CHAPTER XXXII
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]
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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!
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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.”
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