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THE LETTERS OF FRANKLIN K. LANE
Personal and Political
EDITED BY ANNE WINTERMUTE LANE AND LOUISE HERRICK WALL
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
Prom the thousands of typewritten letters found in his files, and
from the many holograph letters sent to me from his friends in
different parts of the country, we have attempted, in this volume,
to select chiefly those letters which tell the story of Franklin
K. Lane's life as it unfolded itself in service to his country
which was his passion. A few technical letters have been included,
because they represent some incomplete and original phases of the
work he attempted,--work, to which he brought an intensity of
interest and devotion that usually is given only to private
enterprise.
In editing his letters we have omitted much, but we have in no way
changed anything that he wrote. Even where, in his haste, there
has been an obvious slip of the pen, we have left it. Owing to his
dictating to many stenographers, with their varying methods of
punctuation and paragraphing, and because the letters that he
wrote himself were often dashed off on the train, in bed, or in a
hurried five minutes before some engagement, we found in them no
uniformity of punctuation. In writing hastily he used only a
frequent dash and periods; these letters we have made agree with
those which were more formally written.
With the oncoming of war his correspondence enormously increased--
the more demanded of him, the more he seemed able to accomplish.
Upon opening his files it took us weeks to run through and destroy
just the requests for patronage, for commissions, passports,
appointments as chaplains, promotions, demands from artists who
desired to work on camouflage, farmers and chemists who wished
exemption, requests for appointments to the War Department;
letters asking for every kind of a position from that of night-
watchman to that of Brigadier-General. For his friends, and even
those who had no special claim upon him, knew that they could
count on his interest in them.
One of his secretaries, Joseph J. Cotter, a man he greatly
trusted, in describing his office work says: "Whatever was of
human interest, interested Mr. Lane. His researches were by no
means limited to the Department of the Interior. For instance, I
remember that at one time, before the matter had been given any
consideration in any other quarter, he asked Secretary of
Agriculture Houston to come to his office, in the Interior
Department, and went with him into the question of the number of
ships it would take to transport our soldiers to the other side.
And as a result of this conference, a plan was laid before the
Secretary of War. I remember this particularly because it
necessitated my looking up dead-weight tonnage, and other matters,
with which I was entirely unfamiliar. ...
"I have never known any one who could with equal facility follow
an intricate line of thought through repeated interruptions. I
have seen Mr. Lane, when interrupted in the middle of an involved
sentence of dictation, talk on some other subject for five or ten
minutes and return to his dictation, taking it up where he left it
and completing the sentence so that it could be typed as dictated,
and this without the stenographer's telling him at what point he
had been interrupted."
His letters are peculiarly autobiographical, for whenever his
active mind was engaged on some personal, political, or
philosophical problem, his thought turned naturally to that friend
with whom he would most like to discuss the subject, and, if he
could possibly make the time, to him he wrote just what thoughts
raced through his mind. To Ambassador Page he wrote in 1918, "I
have a very old-fashioned love for writing from day to day what
pops into my mind, contradicting each day what I said the day
before, and gathering from my friends their impressions and their
spirit in the same way." And in another letter he says, "Now I
have gossiped, and preached, and prophesied, and mourned, and
otherwise revealed what passes through a wandering mind in half an
hour, so I send you at the close of this screed, my blessing,
which is a poor gift."
At home on Sunday morning before the fire, he would often write
many letters--some of them twenty pages in length and some mere
scrappy notes. He wrote with a pencil on a pad on his knee,
rapidly stripping off the sheets for me to read, in his desire to
share all that was his, even his innermost thoughts.
To the many correspondents who have generously returned to me
their letters, and with no restrictions as to their use, I wish
particularly to express here my profound gratitude. The limits of
one volume have made it possible to use only a part of those
received, deeply as I have regretted the necessity of omitting any
of them. In making these acknowledgments I wish especially to
thank John H. Wigmore, since to him we owe all the early letters--
the only ones covering that period.
For possible future use I shall be grateful for any letters that I
have not already seen, and if in the preparation of these letters
for publication we have allowed any mistakes to slip in, I hope
that the error will be called to my attention.
