run the university and covered up her death by poisoning in 1905. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>White suspects that university president Jordan may have suspected Berner at the time, and that he may have actively protected her after Jane Stanford’s demise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He does it in writing,” White said: “He reassures her that, ‘we know you didn’t do it; we’re going take care of you; you have nothing to worry about.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even if other people close to Jane Stanford suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, nobody wanted to bring that kind of scandal upon Stanford University, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University, next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to its final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who led the cover-up of her murder now led the walk from the church to her tomb. And walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/63j9eNYdy78nVPUzUJ791e?utm_source=generator&theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Stanford University is undeniably a Bay Area icon with the pedigree to match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Founded back in the late 19th century, this private institution sprawling over 8,000 manicured acres on the sunny San Francisco peninsula is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities. It has 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short: not the kind of place you’d necessarily expect to harbor a century-old mystery full of skulduggery, lies and poison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s exactly what lies beneath Stanford’s history. Because the woman who co-founded this place, Jane Stanford, died in very strange circumstances in 1905. And although the official verdict was natural causes, some suspect something far more sinister happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re following the historic breadcrumbs to discover who might have been responsible. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> What really happened to Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, who died suddenly in 1905?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED’s Carly Severn brings us the historic mystery — and dastardly cover-up — that a lot of people in the Bay Area still don’t know about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn:\u003c/strong> Death by poisoning is a nasty way to go. But strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this white powder gets into your body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to your muscles resulting in overwhelming, painful spasms all over. Your jaw locks tight. Your limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill you within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but it doesn’t smell of anything. And as an ingredient in rat bait, and even some medicines in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, it was a very popular way to poison someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what if I told you that 120 years ago, the co-founder of Stanford University found this out first-hand. And almost nobody is talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard White is a professor emeritus in Stanford University’s history department. Several years ago he was TEACHING students how to use the university’s own archives to investigate historical conundrums … and he asked them to find out what happened to Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard found there was a lot his students couldn’t uncover about this case, prompting him to turn historical detective after the class had long ended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he started looking into it he was baffled this wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially because a physician at Stanford Medical School had already written a book showing that Jane Stanford had 100% been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And the university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack. And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university, but it hadn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>To get to the bottom of this mystery, let’s wind back all the way to 1828 when Jane Stanford entered this world in upstate New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman, Jane married Leland Stanford, a businessman and politician who made his fortune in the railroad business, and who briefly served as governor of California in the 1860s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane gave birth to her only child — also called Leland — when she was 39. And she doted on him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then tragedy struck in 1884, when that son died of typhoid. And in their grief, the Stanfords looked for ways to honor his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And so, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened a university on the Peninsula calling it Leland Stanford Junior University, after their son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just two years later, Jane’s husband died. And at age 65, Jane found herself in charge of the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard says Leland Stanford had mismanaged University funds and his own fortune for a long time. So for the next several years, Jane was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t tank her considerable fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is really where the trouble began. Because Jane’s way of managing affairs at Stanford University made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White:\u003c/strong> Once she gets power she uses it ruthlessly. She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power, so much so that she makes a great many enemies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but treated those students terribly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And when it came to men, Jane particularly butted heads with the president of Stanford University: David Starr Jordan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford runs Stanford University as a personal fiefdom. David Starr Jordan is devoted to the university, but he knows that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford was also a Spiritualist, a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. And like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Jane was motivated by personal tragedy beginning with the death of her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She never gets over that. She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time and quite another for the leader of a major university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane’s Spiritualism became a big problem for Stanford University and for its president, Jordan. Because Jane told people that she was using her seances to receive instructions from her dead husband and son on how to run Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The great fear of Stanford University is that they’re gonna discover that Jane Stanford is a spiritualist and that’s gonna endanger all the legal documents she signs. It’s very hard to uphold the legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane’s beliefs were a constant source of stress for Jordan. And their relationship deteriorated even further when Jane made him fire a professor friend of his, sparking a scandal about academic freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while trying to navigate all of this, Jordan made a discovery:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He also realizes that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>In 1905, when Jane was 76, someone tried to poison her not once, but twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first attempt, at her Nob Hill mansion, was unsuccessful. Jane complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of spring water and called for her staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>One of them was her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner, who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha and the maids helped Jane to vomit. And when that water bottle was tested, the verdict came back: it was strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it wasn’t pure strychnine. Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people, had dumped rat poison in it. The rat poison had caused her to vomit. She felt very sick, but she recovered from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>The people around Jane advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal. And to get the hell out of dodge away from the poisoner who might try again with something even stronger than rat poison this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Jane left for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to the second poisoning. Just over a month after the first attempt, Jane woke up in the middle of the night in her Oahu hotel and screamed for Bertha. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Somebody obtained pure strychnine, put it in her water and she died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in. The doctors looked at her, she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And this was the story that was reported by the earliest newspaper accounts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reads newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Oceanside Blade, March 1905: Mrs. Jane Stanford of San Francisco … died at Honolulu Wednesday under suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine which had been mixed with bicarbonate of soda taken as a medicine … Mrs. Stanford had taken the medicine and retired but was soon afterward seized with violent convulsions dying in a few minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Naturally, Jane’s household was under suspicion. But another person absolutely had the motive — David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just a few weeks before Jane was poisoned the first time he’d found out that she was planning to fire him. And Richard says Jordan had also been trying to take control from Jane of those Stanford finances via some pretty shady means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now, Jane was dead and Jordan was on a boat to Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Ostensibly to bring her body home, but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict. He hires another doctor. He says she didn’t die of strychnine poisoning, though he has not examined the body, doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning, and he discredits doctors who in fact are much more senior and well-known than him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, which neatly concluded that instead of being poisoned, Jane had died of a heart attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan also used the newspapers to discredit the Hawaii authorities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Press Democrat, December 1905: According to Dr. Jordan no strychnine was found in Mrs. Stanford’s room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>There’s nothing to see here. There’s nothing to look at. Let’s get on with things. And it is a conspiracy to cover up her death and the conspiracy worked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Because in 1905 — before widespread telephones, before the internet — covering up someone’s death like this across an ocean no less was in many ways a lot simpler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University, that she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So you’re hearing all this and thinking: well, it’s so clearly this guy right? David Starr Jordan’s the murderer? He’s the one trying to cover up her death! I mean, what more do we need??