Stop all the cocks!

If you’ve spent time at any of the private colleges and universities in the US, you may have been struck by something mirage-like about the campuses: a distinct lightness of being, despite the stony masses of the buildings. It’s partly an effect of the heavy deployment of architectural pastiche to create the illusion of antiquity, but it may also have to do with the fact that many of these institutions arose as much out of vanity or whim as necessity. If some magnate hadn’t been seized by the monument-building urge, they simply wouldn’t exist. Whatever else it may be, Sarah Lawrence is William Van Duzer Lawrence’s tribute to his wife, Sarah; Vassar is Matthew Vassar’s tribute to himself. Smith and Williams, in Massachusetts, sprang up to commemorate their donors. But for sheer iron-willed capriciousness and morbid narcissism, nothing comes close to Stanford – or rather, Leland Stanford Junior University, as it is still officially called. As the historian Richard White puts it in his lively account of the institution’s origins, ‘without the dead child – Leland Stanford Junior – the Stanford campus would be just another patch in the suburbs sweeping south from San Francisco.’

Leland Stanford Jr, born in 1868, was the precocious only child of an immensely wealthy Gilded Age couple. His father, Leland Sr, made his fortune from the Central Pacific Railroad. His mother, Jane, was an ardent Spiritualist, whose beliefs about communication with the dead turned out to be a dangerously effective preparation for bereavement. The two doted on him (Jane was almost forty when she gave birth). They treated him more as a companion than a child, taking him on their European travels, where he offered advice in fluent French to famous painters – Meissonier, Bonnat, Carolus-Duran – and had an audience with the pope. At thirteen he began collecting antiquities for a projected museum. And at fifteen he died, felled by typhoid in Florence, in March 1884.

In accordance with his mother’s beliefs, death was far from the end of the boy’s illustrious career. Accounts of his transition to the next stage differ in their particulars, but the gist is that he visits one or both parents, either as a spectre or via a hired psychic, and instructs them to establish a seat of learning. ‘Father, I want you to build a university for the benefit of poor young men,’ he declares in the most affecting version, ‘so they can have the same advantages the rich have.’ For several months he remained physically with his distraught parents, pausing at select mortuaries as they made their way slowly back to the States. From New York he accompanied them to California in a black-draped railway carriage. There, after an interment and a memorial service featuring the contemporary equivalent of $600,000 worth of flowers, construction of the university was begun on the family’s estate in Palo Alto.

It opened in 1891. Classes were held in the Quad, but to anyone visiting at the time the educational mission would have seemed secondary to the commemorative. There was a Memorial Church, a Memorial Arch, a museum for Leland Jr’s bric-à-brac – jade bird, beaded necklace – and a mausoleum for his mortal remains. In 1893 an exact replica of his bedroom was installed in the museum. His father was added to the mausoleum later that year. An empty sarcophagus awaited his mother, its inscription already chiselled into the marble, complete except for the date of her death: ‘Jane L. Stanford. Born in Mortality, August 25, 1828. Passed to Immortality …’

The man appointed as the university’s president, an ichthyologist called David Starr Jordan, was a surprising choice. He was, on the face of it, as rational and progressive as Jane was mystical and reactionary. He had spent his career promoting the liberal agenda of the time – which included eugenics along with pacifism and anti-imperialism – and described himself as a ‘minor prophet of democracy’. He also had a special disdain for the fad of spiritualism, and it embarrassed him to think that he owed his job ‘to a message from a dead child’. But with promises of a budget thirty times that of Indiana University, where he was currently president, as well as full control over hiring and firing, he had grounds for believing the opportunity was too good to pass up. He seems to have imagined he could handle Jane with judicious acts of obsequiousness, for which he had a definite flair. But he had seriously underestimated her.

