American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford

by Roland De Wolk

The rags to riches story of Silicon Valley's original disruptor.

American Disruptor  is the untold story of Leland Stanford – from his birth in a backwoods bar to the founding of the world-class university that became and remains the nucleus of Silicon Valley. The life of this robber baron, politician, and historic influencer is the astonishing tale of how one supremely ambitious man became this country's original "disruptor" – reshaping industry and engineering one of the greatest raids on the public treasury for America’s transcontinental railroad, all while living more opulently than maharajas, kings, and emperors.

It is also the saga of how Stanford, once a serial failure, overcame all obstacles to become one of America’s most powerful and wealthiest men, using his high elective office to enrich himself before losing the one thing that mattered most to him – his only child and son. Scandal and intrigue would follow Stanford through his life, and even after his death, when his widow was murdered in a Honolulu hotel – a crime quickly covered up by the almost stillborn university she had saved. Richly detailed and deeply researched,  American Disruptor  restores Leland Stanford’s rightful place as a revolutionary force and architect of modern America.

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Business, Politics, Biography Memoir

343 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Roland De Wolk is the author of American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford (UC Press).

He is the author of the upcoming Rum, Roulette & the Righteous: An American Epic of Greed, Goodness & Outrageous Optimism (Bancroft Press, Fall 2026).

He is a UC Berkeley educated historian who left academia for a career in journalism, then returned to teach at a San Francisco Bay Area university as an adjunct while retaining his full-time, prize-winning investigative reporting work.

Roland De Wolk is one of a new breed of historians alloying deep, verifiable research with lively, vivid writing designed to bring the true story home.

Reviews

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 A true American success story, though that Stanford would accomplish all he did, was not a given conclusion. His road to success had a delayed start, as in the first part of his life, he couldn't settle on a solid course. He dropped out of school, tried different areas of employment, until the Gold Rush and his decision to go west. In California he would find both success and wealth beyond measure. It is here that he suffered immensely after the death of his only child, a son. One of the big four, he would become President of the Central Pacific railroad, become California governor, a United States senator and found a university. A university which will be credited with the start of Silicon Valley, Stanford University.

I enjoyed very much learning about this man, his works, his family of which I knew little. The middle of this book about the railroad, the big four, all the political ins and outs, challenging. There was much to absorb and of much to keep track. Truly enjoyed the pictures they always add so much to my mind eye, and I thought Standford quite a handsome man. He had such sharp, piercing eyes and his son looked so much like him. Heartbreaking that part of the story but also one of the reasons he opened his University, to set a mauseleum on the grounds for his family to lie in repose.

In a book coincidence I'm also reading Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, which is partly the story of David Start Jordan, who would become Standfords first President. The last part of this book was my favorite, the clearest narrative, about Standfords widow, the mess she had to untangle and her own unfortunate end.

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Tiger Woods was a student at Stanford, he has noted in interviews that many future scientists would stay up until all hours creating society’s innovations. While Woods and other notable athletes grace Stanford’s alumni lists, the university is a who’s who of scientists, inventors, Nobel Prize winners, and NASA engineers as well as United States senators, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet members. Stanford is America’s technological think tank, making it hard to fathom that the school is only one hundred thirty years old. Whereas today Silicon Valley is still a buzz with inventions and Stanford is one of America’s top universities, for the first half of the United States’ existence, California was far removed from the wheelings and dealings on the Atlantic seaboard. One man responsible for linking California with the eastern half of the United States was Leland Stanford. This is his story.