\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And that’s what a lot of people think, except that the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>For one thing, he’s not present at the scene of either poisoning attempt. And he definitely wasn’t anywhere near Hawaii the second time. So while he had the motive, he doesn’t actually have the opportunity to poison her himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>It’s one of those times where for David Starr Jordan, you just think sometimes you just get really lucky. He wanted her killed and she was killed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it wasn’t David Starr Jordan, who did kill Jane Stanford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well if you’ve watched one murder mystery in your life, you’ve probably learned to watch out for that one “harmless” background character who keeps popping up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so you might be wondering, what about Jane’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary: Bertha Berner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertha had been employed by Jane from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Jane’s son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And Bertha Berner, by all accounts, was both a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha never married, which wasn’t that unusual for the time, but Richard says that was a strategic, practical decision she made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>First of all, it would give up her job that she has with Stanford, traveling around the world, the access to a society which otherwise she would have no access to. And secondly, she becomes the sole support of her mother. She really cannot afford to give up this job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And Jane knew it. Richard says this gave her carte blanche to treat Bertha like a true “frenemy,” even going so far as to sabotage Bertha’s romantic relationships when she dared to have them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Their relationship becomes incredibly rocky. Bertha Berner refuses to put up with it. And several times, which rarely shows up until I started looking at it, she leaves Jane Stanford’s employ, sometimes for years at a time. But she always comes back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Another reason that Bertha stuck around through it all … she was in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is where we come to Richard’s theory about Bertha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the second poisoning attempt coincides with Bertha’s mother getting really sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>When Jane Stanford asked her to come to Hawaii, says, I can’t. My mother’s dying. I have to stay here and take care of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But Jane insisted she make the journey if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane clearly still trusted Bertha and harbored zero suspicions she’d been involved in the first poisoning. Although she did have some dirt on Bertha:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Bertha Berner has had an affair with Albert Beverly, who’s Jane Stanford’s butler at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Yup, there’s a shady butler in this mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford knows about that. And she also knows that both of them have been embezzling money from her. She can hang that over Bertha Berners head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>As all good mysteries show, a killer needs the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And according to Richard, Bertha had all three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She had the motive: anger at her years of mistreatment by Jane, fear that her embezzlement might be exposed, and financial incentive, from being in the will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>If she can get away with the murder, she will have money in the will. She will in fact be able to continue to take care of her mother and she can set herself up not comfortably, but well enough to last for the rest of her life, which she does do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>She also had the physical opportunity. All of Jane’s servants were suspects in the first poisoning, but Bertha was the only one who’d been present for both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the means. That first poisoning, with the rat poison, had been clumsy. But by the time Bertha left for Hawaii, Richard says she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He becomes a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine. Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Guess the Butler was out of the picture?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some time after Jane died, Bertha also did something really weird. She wrote a tell-all book about Jane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She doesn’t mention the affairs, she doesn’t mentioned the embezzling, but what she says is Jane Stanford had money and she knew the power of money. She used it like a queen. She dominated everyone around her. She got what she wanted and she forced people to do what she want them to do because she has control over her money. Which sounds very much like the reason why, in fact, in the end, she will kill her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it was Bertha, even if Stanford president David Starr Jordan wasn’t in on it, did he know?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richard says he’s pretty sure the answer is yes, given how Jordan treated Bertha after the murder:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>What he does, and this he does in writing, is he reassures her that we know you didn’t do it, we’re gonna take care of you, you have nothing to worry about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And even if other people close to Jane suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, they didn’t want to bring that kind of smoke to Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to her final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Starr Jordan — the man who led the cover-up of her murder — led the walk from the church to her tomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the final insult? Walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The woman I think, murdered her.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>When you made as many enemies in life as Jane Stanford not even your funeral is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That was KQED’s Carly Severn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious has published many episodes over the years that get into the spookier side of Bay Area history. If you’re looking for a little thrill this All Hallow’s Eve, check out our spooky Spotify playlist linked in the show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, don’t forget to grab yourself a ticket to our trivia night. It’s on Thursday, November 13 at KQED headquarters in San Francisco. Come alone or with a team. It will be a lot of fun! Tickets are at kqed.org/events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow. See you next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cbr>\nFounded in 1885, Stanford University is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities, not to mention its 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003cbr>\nThis manicured institution on the San Francisco peninsula isn’t necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to harbor a century-old murder mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But 120 years ago this year, the university’s co-founder, Jane Stanford, died suddenly one winter evening. And although the official verdict was natural causes, the original coroner’s report indicated something far more sinister: poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what really happened to Jane Stanford in 1905? It’s a question that preoccupies Richard White, Stanford University history professor emeritus and author of \u003ca href=\"https://history.stanford.edu/people/richard-white\">\u003cem>Who Killed Jane Stanford\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several years ago, White was teaching his students how to use the Stanford University archives. He asked them to research the curious history of Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061787\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1594px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061787\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1594\" height=\"2500\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED.jpg 1594w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-160x251.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-979x1536.jpg 979w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-06-KQED-1306x2048.jpg 1306w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1594px) 100vw, 1594px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Portrait of Jane Stanford with her son, Leland Jr., before he died of typhoid in 1884. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When his students kept hitting roadblocks in the archives, an intrigued White couldn’t resist looking into the story himself — and soon found himself baffled that the death of Jane Stanford wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially since Stanford Medical School physician Robert Cutler had \u003ca href=\"https://www.sup.org/books/history/mysterious-death-jane-stanford\">already published a 2003 book\u003c/a> concluding that she did not die of natural causes, but had instead been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack,” White said. “And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university — but it hadn’t.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.stanford.edu/about/history/\">The university’s history webpage\u003c/a> doesn’t mention the death of Jane Stanford at all, let alone the fact that she may well have been murdered. (Stanford University didn’t respond to our request for official comment on their co-founder’s death.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But one thing is certain: strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die. When this white powder gets into the body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to a person’s muscles, inducing waves of painful spasms. The jaw locks tight and the limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but is odorless, making it a notoriously popular way to poison a person in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also an ingredient in rat bait — and even some medicines — making it easy to obtain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence,” White said. And after much research, he has a theory about who ended Jane Stanford’s life.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A ‘personal fiefdom’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was born Jane Lathrop in 1828 in upstate New York. At the age of 22, she married Leland Stanford, a railroad baron, who briefly served as governor of California from 1862 to 1863, and then a U.S. senator for almost a decade starting in 1885.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 39, Jane Stanford gave birth to \u003ca href=\"https://stanfordmag.org/contents/about-a-boy\">her only child, Leland Stanford Jr\u003c/a>., but Leland Jr. died from typhoid in his teens. “She never gets over that,” White said. “She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In their grief, the Stanfords sought ways to honor Leland Jr.’s memory. At this time, “California has great ambitions beyond just being a sort of outpost of wealth in the West,” White said. “It wants to become a cultural leader, an industrial leader. And so, founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened their university on the San Francisco Peninsula, called Leland Stanford Junior University. But Leland Stanford Sr would only live two more years before he too died, in 1893.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At age 65, Jane Stanford found herself in charge of the new university — a heavy responsibility compounded, White said, by Leland Sr’s financial mismanagement of both the university’s funds and the Stanfords’ own money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the next several years, Jane Stanford was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t further tank her considerable fortune. But her methods of managing the university’s affairs swiftly made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once she gets power, she uses it ruthlessly,” White said. “She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power — so much so that she makes a great many enemies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but then treated those same students poorly. The women in her personal life found this out firsthand — chief among them her longtime companion and secretary, Bertha Berner, “who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061782\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061782\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1387\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-04-KQED-1536x1065.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Stanford women’s basketball team circa 1896. Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, insisted that women be admitted from the school’s inception in 1891. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While running the university as what White called “a personal fiefdom,” Jane Stanford butted heads often with the institution’s president, David Starr Jordan. While “devoted” to the university, Jordan knew “that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford’s religious beliefs were also a major headache for Jordan. She was a Spiritualist: a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. Like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Stanford was motivated by the losses in her own life: the death of her son and husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the Victorian era, the sheer prevalence of death through disease and infant mortality meant that virtually everyone was surrounded by tragedies like Stanford’s. But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time, and quite another for the leader of a major university. Not least because Stanford told people that she was using those seances to receive instructions on how to run the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan and his Stanford University colleagues lived in fear of their boss’s Spiritualism becoming common knowledge, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s going to endanger all the legal documents she signs,” he said. “It’s very hard to uphold a legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for Jordan, things soon got even worse, White said – when he realized “that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of this leads us to 1905, when 76-year-old Jane Stanford was poisoned not once but twice. She did not survive the second attempt.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A cover-up across an ocean\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first poisoning attempt in January 1905, inside Jane Stanford’s San Francisco mansion, was unsuccessful.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of Poland Spring water and called out for her household staff, including her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner. After vomiting, Stanford recovered — and when the water was tested, strychnine was found.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp> However, it wasn’t a pure form of the poison in the bottle. “Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people had dumped rat poison in it,” White said. Other ingredients in the rat poison had caused Stanford to vomit, which saved her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanford’s inner circle advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal that could taint the university, and to get far away from San Francisco and a poisoner who might try again. So just over a month later, Stanford departed for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her attempts to evade her poisoner proved unsuccessful. On February 28, 1905, Stanford woke up in her Oahu hotel in the middle of the night and screamed out for Berner. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in,” White said — and the medical evaluation swiftly concluded she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. “Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This was the story reported by the earliest newspaper accounts, like that of \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=BT19050304.2.29&srpos=10&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">the Oceanside Blade in Southern California\u003c/a> on March 4, 1905, which noted the “suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine.\u003cstrong>”\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061783\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061783\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2047\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-scaled.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-2000x2501.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-160x200.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1228x1536.jpg 1228w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-05-KQED-1638x2048.jpg 1638w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University and butted heads with Jane Stanford often. He died in 1931, outliving Jane by more than 20 years. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>While Stanford’s household fell under suspicion, another person absolutely had the motive, White said: Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan. Just a few weeks before the first poisoning attempt, Jordan had not only discovered that Stanford intended to fire him, but had been working with colleagues to try to take control of the university’s finances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the news of Jane Stanford’s death, Jordan jumped on a boat to Oahu: “Ostensibly to bring her body home,” White said, “but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On arrival in Honolulu, Jordan hired another doctor to deliver a verdict on the death, one who contradicted the earlier account of strychnine poisoning, “though he has not examined the body,” and “doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning,” White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, an inquiry which neatly concluded that rather than being poisoned, Stanford had instead died of a heart attack. \u003ca href=\"https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SRPD19051231.2.17&srpos=5&e=------190-en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22jane+stanford%22----1905---\">He also used the local papers\u003c/a> to discredit the Hawaii authorities, creating a general air of — as White put it — “There’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to look at, let’s get on with things.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University: That she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A suspect in plain sight\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>While Jordan certainly acted suspiciously, White said that “the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan may have had several reasons to want Jane Stanford out of the picture, but he wasn’t actually present at either poisoning attempt. He lacked the opportunity to poison her himself. “Sometimes you just get really lucky,” White said. “He wanted her killed, and she was killed.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>For White, there’s a far more persuasive suspect hiding in plain sight: Stanford’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Berner had been in Stanford’s service from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Leland Junior. She was, by all accounts, “a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman,” White said — and he believes Berner’s decision not to marry was a strategic, practical move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only would marriage have meant giving up traveling the world with Jane Stanford and access to high society, but Berner was also the sole caretaker for her sick mother. “She really cannot afford to give up this job,” White said. And Stanford knew it, even going so far as to sabotage any romantic relationships Berner dared to have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The relationship between the two women became “incredibly rocky,” White said, to the point where Berner quit Stanford’s employ several times. “But she always comes back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not convinced? How about this for motive — Berner was a beneficiary in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And at the time of the second poisoning attempt, Berner’s mother became even sicker. Berner even declined to join Stanford on her Hawaii trip due to fears about her mother’s ailing health, but her employer insisted that Berner make the trip if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Stanford clearly did not harbor any suspicions that her trusted companion and secretary of many years had anything to do with the first attempt on her life, she was nonetheless aware that Berner was romantically involved with Stanford’s own butler — and that the pair had been “embezzling money from her,” White said. “She can hang that over Bertha Berner’s head.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A killer walks free?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>To White, when added together, Berner’s motives are convincing. Her trusted position meant she also had the opportunity to poison Stanford, and she was present at both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>White’s research shows Berner also had the means to kill Jane Stanford. By the time Berner left for Hawaii, she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist. This association provided “a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine,” White said. “Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12061780\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12061780\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1362\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-160x109.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251027-JANE-STANFORD-ARCHIVAL-02-KQED-1536x1046.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, bats in a faculty versus student baseball game, a tradition on campus. Jordan often butted heads with Jane Stanford over how to run the university and covered up her death by poisoning in 1905. \u003ccite>(Special Collections & University Archives, Stanford University Libraries)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>White suspects that university president Jordan may have suspected Berner at the time, and that he may have actively protected her after Jane Stanford’s demise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He does it in writing,” White said: “He reassures her that, ‘we know you didn’t do it; we’re going take care of you; you have nothing to worry about.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And even if other people close to Jane Stanford suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, nobody wanted to bring that kind of scandal upon Stanford University, White said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane Stanford was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University, next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to its final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who led the cover-up of her murder now led the walk from the church to her tomb. And walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/63j9eNYdy78nVPUzUJ791e?utm_source=generator&theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" scrolling=\"yes\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> Stanford University is undeniably a Bay Area icon with the pedigree to match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Founded back in the late 19th century, this private institution sprawling over 8,000 manicured acres on the sunny San Francisco peninsula is famed for its world-class research in medicine, business, law and the humanities. It has 20 living Nobel laureates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short: not the kind of place you’d necessarily expect to harbor a century-old mystery full of skulduggery, lies and poison.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s exactly what lies beneath Stanford’s history. Because the woman who co-founded this place, Jane Stanford, died in very strange circumstances in 1905. And although the official verdict was natural causes, some suspect something far more sinister happened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today on Bay Curious, we’re following the historic breadcrumbs to discover who might have been responsible. Stay with us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sponsor message\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> What really happened to Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, who died suddenly in 1905?