Anne Wintermute Lane
March, 1922
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION
Youth--Education--Characteristics
II. POLITICS AND JOURNALISM. 1884-1894
Politics--Newspaper Work--New York--Buying into Tacoma News
--Marriage--Sale of Newspaper
LETTERS:
To John H. Wigmore
To John H. Wigmore
To John H. Wigmore
To John H. Wigmore
III. LAW PRACTICE AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES. 1894-1906
Law--Drafting New City Charter--Elected as City and County Attorney--
Gubernatorial Campaign--Mayoralty Campaign--Earthquake
--Appointment as Interstate Commerce Commissioner
LETTERS:
To P. T. Spurgeon
To John H. Wigmore
To John H. Wigmore
To John H. Wigmore
To Lyman Naugle
To John H. Wigmore
To John H. Wigmore
To William R. Wheeler
To Orva G. Williams
To the Iroquois Club, Los Angeles, California
To Isadore B. Dockweiler
To Edward B. Whitney
To Hon. Theodore Roosevelt
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler
To William E. Smythe
To John H. Wigmore
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler
To William R. Wheeler
To John H. Wigmore
To William R. Wheeler
IV. RAILROAD AND NATIONAL POLITICS. 1906-1912
Increased Powers of Interstate Commerce Commission--Harriman
Inquiry--Railroad Regulation--Letters to Roosevelt
LETTERS:
To Edward F. Adams
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler
To Elihu Root
To E. B. Beard
To George W. Lane
To Charles K. McClatchy
To Lawrence F. Abbott
To John H. Wigmore
To Mrs. Franklin K. Lane
To Theodore Roosevelt
To John H. Wigmore
To William R. Wheeler
To Lawrence F. Abbott
To Charles K. McClatchy
To Charles K. McClatchy
To John Crawford Burns
To Theodore Roosevelt
To Samuel G. Blythe
To Sidney E. Mezes
To John H. Wigmore
To George W. Lane
To Carl Snyder
From Oliver Wendell Holmes
To Oliver Wendell Holmes
To John H. Wigmore
To Daniel Willard
To John McNaught
V. EXPRESS CASE--CABINET APPOINTMENTS 1912-1913
Politics--Democratic Convention--Nomination of Wilson --Report on
Express Case--Democratic Victory--Problems for New Administration
--On Cabinet Appointments
LETTERS:
To Albert Shaw
To Curt G. Pfeiffer
To George W. Lane
To Oscar S. Straus
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler,
To George W. Lane.
To John H. Wigmore.
To Timothy Spellacy.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To William F. McComba,
To Hugo K. Asher.
To Francis G. Newlands.
To Woodrow Wilson.
To William J. Bryan.
To James D. Phelan.
To Herbert Harley.
To Charles K. McClatchy.
To Ernest S. Simpson.
To Fairfax Harrison.
To James P. Brown.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To Edward M. House.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To Sidney E. Mezes.
To John H. Wigmore.
To John H. Wigmore.
To Joseph N. Teal.
To Edward M. House.
To Mitchell Innes.
VI. SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR. 1913-1915
Appointment as Secretary of the Interior--Reorganization of the
Department--Home Club--Bills on Public Lands
LETTERS:
To John H. Wigmore.
To Walter H. Page.
To Edwin A. Alderman.
To Theodore Roosevelt.
To Lawrence F. Abbott.
To William M. Bole.
To Fairfax Harrison.
To Frank Reese.
To Mark Sullivan.
To Edward M. House.
To James H. Barry.
To Edward F. Adams.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson,
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To Albert Shaw.
To Charles K. Field.
To Frederic J. Lane.
To Edward E. Leake.
To William R. Wheeler.
To--.
To his Brother on his Birthday.
To Cordenio Severance.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Theodore Roosevelt.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Lawrence F. Abbott.
VII. EUROPEAN WAR AND PERSONAL CONCERNS. 1914-1915
Endorsement of Hoover--German Audacity--LL.D. from Alma Mater
--England's Sea Policy--Christmas letters
LETTERS:
To William J. Bryan.
To John Crawford Burns.
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To John H. Wigmore.
To John Crawford Burns.
To Edward J. Wheeler.
To John Crawford Burns.
To William P. Lawlor.
To William G. McAdoo.