Amasa Leland Stanford was born in Troy, New York in 1822. His parents owned the Bull Head’s tavern, a mere stone’s throw from the newly constructed Erie Canal. The Bull’s Head became a popular gathering spot for commercial travelers who utilized the new waterway which linked the Great Lakes to the the Atlantic Ocean. Although a few generations before the industrial revolution swept through the United States modernizing the nation, the Erie Canal was a step toward the future; people from different regions could get to a destination that much sooner, making the world smaller. Young Leland Stanford did not show much aptitude for schooling, a trait common with many of American inventors over time. His parents and older brothers desired that he run the family’s farm or the Bull’s Head, but Leland craved adventure and the future and wanted to get away from Troy and see the world. Leaving behind his fiancé and future wife Jane Elizabeth Lathrope, Leland Stanford passed the bar exam and moved to Port Washington, Wisconsin and joined a law practice there. After marriage, Jennie would unite with him there, yet Port Washington would turn out to be the couple’s first stop on a journey westward.

Gold had been sighted near Placerville, California in 1849. The Stanford brothers got gold fever and rushed to the west coast, finding more money to be had in establishing Stanford Brothers general store than in panning for gold. By 1852, they sent for their younger brother, and Leland underwent an arduous journey to join them. Jennie would join him in 1855 after a three year separation as the era’s convictions were that such a journey was not appropriate for a woman. California had just been admitted to the union as a free state five years earlier in an attempt to maintain balance in an already precarious union. The United States had only purchased the territory from Mexico in 1845 because the west coast was still a world away from Washington and New York, a precursor of a societal east coast bias that still exists to this day. The Stanford brothers saw that the future of California lay in the port cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles and left the general store to their brother Leland. It was this fortuitous circumstance that introduced Leland Stanford to partners Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington, setting up an alliance that would influence California and United States history during the second half of the 19th century.

Canals and steamships might have been the choice transportation during the first half of the 19th century, but railroads surpassed them in the second half, bringing the United States to a modern age. Leland Stanford along with Hopkins, Huntington, and Charles Crocker comprised the Big Four and joined the newly established Republican Party with Stanford holding elected office on multiple occasions. Today this would be viewed as a conflict of interest, but by placing Leland Stanford in the California governor’s office, the Big Four had their man in a position to lobby tax payers in order to establish their company: Central Pacific Railroad. The goal was to unite the Central Pacific with the Union Pacific Railroad to create a transcontinental railroad. Both the robber barons of the east and west lobbied Washington persistently in order gain the upper hand on each other. A few well placed Stanford appointments on the Supreme Court found him in favor with the federal government, leading to the Central Pacific getting the better of the Union Pacific, eventually creating the Southern Pacific and a national railroad system. The railroads were not without controversy, and Stanford and his associates seemed to find scandals before they created them.

In the Silicon Valley age of internet trails, the Big Four associates would be looking at years in federal prison for money laundering. In the 19th century, railroad magnates borrowed from the federal government, took money from tax payers, and lived lavishly. If they did not want government officials to find out about their scheming, they simply burned or destroyed their transactions. Stanford built a mansion in Sacramento and a second one in the newly established posh neighborhood of Nob Hill in San Francisco. He had a penchant for horse racing and owned hundreds of horses and tried his hand at wineries in Napa Valley. As the railroads moved down the coast, he also built a rural chateau for his small family in the town of Palo Alto. Leland Stanford lived big and was a forward thinking man who would have done well in the Stanford University of the 21st century. In the 19th century, his associate turned rival Collis Huntington believed that being in politics and the railroad was a conflict of interest even though Huntington himself lived just as lavishly and schemed just as much as Stanford. In 1876, Huntington convinced Stanford to run for the Senate under one condition: giving up his position as president of the Central Pacific railroad. Stanford was out, Huntington was in, Jennie Stanford was livid, and the family was nearly bankrupt. It would take one last innovation to cement the Stanfords’ legacy and place in American history.

