The Robber Baroness of Northern California

As he investigates her homicide, White finds that Jane Stanford’s sanitized public persona masked a actuality that was each extra scandalous and weirder. A spiritualist who attended the flowery séances {of professional} mediums, Stanford sought counsel and luxury from her departed son and husband. However extra importantly, for White’s functions, she usually clashed with the residing.

These clashes, in accordance with White, started within the dwelling. Regardless of her professions of devotion, Berner usually fought with Stanford over the circumstances of her employment. She briefly stop, in 1889, when Stanford denied her day off to look after her sick mom. Comparable disputes arose once more on a number of of Stanford’s prolonged home and worldwide journeys. Stanford, who was deeply spiritual, additionally suspected that Berner was romantically concerned with two male workers within the family, and made no secret of her disapproval. Berner obtained her revenge by taking kickbacks on family bills.

Although White portrays her as a very tyrannical employer, Stanford was all too typical within the management that she sought over her workers’ time and our bodies. Reside-in servants usually labored twelve-hour days, and even when not formally working had been “on name.” “Mistresses,” like Stanford, sometimes permitted the members of their employees to go away the home just one night through the week, and each different Sunday afternoon and night. They positioned themselves because the ethical guardians of their working-class workers, and disciplined servants discovered flirting or socializing with males. Romantic suitors, in any case, had been opponents for workers’ time and loyalty. On this sense, Berner’s relationships weren’t solely a menace to Stanford’s Christian sensibilities—additionally they threatened the sleek operations of a family that was each bit as a lot of a enterprise as Leland’s railroads. The maids, cooks, and secretaries who play a key position within the occasions in White’s guide had been solely the innermost circle of the Stanfords’ a lot bigger employees.

White focusses on the dramas that unfolded within the family and the college, however the Stanford property’s most bitter labor conflicts passed off on the household farms. Moreover their major residence, located in downtown San Francisco, the Stanfords owned three rural properties: a seventy-two-hundred-acre residential property and inventory farm, in Palo Alto; the Gridley wheat farm, in Butte County; and the Vina Ranch, straddling Butte and Tehama County, which contained a rustic home and what was, by some accounts, the world’s largest winery. The properties constituted the unique endowment for the college that the Stanfords based and, after Leland’s loss of life, a possible supply of money.

When Jane Stanford inherited the farms, she got down to make the sometimes money-losing properties worthwhile by leasing sections of the land, promoting off a few of Leland’s horses, closing a distillery, and firing workers who wouldn’t take pay cuts. When Stanford visited Vina within the winter of 1894, newspapers reported {that a} group of native males surrounded her non-public automobile, shouting and firing their revolvers into the air.

Stanford additionally took a web page out of her late husband’s enterprise playbook, hiring indebted migrant staff by the labor contractors who operated all through the area. Not lengthy after the taking pictures incident, rumors started circulating that she had changed Vina’s whole employees of white winery staff with Japanese migrants contracted at decrease wages. That wasn’t fairly true, however newspaper protection, guests’ accounts, and data within the Stanford household’s archives all point out that Jane Stanford employed a whole bunch of each Chinese language and Japanese staff throughout the farm properties, sometimes paying them lower than whites in comparable jobs. Because the historian Cecilia Tsu has written, the favored picture of Northern California as a haven for the idyllic white “household farm” masked the area’s reliance on a big, expert Asian labor drive.

In August, 1898, Stanford instructed her buddy Could Hopkins that she was in Vina attempting to “pacify a bitter feeling current between white workers and Chinese language.” The white staff, it turned out, had set hearth to the winery, protesting the discount of their day by day wages and the employment of Chinese language grape pickers. The arsonists destroyed 600 kilos of hay and alfalfa, together with all the winery instruments, although it appeared that their actual targets had been close by cabins belonging to the Chinese language pickers. Stanford claimed that she subtle the stress with “a couple of form phrases,” and the newspapers praised her as a “peacemaker.” Per week later, fifteen cabins burned down.

The papers attributed the fireplace to a “careless smoker,” however the incident had all of the markers of the anti-Chinese language violence that the historian Beth Lew-Williams has proven was endemic within the Gilded Age. Towards the backdrop of California’s surging battles over labor and immigration, the goings on at Vina couldn’t fully escape controversy. But the farm’s proprietor retained her picture as a gracious homemaker. In her biography, all Berner talked about of Stanford’s administration of Vina had been the preserved fruits, fruit cordials, and selection meats that the widow introduced again to share among the many residents and company of her residence within the metropolis.

Valued at twenty million {dollars} in 1891, Leland Stanford Junior College’s land-backed endowment exceeded the price of Harvard’s by an element of almost 5. The Stanfords envisioned the college as an alternative choice to the élite universities of the East, which sought to coach rich gents for a lifetime of cultured leisure. Their college, in distinction, would admit women and men of all courses. It could settle for high-school store work as an entrance prerequisite, provide extension programs on agricultural science to native fruit growers, and dispense with each grades and tuition.

It’s tempting to view the college merely as a sort of cash laundry, recycling the Stanfords’ ill-gotten positive aspects for the noble functions of teaching the frequent individuals. However the couple’s goals, particularly Jane ’s, had been extra formidable. She didn’t solely need to achieve the favor of California’s working courses. Because the scholar John Ott has argued, she additionally needed to mildew them.

