Yes, those Stanford's.
From The New Yorker, May 30, 2022:
Authorities who investigated Jane Stanford’s mysterious death said the wealthy widow had no enemies. A new book finds that she had many.
In the summer of 1894, Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford travelled to the Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon. Parking her private railroad car, the Stanford, on a sidetrack among the trees, she planned to rest until the mountain air restored her health and rejuvenated her spirits. When the regular train passed through the outpost, she received her newspapers and any necessary provisions. Save for the two servants who accompanied her, she avoided the company of other people.
But Stanford soon had to return to her home in San Francisco: urgent business in the city required her attention. That business likely involved the affairs of Stanford’s recently deceased husband, Leland, who in his lifetime had been the president of the Southern Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroad, a U.S. senator, and the governor of California.
When Leland Stanford died, his immense fortune was rivalled only by his immense debts. Collis P. Huntington, his successor as president of the Southern Pacific, had demanded that Jane Stanford help pay off the railroad’s private creditors. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney General had sued her as the executor of her husband’s estate for the $15,237,000 he owed the federal government. If the suit succeeded, it would bankrupt the namesake university in Palo Alto that the Stanfords had founded.
After leaving Siskiyou, Stanford stopped in Sissons, California, where she learned that striking workers affiliated with the American Railway Union had purportedly destroyed a trestle bridge. The disruption would block her way further south. James Agler, the general manager of the Southern Pacific, warned Stanford by telegram to stay in Sissons for her own safety.
Undeterred, Stanford sent a message to Eugene V. Debs, the A.R.U.’s president, requesting that he give permission to some of his men to escort her home. A few workers had already aided her passage to Sissons, and Stanford hoped that they might take her on to San Francisco. Debs promised Stanford, the widow of a railroad owner who had brutally exploited his workers, that he would do everything in his power to facilitate her safe return.
Sure enough, an armed guard of A.R.U. members transported Stanford’s party and their private car to Dunsmuir, California. There they arranged for another special car to take the group down to the Bay, decorating its sides with flowers, flags, and an A.R.U. banner. When Stanford and her entourage arrived at the Sixteenth Street station in West Oakland, a reception committee of union men and press greeted them with cheers. One newspaper dubbed Stanford the “railway queen,” and she praised the “gallant” and “kindly” men who had insured her safety.
But, once Stanford arrived back at her residence in San Francisco, she clarified her viewpoint on the strike to reporters. “I look at it from a railroad standpoint,” she told the San Francisco Examiner. “My interests are identified with those of the railroad, and I am not in sympathy with the strikers.”
The same newspapers don’t appear to have reported Debs’s reaction, but one imagines that he felt betrayed. For a moment, it had suited both Stanford and the A.R.U. to pretend that the widow was an innocent bystander to her husband’s business escapades, rather than an antagonist of the strikers: Stanford looked like an ally of the people, while Debs looked like a champion of chivalry. As an added bonus, the alliance served as an insult to Huntington, Debs and Stanford’s common enemy. In front of the press, Stanford had asked the A.R.U strikers whether they would have extended such a favor to the Southern Pacific’s president. “Huntington,” the men replied, “would not be allowed to even walk over this road.” But, in the end, Stanford made her position clear. She stood with the bosses.
The life of Leland Stanford is the stuff of legend: the journalist Matthew Josephson popularized the term “robber baron” in his 1934 book about Gilded Age capitalists to describe Leland and his peers. “It was said of him that ‘no she-lion defending her whelps or a bear her cubs will make a more savage fight than will Mr. Stanford in defense of his material interests,’ ” Josephson wrote. Others heralded Leland as a talented entrepreneur, his railroads as the engines of American economic progress. Jane Stanford never received such extravagant praise nor such harsh censure. When she died suddenly in a Hawaii hotel room, in 1905, an obituary reported that her greatest happiness was caring for her home. Leland was a mother bear; Jane was just a mother.
That view shaped the investigation that followed her death. When a violent spasm threw her from her bed, Stanford had told the doctor who rushed to her care, “I have been poisoned.”....
....MUCH MORE
HT: FT Alphaville