Leland Stanford Junior University was established as a memorial to the Stanford’s only son who died tragically at age fifteen. The school today is a laundry list of notable Americans, but at its opening, the school itself was shrouded in scandal as the school’s first president attempted to rid the university of professors who did not see eye to eye with his opinion on teaching. George Crothers, an early trustee said to resemble Leland Junior, became a confidante of Jennie Stanford and lead the school into the 20th century. It would survive the depression and become the rival of Harvard and Yale on the west coast. Roland De Wolk did not have quite enough information to write a definitive volume on Leland Stanford so he combined American history, the railroad, and the establishing of a university through a lens of scandal. It appears that Leland Stanford was not shrouded in scandal but that it found him. He invented time zones, was ahead of his time in establishing Napa Valley, and left an endowment to fund a university that today is one of the United States’ grand institutions. Leland Stanford was not so much a scandalous figure but an innovator, way ahead of his time, who would fit in with the thinkers of his university and the Silicon Valley of today.

3.5 stars

[Mal Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

He founded Stanford University to honor his fifteen-year-old son who died of typhoid fever — and left the university near bankruptcy when he died, without an endowment. He was elected as California’s eighth Governor when his business partners effectively bought the job for him after he had lost four previous election campaigns by embarrassing margins. His crowning achievement was the completion of the transcontinental railway, a feat financed by the federal government with loans he never repaid. This otherwise ordinary man whose principal virtue was persistence was Leland Stanford, the subject of journalist Roland de Wolk’s superb new account of Stanford’s “preposterous career and life,” American Disruptor.

Stanford “outstripped America’s more celebrated robber barons”
When historians cite the Robber Barons of late nineteenth century America, they typically mention Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller. The name Leland Stanford rarely shows up on such lists, perhaps because he lived and identified with the state of California, so far away from Wall Street. (However, he was born in a village near Albany, New York, and practiced law for years in Wisconsin.) Yet during his lifetime Stanford was widely recognized as one of the wealthiest and most reviled of the lot. The satirist “Ambrose Bierce began calling [him] ‘Stealin Landford.'” Together with his three partners (Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker), he founded — and plundered — the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads, treating the near-monopoly they held on transcontinental transportation as his private property. In De Wolk’s estimation, they created “one of the first and most bitterly hated monopolies in U.S. history, outstripping America’s more celebrated robber barons.”

Leland Stanford was, in a sense, the Bill Gates of his time
It’s difficult to understand the scale of the theft that Stanford and his partners engineered. “The Big Four [as they were known] made an estimated $62.6 million ‘surplus’ on transcontinental railroad construction and a similar $55.5 million from the other many railroads they controlled.” By contrast, “the entire annual California state budget in 1886-87 was about $6 million, the total U.S. budget about $312 million.” And in today’s dollars, the $118.1 million the Big Four walked away with would be the equivalent of at least $3.2 billion. However, the inflation multiplier of twenty-seven is misleading. The four men’s wealth was many thousands of times as great as that of the average person, so they would rank with today’s wealthiest men, such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. In fact, as De Wolk emphasizes, railroads were the cutting-edge technology of his time, so, like them, Stanford was a tech entrepreneur. And, ironically, he founded Stanford University, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. De Wolk makes much of his observation that Stanford disrupted American society in the nineteenth century as surely as Silicon Valley upended the twentieth.

“The enormity of the challenge”
Today, at a time when the nation’s population is 330 million and California’s approaches forty million, it’s difficult to grasp the enormity of the challenge Americans faced in knitting together the vast, sparsely populated territory the United States had acquired in the first half of the nineteenth century. California had become the thirty-first state in 1850, just two years after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War and the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Suddenly, thousands of men (and many fewer women) were flocking westward in hopes of striking it rich. It was “the largest mass movement in the history of the Western Hemisphere.” But the journey involved several months of perilous travel by ship around Cape Horn or, with an equally dangerous overland interlude, across the isthmus of Panama or through Nicaragua, and then up the coast by ship again to San Francisco. Many died long before reaching the gold fields.

The nation’s greatest public works project
It wasn’t long after California achieved statehood before pressure began building for a transcontinental railroad that could cut the time to less than a week. However, the Civil War was well underway in 1862 when President Lincoln signed the legislation approving the massive loans that would make the railroad’s construction possible. Central Pacific President Leland Stanford drove the famous Golden Spike into the ground in Utah just seven years later, “seven years before the congressionally mandated deadline.” The ceremony marked the completion of what was by far the nation’s greatest public works project before the middle of the twentieth century. Suddenly, the continental United States was made whole.

