The Wall Street Journal - 28.10.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, October 28, 2019 |A

Leland Stanford:

Life and Myth

American Disruptor By Roland De Wolk (California, 298 pages, $34.95)

BOOKSHELF| By Randall Stross

O

n May 11, 1869, Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad Co., sent a telegram from Promontory Summit, Utah, to his business partner Collis Huntington that read: “The Rails Connected with appropriate Ceremony.” None of Stanford’s business partners were present at the joining of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, the two lines that formed America’s first transcontinental railroad. But it was fitting that they left it to Stanford to handle publicity. Stanford’s contributions to the partnership had been modest: He worked only when sharply prodded by his partners, and exasperated them with his natural indolence and attachment to highly conspicuous consumption. Having Stanford act as the public face of the company was about all his partners could expect of him. Roland De Wolk’s “American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford” attempts to make a heroic story out of the man’s life and legacy. The author, a journalist and a lecturer at San Francisco State University, sees Stanford as the “unwitting godfather to the information economy.” It’s not clear, however, why he should be credited this way. Yes, he co- founded, with his wife, Jane, a university—named for their deceased child, Leland Stanford Jr.—that opened in 1891 and would eventually play an important role in fostering the Silicon Valley ecosystem. But the elder Stanford died two years later, at age 69, before he could implement his plans for what he called “a practical education.” A rather important but unfulfilled part of this plan was to establish an endowment for the university. With Stanford’s estate simultaneously tied up in probate and entangled in a long legal battle with the federal government, the university came frighteningly close to shutting down before its pioneer class could even graduate. The $12.5 million that the university would eventually receive to establish its endowment came from Jane, not Leland. Yet Mr. De Wolk insists that hissubject paved the way to a postindustrial revolution. “The wayvirtu- ally every man, woman, and child in the world would live would be altered permanently,” the author writes. “All because of Leland Stanford’s life.” Nonsense. The story that Mr. De Wolk tells is of an undistinguished man who had no success on his own as a young adult. But he did have the good fortune of having brothers who set him up with a wholesale grocery shop in Sacramento, Calif. More good luck came his way when Huntington, at the time a fellow shopkeeper, and two other local merchants hatched a railroad company—even though none of them had any railroad experience—and invited Stanford to join as a partner. The vast sums of capital that they would need would be mostly supplied by 30-year bonds issued by the federal government, which also awarded enormous grants of land, gratis.

Mr. De Wolk speaks in a single breath of “Stanford’s iron rails and today’s internet” but the claimed connection is fanciful. The Central Pacific was always in the hands of multiple partners. Huntington raised capital in Washington, D.C.; Mark Hopkins was the treasurer and kept the books; Charles Crocker supervised the construction gangs. Those three saw in Stanford a pliable partner—and heard in his basso voice the makings of a politician and front man. They arranged for him to be nominated by the Republican Party for state treasurer. Stanford lost but was put up for the governorship in 1861 and won. What followed was a two- year term in office spent in service of the railroad endeavor. “Stanford would be responsible for exploiting the agency he suddenly had as governor,” Mr. De Wolk writes, “to obtain as much taxpayer money as he could from the federal government, state, California counties, and towns.” In addition to the Central Pacific’s Big Four, as the men were known, Crocker’s older brother, Edwin—later a justice of California’s supreme court—was the company’s attorney. The most important person in the company’s founding was altogether excluded from the quintet at the top: Theodore Judah, a young man in his early 30s and the only one among the leadership who had any real experience building railroads. Judah’s surveys of the Sierra Nevada led to the discovery of a feasible passage at Donner Pass. It was Judah’s presentation to prospective investors that emboldened the Sacramento shopkeepers to go into the railroad business. Judah spent time in Washington, D.C., securing congressional staff positions that allowed him to guide into law the first Pacific Railway Act in 1862, giving the exclusive Western franchise to the Central Pacific. When he returned to California, however, he quarreled with the Central Pacific leadership about business practices he regarded as unethical and quickly accepted a buyout. He promptly set off for the East Coast again, but as the transcontinental railroad had yet to be built, he traveled by boat from California to New York via Panama, and in doing so contracted yellow fever. He died one week after arriving in Manhattan, at the age of 37. “The scandalous life” of the book’s subtitle refers, apparently, to the way Stanford and his partners used subterfuge to pull money out of a succession of operating companies set up to hide the financial looting. Without having repaid a penny of the 30-year bonds, Stanford enjoyed the good life as the owner of many estates, a vineyard and his Palo Alto stock farm, home to his 775 racehorses and the eventual site of the university. The one scandal that receives the most attention here had nothing to do with Leland but concerned Jane’s apparent murder, 12 years after his death, from strychnine poisoning. Mr. De Wolk did not have an abundance of materials to work with. Leland Stanford had no close friends and was pathologically laconic. “Good and evil fortune seem to affect him alike—or rather, alike seem not to affect him,” one observer wrote. Jane burned all of Leland’s letters to her soon after his death. The reality is that the man was not the far-sighted builder that Mr. De Wolk would portray. A more compact—and accurate—biography might be found in poet and satirist Ambrose Bierce’s nickname for Leland Stanford: $tealin’ Landford.

