Palo Alto, page 8
As the nineteenth century closed, California’s white labor movement increasingly shifted toward racial exclusion as its central operating principle. Instead of trade unions, the settlers had “anti-coolie clubs.” The Workingmen’s Party of California emerged from this milieu, cobbling together socialist rhetoric, trade union demands like an eight-hour day, and anti-Chinese racism. They were the ones who, in the midst of the 1877 unemployment crisis, marched up to Leland Stanford’s mansion and threatened him. But their front man, Denis Kearney, was better at being a racist than a labor leader. “I will give the Central Pacific just three months to discharge their Chinamen,” he railed, “and if that is not done, Stanford and his crowd will have to take the consequences.”19 However, it was easier for the Workingmen to impose consequences on Chinese workers than on white bosses: Stanford simply had Kearney arrested. Still, the Workingmen posed a threat to the Democrat-Republican duopoly, and with the railroad built, Chinese wages rising relative to white, and a surplus of “American” immigrants (who were more likely German or Irish), California’s capitalists no longer had the same need for Asian work. Besides, Chinese workers were starting to become Chinese businessmen and farm owners, competing with white capital in addition to white labor. The only things that separated labor contractors from the capitalists were money and race, and the contractors were making money. This was a dangerous place for the California Chinese to be, for it was the “vigilance committees” organized by Republican businessmen that helped keep white rioting in check. (These committees weren’t the only thing: Though settlers [and indeed, on occasion, indigenous residents] victimized individual Chinese, “the ghetto itself was armed,” Saxton writes of Chinatown.)20 As long as Republican officials extended the most basic protection of the law to their Chinese business partners, Chinatown could defend itself.iv But the balance was tenuous, and white-settler plans for “abatement by force”—ethnic cleansing—were ghastly.
The “Chinese question” found its answer at the national level, in the debate over a California-led plan for Chinese exclusion. In reconstructing the United States, California was emerging as the regional swing vote, just as the state’s enfranchised settlers became single-issue voters. The transcontinental railroad solidified the state’s membership in the Union, which was far from a given considering how often the territory had changed hands in the previous few decades as well as its continual political instability and foreign interference in Mexico, not to mention the temporary sundering of the United States itself. California’s Unionist majority helped repair that split, cutting off the Confederacy’s western tendency. But Unionist didn’t necessarily mean faithfully devoted to principles of abolition democracy and the spirit of the slave revolution. The race-based exclusion of Chinese from the country flew in the face of Reconstruction and the black-led attempt to create a pluralist, racially equal nation. But that seeming contradiction was no contradiction at all for California’s white Jacksonians, because they maintained a consistent position in favor of free white labor and free white labor only. As for the regionally aligned party duopoly, California’s vote swung against the South during the war, but it could swing back. Federal civil rights legislation meant to force the ex-Confederate states to integrate also applied to settler California’s relations with the Chinese, which left the southern and western delegations looking for a solution to their linked nonwhite labor problems. If former slaves and their children were able to escape not just their commodity status but also their working role in the regional economy, southern planters threatened to bring in Chinese laborers to replace them, just as planters had in the West Indies. That would blow the exclusion plan out of the water, which gave California an incentive to compromise with the South. These two racist blocs came to an agreement that permanently set the direction of the modern American project: They agreed to cede the South to the Confederate redeemers and exclude the Chinese.
The Chinese Exclusion Act, which closed the door to immigration from the territory, passed in 1882, after a couple of years of ironing out the details conveniently gave employers some time to figure out their labor situations. The Burlingame Treaty with China prevented Congress from banning Chinese immigration, so the act set a ten-year clock (after which the restriction was renewed). Over the following decades, the California and federal governments tightened restrictions on Chinese people living in the United States, excluding them from naturalized citizenship and even barring them from land ownership. These legal restrictions made assimilation into an integrated society along the same path as white immigrants impossible. The 1882 legislation also served as a signal to racist vigilantes in the West, who were already organized to varying degrees. In September of 1885, a settler pogrom in Rock Springs, Wyoming, killed 28 Chinese Union Pacific Railroad workers and triggered anti-Asian riots across the region. Not content with halting the flow of immigrants and now implicitly blessed by Congress, these civic vigilantes put their abatement plans into action. To a point, it worked: By the end of the century, the U.S. Chinese population fell by nearly a third, from 133,000 before the Exclusion Act down to 90,000, a direct consequence of the ethnic-cleansing campaign.21
The transcontinental United States of America was a new nation. Where parochial standards endured—in timekeeping, for example, or in the gauge of the railroad track—the transcontinental line hammered them to uniformity. It secured the country’s continental borders, and they haven’t come up for much serious debate since. Chinese railroad workers made the country that in turn made the twentieth century, and that nation, never so friendly in the first place, turned on them hard. It’s no use speculating on the various moments that seem contingent in retrospect. This story is not a product of men’s choices, a series of psychic coin flips that results in the world as it is, one piece of fruit among many on a branching tree of equally probable outcomes. With the advent of the integrated world system, in which the transcontinental line was, along with the Suez Canal, a decisive link, investment flows determined the shape of what was to come. Capital’s ravenous hunger for higher returns carved a new physical and social geography out of the earth. It figuratively flattened space, blowing holes in some mountains as well. But contrary to some progressive expectations, it failed to dissolve barriers between peoples. Instead it formalized new ones. Capitalists used racial segregation to generate wage differentials, and legal, economic, social, and civic exclusion fell together in a dialectical tumble, each determining and determined by the others.
