THE STORY OF STANFORD
Thirty miles south of San Francisco, sheltered behind the coast range of
mountains, lies the great institution with whose students the “Golden
Bear” does its fighting. Stanford University was founded by one of the
“Big Four” railroad kings, who for forty years or more plundered the
people of California. Like other railroad kings, Leland Stanford amused
himself by purchasing racehorses and state legislators, but he differed
from the rest in that he had a respect for knowledge. He wanted to be a
trustee of the University of California, and when he failed, he decided
to start a rival institution. When his only son died in early youth, the
heart-broken old man chose this means of perpetuating the boy’s name,
and he pledged to Leland Stanford, Jr., University his land, his
racehorses, and a part of his railroad stock; also a valuable asset in
the form of David Starr Jordan, a scientist and teacher with some real
interest in democracy.
Senator Stanford died in the midst of the panic of 1893, and his
university was in a predicament; there was no money on hand, and it was
impossible to sell any land, and parasites and blackmailers gathered in
a swarm—relatives and friends, legislators whom the senator had kept on
his payroll, newspaper editors and publishers he had used. The editor of
one San Jose newspaper sent in a bill for twenty-five hundred dollars
advertising—he had printed news about the opening of the university!
Senator Stanford left a hundred thousand dollars to every relative he
could find, hoping thereby to buy them off; but within twenty-four hours
of his death one of his relatives in New York forged his name to a check
for a hundred thousand dollars; another relative, a woman, was shot by
her husband, a gambler, because she did not get her money quickly
enough!
The only way to keep the university safe was to make it Mrs. Stanford’s
personal property; all the professors were listed as her private
servants—a device which some other presidents of universities might be
interested to make note of! For years the institution was supported from
Mrs. Stanford’s income, eked out by the occasional selling of a
racehorse. The job of running a university and a racing stable in
combination offered a diversified task for the widow of a railroad king
and a specialist in ichthyology. The senator had been offered a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for “Palo Alto,” a prize stallion; the offer
was refused—and next year the stallion died!
The university owned a fourth interest in the Central Pacific Railroad,
now a portion of the Southern Pacific; the other fourths were owned by
the Crocker estate, the Hopkins estate, and Collis P. Huntington, the
prize grabber of them all, who resented the university as an insult to
his lack of culture. He would “stop that circus some day,” he used to
say; describing it as “putting a two thousand dollar education into a
two hundred dollar boy.” Some years previously he had proposed that in
order to determine the value of the Central Pacific stock, each of the
four holders should put some of it on the market; this was done, and
Huntington secretly bought it all, and then turned Stanford out and had
himself made president of the road. Dr. Jordan described Huntington’s
motto as: “Anything is mine that is not nailed down, and nothing is
nailed that I can pry loose.” After Stanford’s death he tried to buy the
university holdings in the railroad for three million dollars; but the
university held on—and had better luck than Johns Hopkins University,
which was left a big block of Baltimore and Ohio stock by its founder,
and was frozen out by the big fellows, and did not get a dollar.
Ultimately the Stanford stock was sold to James Speyer for sixteen
millions.
Many and curious were the efforts made to get Mrs. Stanford’s money away
from her university. A preacher came and delivered a sermon about her
dead boy, in which he compared him to the youthful Jesus Christ—but he
did not get her millions for Methodism! The Catholics came, and they
deeply impressed the old lady’s failing mind with their bells and
incense and colored lights—but they did not persuade her to move the
Stanford girl-students to their school at Menlo Park! Bearing in mind
these tragedies averted, we may forgive our ichthyological diplomat for
some of the minor atrocities which he was unable to avert: for example,
the great bronze statue of Senator Stanford, with his wife and son
kneeling dutifully at his feet. This group is known to the irreverent
students as the “Holy Trinity,” and it used to stand in the middle of
the campus; but the elements were also irreverent, and so it has been
moved indoors, and fills the rotunda of the museum.
I do not know where in the world you can find a more curious and
pathetic monument to human vanity than the family rooms of this Stanford
museum; rooms full of great glass cases, filled with the domestic
implements and the clothes, the toys and the trophies of the tribe of
Stanford. Case No. One: The senator’s uniform, his military vest,
gloves, sword and pistols, which he never had occasion to use except on
parade. Case No. Two: the crockery and lamps used by the Stanford family
at all stages of its career. Case No. Three: the skirts and other
wearing apparel of Mrs. Stanford’s sisters—all these objects patiently
classified and labeled in the old lady’s handwriting. Case No. Four: the
photographs of the senator’s racehorses, the cups they won, and the
hoofs and ears of many of them. Case No. Five: sixty-two photographs of
the Stanford family—this not counting the photographs in other cases.
Case No. Six: the baby paintings, the chess set, and eight of the canes
of the only begotten son. Case No. Seven: his baby shoes, toilet set,
pens and cups. Case No. Eight: his boxing gloves, fishing lines, rifles,
magic lanterns. Case No. Nine: his wood carvings and other apparatus.
Case No. Ten: his toy boats and trains. Case No. Eleven: his soldiers,
cannon, drum. Poor, feeble lad, spoon-fed and coddled, he beat his
little drum, but the drum-sticks fell from his nerveless fingers. If he
had grown up he would have wasted the Stanford fortune, as the Pullman
boys, and the Goulds, and the Thaws, and the Crokers, and the Whitneys,
and the MCCormicks, and so many others. Instead, he died, and the world
has a university!
