LITMIR.BIZ

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      Adolph Sutro was a Prussian-born mining engineer who became wealthy through his mining investments and the development of the famous Sutro Tunnel, which drained the silver mines near Virginia City, Nevada. Sutro had refined tastes that he satisfied by amassing a huge private library. He and his agents searched Europe, Mexico, and the United States to add to his collection. Sutro would buy the entire stock of a bookstore, or an entire library, to obtain one treasured item. He prevailed on poor monks to sell centuries-old monastery libraries with their rare incunabula (books printed before 1501). Sutro's library may have amounted to 200,000 books, pamphlets, and newspapers. It was one of the largest privately held libraries in the world, and in some ways one of the richest. Sutro owned more than 4,000 incunabula, perhaps more than any other library anywhere. His interests were different from Bancroft's, as reflected in Sutro's holdings in science, natural history, and European subjects. But there was some overlap, as in the cases of Mexican history and American newspapers. Cornell University historian and librarian George Lincoln burr judged Sutro's holdings in some categories as being unrivaled in America and perhaps even in Europe.⁸

      Unlike Bancroft, who wished to sell his collection, Sutro offered his library to the public. In 1895 he promised to give the library, a building to house it, and twenty-six acres in San Francisco to the University of California, which turned him down because accepting would have required the abandonment of the new Berkeley campus. Sutro's heirs continued the search for a suitable public recipient, but no one would have it. So it was that two of the worlds’ great private libraries were spurned by the people of California, who would neither purchase nor receive a great library as a precious gift.

      Like a good fisherman, Farrand lured Turner with libraries. He asked Turner for his estimation of the value of the Bancroft and Sutro collections. Like a wary trout, Turner circled the bait. Turner was not familiar with the Sutro holdings but supposed it was a good modern European library. As for the Bancroft, “if the $200,000 or so” that was supposed to be its price was “to be expended chiefly on early Indian and Spanish records,” Turner felt “less confident…if the documentary material for the American period of the history of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast” could be obtained elsewhere. Remarkably, Turner believed that too large a proportion of Spanish records actually devalued the Bancroft collections as a resource for a university library—or at least for his university library. He thought the record of the American period of about a half century outweighed three and one-half centuries of Spanish and Mexican history. The very sort of materials that Bolton was laboriously collecting in Mexico were of no concern to Turner.⁹ Nevertheless, if Bancroft's library had the Anglo-American materials that Turner valued so highly, or if they could be obtained and added to the collection, Turner supported the purchase.

      Turner made it clear that if the Bancroft (or the Sutro) did not have the materials that he needed, Stanford should find or build a library that did. Jordan and Farrand agreed. On Christmas Eve 1904 Farrand wrote Turner that “one by one the obstacles are being removed in the most satisfactory way,” though there were still details to be worked out that Farrand would not reveal.¹⁰

      What was Farrand unwilling to tell Turner? The new library building at Stanford was about to open, and Jordan was undoubtedly pressing Jane Stanford on the need for books to fill it, a need that coincided with Turner's recruitment. Stanford decided to fund the proposed acquisitions, but before she could act, she had a frightening experience. In January 1905 she sipped some water at her bedside table, but the foul taste made her spit it out. There were no lasting ill effects, but analysis revealed that the water had been tainted with strychnine. Investigators thought the poisoning had been an accident, but Stanford believed that someone had tried to murder her. She decided to go to Honolulu, where she hoped she might be safe. Before sailing on February 15, she took care of the library business.¹¹ “We need books at present more than anything else,” she wrote. The new library had room for one million volumes and she intended to acquire them. Therefore, she requested that the trustees establish an endowment from the sale of her “diamonds, rubies, and other precious stones,” to be known appropriately “as the Jewel Fund.”¹²

      The story of the Jewel Fund does not have a happy ending. A few weeks after announcing her plans for the library, Stanford died in Honolulu, the victim of a second strychnine poisoning. Her murderer was never found. Indeed, the police did not investigate the crime. President Jordan, who evidently hoped to spare the Stanford family as well as the university from a scandal, insisted that she had died of heart failure even though an inquest in Hawaii indicated otherwise. Jordan's unfounded version of events was widely believed until recently when researchers examined the autopsy report and other testimony from Hawaii.¹³ Nevertheless, as Jane Stanford had wished, the Jewel Fund was established and became the essential endowment for Stanford's library.¹⁴

      In January 1905 Jordan made an offer to Turner of $5,000 per year, a $1,000 raise over his Wisconsin salary. Turner did not jump at the offer, but he did not turn it down. He decided to wait for a year to see what Stanford would do about a library.¹⁵ The California rumor mill turned. A San Jose newspaper erroneously reported that Turner was going to Stanford.¹⁶ In Berkeley Professor Stephens, who was by then the history department head, heard the false report and implored Turner not to go to Stanford until he visited Berkeley. He promised to match any offer that Stanford made. Turner assured Stephens that Jordan had made no offer, but of course the Stanford offer was on the way.¹⁷

      Turner's delaying tactics with Stanford gave Stephens time to address Berkeley's library problem. Like Stanford, Berkeley lacked a library that could support serious research in history. Stephens was a European historian, but he recognized the immense value of the Bancroft for the study of history on the Pacific Coast. He convinced President Benjamin Ide Wheeler that acquisition of the Bancroft was crucial to the future of the university. Wheeler then won over the regents, but money stood in the way, for Bancroft wanted a quarter of a million dollars for his library. Bancroft himself helped to overcome financial obstacles by agreeing to “donate” $100,000 toward the purchase while agreeing that the balance could be paid him in three $50,000 installments. On September 15 Stephens and Bancroft reached an agreement that Stephens sealed, in his decorous way, by kissing Mrs. Bancroft's hand.¹⁸

      The regents feared a public outcry because Bancroft was portrayed in the press as a self-promoter who was prying money from the public treasury for a worthless lot of old books and papers, mere “rubbish” as some people thought.¹⁹ To mute criticism, the regents called for an expert appraisal. The choice of appraisers was especially shrewd considering Stephens's cherished desire to recruit Turner. The call went out to Reuben gold Thwaites, Turner's colleague and friend and the superintendent of historical collections for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. His praise was unstinting. Bancroft's library was “astonishingly large and complete, easily first in its own field, and taking high rank among the famous general collections of Americana, such as exist at Harvard University, the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, the New York State Library, and the Wisconsin Historical Library.” The library would “at once attract to the University a body of graduate students in American and Spanish-American history and allied studies, who are to find here a practically unique collection of material of the highest order of excellence.”²⁰

      Thwaites recommended creating at Berkeley a repository of material for all of Spanish America. Nor was Anglo-American history to be forgotten. Bancroft had amassed a huge collection of newspapers, books, documents, reminiscences, business records, and other materials bearing on the Anglo-American phase of California and the West. The opportunities for research were “quite unexampled elsewhere in America.” As to its monetary value, the Bancroft Library was “a bargain” worth far more than the price that Bancroft had put on it.²¹ Thwaites made one additional suggestion: that Frederick J. Teggart, librarian of the fine Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco, be put in charge of moving the library to Berkeley. Teggart had been working in the library for some time and was already a University of California extension lecturer.²² Accordingly he organized the move and eventually became curator of the Bancroft in Berkeley.

      Bancroft's splendid rubbish now belonged to the university, but it remained in San Francisco until the University completed the Doe

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