The Railroad Baron's Monument

The university whose campus you are passing was built by a man who had spent two decades monopolizing transportation across California and extracting enormous wealth from a labor force he had helped ensure would have no legal recourse to demand equal treatment.

Leland Stanford was one of the four principal founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which built the western half of the transcontinental line using Chinese immigrant workers who were paid less than the white workers doing equivalent labor. The railroad secured land grants from Congress displacing existing settlers, and then used its monopoly position to set freight rates across California for twenty years. Stanford became extraordinarily wealthy. He also served as governor of California and United States senator.

In eighteen eighty-four, his fifteen-year-old son Leland Junior died of typhoid fever in Florence, Italy. Stanford and his wife Jane returned home and, within the year, announced that they would found a university in their son's memory. They chose Palo Alto. They refused to charge tuition. Their stated reason was that the children of California should be their children, a memorial expressed as open access. The university opened in eighteen ninety-one.

Stanford chose a motto for the university in German: Die Luft der Freiheit weht. It translates as 'the wind of freedom blows.' The motto was selected by a man who had helped design a labor system explicitly premised on the exclusion of Chinese workers from the wages and protections available to others.

The Stanford University Libraries document this history, and the California History journal has published peer-reviewed scholarship on the Central Pacific's labor practices. The irony of the motto was, according to those sources, largely unremarked upon for decades. The wind of freedom, it turns out, is a phrase capacious enough to contain a great deal of specific history underneath it.

The university endures. It has since produced the venture-capital corridor, two presidents, and the foundational architecture of the digital economy. What it was built with, and what it was built to memorialize, remains the condition underneath all of that.