To John Crawford Burns.
To E. W. Scripps.
To George W. Wickersham.
To Frederic J. Lane.
To John Crawford Burns.
To Eugene A. Avery.
To John F. Davis.
To Dick Mead.
To John Crawford Burns.
To Sidney E. Mezes.
To Cordenio Severance.
To Frederick Dixon.
To Robert H. Patchin.
To Francis R. Wall.
To John H. Wigmore.
To Mrs. Adolph C. Miller.
To Mrs. Magnus Andersen.
To Mrs. Adolph C. Miller.
VIII. AMERICAN AND MEXICAN AFFAIRS.
On Writing English--Visit to Monticello--Citizenship for Indians--On
Religion--American-Mexican Joint Commission
LETTERS:
To William M. Bole.
To Mrs. Adolph C. Miller.
To Edward F. Adams.
To Carl Snyder.
To Mrs. Franklin K. Lane.
To Will Irwin.
To--.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Frederic J. Lane.
To Frank L Cobb.
To George W. Wickersham.
To H. B. Brougham.
To Frederic J. Lane.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Mrs. Franklin K. Lane.
To Mrs. Adolph C. Miller.
To Mrs. Franklin K. Lane.
To William R. Wheeler.
To James S. Harlan.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To Frederic J. Lane.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To R. M. Fitzgerald.
To James K. Moffitt.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To Roland Cotton Smith.
To James H. Barry.
IX. CABINET TALK AND WAR PLANS. 1917
Cabinet Meetings--National Council of Defense--Bernstorff--War--Plan
for Railroad Consolidation--U-Boat Sinkings Revealed--Alaska
LETTERS:
To George W. Lane.
To George W. Lane.
To George W. Lane.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To George W. Lane.
To George W. Lane.
To Edward J. Wheeler.
To George W. Lane.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To George W. Lane.
To George W. Lane.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To Will Irwin.
To Robert Lansing.
To Henry Lane Eno.
To George B. Dorr.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To John O'H. Cosgrave.
X. CABINET NOTES IN WAR-TIME. 1918
Notes on Cabinet Meetings--School Gardens--A Democracy Lacks
Foresight--Use of National Resources--Washington in War-time--The
Sacrifice of War--Farms for Soldiers
LETTERS:
To Franklin K. Lane, Jr.
To George W. Lane.
To Albert Shaw.
To Walter H. Page.
To John Lyon.
To Frank Lyon.
To Miss Genevieve King.
To John McNaught.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Allan Pollok.
To E. S. Pillsbury.
To William Marion Reedy.
Notes on Cabinet Meetings.
To Daniel Willard.
To James H. Hawley.
To Samuel G. Blythe.
To George W. Lane.
To Edgar C. Bradley.
XI. AFTER-WAR PROBLEMS--LEAVING WASHINGTON. 1919
After-war Problems--Roosevelt Memorials--Americanization--Religion
--Responsibility of Press--Resignation
LETTERS:
To E. C. Bradley.
To George W. Lane.
To George W. Lane.
To William Boyce Thompson.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To E. S. Martin.
To George W. Lane.
To Van H. Manning.
To E. C. Bradley.
To Mrs. Louise Herrick Wall.
To--.
To M. A. Mathew.
To Herbert C. Pell, Jr.
To Henry P. Davison.
To George W. Lane.
To C. S. Jackson.
To John Crawford Burns.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To Mrs. Louise Herrick Wall.
To Mrs. M. A. Andersen.
To George W. Lane.
To Daniel J. O'Neill.
To Hamlin Garland.
To Hugo K. Asher.
To Admiral Gary Grayson.
To Herbert C. Pell, Jr.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Frank W. Mondell.
To Robert W. De Forest.
XII. POLITICAL COUNSEL--LINCOLN'S EYES. 1920
Suggestions to Democratic Nominee for President--On Election of
Senators--Lost Leaders--Lincoln's Eyes--William James's Letters
LETTERS:
To William Phelps Eno.
To Roland Cotton Smith.
To James M. Cox.
To Timothy Spellacy.
To Edward L. Doheny.
To Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To Mrs. George Ehle.
To Isadore B. Dockweiler.
To Hall McAllister.
