Richard White - Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University

WHO KILLED JANE STANFORD?

A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University

RICHARD WHITE

TO MY BROTHER,

STEPHEN

FOR YEARS a visit to Stanford University has involved crossing paths with tours led by undergraduates who, walking backward, face a trailing audience of prospective students and their families. Those in the tours crave admission to one of the wealthiest and most exclusive universities in the world.

The tour guides convey an origin story of the university: a beloved child of a rich couple dies tragically; the grieving parents vow to devote their fortune to the creation of a college for the children of California, and Leland Stanford Junior University opens in 1891. The story is true as far as it goes, but it leaves out critical details that change the storys meaning. The full story involves a dubious and insecure fortune laundered into a monument to the founding family, and a school rejuvenated through the blood of one of its founders.

It is a Gilded Age story, and this book tells that story.

Who Killed Jane Stanford? originated from another tour, one I gave for years as part of a class I taught on the nineteenth century. I walked my students back into the pastinto the Gilded Ageto get them to decipher what was hidden in front of their eyes. My tour covered the oldest parts of Stanford the Quad, the Memorial Church, the museum, the mausoleum, and remnants of the Memorial Archthat date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their original form, these monuments to the Stanfords were so grandiose and brazenso lacking in subtletythat the immediate instinct was to accept them at face value and never consider what they might conceal.

But Leland Stanford Junior University was never what it seemed. Stanford was inwarda common expression of the late nineteenth century used to describe things that were not as they appeared on the surface. Stanford appeared to be simply another of the new research universities funded by rich people during the Gilded Age: the University of Chicago, Rice University, Vanderbilt University, and Carnegie Mellon University. But Stanford University became much stranger and much darker.

It was more fitting than I originally knew to begin my tour at the mausoleum because it was Jane Stanfords death that saved the university created by the death of Leland Jr. Both, along with Leland Stanford Sr., rest inside. Initially and obtusely, I focused on Leland Stanford Sr., whose fortune derived from the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads. I recognized soon enough that without the dead childLeland Stanford Jr.the Stanford campus would be just another patch in the suburbs sweeping south from San Francisco.

But the key figure was Jane Stanford. After the death of her husband and cofounder Leland Stanford in 1893, she wielded power over the university. For a dozen years the dead son and the dead father rested alone in the mausoleum while Jane Stanford kept the university alive during the hard times of the 1890s. She shaped it until her death in 1905. During those years, an empty sarcophagus awaited her inside the family mausoleum. The inscription engraved on its marble surface stopped, incomplete: Jane L. Stanford. Born in Mortality, August 2, 1828. Passed to Immortality... On March 16, 1905, a workman chiseled in the missing date: February 28, 1905. What Jane Stanford called her earthly life was complete.

Leland Stanford Junior University was not like other universities because Jane Stanford was convinced that not only was she doing Gods work, she was also his agent in promoting the education of the soul as well as the mind. In 1900, taking a cure in Bavaria, she imagined the scene at the university, with carriages rushing up the main drive up to the Arch.... I can see the artists at work on the carving bringing out the story of the civilization of the world and prevading [sic] my entire being such a sense of gratitude fills me... that I, so unworthy of Gods special care, should have been chosen as a humble instrument to do the will of the loved ones gone on to their reward for lives well spent.

Contrary to the selfless image created of her after her death, Jane Stanford always deflected attention back to herself, even as she celebrated her son, her husband, God, and civilization. She commissioned the statue of her family; she built the arch and the church. She dedicated the church to Leland Stanfordmy husband; she was the instrument of Gods and her deceased familys will. The Reverend David Charles Gardner proved a spectacularly poor prophet but correct enough in discerning the churchs purpose when he said at its dedication, This cathedral like church will stand forever a monument to the piety of a woman.

Jane made her Christian devotion, her identity as a mother and wife, and her service to civilization visible, but they also masked what she sought to keep out of public notice: her spiritualism. Spiritualism was both common and controversial in Gilded Age America and, for that matter, in Victorian England. Queen Victoria was a spiritualist; so too were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Lincoln, President Ulysses S. Grant, and his wife Louisa. Spiritualism had numerous variations, but essentially it involved communication with the dead. Death was so thin a barrier that spiritualists often refused to use the word, instead resorting to euphemisms like birth into a higher life. In a world full of early deaths, this was comforting.

Jane Stanford did not advertise her spiritualism, but neither did she hide it from those who knew where to look. The nondenominational Memorial Church was Jane Stanfords great solace. She described it as soul-satisfying, a work of love. But the church was deeply inward.

The cacophony of creeds and symbols in the ecumenical Memorial Church allowed the voices of spiritualists to babble inconspicuously among the others. Jane Stanford personally gathered the spiritual quotations that covered the lower walls of the east and west sides of the church. She sought to strip Christianity of dogma and make it nonsectarian, but the result spoke mainly to a sect of one: Jane Stanford. The church of Jane rested on two key texts. The first read: The best form of religion is, trust in God and a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, life everlasting. This she attributed to a letter from her husband. So too the second: An eternal existence in prospect converts the whole of your present state into a mere vestibule of the grand court of life; a beginning, an introduction to what is to follow; the entrance into that immeasurable extent of being which is the true life of man. The best thoughts, affections and aspirations of a great soul are fixed on the infinitude of eternity. Destined as such a soul is for immortality, it finds all that is not eternal too short, all that is not infinite too small.