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED’s Carly Severn brings us the historic mystery — and dastardly cover-up — that a lot of people in the Bay Area still don’t know about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn:\u003c/strong> Death by poisoning is a nasty way to go. But strychnine poisoning is a particularly horrible way to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When this white powder gets into your body, it attacks the chemical that normally controls nerve signals to your muscles resulting in overwhelming, painful spasms all over. Your jaw locks tight. Your limbs start twisting in on themselves. In high amounts, strychnine can kill you within minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Strychnine tastes bitter but it doesn’t smell of anything. And as an ingredient in rat bait, and even some medicines in the 19th and early twentieth centuries, it was a very popular way to poison someone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So what if I told you that 120 years ago, the co-founder of Stanford University found this out first-hand. And almost nobody is talking about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>You have to be able to follow the evidence, and I follow the evidence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard White is a professor emeritus in Stanford University’s history department. Several years ago he was TEACHING students how to use the university’s own archives to investigate historical conundrums … and he asked them to find out what happened to Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>I thought, if I can’t get them interested in the story that supposedly somebody murdered the founder of the university, I cannot get them interested in anything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard found there was a lot his students couldn’t uncover about this case, prompting him to turn historical detective after the class had long ended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he started looking into it he was baffled this wasn’t a bigger source of intrigue. Especially because a physician at Stanford Medical School had already written a book showing that Jane Stanford had 100% been killed by strychnine poisoning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And the university had contended from the very beginning that she’d died of a heart attack. And that contradiction, I thought, would have a lot of public interest and certainly bring some response from the university, but it hadn’t.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>To get to the bottom of this mystery, let’s wind back all the way to 1828 when Jane Stanford entered this world in upstate New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a young woman, Jane married Leland Stanford, a businessman and politician who made his fortune in the railroad business, and who briefly served as governor of California in the 1860s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane gave birth to her only child — also called Leland — when she was 39. And she doted on him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then tragedy struck in 1884, when that son died of typhoid. And in their grief, the Stanfords looked for ways to honor his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Founding universities and founding colleges is very much in the mind of the San Francisco elite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And so, in 1891, Jane and Leland opened a university on the Peninsula calling it Leland Stanford Junior University, after their son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just two years later, Jane’s husband died. And at age 65, Jane found herself in charge of the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it turned out that Leland Stanford was not nearly as competent as most people thought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Richard says Leland Stanford had mismanaged University funds and his own fortune for a long time. So for the next several years, Jane was constantly fighting to keep the university afloat in a way that wouldn’t tank her considerable fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is really where the trouble began. Because Jane’s way of managing affairs at Stanford University made her very unpopular.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White:\u003c/strong> Once she gets power she uses it ruthlessly. She knows the power of wealth and she exerts that power, so much so that she makes a great many enemies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane was a walking contradiction. She was an advocate for women’s rights and insisted Stanford admit female students, but treated those students terribly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And when it came to men, Jane particularly butted heads with the president of Stanford University: David Starr Jordan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford runs Stanford University as a personal fiefdom. David Starr Jordan is devoted to the university, but he knows that the university and his own job depend on pleasing Jane Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford was also a Spiritualist, a belief system that hinged on making contact with the dead. And like many people who turned to Spiritualism in the 19th century, Jane was motivated by personal tragedy beginning with the death of her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She never gets over that. She will be in mourning for the rest of her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But it was one thing for well-to-do ladies to be conducting seances in their free time and quite another for the leader of a major university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane’s Spiritualism became a big problem for Stanford University and for its president, Jordan. Because Jane told people that she was using her seances to receive instructions from her dead husband and son on how to run Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The great fear of Stanford University is that they’re gonna discover that Jane Stanford is a spiritualist and that’s gonna endanger all the legal documents she signs. It’s very hard to uphold the legal document when you say the ghosts are the ones telling you to sign it or not.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jane’s beliefs were a constant source of stress for Jordan. And their relationship deteriorated even further when Jane made him fire a professor friend of his, sparking a scandal about academic freedom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And while trying to navigate all of this, Jordan made a discovery:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He also realizes that Leland Stanford had endowed the university in such a way that the university really has no free and clear access to its funds or even a guarantee of its funds until Jane Stanford is dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>In 1905, when Jane was 76, someone tried to poison her not once, but twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first attempt, at her Nob Hill mansion, was unsuccessful. Jane complained of feeling sick after drinking from a bottle of spring water and called for her staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>One of them was her secretary and companion, Bertha Berner, who wasn’t really a servant, but Jane Stanford often treated her like one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha and the maids helped Jane to vomit. And when that water bottle was tested, the verdict came back: it was strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>But it wasn’t pure strychnine. Somebody who didn’t know much about poisoning people, had dumped rat poison in it. The rat poison had caused her to vomit. She felt very sick, but she recovered from it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>The people around Jane advised her to keep the incident under wraps to prevent a scandal. And to get the hell out of dodge away from the poisoner who might try again with something even stronger than rat poison this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So Jane left for Hawaii with just two trusted employees: a maid and Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which leads us to the second poisoning. Just over a month after the first attempt, Jane woke up in the middle of the night in her Oahu hotel and screamed for Bertha. She knew she’d been poisoned again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Somebody obtained pure strychnine, put it in her water and she died within 10 minutes of the doctor coming in. The doctors looked at her, she showed all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning. Later on, the coroner’s jury would determine that it had been strychnine poisoning and that she had been poisoned by party or parties unknown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And this was the story that was reported by the earliest newspaper accounts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reads newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Oceanside Blade, March 1905: Mrs. Jane Stanford of San Francisco … died at Honolulu Wednesday under suspicious circumstances which point to poisoning by strychnine which had been mixed with bicarbonate of soda taken as a medicine … Mrs. Stanford had taken the medicine and retired but was soon afterward seized with violent convulsions dying in a few minutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Naturally, Jane’s household was under suspicion. But another person absolutely had the motive — David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just a few weeks before Jane was poisoned the first time he’d found out that she was planning to fire him. And Richard says Jordan had also been trying to take control from Jane of those Stanford finances via some pretty shady means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now, Jane was dead and Jordan was on a boat to Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Ostensibly to bring her body home, but what he’s really in Hawaii for is to suppress the coroner’s jury verdict. He hires another doctor. He says she didn’t die of strychnine poisoning, though he has not examined the body, doesn’t know anything about strychnine poisoning, and he discredits doctors who in fact are much more senior and well-known than him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Jordan then used that new verdict to suppress the investigation back in San Francisco, which neatly concluded that instead of being poisoned, Jane had died of a heart attack.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jordan also used the newspapers to discredit the Hawaii authorities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Voice reading newspaper clipping: \u003c/strong>Press Democrat, December 1905: According to Dr. Jordan no strychnine was found in Mrs. Stanford’s room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>There’s nothing to see here. There’s nothing to look at. Let’s get on with things. And it is a conspiracy to cover up her death and the conspiracy worked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Because in 1905 — before widespread telephones, before the internet — covering up someone’s death like this across an ocean no less was in many ways a lot simpler.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>For a long time, this becomes the official story from Stanford University, that she died a natural death and that she was not poisoned by strychnine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So you’re hearing all this and thinking: well, it’s so clearly this guy right? David Starr Jordan’s the murderer? He’s the one trying to cover up her death! I mean, what more do we need??\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And that’s what a lot of people think, except that the other stuff with Jordan doesn’t really add up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>For one thing, he’s not present at the scene of either poisoning attempt. And he definitely wasn’t anywhere near Hawaii the second time. So while he had the motive, he doesn’t actually have the opportunity to poison her himself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>It’s one of those times where for David Starr Jordan, you just think sometimes you just get really lucky. He wanted her killed and she was killed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it wasn’t David Starr Jordan, who did kill Jane Stanford?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well if you’ve watched one murder mystery in your life, you’ve probably learned to watch out for that one “harmless” background character who keeps popping up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so you might be wondering, what about Jane’s longtime, long-suffering companion and secretary: Bertha Berner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertha had been employed by Jane from a young age, ever since they met at the memorial service for Jane’s son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>And Bertha Berner, by all accounts, was both a very attractive, very smart, and very capable woman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Bertha never married, which wasn’t that unusual for the time, but Richard says that was a strategic, practical decision she made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>First of all, it would give up her job that she has with Stanford, traveling around the world, the access to a society which otherwise she would have no access to. And secondly, she becomes the sole support of her mother. She really cannot afford to give up this job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And Jane knew it. Richard says this gave her carte blanche to treat Bertha like a true “frenemy,” even going so far as to sabotage Bertha’s romantic relationships when she dared to have them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Their relationship becomes incredibly rocky. Bertha Berner refuses to put up with it. And several times, which rarely shows up until I started looking at it, she leaves Jane Stanford’s employ, sometimes for years at a time. But she always comes back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Another reason that Bertha stuck around through it all … she was in Jane Stanford’s will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this is where we come to Richard’s theory about Bertha.