To Mrs. George Ehle.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To John W. Hallowell.
To John W. Hallowell.
To Robert Lansing.
To Carl Snyder.
To William R. Wheeler.
To George Otis Smith.
To George W. Wickersham.
Lincoln's Eyes.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Timothy Spellacy.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To John G. Gehring.
To John W. Hallowell.
To John G. Gehring.
XIII. LETTERS TO ELIZABETH. 1919-1920
LETTERS:
To Mrs. Ralph Ellis.
XIV. FRIENDS AND THE GREAT HOPE. 1921
Need for Democratic Program--Religious Faith--Men who have Influenced
Thought--A Sounder Industrial Life --A Super-University for Ideas
--"I Accept"--Fragment
LETTERS:
To Mrs. Philip C. Kauffmann.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Mrs. George Ehle.
To Mrs. William Phillips.
To James H. Barry.
To Michael A. Spellacy.
To William R. Wheeler.
To V. C. Scott O'Connor.
Letter sent to several friends.
To John G. Gehring.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To John G. Gehring.
To John W. Hallowell.
To Curt G. Pfeiffer.
To John G. Gehring.
To D. M. Reynolds.
To Mrs. Cordenio Severance.
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To James S. Harlan.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To Lathrop Brown.
To John G. Gehring.
To John H. Wigmore.
To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To John W. Hallowell.
To John G. Gehring.
To Hall McAllister.
To Mrs. Frederic Peterson.
To Roland Cotton Smith.
To John G. Gehring.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To Robert Lansing.
To James D. Phelan.
To Mr. and Mrs. Louis Hertle.
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To John Finley.
To James H. Barry.
To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To friends who had telegraphed and written for news.--"I accept."
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To John W. Hallowell.
To Robert Lansing.
Fragment.
ILLUSTRATIONS
FRANKLIN K. LANE
FRANKLIN K. LANE With his younger brothers, George and Frederic.
FRANKLIN K. LANE At eighteen.
FRANKLIN K. LANE As City and County Attorney.
FRANKLIN K. LANE, MRS. LANE, MRS. MILLER, AND ADOLPH C. MILLER
FRANKLIN K. LANE WITH Ethan Allen, Superintendent of Rainier
National Park, Washington
FRANKLIN K. LANE AND George B. Dorr
In Lafayette National Park, Mount Desert Island, Maine.
FRANKLIN K. LANE IN 1917 Taken in Lafayette National Park.
"LANE PEAK," Tatoosh Range, Rainier National Park
DATES
1864. July 15. Born near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
1871-76. Taken to California. Went to Grammar School at Napa,
California.
1876. Went to Oakland, California. Oakland High School.
1884-86. University of California, Berkeley, California. Special student.
1885. Reporting on Alta California in San Francisco for John P. Irish.
1887. Studied Hastings Law School.
1888. Admitted to the Bar.
1889. Special Newspaper Correspondent in New York for San
Francisco Chronicle.
1891. Bought interest in Tacoma News and edited that paper.
1892. Campaigned in New York for Cleveland.
1893. Married.
1895. Returned to California. Practiced law.
1897-98. On Committee of One Hundred to draft new Charter for San
Francisco.
1898. Elected City and County Attorney to interpret new Charter.
1899. Reelected City and County Attorney.
1901. Reelected City and County Attorney.
1902. Nominated for Governor of California on Democratic and
Non-Partisan Tickets.
1903. Democratic vote in Legislature for United States Senator.
1903. Nominated for Mayor of San Francisco.
1905. December. Nominated by President Roosevelt as Interstate
Commerce Commissioner.
1906. June 29. Confirmed by Senate as Interstate Commerce Commissioner.
1909. Reappointed by President Taft as Interstate Commerce Commissioner.
1913. Appointed Secretary of the Interior under President Wilson.
1916. Chairman American-Mexican Joint Commission.
1918. Chairman Railroad Wage Commission.
1919. Chairman Industrial Conference.
1920. March 1. Resigned from the Cabinet.
1920. Vice-President of Pan-American Petroleum Company.
1921. May 18. Died at Rochester, Minnesota.
FAMILY NAMES
Franklin K. Lane was the eldest of four children.