Founding Stanford University was the least of his accomplishments
Leland Stanford was “born in Jeffersonian America, when California seemed as distant as Saturn and when being able to read was less common than dying of tuberculosis or typhoid.” He died in 1893 when the Gilded Age was in full swing, leaving his poorly educated widow ill-prepared to disentangle the confusion of his secretive financial affairs — and responsible to keep his namesake university alive without the means to do so. We remember Leland Stanford today largely because he founded Stanford University, but to his contemporaries that was the least of his accomplishments.

An odious character widely reviled in his lifetime
Stanford was an odious character whose theft of public resources and victimization of the public was widely recognized for many years. In his single, two-year term as Governor, he raised volunteers for campaigns to murder Native Californians and railed against the same Chinese immigrants who later built his railroad. Hundreds of Indians “were massacred during Stanford’s time as governor alone.” Yet, as De Wolk reminds us, “he headed one of the most astonishing accomplishments in American history, dwarfing those of Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller.” Perhaps the only comparable American achievements were the Manhattan Project, the construction of the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Project — all of which came a century later, when the United States was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.

Proofreader, please!
Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s just me. But when I read I find it aggravating to come across bonehead errors in spelling or grammar, or just plain sloppiness in the form of missing or extraneous words. And I found too many such problems in American Disruptor. It’s puzzling to me that the prestigious University of California Press wouldn’t have hired a proofreader. But if one did work on this book, I suggest not employing them on the next one. What else could explain the confusion of principal for principle (not once but several times), or breaks for brakes, or sentences that go awry because extra words have crept in, or . . .? Well, you get the point.

About the author
Roland de Wolk was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the Oakland Tribune for its coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. He has also reported for the San Francisco Chronicle and KTVU and written for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. He’s won a number of awards for his journalism. De Wolk is a graduate of UC Berkeley and teaches journalism at San Francisco State University. American Disruptor is his fourth book.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this down. History, scandal, California's influence on the world... A well-written story, researched exhaustively, told delightfully. The scale of Stanford's and the Big Four's ambition was mighty. Their greed matched it. I knew some of this history, but De Wolk makes new and insightful links to the present. Also, did you know that Leland Stanford's wife was murdered after his death? What a tale.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The myriad instances of poor English usage is truly breathtaking. The author even misspells the given name of the director of the publisher in his acknowledgments. Scandalous.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roland De Wolk’s biography of Leland Stanford "American Disruptor" seems to me to be the work of an investigative journalist looking for scandal at every turn rather than a more balanced story of Stanford’s life and contribution’s to American life than might be expected of a more traditional historian-biographer.

That said, the author does present a fascinating and highly researched rendition of Stanford and those around him. He continually presents Stanford starting out as a ne’er do well who seems to either squander the modest opportunities in front of him or as the victim of bad luck and then wonders how he apparently stumbles into the leadership of one of the country’s early dominant transportation companies with the acquiescence of his fellow founders C. P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and others.

I certainly do not want to be an apologist for Stanford’s business and political practices, but must suggest that it seems to me that the author is applying today’s standards of ethics and expectations to Stanford and his colleagues, who were not terribly different than other big business leaders of the time, such as Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan and many others. The prevailing practices of that time led to increased government regulation and social pressures for increased transparency and responsibility for all stakeholders in American life.

It seems to me that the author portrays Stanford a “flat” character except for being avaricious and not hard working, and with little personality otherwise. For me, anyone who achieves what he did in many fields must have been far more interesting than what came across to me in this book.
Much of the language used is rife with hyperbole. It seems that the author is often seeking viewers for his investigative journalism pieces on TV news, with over-the-top descriptions, and his continual, even if implicit, reminders that, at least in his view, Stanford was neither smart enough nor worked hard enough to accomplish what he did.