Among her advantages in their increasingly frosty relationship was her continued communication with her dead husband and son – ‘my two spiritual advisers’, as she called them – whose deceased status rendered them infallible. Under their guidance she laid out a pedagogic vision requiring Stanford students to be taught that ‘every one born on earth has a soul germ’ and that ‘cultivating the soul intelligence will endow them with that which is beyond all human science and reveal to them God’s very self.’ To that end she unilaterally hired a professor of personal ethics, Reverend Hepworth, who preached that ‘the departed are nearer to us, very much nearer than we dare think.’ The Darwinian ichthyologist was not happy with any of this, but he kept his powder dry for bigger battles.

The most damaging of these involved a popular young economist on the faculty, Edward Ross, whose public pronouncements against capitalism in general and railroad companies in particular so affronted Jane that she demanded Jordan fire him. Academic freedom had been a contentious issue on campuses since the rows over the teaching of evolution in the 1870s, but by now the leading universities had more or less enshrined it as a right. As Charles Eliot, Harvard’s president, wrote to Jordan, ‘it would be a great calamity for the Leland Stanford University if it should come to be known that a professor had been obliged to leave it because Mrs Stanford expressed a wish to that effect.’

Jordan, to his credit, put up a fight, unctuously professing his reverence for the ‘mother of the university’ while imploring her to reconsider. But Jane held firm. Her decision had been made on the basis of ‘disappointment, reflection and prayer’, and was not negotiable. A solution seemed to be reached when Ross was persuaded to resign quietly for the good of the university. But then he decided to go public after all. The uproar that followed would have been a challenge for any administrator, but Jordan handled it with outstanding ineptitude. First he told people that Jane had forced the decision, swayed by friends at the railroad companies in which she held shares. Then he retracted the story and went grovelling back to Jane, telling her she was right about Ross, who was ‘at bottom just a dime novel villain’. Around the same time, as if taking careful aim at his own foot, he published a satire on spiritualist cults, inventing one that claimed to regrow its adherents’ teeth – an obvious crack at Jane, whose teeth were mostly missing.

The faculty was up in arms over Ross’s firing. Several professors decamped in protest. A different president might have offered his own resignation at this point, but Jordan believed he was crucial to Stanford’s survival. The self-styled prophet of democracy went to war against the remaining dissenters, establishing what one of them called a ‘reign of terror’. Jane wasn’t perturbed by the bloodletting – she wanted more of it. But she never forgave Jordan for what she perceived as his betrayal in dragging her name into the scandal, since she had expected him to take sole responsibility for Ross’s removal. And it was no secret that she was intending to force him out when, to her great surprise, and in a manner not at all resembling the painless glide from Nob Hill to heaven that her beliefs had led her to expect, she ‘Passed to Immortality’ on 28 February 1905.

I once taught at a small liberal arts college where, under cover of budget cuts, the embattled president abolished tenure and fired seventeen faculty, most of whom had clashed with her over the years. The campus, set in the bucolic hills of Vermont, turned into a nightmarish little theatre of paranoia and intrigue. Loyalists denounced the fired professors for various unspeakable crimes, anonymous statements circulated in their defence, conspirators huddled in dark corners, and observers from the AAUP, the academic professionals’ association, were escorted off the premises by security. I’d been too recently hired to stack up any plausible grounds for dismissal myself, but I quit anyway, and tried to capture the hysteria in a pitch for a screenplay. The problem, as I realised after watching several producers’ eyes glaze over, was that however momentous these campus dramas may seem when you’re in the thick of them, they are not, after all, Paris during the Terror, or Moscow in the Purges. The stakes are just not very high – or can only seem so by an effortful mental extension – and I did wonder how interesting White’s scrupulously researched book would be if I didn’t know in advance that one of the parties was going to come to a gruesome end. White makes claims for the story as a window into the Gilded Age, as well as a fable for our own moment: ‘In an age of staggering inequality, it is set in another age of staggering inequality.’ Both claims are valid, to a point – but really it was the promise of strychnine that kept me glued.