The college’s most significant function, Stanford defined in an deal with to its Board of Trustees a couple of years after her husband’s loss of life, was the event of the coed’s “soul germ.” She urged the trustees to eschew school rooms in favor of outlets and workshops that will “dignify labor” by educating future staff to “use their palms deftly and usefully.” Stanford believed that, along with offering vocational coaching, the college ought to inculcate the values of religion, thrift, and abstinence of varied sorts. She and her husband banned alcohol from the dormitories and capped the variety of girls undergraduates at 5 hundred.

Élite Western girls of this era, because the historian Peggy Pascoe has written, sought ethical authority in a male-dominated world by insisting on their distinctive capability for piety and purity. In search of affect in relation to males, they might exert their energy over nonwhites and the poor. Like friends who established “rescue properties” for sex-workers and single moms, Stanford made her generosity contingent on adherence to her ethical code.

Unsurprisingly, college students chafed at Stanford’s supervision of their social lives. White finds that directors and professors additionally objected to her meddling in tutorial affairs. “Within the eyes of the legislation the college professors had been Mrs. Stanford’s private servants,” the college president, David Starr Jordan, wrote in “The Story of a Good Lady,” primarily based on a speech he gave to honor the college’s co-founder. Jordan was referring to a decide’s order, through the dispute over Leland Stanford, Sr.,’s property, that the college pay its workers’ salaries from the identical allowance reserved for family employees. However White’s characterization of the connection between Jordan and Jane Stanford means that the assertion may need had one other that means. Regardless of the flowery reward he provided her in public, Jordan privately fumed over Stanford’s interference in issues of hiring and firing.

The tensions between Stanford and Jordan got here to a head over the destiny of the economics professor Edward Ross. Ross had advocated publicly for populist causes resembling including silver to gold because the financial customary, the general public regulation of personal utilities, and a ban on Japanese immigration—reportedly saying the U.S. ought to flip its weapons on each ship crossing the Pacific. Stanford was outraged by the assertion, much less due to its horrifying genocidal implications than as a result of it represented an assault on the labor practices of capitalists like her husband and herself. Jordan tried to steer Stanford to retain Ross within the title of freedom of speech, to no avail. Ross resigned, at Stanford’s behest and amid nice scandal, forcing Jordan to take the blame for the choice and defend his benefactress with a purpose to save the college’s fame. For as soon as, the general public wasn’t fooled. “Mrs. Stanford selects a president and college as she would a butler with a employees of footmen, cooks, and scallions,” one newspaper reported.

The injury to the college’s standing ensuing from the “Ross Affair” and different tutorial scandals set the stage for what White argues was Jordan’s cover-up of Jane Stanford’s homicide. Wills and trusts had been susceptible to authorized problem if the testator was deemed insane, and people episodes had impressed whispers about Stanford’s erratic decision-making and her communions with spirits. A homicide trial would convey extra undesirable consideration to a few of the much less savory elements of the benefactress’s previous, and solutions of suicide might be taken as proof of madness. With the college’s monetary and reputational grounds threatening to break down underneath the load of one other scandal, the one answer was to redirect the general public’s consideration away from the suspicious circumstances of Stanford’s loss of life.

Solely as soon as in her biography, on the third-to-last web page, does Bertha Berner come near telling one thing like the reality about Jane Stanford. “Mrs. Stanford got here to rule individuals by her wealth,” Berner writes, “and no crown or title might have made her rule extra absolute nor the conclusion of her energy extra clear in her thoughts.” Nonetheless, Berner couches that blunt evaluation in reward. She tells us that Stanford modelled her monarchical fashion on Queen Victoria’s, doggedly devoting herself to the welfare of her individuals. When Stanford had performed all that she might to enhance their lot, Berner writes, she was able to die.

White additionally lays out his playing cards in his guide’s remaining pages. Berner, he concludes, killed Jane Stanford—possibly due to the cash that Stanford left her in her will, possibly as a result of Berner feared that Stanford would discover out concerning the kickbacks, possibly as a result of she’d merely had sufficient. Jordan, too, had a believable motive for homicide—Stanford deliberate to fireside him upon getting back from her journey—however White thinks that the bumbling administrator didn’t have it in him. As a substitute, the historian concludes, Jordan hid Berner’s crime to guard the college’s picture, and his personal.

White helps his theories with some essential items of neglected proof, resembling a short point out in a newspaper story connecting Berner to a druggist who would have had entry to strychnine. However, greater than something, it’s the continually shifting tales that Berner and Jordan instructed about their employer that appear to show their guilt. Like Debs, each Berner and Jordan had incentives to uphold Stanford’s picture as a guileless widow.

The thriller of Jane Stanford’s loss of life seems to hinge on the thriller of her life: how a lady on the flip of the 20th century might amass such energy, and the way she might disguise that energy from the general public. As a substitute of in search of equality with males, Stanford insisted on her distinction, and capitalized upon her authority as a spouse and mom. She prolonged her dominance properly past the family by working underneath the pretense of female care and generosity. Her achievement, ultimately, was not emulating her husband, however performing with a ruthlessness that was fully her personal.