We continue our walk about the room. Case No. Twelve: the fans which
Mrs. Stanford wielded in a lifetime of fascination. Case No. Thirteen:
her souvenir spoons and necklaces. Case No. Fourteen: the senator’s
chair, and the canes which he carried, all carefully labeled as to where
he purchased them and carried them. A plain and humble author, I have
been able to go through life so far without ever owning a cane; but it
appears that a senator and railroad king must have twenty-four elaborate
and expensive ones; and posterity must have a fireproof building in
which to preserve them, and great steel doors, such as you find in the
vaults of a bank, to keep them safe from thieves. If you have not seen
enough, come downstairs, and inspect more of Leland’s toys, including
his old-fashioned bicycle. The students declare that somewhere in this
museum is hidden a model of Leland’s last breakfast of fried ham and
eggs; but this, of course, may be just youthful waggery.[J]
-----
Footnote J:
A woman friend who has lived for sixteen years in Palo Alto swears to
me that she has been shown, in the secret rooms of the museum, a
porcelain plate containing a porcelain bologna sausage and a porcelain
fried egg!
-----
We are told not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, and the saying should
perhaps apply to a university. We can hardly expect that a vain old
lady, put in charge of an institution of learning for ten or fifteen
years, would not busy herself to see that evil ideas were kept out of
it. In the Bryan campaign of 1896, there rose up in the university a big
bold fellow by the name of Ross, who actively favored Free Silver—which
meant the cutting in half of the wealth of all the interlocking
directors, except those who owned silver mines. Subsequently this bold
bad man made speeches opposing oriental immigration, whereas he knew
that Senator Stanford had been an ardent advocate of cheap Chinese
labor. Also he said to some of his students in the university that “a
railroad deal is a railroad steal!” So Mrs. Stanford served notice on
her president that Professor Ross must go; and this at the perilous time
when the Catholic cohorts were gathering, with their bells and incense
and colored lights and other magic spells! I could appreciate that
President Jordan was speaking from the depths of his heart when he said
to me: “The best thing that the founder of a university can do is to die
and let others run it!”
The radical professor was let out, and there was a terrific uproar, and
several others resigned. The controversy lasted all through the academic
year. Professor G. E. Howard, head of the department of history,
ventured to make a sarcastic reference to the incident in a lecture to a
class, and some weeks later received a letter from the president, asking
for his resignation; this was followed by a number of other
resignations, chiefly in Professor Howard’s department. This series of
events caused so much injury to Stanford’s reputation that the
authorities made a desperate effort to counteract the effects. The story
of what they did is told me by Professor A. O. Lovejoy, now of the
department of philosophy of Johns Hopkins, and at that time professor of
philosophy at Stanford. I quote from his letter:
Late in the academic year, near the beginning of which Professor Ross
was dismissed, a statement addressed to the public and designed for
signature by members of the Stanford faculty was drawn—by whom I do
not know—and an attempt was made to secure the signatures of all
members (I believe) above the rank of instructor. Each teacher was
invited to come separately to the office of one of the senior
professors, a close personal friend of President Jordan; was there
shown certain correspondence between Mrs. Stanford and President
Jordan, which had not been made public; and was thereupon invited to
sign the statement—which was to the effect that the signers, having
seen certain unpublished documents, had arrived at the conclusion that
President Jordan was justified in the dismissal of Professor Ross and
that there was no question of academic freedom involved in the case.
It was perfectly well understood by me, and I think by all who were
shown the letters, that we were desired by the university authorities
to sign the “round-robin”; and it was intimated that if any, after
seeing the correspondence, should reach a conclusion contrary to that
in the “round-robin,” they were at least expected to keep silence.
Because of this last intimation I myself for some time refused to have
the letters shown me; and consented finally to examine them only after
stipulating that I should retain complete freedom to take such action
afterwards as the circumstances might seem to me to require. When I
read the letters they appeared to me to prove precisely the opposite
to the two propositions contained in the statement to the public. They
showed clearly (a) that President Jordan—-who under the existing
constitution of the university was the official responsible in such
matters—had been originally altogether unwilling to dismiss Ross, and
had consented to do so only under pressure from Mrs. Stanford; (b)
that the express grounds of Mrs. Stanford’s objection to Ross were
certain public utterances of his, and that, therefore, the question of
academic freedom was distinctly involved. I drew up a short statement
to this effect, and after the “round-robin” was published,
communicated it to the newspapers, at the same time declining the
reappointment of which I had previously been notified. I was thereupon
directed to discontinue my courses immediately. About the same time
another man—-one of the best scholars and the most effective teachers
in his department—-who had refused to sign, and was known to
disapprove strongly of the administration’s conduct, but who had given
no public expression of his opinion, was notified that he would not be
reappointed; and it was currently reported in the faculty that the
vice-president, then acting president, of the university, Dr. Branner,
had announced a policy of (in his own phrase) “shaking off the loose
plaster.”
Professor Lovejoy goes on to tell how some years later, when he was
visiting Palo Alto, “one of the signers of the collective statement to
the public told me that he had signed with great reluctance, and with a
sense of humiliation, but, since he had a family of young children, he
had not felt that he could afford to risk the loss of his position. I
cannot, of course, give this man’s name.” Professor Lovejoy calls
attention to the fact that practically all the men who resigned were
either unmarried or were married men without children. It might seem as
if Francis Bacon, a scholar himself, had foreseen the plutocratic empire
of American education when he wrote, three hundred years ago: “He that
hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”