Whether Jane’s interferences in the running of the university had any direct link to her fatal poisoning, or the attempted poisoning that preceded it, remains open to question. But they demonstrated some traits of hers that almost certainly did. Dangling money to exert control was one of them. As the richest woman in San Francisco, she had plenty of it to dangle, and she made sure to keep its potential recipients in a state of compliant uncertainty. The generous funding she’d promised Jordan never quite materialised, or not in the way he’d been led to expect. When she did finally make a substantial grant to the university, she put a clause in the deed allowing her to do whatever she wanted with the money, including withdrawing it for her own benefit. She prevented Jordan from paying competitive salaries, and pestered him about petty expenditures such as the $3 doorstops in the chemistry building. Regardless of whether he played any role in her murder, he certainly benefited from it, and he led a largely successful effort to cover it up, deliberately hiring incompetent detectives and unscrupulous medical examiners.

His motive, again, was ostensibly to protect his beloved institution – this time from challenges to Jane’s will, in which she left the bulk of her fortune to the university. An official murder investigation would have brought her eccentricities under close scrutiny, which might have provided a basis for claims that she was of unsound mind when she wrote the will. If Jordan really was involved in her murder, then the cover-up also served to deflect suspicion from himself. But even if he wasn’t, it would be hard to imagine him failing to take some private satisfaction in having his tormentor’s death ruled the result of natural causes – including indigestion and ‘fright’ – rather than cold-blooded murder.

But there was another trait of hers that was perhaps even more likely to have precipitated her demise than her unlovely way with money. As White puts it, ‘Jane Stanford over the years became obsessed with the sexuality of young women.’ On the university front, this manifested itself mainly as a growing opposition to allowing them through the doors. Having originally been in favour of co-education, she came to regard female students as a threat to the chasteness of her ‘boys’, and she began agitating for their exclusion. Jordan resisted, and so did Jane’s main adviser (in the realm of the living), a former student called George Crothers, whom Jane had recruited solely because of his physical resemblance to her son. Crothers shared Jordan’s desire to see Stanford succeed, but unlike Jordan had no personal ambition wrapped up in the project. He also, crucially, took no money for his services, which put him in a stronger position to influence Jane. He forged a compromise on the co-ed question, though its terms reveal how extreme Jane’s latest foible had become. Matrons were to be brought in to police the female students. Mounted guards would be hired to watch over campus morality. Students found ‘conspicuous in their attention to the opposite sex’ would be turned over to the university authorities.

But on the domestic front there was no Crothers to wring even these grim concessions. Along with her four Chinese servants (one of whom had a possibly murderous, money-related grudge of his own against the Stanfords) Jane employed an English butler, a maid and a secretary, Bertha Berner. Berner lived and travelled with Jane much of the time, but was also caring for her own mother. Between her obligations to both women, she had little chance to make a life for herself. But in her discreet way she attracted men and clearly didn’t share her employer’s straitlaced views. In later years she fondly recalled flirting with Lord Kitchener while accompanying Jane to a garden party at Windsor. On another occasion she found a necklace hidden under her plate by a secret admirer. She grew close to several male visitors to the Stanford household, and at one point almost certainly became involved with the English butler, a married man called Albert Beverly. Jane did her best to thwart her at every turn. She pressured Beverly to resign and refused to re-engage him for a trip to Hawaii despite Berner’s strenuous attempts to persuade her that they would need a man along for the voyage. The secretary was clearly running out of patience with her imperious employer by the time they left: ‘I could bear no more,’ she later said. The first attempt on Jane’s life had come a month earlier, when someone put rat poison in the bottle of Poland Spring water on her bedside table. The maid was dismissed, but Jane seems to have been unable to believe that anyone could seriously want to harm her, so that was as far as the matter went. In Hawaii her nemesis struck again, this time using pure strychnine.

White devotes much of the book to sifting through conflicting newspaper reports and other testimony from the investigation. There may be a few too many triumphantly dredged-up cold case minutiae for some tastes, especially concerning the comings and goings of the bottle of bicarbonate of soda in which the second dose of poison was secreted. There are certainly too many elaborate hypotheses that turn out to be red herrings. But the story is a mystery after all, and White has an ingenious theory to present, which requires the elimination of competing theories. He follows the rules of the genre, in other words, delaying his solution until the very end, with all the necessary twists along the way.

