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About the Author
Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and the author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials and Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, California, and graduated from the University of Maryland.
ALSO BY MALCOLM HARRIS
Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials
Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History
Notes
Chapter 0.1 Introduction
1. Hanna Rosin, “The Silicon Valley Suicides,” The Atlantic, November 17, 2015.
2. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13.
Chapter 1.1 To Whom Time Is Money
1. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, The Lamar Series in Western History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 315.
2. Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco [1856]: A Study of American Character (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886), 60.
3. Robert F. Heizer and Alan J. Almquist, The Other Californians, Prejudice and Discrimination Under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 19.
4. Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier, Yale Western Americana Series 35 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 57.
5. Charles Howard Shinn, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1885), 212.
6. “The same rule which would admit them to testify, would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship, and we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” People v. Hall, 4 Cal. 399, 405 (1854).
7. Peter Burnett, “Governors of California—State of the State Address,” January 6, 1851, https://governors.library.ca.gov/addresses/s_01-Burnett2.html.
8. Madley, An American Genocide, 3; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 130.
9. Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of the California Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 305.
10. Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 145.
11. Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Co., 16 F. 25 (D. Cal. 1883).
12. Jeffrey Michael Bartos, “Mining for Empire: Gold, American Engineers, and Transnational Extractive Capitalism, 1889–1914” (PhD diss., Montana State University, 2018), 4, https://scholarworks.montana.edu/xmlui/handle/1/15077.
13. Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 33.
14. The Fossat or Quicksilver Mine Case, 69 U.S. 649 (1864). Though not entitled to one under the ruling, Barron and Forbes extracted a payment from Quicksilver via an armed standoff of hundreds of men.
15. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley, 40.
16. It also helped support a local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury, which launched in the early 1850s.
17. Mary Hallock Foote, New Almaden: Or, A California Mining Camp: Life in 1877 at New Almaden as Pictured in Word and Illustration (Fresno, CA: Valley Publishers, 1878), 482.
18. Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (London: The New Press, 2004), 165–66.
19. Ibid., 152.
20. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001), 121.
21. Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 124.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 80.
24. It’s worth noting that in Hawaii, Azorean immigrant workers were classified as “Caucasian but not white.” Recent archaeological evidence suggests the islands between Europe and North Africa were not uninhabited when colonized by Portugal in the fifteenth century, contrary to long-held belief. Valentí Rull, Arantza Lara, María Jesús Rubio-Inglés, Santiago Giralt, Vítor Gonçalves, Pedro Raposeiro, Armand Hernández, et al. “Vegetation and Landscape Dynamics under Natural and Anthropogenic Forcing on the Azores Islands: A 700-Year Pollen Record from the São Miguel Island.” Quaternary Science Reviews 159 (2017): 155–68, doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2017.01.021.
25. Robert LeRoy Santos, Azoreans to California: A History of Migration and Settlement (Denair, CA: Alley-Cass Publications, 1995), 69.
26. There was no “Italy” per se yet; Luigi was from Genoa.
27. Paul Richard Steger, “A Historical Geography of the Bank of America’s Branch Bank System, 1904–1970” (master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1975), 18–19, https://shareok.org/bitstream/handle/11244/19202/Thesis-1977-S8175h.pdf.
28. Janet Wasko, Movies and Money: Financing the American Film Industry (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1982), 121–22.
29. Saturday Evening Post, September 20, 1947, 119.
30. “Hearings Before the Committee on Banking on H.R. 6855” (1924), 185.
31. Mark Carlson and Kris James Mitchener, “Branch Banking and the Transformation of Banking in California,” National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2005, http://www.cirje.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/workshops/history/history_paper2005/mitchener.pdf, 2.
32. Joseph M. Collier, ed., Americans Ethnics and Minorities (Los Alamitos: Hwong Pub. Co., 1978), 247.
Chapter 1.2 The Combine
1. Myron Angel, History of Placer County, California (Franklin Classics, 2018), 392–94.
2. Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 360.
3. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 19.
4. Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroad Timetable, 1882, accessed March 8, 2022, http://cprr.org/Museum/Ephemera/CP-UP_Timetable_1882.html. Philip L. Fradkin and Andy Anderson, Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster Source, 2002), 40–41.
