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]]
[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!