It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up. Someone murdered Jane Stanford, the cofounder of Stanford University, on Tuesday, February 28, 1905, putting a precisely calibrated dose of pure strychnine in her bicarbonate of soda. The murderer had made an earlier attempt, introducing rat poison into Stanford’s nightstand bottle of Poland Spring water. We can’t be sure who the murderer was, but in Who Killed Jane Stanford? the Stanford University historian turned sleuth Richard White conducts a thorough investigation that includes showing who covered up the murder: David Starr Jordan, the founding president of the university.
Jordan was at least an accessory after the fact. White reaches his own conclusion about who dunnit, but the real interest of his book is his use of the crime and especially the cover-up to lay bare the forces at work in the early days of Stanford. This institution (where I also teach), with its intimate ties to Silicon Valley, its $36 billion endowment, and its outsized prestige—it generally ranks among the top three universities worldwide—has a gothic heritage that might surprise you, as well as some skeletons in the closet that, alas, might not.
American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford, a recent book by the journalist Roland De Wolk, offers important background because, although the murder took place after the death of Leland Stanford, Jane’s husband and the other cofounder of the university, his life set the stage for her death. Despite its glorifying title, American Disruptor penetrates the thicket of hagiography surrounding Leland Stanford, the son of a farmer and innkeeper near Albany, revealing him to be a typical American success story: he blundered and swindled his way to wealth, propelling himself upward by the liberal use of other people’s bootstraps.
A reluctant student who never graduated from secondary school, Stanford dropped out of, or was expelled from, a succession of schools, one after only a single night, apparently because he disliked dining at the same table as Black students. By spending two years clerking for a lawyer in the hamlet of Port Washington, Wisconsin, he received a certification to practice law in the state and established a reputation there—not as a good lawyer but as a man who could drink anyone under the table. In 1850 he went home to marry Jane Lathrop, the daughter of an Albany merchant, and she returned with him to Port Washington. But his legal career was a bust. What next?