But the most intriguing aspect of the case is Jane Stanford’s personality, and its warping effect on those around her. White doesn’t psychoanalyse her, but it seems clear that her growing horror of sex was closely bound up with her neurotic attachment to the dead. She couldn’t bring back her lost child, but she could dissolve the boundary between this world and the hereafter, at least in her own mind. ‘My husband or son are with me all the time,’ she told a reporter, adding with the blandness of the truly cuckoo: ‘They never come together, but in turns. Their stay is limited to within two weeks’ time.’ She had the pharaonic means and will to project her delusion onto the world she ruled over, imposing a regime of sepulchral stasis in which no change was to be permitted, and certainly no procreation: stop all the cocks! Among other things, she informed Crothers that she intended to continue working for the university after her death. He can’t have been surprised to hear it.

Prolonged exposure to Jane turned Jordan from an idealistic scientist into an embittered, vindictive bureaucrat. ‘If someone wanted to make a macabre joke,’ White observes of Jane’s funeral, ‘they could not have done better. Leading her procession to the grave were people suspected of her murder, people who covered it up, and those she despised and wished to fire.’ Jordan belonged in all three categories, but it seems fair to say that it was Jane who twisted him into this abject parody of himself. In the enigmatic Bertha Berner, Jane’s effect was more subtle, if possibly more deadly. Berner was one of those figures of uncertain status beloved of 19th-century novelists – tutors, governesses, impoverished relatives – whose combination of refinement and powerlessness makes them perfect instruments for registering their benefactors’ humanity, or the lack of it. Despite ruptures between the two women, the written testimony of both suggests a surprising degree of affection on both sides. Jane described Berner’s love as ‘god-giving’, and never for a moment suspected her of tampering with her Poland Spring water in Nob Hill, or – in the brief time left to her after consuming it – her bicarbonate of soda in Hawaii. For her part, Berner, under suspicion after the murder, sounds as tender and innocent as any wronged Victorian heroine with nothing but her own true heart to defend her: ‘I base my trust for final vindication upon the knowledge that I have not done anything to my dear Mrs Stanford for which I need to reproach myself.’

White finds something damningly ‘oblique’ in those words. I can’t say I see it myself, but if he’s right (and he does have other evidence against Berner), then Jane’s tyrannical behaviour incubated a virtuoso of malice and dissimulation. If he’s wrong (and by the same token there are significant holes in his case), then Berner becomes a figure of equally preternatural patience and forbearance. Either way, she’s an intriguing character, whose equivocal role in the story would have lent itself beautifully to fictional treatment by any of the subtler practitioners of her day. Jane always wanted William James to teach at Stanford, and he did finally agree to come (though he arrived after her death). He didn’t much enjoy his time there: ‘every lecture a dead weight’, he wrote to his daughter as the semester dragged on. It was too bad Jane hadn’t included his brother in the invitation: Henry might have found the atmosphere more stimulating.

Stanford currently holds third place after MIT and Cambridge in the QS World University Rankings, and has no reason to dwell on the less salubrious details of its origins. Prospective students touring the campus are given a sanitised version that skirts the reality of what White sums up as ‘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’. But Jane’s woeful spirit lingers on. It’s there in the pomp and solemnity of Frederick Law Olmsted’s campus layout. It’s there in the hacienda-necropolis style of the buildings themselves. It’s there in the museum, where, if you care to look, you can still find the slate ‘apports’ on which the dead Leland Jr is supposed to have chalked his responses during séances. It would be unfair to link her with the brutally sexualised murder of the newly wed Arlis Perry inside the Memorial Church in 1974, but something of Jane’s horror sexualis had clearly infected the campus guard who killed the young bride of a Stanford student. And she seems to be making good on her promise to keep working for the university after death – at least in the sense of continuing to persecute Jordan. In 2020 Jordan’s name was expunged from the campus after his enthusiasm for eugenics finally caught up with him. Meanwhile, hers was added: you can now approach the Memorial Court along Jane Stanford Way.