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the second poisoning attempt coincides with Bertha’s mother getting really sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>When Jane Stanford asked her to come to Hawaii, says, I can’t. My mother’s dying. I have to stay here and take care of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>But Jane insisted she make the journey if she wanted to keep the job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane clearly still trusted Bertha and harbored zero suspicions she’d been involved in the first poisoning. Although she did have some dirt on Bertha:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Bertha Berner has had an affair with Albert Beverly, who’s Jane Stanford’s butler at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Yup, there’s a shady butler in this mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>Jane Stanford knows about that. And she also knows that both of them have been embezzling money from her. She can hang that over Bertha Berners head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>As all good mysteries show, a killer needs the means, the motive, and the opportunity. And according to Richard, Bertha had all three.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She had the motive: anger at her years of mistreatment by Jane, fear that her embezzlement might be exposed, and financial incentive, from being in the will.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>If she can get away with the murder, she will have money in the will. She will in fact be able to continue to take care of her mother and she can set herself up not comfortably, but well enough to last for the rest of her life, which she does do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>She also had the physical opportunity. All of Jane’s servants were suspects in the first poisoning, but Bertha was the only one who’d been present for both attempts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the means. That first poisoning, with the rat poison, had been clumsy. But by the time Bertha left for Hawaii, Richard says she’d started a relationship with a Palo Alto pharmacist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>He becomes a place where Bertha Berner can get free, pure strychnine. Otherwise, that would be very difficult to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>Guess the Butler was out of the picture?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some time after Jane died, Bertha also did something really weird. She wrote a tell-all book about Jane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>She doesn’t mention the affairs, she doesn’t mentioned the embezzling, but what she says is Jane Stanford had money and she knew the power of money. She used it like a queen. She dominated everyone around her. She got what she wanted and she forced people to do what she want them to do because she has control over her money. Which sounds very much like the reason why, in fact, in the end, she will kill her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>So if it was Bertha, even if Stanford president David Starr Jordan wasn’t in on it, did he know?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richard says he’s pretty sure the answer is yes, given how Jordan treated Bertha after the murder:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>What he does, and this he does in writing, is he reassures her that we know you didn’t do it, we’re gonna take care of you, you have nothing to worry about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>And even if other people close to Jane suspected there’d been a murder and a cover-up, they didn’t want to bring that kind of smoke to Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jane was buried in the mausoleum at Stanford University next to her husband and son. As her body was carried to her final resting place, the procession was full of people who had butted heads with her while she was alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Starr Jordan — the man who led the cover-up of her murder — led the walk from the church to her tomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the final insult? Walking pride of place, behind the casket, was Bertha Berner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Richard White: \u003c/strong>The woman I think, murdered her.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Carly Severn: \u003c/strong>When you made as many enemies in life as Jane Stanford not even your funeral is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong> That was KQED’s Carly Severn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious has published many episodes over the years that get into the spookier side of Bay Area history. If you’re looking for a little thrill this All Hallow’s Eve, check out our spooky Spotify playlist linked in the show notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, don’t forget to grab yourself a ticket to our trivia night. It’s on Thursday, November 13 at KQED headquarters in San Francisco. Come alone or with a team. It will be a lot of fun! Tickets are at kqed.org/events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bay Curious is produced at member-supported KQED in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Our show is made by Christopher Beale, Gabriela Glueck, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on team KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow. See you next week!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Proposition 50: Redistricting in California, Thoroughly Explained",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California voters have one proposition on the ballot this November: Proposition 50. It’s supporters want California to adopt a new congressional map that could give Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a counter to similar actions taken in Texas. Opponents say it’s a step in the wrong direction for good governance, or are upset at the potential loss of Republican seats. We wade into the debate with KQED’s Guy Marzorati.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4282397539&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Right now, voters are being called to the polls or in the era of mail-in ballots to their dining room tables to cast a vote in one single statewide election, Proposition 50. And the political ads are everywhere… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>President Obama in advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California, the whole nation is counting on you. Democracy is on the ballot Nov. 4. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California voters stopped rigged elections with an independent commission run by citizens. Prop 50 cancels this historic reform. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Vota sí a la proposición cincuenta.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Proposition 50 would redistrict California with an eye towards the upcoming midterm elections. And its sponsors don’t mince words. It’s designed to give Democrats the best chance possible to pick up seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today on Bay Curious, we explore the ins and outs of Proposition 50. By the end, you’ll understand how district maps are drawn, the impacts this proposition would have on the Bay Area, and how this singleton proposition got on the ballot in a year when normally we’d have a break from propositions. Stay with us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SPONSOR\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Today we’re shedding light on California’s Proposition 50. On your ballot, it reads like this. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps in response to Texas’s partisan redistricting. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Joining me today is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. He’s been covering Proposition 50 for KQED. Welcome, Guy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks so much for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to start with a quick refresher for folks on a few basic concepts related to Proposition 50. First off, what is redistricting? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So redistricting is the drawing of political maps to reflect changes in population. So we know that every state gets divided into congressional districts. These congressional districts have equal size. So California is a big state. We have 52 congressional districts. What happens is we take a measurement of the population, that’s the census, and then when the population changes, people move around. So districts have to change too to make sure they’re still equal sizes. And there’s a couple of different ways you can do redistricting. In a lot of cases, it’s the state legislatures that are drawing maps. And they sometimes have a couple different goals. One is: help whatever party’s in power. That’s called gerrymandering. Basically, when the lines are being drawn to either help Republicans or help Democrats, or in some cases to help everyone who’s in office just stay in office. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So that’s one path. But then there’s another way to do redistricting, which is how we have it in California. And we have a commission of average citizens who get together, take input from residents, and draw districts based on what they’re hearing from people who are living here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What’s really changing right now in 2025 is we’re seeing this battle over redistricting break out across the country in the middle of a decade, right? We haven’t taken a new census. This is simply different states that are trying to gain partisan advantage in their political maps, either by helping Democrats or helping Republicans. And Prop 50 is in the middle of this national redistricting fight where Democrats in California are trying to redraw the maps to help their party win more seats in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And this acceleration of gerrymandering is in part because of some rulings from the Supreme Court that really set the stage for more gerrymandering, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s right. The Supreme Court has said they don’t really want to wade into fights over partisan redistricting. So they’re not gonna take up challenges to maps that are unquestionably biased towards Republicans or biased towards Democrats. And so what we’ve seen is states continue along this path of doing gerrymandered maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes, it’s been practiced for decades by both political parties. But what we’ve seen this year is President Trump take the unprecedented step of actually going to states and saying, I want you to redraw your lines to help Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So it started in Texas – Trump you know, went and asked the Texas legislature to redraw their lines to give Republicans five additional seats in Congress. But this just keeps escalating, beyond Texas, beyond California. Republicans are pursuing seats through a redraw of maps in Missouri, in redistricting in Kansas, in North Carolina – Democrats have introduced plans to pick up a seat in Maryland. And the Supreme Court is also considering a case about the use of race in drawing congressional maps that could potentially change how gerrymandered maps are challenged in the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So in the language of the proposition, it states that this is in response to actions taken in Texas. Can you walk us through what happened in Texas and why it matters here in California? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The House is very closely divided right now, and any alteration to the map, any kind of change to the district lines could really decide the control of Congress in 2026. So Trump went to Texas, pressured them to take this move. Texas responded, redrew their map to help Republicans. As this was happening, Governor Gavin Newsom in California, other Democrats in California, started having meetings and discussing, ‘okay, what can we do to respond to this?’ And ultimately that resulted in Proposition 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The legislature voted to put this on the ballot. The key difference between California and Texas is: in California, this change has to happen only with the permission of voters. California has this independent commission that draws district lines. Voters created that system. So it has to be taken to voters if any change is going to be made to that. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Music break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so let’s dig in on what exactly the proposition would do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This would redraw California’s congressional maps. And it’s worth noting, the commission also draws lines for the state legislature. Those are not being affected at all by Proposition 50. This is just for US congressional maps, House districts. So it’s estimated that these new maps would favor Democrats by helping them pick up up to five new seats that are currently held by Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In doing so, it puts a pause on the current maps that we have that were created by the Independent Commission back in 2021 and that were really regarded as fair, I think, by a lot of election analysts and that have really created very competitive elections, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you draw maps in order to favor one party or the other, you’re gonna result often in fewer competitive elections. And if you compare California to other large states such as Texas, such as Florida, just in the last decade, we’ve had far more competitive House elections than these other states because our lines are not drawn to protect political incumbents. They’re not drawn to help Democrats or Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so what this Proposition 50 is saying is let’s set aside the independent maps for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections and put in place these maps favoring Democrats. The way the measure is written, we’d go back to the citizen redistricting process after 2030 — that’s because there would be a new census in 2030, the commission meets after that and draws new lines for the 2032 elections.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So How exactly does the California Citizens Redistricting Commission create these fairer maps? Like how are they made up? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So the commission itself is made up of 14 members. You have five Democrats, five Republicans, and then four who are not registered with either political party. And so this commission, it’s citizens from around the state who apply, who get chosen to be on the commission. And one of the key metrics or key things that the commission really focuses on is this idea of communities of interest. And I talked to Pedro Toledo, who’s the current chair of the independent commission, and he explained kind of how commissioners think about these communities of interest and why they matter when you’re drawing political maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Pedro Toledo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Every community is different. The issues that a community in the Central Valley might care about, maybe water or some of the healthcare issues that are prevalent out there, some of the lack of healthcare, the lack of infrastructure, might be very different in a more urban settings. And that matters because one would hope that the elected official that a community elects would represent those issues in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And I’ll note, you know, Princeton University rates the different redistrictings in each state. They gave California a B score on partisan fairness. But if adopted, they say the Proposition 50 maps would get an F. So it gives you a sense of the direction California would be going when it comes to nonpartisan maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In theory, you know ,Proposition 50 would replace the work of the commission until 2030. But there is a lot of skepticism, I think, from opponents of this who feel like when is the deescalation going to happen, right? We see states just competing, competing, trying to change their maps in more and more partisan ways. Is California really gonna step away from that and go back to more of an independent system? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So this is really a departure from what was a fairly non partisan way of redistricting to one that is overtly partisan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Yeah, that’s right. And I think look, even like supporters of Proposition 50 realize that in a vacuum, doing away with citizens drawn maps is unpopular. What I think they would argue is this is not happening in a vacuum. This is happening as part of a wider fight across the country. This battle for control of the House of Representatives, and Democrats who are supporting Prop 50 say: ‘The stakes are too high for us to just simply be focusing on good governance. We need to retake the House of Representatives.’\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> What kind of local impacts could this have on the Bay Area? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One is in Sonoma County, where Sonoma is now gonna be paired with communities in the northern part of the state: Butte County, Tehama County. And really the point there is to take a district, currently the first district that’s controlled by a Republican, and dragging the lines down south into Sonoma County and therefore picking up all of these Democratic voters who live in Sonoma. So that’s a key part of redistricting when you’re trying to do it for partisan gain. You’re trying to bring voters from one party into a new district in hopes that they’ll change the outcome of it. And really the hope is that district would go from currently represented by a Republican to being represented by a Democrat in 2026. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There’s another change that that’s happening in eastern Contra Costa County, where you have a lot of communities around the Carquinez Strait, the northern waterfront – from Martinez, Pittsburgh, Antioch, even across into Solano County, Vallejo that are currently grouped in this district that the commission created back in 2021 with the explicit goal of putting together working class communities that are racially diverse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They got a lot of input from residents who felt like, you know, communities like Richmond, Vallejo, Pittsburgh, Antioch have a lot in common and should be included in one congressional district to kind of maximize the voice of people living there. So their shared concerns about living around refineries, their shared concerns about means of transportation. If all those voters would be in the same district, whoever wins that seat would have no choice but to listen to the concerns of the community. So that was what the commission thought when they’re creating this 8th district. That district would be broken up under the Proposition 50 map. And the reason is because voters in Antioch and Pittsburgh would be moved into a Central Valley district. The strategy behind that is these are heavily Democratic voters in Pittsburgh and Antioch. They’d be moved into a Central Valley district to help a vulnerable Democratic incumbent have an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So there’s two kinds of things at play here with Proposition 50. There’s targeting seats that are currently held by Republicans, trying to flip them to Democratic seats. There’s also seats that Democrats currently hold, but they’re a little bit tenuous. They’re kind of close competitive seats. Proposition 50 would make them less competitive. So give those Democrats an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those local impacts are actually really, really interesting, but we don’t actually hear people talking about the local impacts that much. I would say most of the campaigning for this proposition has been about the balance of power in Washington. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Absolutely. And that’s by design. Look, the supporters of Proposition 50 are really framing this as part of the national fight over the House of Representatives, over gerrymandering that’s breaking out in Republican states. And they want to talk about the need to win these House seats for Democrats in order to break Republican hold on power in Washington. And that’s really the argument that you’re hearing coming from the Yes on 50 campaign. The phrase they love to use is ‘you have to fight fire with fire.’ Some of the ads for Proposition 50 don’t even mention redistricting. They highlight a lot of the actions the president have t has taken that are unpopular in California and are basically saying to voters, look, you need we need to stop this, vote yes on Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> It’s worth noting though that just because you redraw the districts doesn’t mean that somebody automatically wins. I mean, these candidates still have to run. They still have to convince voters to vote for them. So let’s just, you know, slow our roll a little bit, you know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> That’s a great point. You still actually have to have the campaigns, right? When we talk about redistricting, the end result is just okay, ‘how many Democrats live in this district and how many Republicans.’ But to your point, there still needs to be candidates that are running. There’s still everything that’s happening in the world that influences how people vote in an election. So all of that will still have to play out no matter how Proposition 50 fares. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so we’ve heard a lot about what the yes side is doing. What argument is the no side making? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Well, the no side is really making a good government argument against gerrymandering. They’re supporting the system that we currently have right now, these maps drawn by citizens that are not focusing on helping Republicans or helping Democrats, and they say they want to keep the system that way. Now, that’s not to say that the opponents of Prop 50 don’t have partisan interests in mind. A lot of Republicans are opposing Prop 50 because if this passes, they will probably lose seats in Congress. So there is a lot of partisan interest in the opposition, but the messaging they’re putting out there is really about maintaining this system of good governance that we have. And a key messenger in that is former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator in advertisement:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> The politicians want their power back.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in political advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s what they want to do is take us backwards. That is why it is important to vote no on Proposition 50. Democracy. You’ve got to protect it and we’ve got to go and fight for it. \u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Schwarzenegger was the one who helped create the Independent Commission back in 2008. And he has actually spoken out against Proposition 50. He said he opposes it, basically along the lines of two wrongs don’t make a right, just because Texas and Republican states are gerrymandering, California shouldn’t go down this path. But I’ll say it’s interesting the way in which Schwarzenegger has come out and talked about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He spoke at an event at the University of Southern California. He said he’s against Prop 50. He encouraged the no vote. And it was actually the ‘No on 50’ campaign was in the crowd. They were filming it, and they used that video for an advertisement. They scrubbed out the background so it doesn’t say USC anymore, it says No on 50. But that’s interesting because Schwarzenegger himself has been a little bit hesitant to actually engage in the campaign. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He didn’t, you know, meet up with the No on 50 campaign and create that ad. He hasn’t been out barnstorming against Prop 50. And I think that’s because he feels perhaps a little bit uncomfortable in that this has really become a Democratic versus Republican fight. Schwarzenegger does not like President Trump, not a big fan, and he’s always tried to keep a little distance from the Republican Party establishment, especially now. So he probably feels maybe caught in the middle in some way, even as he opposes Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, let’s talk about campaign finance. What kind of money is being spent on the race and by whom? