Notes: Beyond Capitalism: Leland Stanford's Forgotten Vision

Beyond Capitalism: Leland Stanford's Forgotten Vision, Notes

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Tim Tyson, Prof. Henry Levin, Prof. Lawrence Goodwyn, Prof. Barton Bernstein, Ted Nace, Herb Caen, Roxanne Nilan, and Bob Beyers for their helpful comments, the staff of the Stanford University Archives for their excellent and generous librarianship, and the Synergy and Columbae cooperative communities for creating the intellectual environment that gave rise to this work. Research for this article was initiated in the Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues (SWOPSI), Stanford University.

NOTES

1. Bancroft, p. 112. Bancroft's posthumously published biography of Stanford must have been completed between September 1889 and December 1889, based on information in Bancroft, p. iv, and in George T. Clark, 1933, "Leland Stanford and H. H. Bancroft's `History': A Bibliographical Curiosity," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 27: 12-23. Bancroft does not cite the sources for his extensive section quoting Leland Stanford on "the character and purposes of the university" (pp. 105-117); part of it (not used here) is from an interview of Leland Stanford in the San Francisco Examiner, April 28, 1887.

2. Stanford Observer 21 (5): Special Issue, April 1987. Ibid. 21 (6): 9-11, May, 1987. Campus Report [Stanford] , March 7, 1984, pp. 13-16. Ibid. November 13, 1985, pp. 1, 7-10. Sandstone and Tile 9 (2), Winter 1985. Ibid 10 (1), Autumn 1985, pp. 1-11. "History of the University," Stanford University Bulletin 31 (79), September 1987, pp. 6-7.

3. Curl, pp. 5-21. Adams and Hansen, pp. 11-18.

4. Goodwyn, pp. 25-93. Curl pp. 26-31. Adams and Hansen, pp. 16-18.

5. Stanford, pp. 1-2.

6. Townsend. The formation of cooperative associations among the California gold miners may be a subject whose history has yet to be written. There are brief references to it in Shinn (pp. 111-114, 288-289), and it may have been a source fostering the formation of cooperative projects among California farmers afterward (Nordhoff, pp. 202-209).

7. Goodwyn, pp. 32-35.

8. Bancroft, p. 114.

9. ibid.

10. Stanford, p. 4.

11. Congressional Record, 49 Congress 2 Sess.: 1804, February 16, 1887.

12. Stanford, p. 16.

13. Townsend.

14. Stanford, p. 3.

15. Congressional Record, 49 Congress, 2 Sess.: 1805, February 16, 1887.

16. Stanford, p. 4.

17. ibid., p. 11.

18. ibid., pp. 6-7.

19. ibid. p. 11.

20. ibid. p. 15

21. ibid., p. 11. The capacity of worker cooperatives to reduce unemployment is also the subject of more recent studies, see Levin, H. M., "Employment and Productivity of Producer Cooperatives," in Jackall and Levin, pp. 21-24.

22. Stanford, p. 6.

23. Levin, H. M., "Employment and Productivity of Producer Cooperatives," in 24. Stanford, pp. 15-16.

25. Bancroft, p. 112.

26. "Address of Leland Stanford to the Trustees," in The Leland Stanford, Junior, University, pp. 30-31.

27. Stanford, p. 4.

28. ibid. p. 5.

29. ibid. pp. 5-6.

30. ibid. p. 6.

31. Townsend.

32. "The Grant of Endowment," in The Leland Stanford, Junior, University, p.16. Stanford University Archives.

33. Congressional Record, 49 Congress, 2 Sess.: 1805, February 16, 1887.

38. Adams and Hansen, pp. 13-14.

39. Congressional Record, 51 Congress, 1 Sess.: 5170, May 23, 1890.

40. Goodwyn, pp. 86, 111.

41. ibid. pp. 107-115.

42. Congressional Record, 51 Congress, 1 Sess.: 2068-2069, March 3, 1890. Stanford's bill had several deliberate differences from the subtreasury plan, which Stanford criticized for not really creating money because the farmer's loan would be too quickly retired and would therefore produce violent expansions and contractions of the currency (in The Great Question. An interview with Senator Leland Stanford on Money, pp. 23-25). Stanford did not understand the crucial advantage of the subtreasury in enabling the farmer to store his or her crops in the subtreasury until the market price were optimal.

43. Congressional Record, 52 Congress, 1 Sess.: 469-470, January 21, 1892.

44. Congressional Record, 52 Congress, 1 Sess.: 2685, March 30, 1892.

45. Tutorow, pp. 279-280.

46. ibid. p. 266.

47. Clark, p. 470. Mirrielees (p. 30) also describes that Stanford was liked by the rank and file railroad workers, citing his defense of their wages against threatened cuts and his insistence that any cuts be the same percentage across the board from lineman all the way up to the heads of departments, including himself.

40. Bancroft, p. 112.

49. Leland Stanford's last letter, to David Starr Jordan, San Francisco Examiner, June 22, 1893. Special Collection 33a, Box 6, Folder 59, Stanford University Archives.

50. Bancroft, p. 113.

51. ibid. p. 114.