Mr. Stross wrote about the founding of Stanford University in his most recent book, “A Practical Education: Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees.”

The railroad tycoon and university co-founder is often credited for paving the way to a postindustrial revolution. Nonsense.

The Left Targets One of Its Own

Toronto

Y

ou don’t have to be
conservative to attract
a leftist censorship
mob. Ask Meghan Murphy.
The Vancouver-based femi-
nist writer is scheduled to
speak Oct. 29 at a Toronto
Public Library panel discus-
sion titled “Gender Identity:
What Does It Mean for Soci-
ety, the Law, and Women?”
The event will go on, but
only because the city librar-
ian refuses to buckle to
pressure.
Ms. Murphy focuses
mostly on sexual politics and
is an opponent of legal pros-
titution. In 2017 she started
critiquing aspects of trans-
genderism. Last year she got
into a well-publicized Twit-
ter war with trans activist
Lisa Kreut, who’d been in-
vited to speak at the annual
Women’s March. When Ms.
Murphy tweeted, “This was,
after all, a march for
women,” the site briefly sus-
pended her account.
“I see no empathy for
women and girls on the part

of trans activists, that is to say, those pushing gender identity ideology and legisla- tion,” Ms. Murphy said last year. “What I see is bullying, threats, ostracization, and a misogynist backlash against the feminist movement and much of the work it’s accom- plished over years.” She was speaking to Woman’s Place UK, a group that opposes ef- forts to supplant sex with “gender identity” in antidis- crimination laws.

Prominent local authors and the Toronto Public Li- brary Workers Union de- manded the Toronto library cancel Ms. Murphy’s appear- ance. As of Sunday evening, an online petition accusing her of “hate speech” had gar- nered more than 7,500 signa- tures. Pride Toronto, which

runs the local gay-pride pa- rade, wrote an open letter to the library stating there would be “consequences to our relationship” if Ms. Mur- phy was allowed to speak. Even Mayor John Tory, a Conservative, said he was “disappointed” Ms. Murphy was speaking at the library and urged librarian Vickery Bowles to “reconsider her decision.” But Ms. Bowles stuck to her guns: “I’m not going to reconsider...sup- porting free speech,” she told the CBC. Ms. Murphy’s adversaries call her a “right-wing bigot,” but that’s laughable. “My fa- ther was a Marxist who was active in the labour movement, campaigned for Can- ada’s left-wing New Demo- cratic Party, and educated me about the harms of capitalism,” she wrote last year in Quillette. “Throughout my teen years and young adult- hood, I never questioned which side I was on.” Ms. Murphy started her career working for rab- ble.ca, a far-left website that considers the NDP too

moderate. She later worked at the Tyee, a left-wing online magazine, and has writ- ten for Britain’s New States- man. “To this day, I remain steadfast in my belief that everyone deserves access to affordable housing, free health care, and advanced education,” she wrote in Quillette. “I believe that poverty is unacceptable and that wealth is unethical. I believe racism and sexism are embedded within our society.” Her dissent on transgenderism has attracted the attention of right-leaning pub- lications like National Review and the Spectator. She told a reporter in May that she’s “not comfortable” making common cause with conser- vatives, but allowed that “they are willing to engage.” Increasingly they seem to be the only ones who are.

Mr. Taube, a Troy Media syndicated columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Ca- nadian Prime Minister Ste- phen Harper.

By Michael Taube

A dissent against transgenderism leads to an effort to cancel a Toronto library talk.

