| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

*The Governor: The Life and Legacy of Leland Stanford, A California Colossus*. Two Volume Set. By Norman E. Tutorow. (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 2004. lviii + 1146 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $125.00.)
Those who believe that Leland Stanford merits canonization will love Norman Tutorow's latest look at the legendary Gilded Age potentate. Apparently dissatisfied with his earlier one-volume biography, Leland Stanford: Man of Many Careers (Menlo Park, CA, 1971), Tutorow has now brought forth a two-volume hagiography that spans over 1,000 pages of ballast-laden text.	1
Sounding very much like a Gilded Age man himself, Tutorow makes clear from the outset that he is a firm believer in the long discredited Great Man Theory of History. Citing Herodotus and Thomas Carlyle as his chief authorities, Tutorow proclaims that "great men ... are, indeed, the makers of history," and it is, therefore, "the task of the historian" to reconstruct "the lives of great men and women ..." (p. xlvii, emphasis in original).	2
Having made this bold declaration, Tutorow proceeds to argue that Leland Stanford was, well, a great man who was great at just about everything. Says Tutorow, "Stanford was a great railroad builder, a great horsebreeder, a great moneymaker, and a great philanthropist" who "must be included in the list of great men of the world." Quite unlike the envious and small-minded "muckrakers, progressives, and political reformers" who called him names like "robber baron" or denounced his railroad monopoly as a corrupt and grasping "octopus," Stanford "possessed the qualities of a hero" and strode like "a colossus among men" (p. 926).	. . .

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