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Lot of big money pouring into this campaign. There’s been more money in support of it than against Prop 50. The yes side has like a two to one financial edge. And you’ve really seen Governor Newsom rally the Democratic establishment to give to Prop 50. We’ve seen major Democratic donors like George Soros, Tom Steyer spend a lot to support Prop 50. We’ve also seen a lot of grassroots energy. There have been small dollar donations from every single state in the country supporting Prop 50, which I do think speaks to like, yes, this is a state ballot measure. But we’re in a year where there’s not much else on the ballot. And this has gotten a lot of attention, I think, from Democrats across the country who again want to feel like they’re a part of something that’s pushing back against the administration. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the no side, it’s really been one big donor opposing Prop 50. That’s Charles Munger Jr. He’s a philanthropist, big Republican donor in the Bay Area. He bankrolled the measures that created the Citizens Commission back in 2008. So I think he feels this is his baby to some extent. He really supports this idea, and he’s putting a lot of money, at this point more than $30 million, to oppose Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk, thanks for breaking this down for us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In a nutshell, a vote yes on Proposition 50 means you want to adopt a new legislatively-drawn districting map that could make it easier for Democrats to win seats in the House of Representatives through 2030. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A vote no on Prop 50 means you want to keep our current map and keep redistricting in the hands of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s it for our episode on Prop 50. You can cast your vote in person or by mail. Registered voters should have received their ballots by now, and those must be filled out and postmarked on or before November 4th. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our show is made in San Francisco at Member Supported KQED. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz, with extra support Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I’m Katrina Schwartz. Have a great week. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Proposition 50: Redistricting in California, Thoroughly Explained | KQED",
"description": "View the full episode transcript. California voters have one proposition on the ballot this November: Proposition 50. It's supporters want California to adopt a new congressional map that could give Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a counter to similar actions taken in Texas. Opponents say it's a step in the wrong direction for good governance, or are upset at the potential loss of Republican seats. We wade into the debate with KQED's Guy Marzorati. Episode Transcript This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors. Katrina Schwartz: Right now,",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California voters have one proposition on the ballot this November: Proposition 50. It’s supporters want California to adopt a new congressional map that could give Democrats five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, a counter to similar actions taken in Texas. Opponents say it’s a step in the wrong direction for good governance, or are upset at the potential loss of Republican seats. We wade into the debate with KQED’s Guy Marzorati.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC4282397539&light=true\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/strong>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Right now, voters are being called to the polls or in the era of mail-in ballots to their dining room tables to cast a vote in one single statewide election, Proposition 50. And the political ads are everywhere… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>President Obama in advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California, the whole nation is counting on you. Democracy is on the ballot Nov. 4. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">California voters stopped rigged elections with an independent commission run by citizens. Prop 50 cancels this historic reform. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator voice: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Vota sí a la proposición cincuenta.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Proposition 50 would redistrict California with an eye towards the upcoming midterm elections. And its sponsors don’t mince words. It’s designed to give Democrats the best chance possible to pick up seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today on Bay Curious, we explore the ins and outs of Proposition 50. By the end, you’ll understand how district maps are drawn, the impacts this proposition would have on the Bay Area, and how this singleton proposition got on the ballot in a year when normally we’d have a break from propositions. Stay with us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SPONSOR\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Today we’re shedding light on California’s Proposition 50. On your ballot, it reads like this. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Authorizes temporary changes to congressional district maps in response to Texas’s partisan redistricting. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Joining me today is Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk. He’s been covering Proposition 50 for KQED. Welcome, Guy. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks so much for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to start with a quick refresher for folks on a few basic concepts related to Proposition 50. First off, what is redistricting? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So redistricting is the drawing of political maps to reflect changes in population. So we know that every state gets divided into congressional districts. These congressional districts have equal size. So California is a big state. We have 52 congressional districts. What happens is we take a measurement of the population, that’s the census, and then when the population changes, people move around. So districts have to change too to make sure they’re still equal sizes. And there’s a couple of different ways you can do redistricting. In a lot of cases, it’s the state legislatures that are drawing maps. And they sometimes have a couple different goals. One is: help whatever party’s in power. That’s called gerrymandering. Basically, when the lines are being drawn to either help Republicans or help Democrats, or in some cases to help everyone who’s in office just stay in office. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So that’s one path. But then there’s another way to do redistricting, which is how we have it in California. And we have a commission of average citizens who get together, take input from residents, and draw districts based on what they’re hearing from people who are living here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What’s really changing right now in 2025 is we’re seeing this battle over redistricting break out across the country in the middle of a decade, right? We haven’t taken a new census. This is simply different states that are trying to gain partisan advantage in their political maps, either by helping Democrats or helping Republicans. And Prop 50 is in the middle of this national redistricting fight where Democrats in California are trying to redraw the maps to help their party win more seats in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And this acceleration of gerrymandering is in part because of some rulings from the Supreme Court that really set the stage for more gerrymandering, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s right. The Supreme Court has said they don’t really want to wade into fights over partisan redistricting. So they’re not gonna take up challenges to maps that are unquestionably biased towards Republicans or biased towards Democrats. And so what we’ve seen is states continue along this path of doing gerrymandered maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yes, it’s been practiced for decades by both political parties. But what we’ve seen this year is President Trump take the unprecedented step of actually going to states and saying, I want you to redraw your lines to help Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So it started in Texas – Trump you know, went and asked the Texas legislature to redraw their lines to give Republicans five additional seats in Congress. But this just keeps escalating, beyond Texas, beyond California. Republicans are pursuing seats through a redraw of maps in Missouri, in redistricting in Kansas, in North Carolina – Democrats have introduced plans to pick up a seat in Maryland. And the Supreme Court is also considering a case about the use of race in drawing congressional maps that could potentially change how gerrymandered maps are challenged in the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So in the language of the proposition, it states that this is in response to actions taken in Texas. Can you walk us through what happened in Texas and why it matters here in California? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The House is very closely divided right now, and any alteration to the map, any kind of change to the district lines could really decide the control of Congress in 2026. So Trump went to Texas, pressured them to take this move. Texas responded, redrew their map to help Republicans. As this was happening, Governor Gavin Newsom in California, other Democrats in California, started having meetings and discussing, ‘okay, what can we do to respond to this?’ And ultimately that resulted in Proposition 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The legislature voted to put this on the ballot. The key difference between California and Texas is: in California, this change has to happen only with the permission of voters. California has this independent commission that draws district lines. Voters created that system. So it has to be taken to voters if any change is going to be made to that. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Music break\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so let’s dig in on what exactly the proposition would do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This would redraw California’s congressional maps. And it’s worth noting, the commission also draws lines for the state legislature. Those are not being affected at all by Proposition 50. This is just for US congressional maps, House districts. So it’s estimated that these new maps would favor Democrats by helping them pick up up to five new seats that are currently held by Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In doing so, it puts a pause on the current maps that we have that were created by the Independent Commission back in 2021 and that were really regarded as fair, I think, by a lot of election analysts and that have really created very competitive elections, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When you draw maps in order to favor one party or the other, you’re gonna result often in fewer competitive elections. And if you compare California to other large states such as Texas, such as Florida, just in the last decade, we’ve had far more competitive House elections than these other states because our lines are not drawn to protect political incumbents. They’re not drawn to help Democrats or Republicans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so what this Proposition 50 is saying is let’s set aside the independent maps for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 elections and put in place these maps favoring Democrats. The way the measure is written, we’d go back to the citizen redistricting process after 2030 — that’s because there would be a new census in 2030, the commission meets after that and draws new lines for the 2032 elections.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So How exactly does the California Citizens Redistricting Commission create these fairer maps? Like how are they made up? