Stanford spent seven years in the Badger State, where he married Jane Lathrop in But his business faltered, and after a fire consumed his law office and library, he turned his eyes farther west. In , he migrated to California, where he joined his five brothers. Stanford started off in the ancillary enterprises of the California Gold Rush, keeping a grocery store then a wholesale shop in Placer County.
In , he sent for Jane. That same year, he became one of the four principal investors in the Central Pacific Railroad, which Congress authorized in to build the eastbound section of the first transcontinental railroad. From to , Stanford headed a second railroad, the Southern Pacific Railroad, which later merged with the Central Pacific.
In , he was elected to the U. Political maneuvering made Stanford a very rich man. An earlier version of this post erroneously cited a phantom version of this book promoted online by another publisher but never published. Thomas J. Campanella opens his systematic, nuanced, and contradictorily satisfying chronicle with a flourish that demonstrates at once how familiar readers think they are with the place and how so much Brooklyn history has been forgotten. Like many such undertakings, some of which would have made world history, the Globe Tower flopped.
An impressive researcher and stylist, Campanella misses no opportunity to turn a city detail into an engagingly teachable moment.
She explains slavery as a necessity of the times but also shows how Washington, a creature of those times, was moved toward manumission. Strict with the help, paid and enslaved, he was also benevolently paternal. By the time of his death, Washington had embraced the need to free his human chattel. Thompson shows friends and acquaintances lobbying him to manumit. She does not absolve Washington of the sins for which we judge him but clarifies his evolution, illuminating an innovative, compromising, determined, frugal, demanding, and disciplined but flawed man.
This is no hagiography. Consequently, they began amassing great power. Becoming governor awakened something in Stanford, and his all-American paradoxes and opportunities began working in singular rhythm.
He conflated government service with personal profit, and began bullying the state legislature, local counties, and cities to issue bonds to further fund his railroad and, by extension, his fortune.
The railroad construction itself was borne largely on the backs of the pariahs of the time: Chinese immigrants, whom Stanford denigrated, along with Native Americans and others. The Big Four paid their Asian laborers less than their white workers and demanded much more of them as the project crossed the formidable Sierra Nevada and the scorching desert. This was the midth century American success story—four men had traveled west and struck figurative gold.
But not many people knew what was really happening behind the mythic narrative, and of course, no one knew what consequences it would bear.
Leland Stanford would soon become embroiled in scandals, including one of the greatest in American history. Stanford and partners then raced to acquire every railroad in California and much of the West.
Their monopoly exploited freight and passenger customers, charging outrageous prices and laundering the profits through veneer corporations. Furthermore, Stanford declared that his company should not have to pay back the loans to American taxpayers. A series of subsequent state attempts to investigate the railroad, which would soon change its name to the Southern Pacific, failed in large measure because Stanford bought off the so-called investigators. Leland Stanford drove in the golden spike, connecting the Central Pacific Railroad with the Union Pacific Railroad and marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad line, on May 10, , at Promotory Summit, Utah.
Photograph by Andrew J. By Mal Warwick Jan. May 11 May 11, p. Roland de Wolk, author of a new book about Leland Stanford, at Stanford. Photo: Courtesy Roland de Wolk American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford by Roland de Wolk pages 4 stars out of 5 He founded Stanford University to honor his year-old son who died of typhoid fever — and left the university near bankruptcy when he died, without an endowment.
An odious character widely reviled in his lifetime Stanford was an odious character whose theft of public resources and victimization of the public was widely recognized for many years. Proofreader, please! Mal Warwick built a business in Berkeley, where he has lived since He has been reviewing books for Berkeleyside since
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