There are several thousand dollar billionaires on the planet today. But how do you arrange to leave a mark in history forever for this money? Amasa Leland Stanford came up with one of the ways
200 years have passed since the birth of the great politician, businessman and philanthropist. History is often very cruel, so at the beginning of the journey to immortality there was death — the kind after which the eyes will never dry of tears. The death of the only, moreover, prayed-for child. A death after which you endlessly blame yourself for not staying at home, because otherwise none of this would have happened.
Leland Stanford junior just wasn’t feeling well and his parents weren’t panicking either. Childhood illnesses were a common part of life then, and together they enjoyed the magic of places that smelled of books and history. Together they discovered monuments in Turkey, Greece and went to Italy.
However, as soon as they found themselves in the cradle of the Renaissance, in Florence, the boy’s condition quickly deteriorated. The diagnosis was: typhoid fever. He must have gotten it from spoiled food or contaminated water somewhere in the Balkans. Leland’s private teacher later recalled that already in the vicinity of Athens, the boy was unusually quiet while walking around the ancient monuments and fell asleep on the subsequent train ride.
Italian specialists tried methods that in 1884 belonged to medicine. Strong broths, wraps, decoctions of chamomile… All in vain.
“Traveling in those days was very exhausting at best. Young Leland’s body fought, but the bacteria had the upper hand,» writes orthopedics professor James Gamble, who specializes in 19th-century epidemics, on the Stanford University website.
Leland died just before his 16th birthday, and as cruel as it sounds, that’s why we know Professor Gamble today.
University of the Presidents
It was the immense tragedy that led to the fact that a year later the Stanford couple founded a university in their son’s memory that bears their family name. One of the best on the planet. A synonym for successful, rich, powerful. It is incredibly symbolic that Herbert Hoover, the future president of the USA, was the first student to enter the campus.
Concepts such as the Giving Pledge would not have been invented by the authors of science fiction at that time. The Stanfords were light miles ahead of their time.
Their fortune was estimated at $50 million at the end of the 19th century, an estimated $1.8 billion in today’s terms. They donated a total of 40 million dollars to the development of the university, which is approximately 1.3 billion dollars today.
«When the family was crippled by tragedy, the Stanfords decided this: if we couldn’t help our own child, let all the children of California be our descendants,» the Stanford website explains.
Grief cannot be exchanged for money, but they made a gesture that makes the world at least a little bit better. Who knows how they would have handled the property in an alternative history, in which their journey through Europe would have taken place without family misfortune and they would have seen grandchildren. Which university would belong in the Ivy League today instead of Stanford?
Already at the end of the 19th century, young people of black skin (Ernest Houson Johnson, 1895) or of Chinese origin, such as Walter Ngon Fong in 1896, could obtain academic degrees there. A multicultural environment is one of the university’s core values. Stanford consulted with experts from Harvard, donated land and buildings to the school. All this required money. More specifically, a lot of money.
The Golden Railway
Stanford came to them in a very adventurous way — like from the novels of Jack London. The educated lawyer lost all his possessions in a devastating fire, so he and his five brothers set out for California, which at that time was living with a gold rush.
However, Stanford did not pick up the pickaxe, he seized the opportunity in a different way. First in the role of the head of a wholesaler, in which he worked his way up among the elite, and then with other associates he moved to gold in a completely different state. To the railways.
Young America needed to stitch its map with hundreds and thousands of kilometers of tracks. The Central Pacific Railroad (CPR) and later the Southern Pacific was born under his hands, Stanford became the head of the CPR project.
The second half of the 19th century was definitely not the time of gentlemen in gloves. Although his wealth did not have the flavor of money obtained with the help of slaves (cotton magnates could talk), he is still often accused of bribery and manipulation during the construction of the railroad.
A certain argument in its favor can be that it was a certain «standard of the time» and Stanford fundamentally raised this path of the USA in terms of infrastructure. It finally brought him to the role of governor of young California. From 1885 until his death, he served as a senator in Washington.
All the honors and money in his soul were overcome by the sadness of the death of his only son — the Stanfords wanted children, Leland junior was born to them only after many attempts, when his father was 44 years old, which was unusually old for that time. However, the fateful trip to Europe came.
And then the founding of the university. All its graduates, presidents, scientists, millionaires and others, are symbolic Stanford children to this day.