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So the commission itself is made up of 14 members. You have five Democrats, five Republicans, and then four who are not registered with either political party. And so this commission, it’s citizens from around the state who apply, who get chosen to be on the commission. And one of the key metrics or key things that the commission really focuses on is this idea of communities of interest. And I talked to Pedro Toledo, who’s the current chair of the independent commission, and he explained kind of how commissioners think about these communities of interest and why they matter when you’re drawing political maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Pedro Toledo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Every community is different. The issues that a community in the Central Valley might care about, maybe water or some of the healthcare issues that are prevalent out there, some of the lack of healthcare, the lack of infrastructure, might be very different in a more urban settings. And that matters because one would hope that the elected official that a community elects would represent those issues in Congress. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And I’ll note, you know, Princeton University rates the different redistrictings in each state. They gave California a B score on partisan fairness. But if adopted, they say the Proposition 50 maps would get an F. So it gives you a sense of the direction California would be going when it comes to nonpartisan maps. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In theory, you know ,Proposition 50 would replace the work of the commission until 2030. But there is a lot of skepticism, I think, from opponents of this who feel like when is the deescalation going to happen, right? We see states just competing, competing, trying to change their maps in more and more partisan ways. Is California really gonna step away from that and go back to more of an independent system? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> So this is really a departure from what was a fairly non partisan way of redistricting to one that is overtly partisan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Yeah, that’s right. And I think look, even like supporters of Proposition 50 realize that in a vacuum, doing away with citizens drawn maps is unpopular. What I think they would argue is this is not happening in a vacuum. This is happening as part of a wider fight across the country. This battle for control of the House of Representatives, and Democrats who are supporting Prop 50 say: ‘The stakes are too high for us to just simply be focusing on good governance. We need to retake the House of Representatives.’\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> What kind of local impacts could this have on the Bay Area? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> One is in Sonoma County, where Sonoma is now gonna be paired with communities in the northern part of the state: Butte County, Tehama County. And really the point there is to take a district, currently the first district that’s controlled by a Republican, and dragging the lines down south into Sonoma County and therefore picking up all of these Democratic voters who live in Sonoma. So that’s a key part of redistricting when you’re trying to do it for partisan gain. You’re trying to bring voters from one party into a new district in hopes that they’ll change the outcome of it. And really the hope is that district would go from currently represented by a Republican to being represented by a Democrat in 2026. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There’s another change that that’s happening in eastern Contra Costa County, where you have a lot of communities around the Carquinez Strait, the northern waterfront – from Martinez, Pittsburgh, Antioch, even across into Solano County, Vallejo that are currently grouped in this district that the commission created back in 2021 with the explicit goal of putting together working class communities that are racially diverse. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They got a lot of input from residents who felt like, you know, communities like Richmond, Vallejo, Pittsburgh, Antioch have a lot in common and should be included in one congressional district to kind of maximize the voice of people living there. So their shared concerns about living around refineries, their shared concerns about means of transportation. If all those voters would be in the same district, whoever wins that seat would have no choice but to listen to the concerns of the community. So that was what the commission thought when they’re creating this 8th district. That district would be broken up under the Proposition 50 map. And the reason is because voters in Antioch and Pittsburgh would be moved into a Central Valley district. The strategy behind that is these are heavily Democratic voters in Pittsburgh and Antioch. They’d be moved into a Central Valley district to help a vulnerable Democratic incumbent have an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So there’s two kinds of things at play here with Proposition 50. There’s targeting seats that are currently held by Republicans, trying to flip them to Democratic seats. There’s also seats that Democrats currently hold, but they’re a little bit tenuous. They’re kind of close competitive seats. Proposition 50 would make them less competitive. So give those Democrats an easier path to re-election. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those local impacts are actually really, really interesting, but we don’t actually hear people talking about the local impacts that much. I would say most of the campaigning for this proposition has been about the balance of power in Washington. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Absolutely. And that’s by design. Look, the supporters of Proposition 50 are really framing this as part of the national fight over the House of Representatives, over gerrymandering that’s breaking out in Republican states. And they want to talk about the need to win these House seats for Democrats in order to break Republican hold on power in Washington. And that’s really the argument that you’re hearing coming from the Yes on 50 campaign. The phrase they love to use is ‘you have to fight fire with fire.’ Some of the ads for Proposition 50 don’t even mention redistricting. They highlight a lot of the actions the president have t has taken that are unpopular in California and are basically saying to voters, look, you need we need to stop this, vote yes on Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> It’s worth noting though that just because you redraw the districts doesn’t mean that somebody automatically wins. I mean, these candidates still have to run. They still have to convince voters to vote for them. So let’s just, you know, slow our roll a little bit, you know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> That’s a great point. You still actually have to have the campaigns, right? When we talk about redistricting, the end result is just okay, ‘how many Democrats live in this district and how many Republicans.’ But to your point, there still needs to be candidates that are running. There’s still everything that’s happening in the world that influences how people vote in an election. So all of that will still have to play out no matter how Proposition 50 fares. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so we’ve heard a lot about what the yes side is doing. What argument is the no side making? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Well, the no side is really making a good government argument against gerrymandering. They’re supporting the system that we currently have right now, these maps drawn by citizens that are not focusing on helping Republicans or helping Democrats, and they say they want to keep the system that way. Now, that’s not to say that the opponents of Prop 50 don’t have partisan interests in mind. A lot of Republicans are opposing Prop 50 because if this passes, they will probably lose seats in Congress. So there is a lot of partisan interest in the opposition, but the messaging they’re putting out there is really about maintaining this system of good governance that we have. And a key messenger in that is former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Narrator in advertisement:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> The politicians want their power back.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in political advertisement: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s what they want to do is take us backwards. That is why it is important to vote no on Proposition 50. Democracy. You’ve got to protect it and we’ve got to go and fight for it. \u003c/span>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Schwarzenegger was the one who helped create the Independent Commission back in 2008. And he has actually spoken out against Proposition 50. He said he opposes it, basically along the lines of two wrongs don’t make a right, just because Texas and Republican states are gerrymandering, California shouldn’t go down this path. But I’ll say it’s interesting the way in which Schwarzenegger has come out and talked about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He spoke at an event at the University of Southern California. He said he’s against Prop 50. He encouraged the no vote. And it was actually the ‘No on 50’ campaign was in the crowd. They were filming it, and they used that video for an advertisement. They scrubbed out the background so it doesn’t say USC anymore, it says No on 50. But that’s interesting because Schwarzenegger himself has been a little bit hesitant to actually engage in the campaign. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He didn’t, you know, meet up with the No on 50 campaign and create that ad. He hasn’t been out barnstorming against Prop 50. And I think that’s because he feels perhaps a little bit uncomfortable in that this has really become a Democratic versus Republican fight. Schwarzenegger does not like President Trump, not a big fan, and he’s always tried to keep a little distance from the Republican Party establishment, especially now. So he probably feels maybe caught in the middle in some way, even as he opposes Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, let’s talk about campaign finance. What kind of money is being spent on the race and by whom? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Lot of big money pouring into this campaign. There’s been more money in support of it than against Prop 50. The yes side has like a two to one financial edge. And you’ve really seen Governor Newsom rally the Democratic establishment to give to Prop 50. We’ve seen major Democratic donors like George Soros, Tom Steyer spend a lot to support Prop 50. We’ve also seen a lot of grassroots energy. There have been small dollar donations from every single state in the country supporting Prop 50, which I do think speaks to like, yes, this is a state ballot measure. But we’re in a year where there’s not much else on the ballot. And this has gotten a lot of attention, I think, from Democrats across the country who again want to feel like they’re a part of something that’s pushing back against the administration. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On the no side, it’s really been one big donor opposing Prop 50. That’s Charles Munger Jr. He’s a philanthropist, big Republican donor in the Bay Area. He bankrolled the measures that created the Citizens Commission back in 2008. So I think he feels this is his baby to some extent. He really supports this idea, and he’s putting a lot of money, at this point more than $30 million, to oppose Prop 50. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, Guy Marzorati, correspondent on KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk, thanks for breaking this down for us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guy Marzorati:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Thanks for having me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katrina Schwartz: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In a nutshell, a vote yes on Proposition 50 means you want to adopt a new legislatively-drawn districting map that could make it easier for Democrats to win seats in the House of Representatives through 2030. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A vote no on Prop 50 means you want to keep our current map and keep redistricting in the hands of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That’s it for our episode on Prop 50. You can cast your vote in person or by mail. Registered voters should have received their ballots by now, and those must be filled out and postmarked on or before November 4th. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our show is made in San Francisco at Member Supported KQED. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bay Curious is made by Gabriela Glueck, Christopher Beale, Olivia Allen-Price, and me, Katrina Schwartz, with extra support Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"soldout": {
"id": "soldout",
"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
"tagline": "A new future for housing",
"info": "Sold Out: Rethinking Housing in America",
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