Around the world, the new model of railroad colonialism, as scholar Manu Karuka labels it, held to a common pattern: “territorial expansion through financial logics and corporate organization, using unfree imported laborers, blending the economic and military functions of the state, materializing in construction projects across the colonized world.”22 Once in play, these elements repeatedly yielded the same reaction. Capital flows obey systematic laws the way objects in motion obey theirs: predictably, inexorably. Confronted with a runaway train, men could get out of the way, get run over, or, if they were among the lucky few, get on board and find out where the tracks went.
What, then, of the shopkeepers? What of Leland Stanford? Norris’s railroad-baron composite, Shelgrim, urged readers (and writers) to think of the world’s transformation at the end of the nineteenth century in terms of forces rather than men, and indeed that explains how a man as insubstantial as Stanford could come to occupy such an important historical place. With the silver hammer handed him he blessed the accomplished fact of the transcontinental railroad and labored not much more. “He has never made any money but has had a good deal made for him and knows no more of its value when he gets it than he does of the way in which it was obtained,” Stanford’s associate Huntington wrote of the man.23 But in this way, the Governor is more representative of his milieu than the smarter, harder-working Huntington. Neither of them laid anything but a symbolic track between California and the East. They hardly even enriched their shareholders. Instead, they had a good deal of money made for them. Such was the role of the Great Man under global capitalism.
“That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at that particular time in that given country is of course pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad,” Friedrich Engels wrote in an 1894 letter. “[That] if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc.”24 Necessity, he says, appears in the form of accidents, which appear in the form of men. Leo Tolstoy comes to similar conclusions inspired by the same Corsican in War and Peace (“History, that is, the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king’s life as an instrument for its purposes”), and Fyodor Dostoevsky dispatches him as a “pseudo great man” in The Brothers Karamazov. It’s entirely possible that after Napoleon has faded from the history books—as inevitable as it seems unimaginable at the moment of this writing—he will remain in literature, standing in these stories for all the world’s crowned accidents. Leland Stanford’s stature contrasted less with his accomplishments than the empereur’s did, but the Governor’s character seems to have been so unexceptional that his frame fooled few. No matter: The money was in his accounts, the land in his name.
In Stanford, the new system coughed up another man to stand for the larger forces pulling his strings. Though he was but a happy monkey dancing for history’s organ grinder, the West was so dear to the world market, the mass of value involved so gigantic, that the size of his small share surpassed even his fantastic appetite for luxuries. What’s a mortal man to do when he accumulates more than he can consume in a lifetime? The remainder is called a legacy, and Leland Stanford named his legacy Leland Stanford Jr. And he named it Palo Alto.
Footnotes
i Among the rich Europeans to invest in western railroads via Continental bankers was author Marcel Proust, who captured his demimonde of Parisian speculators for posterity. In the sixth book of Proust’s series, his narrator laments that, having sought out high-reward investments to keep his mistress Albertine in style, “the wisest judgments of the previous generation had been proved unwise by this generation,” as his stocks slid and funds dwindled. Vincent Kaufmann, Post Scripts: The Writer’s Workshop (Harvard University Press, 1994), 81–2; Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Volume V: The Captive & The Fugitive (Modern Library Classics, 1999), 866.
ii The Associates were playing a dangerous game; when Mexico left bondholders hanging in 1861, France invaded, overthrew the government, and occupied the country. The handpicked Emperor Maximilian ran the country in the interests of foreign capital until his defeat and execution in 1867.
iii California was only one location for coastal Chinese emigrants during the period. Others went to Caribbean plantations, where they formed a new indentured agricultural workforce, and some later traveled, as we’ll see, to the mines of South Africa. Most, however, ventured to colonial territories in Southeast Asia: the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, and French Indochina. “While many of these immigrants remained poor,” writes Sebastian Strangio, “a significant number flourished under colonial rule, slotting into roles as tax collectors and economic middlemen between the European authorities and native populations.” Sebastian Strangio, In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century (Yale University Press, 2022), 26.
iv Arson attacks failed due to the unusual durability of Chinatown relative to the rest of the city.
