The mystery of the baroness Jane Stanford’s death turns out to hinge on the mystery of her life: how a woman at the turn of the 20th century could amass such power, and how she could disguise that power from the public.
Stanford’s sanitized public persona masked a reality that was more scandalous and strange.In the summer of 1894, Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford travelled to the Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon. Parking her private railroad car, the Stanford, on a sidetrack among the trees, she planned to rest until the mountain air restored her health and rejuvenated her spirits. When the regular train passed through the outpost, she received her newspapers and any necessary provisions.
Undeterred, Stanford sent a message to Eugene V. Debs, the A.R.U.’s president, requesting that he give permission to some of his men to escort her home. A few workers had already aided her passage to Sissons, and Stanford hoped that they might take her on to San Francisco. Debs promised Stanford, the widow of a railroad owner who had brutally exploited his workers, that he would do everything in his power to facilitate her safe return.
The life of Leland Stanford is the stuff of legend: the journalist Matthew Josephson popularized the term “robber baron” in hisabout Gilded Age capitalists to describe Leland and his peers. “It was said of him that ‘no she-lion defending her whelps or a bear her cubs will make a more savage fight than will Mr. Stanford in defense of his material interests,’ ” Josephson wrote. Others heralded Leland as a talented entrepreneur, his railroads as the engines of American economic progress.
Berner’s account of Stanford’s accidental death went mostly unquestioned for several decades. Then, the neurologist Robert W.P. Cutler reviewed Stanford’s medical records. He found that Berner’s biography had glossed over reliable medical testimony identifying the death as a murder. He published his findings in a true-crime book, called “” , writing, with reference to the widow’s dying declaration, “I concur with Mrs. Stanford.
Though White portrays her as a particularly tyrannical employer, Stanford was all too typical in the control that she sought over her employees’ time and bodies. Live-in servants often worked twelve-hour days, and even when not formally working were “on call.” “Mistresses,” like Stanford, typically permitted the members of their staff to leave the house only one evening during the week, and every other Sunday afternoon and evening.
In August, 1898, Stanford told her friend May Hopkins that she was in Vina trying to “pacify a bitter feeling existing between white employees and Chinese.” The white workers, it turned out, had set fire to the vineyard, protesting the reduction of their daily wages and the employment of Chinese grape pickers.
Unsurprisingly, students chafed at Stanford’s supervision of their social lives. White finds that administrators and professors also objected to her meddling in academic affairs. “In the eyes of the law the university professors were Mrs. Stanford’s personal servants,” the university president, David Starr Jordan, wrote in “The Story of a Good Woman,” based on a speech he gave to honor the school’s co-founder. Jordan was referring to a judge’s order, during the dispute over Leland Stanford, Sr.
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