OPINION

I’ll give up my
keyboard
when you pry
it from my
cold, dead
hands. Didn’t
Charlton Hes-
ton say that?
Don’t tell any-
one, but this
weekly col-
umn may be
illegal next year—all because
of the latest self-wounding
law from the statehouse in
Sacramento.
California is so stupid. It
was kind of funny when San
Francisco’s airport banned
plastic water bottles, prompt-
ing travelers to guzzle Gator-
ade instead. It was annoying
when supermarkets were
forced to charge for plastic
bags—and a few folks may
catch dysentery from bacteria
festering on unwashed reus-
able burlap bags. Ditto for
Berkeley’s ordinance banning
natural-gas hookups to elimi-
nate carbon emissions by

It’s Berkeley: They’ll en-
joy eating avocado toast while
they shiver.
Yet Golden State legislators
outdid themselves by passing
Assembly Bill 5, signed last
month by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Effective Jan. 1, the law reclas-
sifies most independent con-
tractors as full-time employ-
ees. This codifies the state
Supreme Court’s 2018 Dy-
namexdecision about “mis-
classified” freelancers.
The new law was pitched

The Gig’s Up for Freelancers

as a simple measure to pro- vide contract workers with benefits like sick leave and health care. Yet as the dust clears, many ugly details are emerging. There were lots of carve-outs: for doctors, law- yers, accountants, psycholo- gists, insurance agents like Jake from State Farm. But here’s something weird: Free- lance journalists are limited to 35 submissions a year per “putative” employer. Wait, what? The author of the law is a former labor organizer, As- semblywoman Lorena Gonza- lez, who you can bet had union help in writing the thing—it’s easier to organize employees than freelancers. Ms. Gonzalez told the Holly- wood Reporter her goal is “to protect and preserve good jobs. We’re trying to create new good jobs and a livable, sustainable-wage job.” And the 35 number? Ms. Gonzalez suggests that a “weekly columnist”—that cuts eerily close to home—amounts to a part-time employee, so she capped freelancers to about 25 submissions a year. When freelance writers pro- tested, she lifted it to 35. She explained, “Was it a little arbitrary? Yeah. Writing bills with numbers like that are a little bit arbitrary.” You’d think a court would throw this out just based on this admission. This evokes a recent com- ment by P.J. O’Rourke in the Washington Post. He asked

himself if future politicians should study political science. “Ha. Ha. No,” he answered. “If politics were a science, it would have been tried on lab rats first.” AB 5 sure makes me feel like a lab rat. The law was aimed at Uber and Lyft drivers. Yet now scriptwriters, actors, house- keepers, gardeners and many other types of contract workers will have their livelihoods threatened by Sacramento saps.

Like many independent contractors, I prefer not to be hired as an employee. I don’t want to attend company pic- nics or sit through mandatory sensitivity training. Shouldn’t I have the ability to choose? Apparently not in California, a job-destroying wrecking ball. On a more serious note, many disabled people or parents with young children would rather work freelance from home than trudge to an office. Retaining more workers di- rectly will send employers’ costs up, up, up. Uber, Lyft and DoorDash are spending about $30 million each to fund a ballot initiative to kill AB 5, but votes won’t be cast

until November 2020. Ugh. So I’ve searched for solu- tions. California isn’t a right- to-work state, but that’s only about working in a union shop anyway. Noncompete agree- ments are null and void in the state, but that only has to do with life after you’ve left a job. So I looked up the Equal Em- ployment Opportunity Com- mission’s list of employment discriminations: age, disability, equal pay, genetic information, harassment, national origin, pregnancy, race, religion, retal- iation, sex, sexual harassment—yet no word about con- tractor status. Not one of these would work. I could invoke the First Amendment and free speech, but I doubt it would fly. Maybe I could roll out the big guns by telling the court the law re- stricts my life, liberty and pur- suit of happiness. Especially liberty, which to me means, “Stop telling me what I can or can’t do.” Maybe I should just keep quiet, but I guess that train has left. Instead, I plan to send one giant “submission” to The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 1, subject to updating and edit- ing by me, which they are free to cut into 48 pieces (I do get the Monday holidays off). If that doesn’t work, I’ll claim I’m a psychologist, easing the pain of every lab rat abused by California politicians. After that, I hear Nevada is nice this time of year. Write to [email protected].

California’s latest dim policy could harm contract workers from cleaners to columnists.

