AMASA LELAND STANFORD

I should know all this, for Stanford University has been part of my life since 1958.  Yet, my only recollection of the founder of this institution, Leland Stanford (with wife Jane), is that he was sort of a shady robber baron.  In fact, in 1975, as the University was dropping Indians, students voted for Robber Barons, as a derisive nod to Stanford, the man.  

Other options were Sequoias, Trees (the campus does have a lot of them), Cardinals, Railroaders, Spikes and Huns.  The Board of Trustees ignored the popular vote, and in 1981 chose Cardinal, the school color, to replace Indians as the official nickname.  The other color, White, might have once been appropriate, but no more.

Yet, without a mascot, that dumb Tree seems to have, at least unofficially, become the symbol of Stanford.  In reality, the Tree is the mascot of the Stanford Band, which itself has its own notoriety.  This group has regularly been banned.  Here is a top ten of controversial moments.  Past trees recently had a reunion.

But going back to Amasa Leland, his given names when born on 9 March 1824, by the age of 20 he ditched his peculiar first name, who in the Old Testament was a nephew of King David.  A book by Roland DeWolk was just published last month, American Disruptor:  The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford.  With Wikipedia referring to him as a Robber Baron, you would think that Leland Stanford was worse than Donald Trump.  But no, he was a truly OUTSTANDING AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN.  Really!

First he was a lawyer, who married Jane Lathrop in 1850.  Their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., came along in 1968, but he died of typhoid in 1984.

He helped start the Republican Party in California and was its eighth governor around the time of the Civil War, cutting the state debt in two and advocated forest conservation.  He also served in the U.S. Senate from 1885 to this death in 1893.  His biggest contributions came between those two political periods:

• from 1961 was president of what became Southern Pacific (the train company) and started what became Wells Fargo and Pacific Life

• also in 1961, with Charles Crocker (banking), Mark Hopkins (that hotel on the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco is where his mansion stood--Stanford's mansion was also up there, destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, upon which now stands the Stanford Court Hotel) and Collis Huntington (also developed Newport News as a key shipping port) starting building the transcontinental railroad

• personally pounded in the golden spike completing the effort in 1869, with the first locomotive, now on display at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, named Gov. Stanford
• in 1984 he and Jane founded Leland Stanford Junior University as a memorial to their son (and yes, they did visit with Harvard President Charles Eliot, right, but only to gain his advice on how to endow a university)
• they donated $40 million for this effort, today worth $1.15 billion

• their horse farm became the campus, which is known as The Farm
• also gave the largest wine acreage in California to the university
• the first student admitted to Encina Hall (where I lived for three years) was Herbert Hoover (tower named after him), who went on to become the 31st president

Finally, the death of Jane Stanford remains today a mystery.  She micro-managed Stanford, whose first president was David Starr Jordan.  She was poisoned with strychnine at her Nob Hill home on 14 January 1905, but survived.  

To recuperate, she caught the steamship Korea to Honolulu on February 15.  During her stay in the Moana Hotel, at a picnic on February 28, she was again poisoned, and this time died.  While the subsequent investigation and re-investigation could not identify a perpetrator, it is said that the most likely culprits were her secretary of 30 years, Bertha Berner, who was said to be carrying on an affair with President Jordan, and they together planned and carried out the assassination.  

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