Chapter 1.3
Blood That Trots Young
Horse Power—The Palo Alto System—Edward Muybridge and the First Movie—Leland Stanford Jr.—Founding Stanford University
Toward the end of the 1870s, the Stanfords started decreasing the amount of time they spent in their luxurious Nob Hill mansion. Not even two decades into the rush San Francisco had become a rowdy metropolis, the biggest city on the West Coast and gaining on the East, in no small part thanks to Stanford and the railroad. The city’s growth came at the people’s expense, as industry corralled pioneers into jobs. Capital-intensive gold mining was consolidated, with nothing on the surface left to pan, and by 1870 there were more Californians working on farms than in mines.1 Completion of the railroad brought more competition, for laborers and for the smaller West Coast manufacturers and merchants that employed them. A transcontinental link undermined the advantages that motivated most forty-niners to set out on the perilous journey in the first place—and so soon, before they could enjoy their rewards too much or recoup the risk-cost of their adventure. Unemployment in San Francisco exceeded one in five, in a city where women’s unpaid labor (which insulates men from the pitiless market) was in short supply.2
The railroad stood for capital in California, the Combine stood for the railroad, and Leland Stanford stood for the Combine. It was an easy and incredibly well-remunerated gig—he didn’t have to do a whole lot more than the standing—but one consequence is that a lot of people hated him and his family. The white labor cartels held him personally responsible for the importation of Chinese workers and the resulting speed-up and attack on wages. If an individual could be responsible for all that, Stanford was as good a choice as any.
The top of the hill in one of the city’s biggest houses sounds like a nice place to live depending on your taste, but one potential drawback is that everyone knows where to find you. The location of the Stanford home was no mystery, and protesters made it a frequent target. Early that decade, the whole world saw what happened when an urban elite got too comfortable with the people’s complaints: The radical workers of Paris, France, took control of the city and declared the Commune. Journalist James Ayers recalled a different French insurrection when, during a visit to the Nob Hill estate, Stanford showed off a gadrooned Sèvres vase, once a present from Marie Antoinette to the Marquis de Villette. He told his guest to just ignore the interrupting cries from the workers outside the window. “Was there, I asked myself, a fatality attending the ownership of that vase?” Ayers wrote in his memoir. “I said to myself that were I Stanford, I would look upon that beautiful work of art as a ‘hoodoo’ and neutralize whatever evil spell it might possess by donating it to some institution where its power for good or evil would expend itself, not on an individual, but on the general Public.”3 The Stanfords’ ruling-class spiritualism didn’t help them see what was obvious to everyone else: Their ill-gotten wealth tempted fate.
The Central Pacific wasn’t about to capitulate to the sandlot crowd. Instead, Stanford gathered his family—which now included Leland Jr., born in 1868—and servants and got out of town. Like other prominent robber barons of the day, the Stanfords “sought security in a country estate,” as Kenneth T. Jackson put it in his classic study, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, providing a model for elites looking to dodge racial strife a century later.4 In 1876, they bought a 650-acre farm, called Mayfield Grange, in Santa Clara County off the train tracks south of the city. No fan of the contemporary Grange Movement of organized farmers, Stanford renamed the area for a big tree next to the tracks: Palo Alto. In Palo Alto the Stanfords could keep any worker who didn’t work for them at a distance, something that wasn’t possible in San Francisco. Compared to the perch in Nob Hill, exposed to the howling winds of class conflict, the South Bay ranch was placid, a grassy pseudo-feudal expanse of lords and servants.
Concurrent with Thomas Hill’s aforementioned railroad commission, Stanford asked the painter to reflect on the estate’s majesty, which he did in Palo Alto Spring. The extended Stanford family reposes around a well-manicured lawn, children playing croquet beneath the trees’ shade, a bit of sky peeking out above a house of undefined large proportions. Leland Sr. sits, his left arm leaning on the back of his son’s chair. The family is bracketed by two black attendants in gray suits, bearing beverage trays and angled away from the viewer. As he did in his more famous painting of the railroad’s completion, Hill seems to have included a lonely Indian in Palo Alto Spring, standing in the background across a road, between the family and their house. In the foreground, at Jane Stanford’s feet, is a bearskin, its dead face the painting’s most alive. The rug’s yellow eye reproaches the viewer as two overdressed young girls sit on its splayed back. Leland escaped the Workingmen’s shouts, but the curse followed his family to Palo Alto. The Stanfords didn’t seem to notice the painting’s implications, and Hill’s work remains on view in the memorial collection.
Away from the Associates, Stanford came into his own in Palo Alto. Never all that interested in railroads (or really anything in particular), he finally found something worth his time: horses. The nouveau riche hobby of breeding racehorses captured his attention in a way that other business didn’t. What with the care Stanford lavished on Leland Jr. and the trotters, his partners among the Associates despaired of getting him to fulfill even his official duties, never mind add any value to their common enterprise. By that time he had plenty of cash secured, and the Stanfords invested it in land and luxuries. The ranch became the Palo Alto Stock Farm, a place where Stanford could see to the rearing and training of his horses (as well as his son). He poured money into the farm, hiring dozens of workers to equip the stables, including his elite chief trainer, Charles Marvin. The project grew massive, and he kept acquiring land to expand his now beloved Palo Alto tract. By the end of the 1880s, the stock farm boasted nearly 800 horses and a staff of 150 spread over 11,000 acres, the largest and finest institution of its kind in the world. Shipping horses back and forth to the West Coast from the farms of Kentucky and the markets of New York might have been a prohibitive expense for most, but not for Stanford the railroad man. He had a custom railcar built for his fine equine cargo.