Despite 33 pages of endnotes [about 10% of the total text], there are a number of misstatements in this work – and, for me, these are enough to cause me to question the diligence of the obviously extensive research]. Two of the more obvious include:

1. On page 82, he refers to Stanford’s brother Philip as his younger brother, while five pages later (p 87), his “sketchy older brother Philip” is referenced. Obviously, Philip cannot simultaneously be both older and younger than Leland. [Note: Leland was born in 1824, Asa Phillips Stanford in 1821 - https://www.geni.com/people/Leland-St...]

2. On page 91, he cites the number of soldiers killed in several Civil War battles: (he says Gettysburg: more than 50,000; Chancellorsville: more than 30,000; Vicksburg: over 37,000) – the statistics he cites are for total casualties – killed, wounded, missing and captured – not those who died in battle. (About 8,000 died at Gettysburg, 3,300 at Chancellorsville, and under 2,000 at Vicksburg, where some 30,000 of the total “casualties” were Confederate soldiers surrendering to Union forces), still a terrible rate of loss, but an inaccurate representation nonetheless.

Overall, a good story, but incomplete and for me, too focused on “scandal” (despite the title) and not enough of the overall accomplishments of this man and his colleagues.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was VERY dense. It took a bit to wade through, but had amazing detail and strong research. I picked it up for the connection with Port Washington WI, my hometown. There was not much about Port, but it certainly set the scene for Stanford. My questions now are ---- was Port Washington better without Stanford? and Would have Port Washington guided Stanford in a different direction? Of course there are no clear cut answers. My initial thoughts suggest that Port was blessed to have him depart. The author suggested that he was on shaky financial footing when the fire burned down his law office and that he was prone to laziness. Of course people change and certainly if he had stayed his life and the United States would probably be very different places. That said, Stanford turned out to be one of the biggest robber barons in the United States! There was plenty of candles and it appears that he and the Big 4 took the United States government and the people on quite a corrupt financial ride. BUT, he did get the railroad built, consolidated trains into a usable system that served the nation well, caused the set-up of the time zones across the United States and did found an amazing University. Was this enough balance against the bad? You will have to read the book and come to your own conclusions.....

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book jumped around a lot. As it is based on information found on Leland Stanford and pieced
together I imagine that might be the reason. I felt it could have had more of a consecutive time line with some more planning by the author. There was also many typo, duplicate pronouns and prepositions. This just seemed unprofessional. It was interesting to learn about the man who started such a famous university.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super-interesting and while very well researched, I found it to be lacking in a narrative. Yes, there are themes, but just when you want an example to prove the point, Prof. De Wolk jumps to a different topic (and sometimes year forward or backward in the life of the Stanfords) without really giving you something concrete.

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.'" (quoting Oscar Wilde, 31)

"Soon the neighborhood was known as the part of town where the nabobs lived, a bastardization of the Hindi ward nawab, a person of some royal standing such as a duke or sovereign. In time it became known as Nob Hill, one of the city's most famous addresses." (138)

"'What other offices have you filled? / None other. / Are you not a Senator of the United States? / Oh, yes, I did not think of that.'" (Stanford testifying to Congress, 165)

"'There is scarcely a week that Mr. Stanford is not asked to give employment to graduates of Yale and Harvard. He has six of them as car-conductors on the Market Street line now.'" (quoting Jennie Stanford, 180)

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very detailed account of a long and complicated
life. Scholarly, but not rigid. Stanford crossed paths with every big name at the crossroads of the industrial revolution, you are there for all of it.

[Sandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting scholarly book about Leland Stanford. Very well documented but at times challenging to read.

[Ryan Schmitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not enjoy how it focused more on the corruption rather than how he made the money. I understand that was the title, but still made him into too much of a villain.

[Cariann · Rating 3 out of 5]

this dude