5. Hearings Before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, 72nd Cong., 2nd Sess., February 13–28, 1933, 283; Elmus Wicker, Banking Panics of the Gilded Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18.
6. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Doubleday, 1903), 576.
7. Hannah Catherine Davies, Transatlantic Speculations: Globalization and the Panics of 1873, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) 39.
8. Paul A. Baran and Paul Marlor Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 226–27.
9. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (New York: Routledge, 2019), 119.
10. “Mr. Huntington and the Central Pacific Railway,” Economist, April 20, 1895, 519.
11. A. J. Wilson, ed., Investors’ Review, July to December 1897, vol. 10 (London: Clement Wilson, 1897), 25.
12. James Willway Treadwell, ed., California Banker’s Magazine: Commercial and Real Estate Review, vols. 13–14 (Solihull, UK: J.W. Treadwell, 1896), 799.
13. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394 (1886).
14. “The High Cost and Remarkable Challenge of Building the CPRR Across the Sierras, and the Deserts of Nevada and Utah: Lewis M. Clement’s 1887 Statement to the U.S. Pacific Railway Commission,” accessed April 21, 2022, http://cprr.org/Museum/LMC_PacRRCommission_1887.html.
15. Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), 84.
16. Ibid., 148–49.
17. Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021), 143.
18. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 130.
19. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 118.
20. Ibid., 149.
21. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, 233.
22. Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), xiv.
23. White, Railroaded, 255.
24. Friedrich Engels to Walther Borgius, January 25, 1894, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_25.htm.
Chapter 1.3 Blood That Trots Young
1. Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (London: The New Press, 2004), 49.
2. Roland De Wolk, American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 126.
3. James J. Ayers, Gold and Sunshine, Reminiscences of Early California (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1922), 282–83.
4. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 88.
5. Monica Hayde, “When the Farm Was Really a Farm,” Palo Alto Weekly, August 19, 1994, https://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/cover/1994_Aug_19.COVER19.html.
6. Adam Longenbach, “Contagious Machines: New York City and the Horse Plague of 1872,” Thresholds 49 (2021): 148–57, doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00738.
7. Frank E. Frothingham, The Boston Fire, November 9th and 10th, 1872, Its History, Together with the Losses in Detail of Both Real and Personal Estate. Also, a Complete List of Insurance Losses, and an Appendix Containing the City Loan, Insurance, and Building Acts (Boston: Lee & Shepard Publishers, 1873), 6.
8. Terance J. Rephann, The Economic Impact of the Horse Industry in Virginia: A Study Prepared for the Virginia Horse Industry Board (Center for Economic and Policy Studies, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, 2011), 5.
9. Richard H. Steckel and William J. White, “Engines of Growth: Farm Tractors and Twentieth-Century U.S. Economic Welfare,” NBER Working Paper 17879 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012), 7, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17879/w17879.pdf.
10. Walker, Conquest of Bread, 165.
11. Phillip Thurtle, The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870–1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 52.
12. John Dimon, American Horses and Horse Breeding: A Complete History of the Horse from the Remotest Period in His History to Date. The Horseman’s Encyclopedia and Standard Authority on Horses, Embracing Breeds, Families, Breeding, Training, Shoeing, and General Management. The Modern and Practical Horse Doctor on the Cause, Nature, Symptoms, and Treatment of Diseases of All Kinds (Hartford, CT: J. Dimon, 1895), 94.
13. Joseph Cairn Simpson, “Horses of California: From the Days of the Missions to the Present,” Sunset, May 1902.
14. Charles Marvin, Training the Trotting Horse: A Natural and Improved Method of Educating Trotting Colts and Horses, Based on Twenty Years Experience (New York: Marvin Publishing Company, 1890), 224.
15. Leslie Macleod, “The Palo Alto Method of Training Trotters,” Wallace’s Monthly, June 1889, 255.
16. Marvin, Training the Trotting Horse, 187.
17. Stanford Historical Photograph Collection, Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, box: 7, folder: Stanford carriages and coachmen—Muybridge.
18. Orrin Chalfant Painter, Poems and Writings (Baltimore: Arundel Press, John S. Bridges & Co., 1905), 70.
19. Edward Ball, The Inventor and the Tycoon: The Murderer Eadweard Muybridge, the Entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the Birth of Moving Pictures (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), 123–25.
20. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (London: Penguin, 2004), 191.
21. Arthur Mayer, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), 29.
22. Allain Daigle, “Not a Betting Man: Stanford, Muybridge, and the Palo Alto Wager Myth,” Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 119.
23. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 2005), 23.
24. Jessica B. Teisch, Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 99.
25. Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 460.
26. Richard Rayner, The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 120.
27. Claude S. Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 115.
28. Ball, The Inventor and the Tycoon, 299.
29. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Children as Collectors of Cultural Heritage,” in Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe (New York: Routledge, 2013), 247.
30. Leland Stanford to Miss Hull, February 12, 1884, in In Memoriam: Leland Stanford, Jr, compiled by Herbert Charles Nash, 1884, 57.
31. Ibid., 53.
32. Rayner, The Associates, 169.
33. In Memoriam: Leland Stanford, Jr, 1884, 226.
34. Orrin Leslie Elliott, Stanford University: The First Twenty-Five Years (Palo Alto: Stanford University, 1937), 19.
35. Herbert Charles Nash, The Leland Stanford Jr. Museum: Origin and Description (Palo Alto: Stanford University Museum of Art, 1886).
36. Lee Hall, Olmsted’s America: An “Unpractical” Man and His Vision of Civilization (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1995), 194–99.
37. The Leland Stanford Junior University Circulars: 1–6 (Palo Alto: Stanford University, 1891), 22.
38. “Investments for Capital,” Santa Clara County, California 1, no. 1 (San Francisco: Board of Trade of San Jose, September 1887), 71.
39. Ibid.
40. Exercises of the Opening Day of the Leland Stanford Junior University: Thursday, October 1, 1891 (Palo Alto: Stanford University, 1891), 12.
Chapter 2.1 Local Ghosts
1. Roland De Wolk, American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 187.
2. Jane Lathrop Stanford to David Starr Jordan, December 16, 1899, in Gunther W. Nagel, Iron Will: The Life and Letters of Jane Stanford (Stanford: Stanford Alumni Association, 1975), 155–56.
3. Robert W. P. Cutler, The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (Stanford: Stanford General Books, 2003), 32.
4. Stanford Digital Repository, Jane Lathrop Stanford papers, 1860–1975, “Jane Lathrop Stanford letter to Horace Davis Jan. 28, 1905,” https://purl.stanford.edu/sn623dy4566.
5. David Starr Jordan, foreword to Experiments in Psychical Research at Leland Stanford Junior University by John Edgar Coover (Stanford: Stanford University, 1917), v.
6. Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 3.
7. Brian Eule, “Watch Your Words, Professor,” Stanford Magazine, February 2015, https://stanfordmag.org/contents/watch-your-words-professor.
8. Hans-Joerg Tiede, University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Richard Hofstadter and Walter Paul Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).
9. Cutler, The Mysterious Death, 121.
10. Bernhard J. Stern, “The Ward-Ross Correspondence III 1902–1903,” American Sociological Review 12, no. 6 (1947): 716.
11. W. B. Carnochan, “The Case of Julius Goebel,” American Scholar 72, no. 3 (summer 2003): 99.
12. In his new book-length investigation of the murder, Stanford historian Richard White concludes, “Bertha Berner killed Jane Stanford, and David Starr Jordan covered up the crime. Jordan was an accessory after the fact.” Richard White, Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022), 299. Though it’s worth noting that Jordan began covering up the crime before it was completed, making him, at least, an accessory in media res.
13. Cutler, The Mysterious Death, 12.
14. “Chinese Cook Suspected of Poisoning Mrs. Stanford,” San Francisco Call, March 3, 1905, 1, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1905-03-03/ed-1/seq-1.
15. “Jordan Reasserts His Opinion That Death Resulted from Natural Causes,” San Francisco Call, March 22, 1905, 1, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1905-03-22/ed-1/seq-1.
16. “Will Ignores Senator’s Kin,” San Francisco Call, March 7, 1906, 1, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1905-03-07/ed-1/seq-1.
17. Carnochan, “The Case of Julius Goebel,” 103.
18. William James, Letter from William James to Theodore Flournoy, February 9, 1906, in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, vol. II (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 266, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38091/38091-h/38091-h.htm#page_266.
