Leland Stanford

Last week my wife and I spent several days with our daughter at a parent-student freshmen college orientation. Spending that time walking around her university campus inspired me to share a brief biography about the founder’s of one of America’s great universities: Leland Stanford.

Leland Stanford was born in1824 on a farm near Albany, New York. In 1848 Stanford passed the bar and moved to Port Washington, Wisconsin to begin a law practice. After his business was destroyed in a fire Stanford packed up and struck out on his own to join his brothers in California to operate a mercantile business. On his way to the Golden State he stayed in Michigan to work in a general store. Stanford did very well at the store and after three years he was able to purchase it and bring his wife from Albany.

Leland Stanford’s wealth came not from the store but from the railroad. Stanford along with other high risk investors formed the Central Pacific Railroad, most famous for building the transcontinental railroad. It was Stanford who had the honor of hammering in the golden spike at the meeting with the Union Pacific in Utah.

The year prior to the completion of the transcontinental railroad his son, Leland, was born. Young Leland was a creative child. He raised dogs and horses and had an interest in both farm equipment and trains. He was a tall child, at 15 young Leland stood taller than 5 feet 10 inches, he was fluent in French, and had interests in art and archeology.

After finally arriving in California, Leland Stanford helped organize the state Republican Party. He worked for Abraham Lincoln during his election in 1860 and was elected governor in 1861. Stanford was elected by Californians to the U.S. Senate in 1885 and 1893.

In 1884 tragedy struck when young Leland contracted typhoid fever. Young Leland died in Florence just two months before turning 16. This tragic event, a heart ache that few can imagine, changed Stanford forever. The day after his son’s death, when Stanford awoke he turned to his wife and said, “The children of California shall be our children.”

After the death of his son Stanford took on a new mission in life. His goal was to replace capitalism and corporations with an economy based on worker-owned cooperatives. His solution to the problem of capitalism was, “through co-operation, labor could become its own employer.”

As a senator he was the author of several cooperative related bills. One bill was to provide a legal basis for worker cooperatives to incorporate. The text of the bill, oddly enough, actually stated how the cooperatives were to be organized. Rather than one person-one vote the voting rights were to be based on the amount of capital that each member provided. Not only did that go against the basic operating principles of cooperatives as established by the Rochdale Principles but it seems to reflect Stanford’s capitalist mentality. No matter what he still unconsciously gave preference to those with wealth.

Along with the legislative efforts, there was also the founding of Stanford University. Stanford explained that the three objectives of the university were education, conservation of the great doctrines, and “the independence of capital and the self-employment of non-capitalist classes, by such system of instruction as will tend to the establishment of cooperative effort in the industrial systems of the future.”

So how successful was Stanford? In both the legislative and the educational arena he failed utterly. None of the senate bills he proposed ever became legislation. And while Stanford University is today known as one of the great universities of the world it never became a center of cooperative economics. Today there is no reference to Stanford’s third objective anywhere on the official school web site.

For a good online article about Leland Stanford and his historic role in Economic Democracy I recommend: http://dynamics.org/~altenber/PAPERS/BCLSFV/