Vernon Lyman Kellogg


Vernon Lyman Kellogg was an American entomologist, evolutionary biologist, and science administrator. His father was Lyman Beecher Kellogg, first president of the Kansas State Normal School, and former Kansas Attorney General. In 1908, Kellogg married Charlotte Hoffman and the two welcomed their only child, Jean Kellogg Dickie, in 1910.
He studied under Francis Snow at the University of Kansas, under John Henry Comstock at Stanford University, and under Rudolf Leuckart at the University of Leipzig in Germany.
From 1894 to 1920, Kellogg was professor of entomology at Stanford University Kellogg specialized in insect taxonomy and economic entomology. Herbert Hoover was among his students, and Florence E. Bemis worked in his lab.
His academic career was interrupted by two years spent in Brussels as director of Hoover's humanitarian American Commission for Relief in Belgium. Initially a pacifist, Kellogg dined with the officers of the German Supreme Command. He became shocked by the grotesque Social Darwinist motivation for the German war machine, "the creed of survival of the fittest based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the Gospel of the German intellectuals." Kellogg decided that the ideas could be beaten only by force and, using his connections with America's political elite, began to campaign for American intervention in the war. He published an account of his conversations in the book Headquarters Nights.
After the war, he served as the first permanent secretary of the National Research Council in Washington, DC.
He served on the board of trustees for Science Service,, from 1921 to 1933.
A Liberty ship built in the United States during World War II was named SS Vernon L. Kellogg.

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