INSIDE
VIEW
By Andy
Kessler

At press time
it was too
early to call a
winner in Ar-
gentina’s
presidential
election Sun-
day. But Per-
onist Alberto
Fernández
and his vice-
presidential
running mate, former Presi-
dent Cristina Kirchner, were
widely expected to defeat the
re-election bid of center-right
President Mauricio Macri.
Primary results in August
indicated that voters blame
the incumbent for high infla-
tion, the rising cost of public
services and anemic economic
growth. Yet a Fernández-
Kirchner win implies a return
to the left-wing populism that
has long undermined Argen-
tine living standards. Mrs.
Kirchner’s government
(2007-2015) was notoriously
corrupt and used its power to
deny due process to its politi-
cal enemies.
Mr. Macri made many mis-
takes, but he aimed for a more
market-oriented economy and
to restore the rule of law. His
loss could turn out to be bad
news for millions of Argen-
tines who yearn for greater
freedom.
Yet no one expects Argen-
tina’s center-right, if it loses,
to go rampaging through the
streets, burning cars, stealing,
blocking roads and destroying
public transportation. That
kind of politics is the specialty
of the left. It has been on dis-
play this month in Chile, where

Chilean Capitalism on Trial

left-wing terrorists savaged Santiago and cities around the country with violence. This happened in a nation that, as the newspaper La Ter- cera reported on Oct. 5, has seen the poverty rate fall be- low 9%, down from 68% in

Income inequality has
also been coming down.
There is still plenty of work
to do. But civilized societies
settle questions of governance
at the ballot box and through
independent institutions, not
with firebombs. So why is the
democratically elected Chilean
President Sebastián Piñera
back on his heels, with little
support from “democrats” in
the media, academia and poli-
tics, after weeks of violence in
the nation’s streets? It’s a dou-
ble standard that deserves at-
tention.
The uprising in Chile began
Oct. 7 when groups of stu-
dents in Santiago jumped sub-
way turnstiles to protest a
fare increase. In the days that
followed, peaceful protests
and further incidents of law-
lessness spread throughout
the country. On Saturday over
a million demonstrators
poured into the streets of San-
tiago to voice grievances—re-
portedly everything from the
high cost of living to income
inequality and climate change.
Yet it is unlikely that the
eyes of the world would be on
Chile if not for the perpetra-
tors of violence, who took ad-
vantage of the moment to
wreak havoc and demand a
new constitution. Subway sta-
tions were destroyed, and su-
permarkets and other stores

were looted and burned. Some 18 people died, most of them caught in fires during the looting. Mr. Piñera was forced to declare a state of emergency and put the army on the street to protect property and life. But empathy isn’t the president’s strong suit, and in the absence of an effective com- munications team the narra- tive is now controlled by his adversaries.

The central government already subsidizes nearly half the public transportation fare in Santiago. What’s more, stu- dent fares didn’t go up. The independent commission charged with setting the prices announced an increase of 3.75% for peak riders on the metro; off-peak fares were re- duced. Fare increases are never popular. But the hard left has spent years planting socialism in the Chilean psyche via sec- ondary schools, universities, the media and politics. Even as the country has grown richer than any of its neighbors by defending pri- vate property, competition and the rule of law, Chileans marinate in anticapitalist pro- paganda. The millennials who poured into the streets to pro-

mote class warfare reflect that influence. The Chilean right has largely abandoned its obliga- tion to engage in the battle of ideas in the public square. Mr. Piñera isn’t an economic liberal and makes no attempt to defend the morality of the market. He hasn’t even re- versed the antigrowth policies of his predecessor, Socialist Michelle Bachelet. Chileans have one side of the story pounded into their heads. As living standards rise, so do ex- pectations. When reality doesn’t keep up, the ground is already fertile for socialists to plow. The violence has another explanation. To chalk it up to spontaneity requires the sus- pension of disbelief. As one in- telligence official in the region told me Friday: “It takes a lot of money to move this number of people and to engage them in this level of violence.” The explosive devices used, he said, were “far more sophisti- cated than Molotov cocktails.” Foreign subversives are sus- pected of playing a key role, with Cuba and Venezuela at the top of the list. The São Paulo Forum, a group of hard- left socialists put together by Fidel Castro in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, es- pouses this radicalism. The actual list of assailants, we don’t know. But Chile has been hit by a well-organized enemy out to bring down the democratic government. That’s something that should alarm all free societies in the region. Write to O’[email protected].

Market policies have been successful. So why are people taking to the streets?

AMERICAS
By Mary
Anastasia
O’Grady

The Wall Street Journal - 28.10.2019

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