52. ibid.

53. Gamson, Z. F. and H. M. Levin, 1984. "Obstacles to the Survival of Democratic Workplaces," in Jackall and Levin, pp. 219-244.

54. Bancroft, p. 114.

55. "The Grant of Endowment," in The Leland Stanford, Junior, University, pp. 15-16.The full text of these requirements is as follows:

"THE TRUSTEES ... SHALL HAVE POWER AND IT SHALL BE THEIR DUTY:...
To prohibit sectarian instruction, but to have taught in the University the immortality of the soul, the existence of an all-wise and benevolent Creator, and that obedience to His laws is the highest duty of man.
To have taught in the University the right and advantages of association and co-operation.
To afford equal facilities and give equal advantages in the University to both sexes.
To maintain on the Palo Alto estate a farm for instruction in agriculture in all its branches."

56. "Address of Leland Stanford to the Trustees," ibid. p. 31.

57. Stebbins, Horatio, 1885. "Leland Stanford, Jr., University, California," in The Resources of California, September 1886, p. 34. Stanford University Archives.

58. Leland Stanford's address at the Stanford University Opening Exercises, October 1, 1891. Special Collection 33a.4, Stanford University Archives.

59. Stanford Quad vol. 1, 1894. Sequoia 1: 22-23, December 9, 1891.

60. Advertisement for Palo Alto High School inserted into the Stanford University Register, 1895-6: "A full corps of experienced teachers, for the most part graduates of the university, is employed. ... The school is not yet organized into a regular public high school, but is conducted on the co-operative plan, and is managed by a board of trustees elected by the patrons, thus furnishing the highest grade of instruction at actual cost".

Another interesting piece of information is that the lots in Palo Alto between San Francisquito Creek and Embarcadero Road, extending from El Camino Real to past Middlefield Road, were owned, as of 1906, by the "Co-operative Land and Trust Company", which offered real estate, rentals, loans, and insurance (from an advertisement in the Daily Palo Alto, March 23, 1906). Whether Leland Stanford had any causal connection with this co-op remains to be investigated.

61. Starr, p. 326, quotes the student who describes ``The Camp'' as a cooperative. The descriptions of The Camp in Elliott (pp. 209-215) and Mirrielees (pp. 61-62), on the other hand, do not use the term ``cooperative''. However, neither Elliott nor Mirrielees refer to the concept of a cooperative anywhere else in their histories.

62. Leland Stanford's last letter, to David Starr Jordan, San Francisco Examiner, June 22, 1893. Stanford University Archives.

63. Goodwyn, pp. 13-14. Congressional Record, 51 Congress, 2 Sess.: 667, December 19, 1890.

64. Congressional Record, 52 Congress, 1 Sess.: 468-470.

65. Tutorow, pp. 274, 278-279.

66. Congressional Record, 51 Congress, 1 Sess.: 5170, May 23, 1890.

67. Jordan, p. 421.

68. Jordan; Crothers, 1932, 1933.

69. Goodwyn, pp. 264-286.

70. Luck, 1950; personal communication with Prof. Luck, October, 1989.

71. "Co-op Living Plans Blossom," Stanford Daily, May 26, 1970, p. 1. "Non-Violent House Opens Doors," Stanford Daily, October 2, 1970, p. 1. "Jordan House First Co-operative," Stanford Daily, October 23, 1970, p. 1.

72. The biographies of Leland Stanford that mention his cooperative vision include Bancroft (who devotes around 32 pages to it, pp. 99, 112-114, 154-181), Clark (who allots four pages of space, pp. 389, 391, 411, 419, 454-455, 459), and Tutorow (who gives two pages, pp. 252-255). Notably, it is not mentioned in three Depression-era books: The Big Four by Lewis, and The Robber Barons by Josephson, and Stanford University: The First Twenty-Five Years, by Elliott; nor by Jordan in The Days of a Man, by Mirrielees in Stanford: The Story of a University, or by Mitchell in Stanford University 1916-1941.

73. Goodwyn, p. 284.

74. ibid. p. xi.

75. Though I will only touch on this subject, in speaking of "refugia" I draw from the field of evolutionary ecology, which refers to a refugium as "an area that has escaped major climatic changes typical of a region as a whole and acts as a refuge for biota previously more widely distributed" (Lincoln, et al., p. 214). In applying this framework to societal evolution, a crucial idea is that the hegemony of a particular cultural mode is never complete, but leaves some people in circumstances in which alternative culture can spontaneously form or even be culturally transmitted. Such refugia can be understood to maintain the stocks of cultural diversity from which the society can draw when it faces changed circumstances. This idea is similarly developed by E. P. Thompson (p. 156) in the idea of "unsteepled places of worship" in which "there was room for free intellectual life and for democratic experiments", by Wendell Berry (pp. 170-223) in the idea of "margins", and by Evans and Boyte in the idea of "free spaces". Modern day cooperatives certainly provide this function in maintaining, developing, and transmitting components of the cooperative vision. This article, in fact, can be taken as a product of such cooperative refugia.

76. Goodwyn, p. 316.

77. ibid. 313.

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