Father: Christopher S. Lane.
Mother: Caroline Burns.
Brothers: George W. Lane.
Frederic J. Lane.
Sister: Maude (Mrs. M. A. Andersen).
He was married to Anne Wintermute, and had two children:
Franklin K. Lane, Jr. ("Ned").
Nancy Lane (Mrs. Philip C. Kauffmann).
THE LETTERS OF FRANKLIN K. LANE
I
INTRODUCTION
Youth--Education--Characteristics
Although Franklin Knight Lane was only fifty-seven years old when
he died, May 18, 1921, he had outlived, by many years, the men and
women who had most influenced the shaping of his early life. Of
his mother he wrote, in trying to comfort a friend, "The mystery
and the ordering of this world grows altogether inexplicable. ...
It requires far more religion or philosophy than I have, to say a
real word that might console one who has lost those who are dear
to him. Ten years ago my mother died, and I have never been
reconciled to her loss." Again he wrote of her, to his sister,
when their brother Frederic--the joyous, outdoor comrade of his
youth--was in his last illness, "Dear Fritz, dear, dear boy, how I
wish I could be there with him, though I could do no good. ... Each
night I pray for him, and I am so much of a Catholic, that I pray
to the only Saint I know, or ever knew, and ask her to help. If
she lives, her mind can reach the minds of the doctors. ... I don't
need her to intercede with God, but I would like her to intercede
with men. Why, Oh! why, do we not know whether she is or not? Then
all the Universe would be explained to me."
From those who knew him best from childhood, no word of him is
left, and none from the two men whose strength and ideality
colored his morning at the University of California--Dr. George
H. Howison, the "darling Howison" of the William James' Letters,
and Dr. Joseph H. Le Conte, the wise and gentle geologist. "Names
that were Sierras along my skyline," Lane said of such men. To Dr.
Howison he wrote in 1913, when entering President Wilson's
Cabinet, "No letter that I have ever received has given me more
real pleasure than yours, and no man has been more of an
inspiration than you."
The sealing of almost every source of intimate knowledge of the
boy, who was a mature man at twenty-two, has left the record of
the early period curiously scant. Fortunately, there are in his
letters and speeches some casual allusions to his childhood and
youth, and a few facts and anecdotes of the period from members of
his family, from school, college, and early newspaper associates.
In 1888, the story begins to gather form and coherence, for at
that date we have the first of his own letters that have been
preserved, written to his lifelong friend, John H. Wigmore. With
many breaks, especially in the early chapters, the sequence of
events, and his moods toward them, pour from him with increasing
fullness and spontaneity, until the day before he died.
All the later record exists in his letters, most of them written
almost as unconsciously as the heart sends blood to the remotest
members of the body; and they come back, now, in slow diastole,
bearing within themselves evidence of the hour and day and place
of their inception; letters written with the stub of a pencil on
copy-paper, at some sleepless dawn; or, long ago, in the wide-
spaced type of a primitive traveling typewriter, and dated,
perhaps, on the Western desert, while he was on his way to secure
water for thirsty settlers; or dashed off in the glowing moment
just after a Cabinet meeting, with the heat of the discussion
still in his veins; others on the paper of the Department of the
Interior, with the symbol of the buffalo--chosen by him--richly
embossed in white on the corner, and other letters, soiled and
worn from being long carried in the pocket and often re-read, by
the brave old reformer who had hailed Lane when he first entered
the lists. This is the part of the record that cannot be
transcribed.
Franklin Knight Lane was born on July 15, 1864, on his father's
farm near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, the eldest
of four children, all born within a few years. The low, white
farmhouse that is his birthplace still stands pleasantly
surrounded by tall trees, and at one side a huge, thirty-foot
hedge of hawthorn blooms each spring. His father, Christopher S.
Lane, was at the time of his son's birth a preacher. Later, when
his voice was affected by recurrent bronchitis, he became a
dentist. Lane speaks of him several times in his letters as a
Presbyterian, and alludes to the strict orthodoxy of his father's
faith, especially in regard to an active and personal devil.
In 1917, when in the Cabinet, during President Wilson's second
term of office, Lane wrote to his brother, "To-night we give a
dinner to the Canadians, Sir George Foster, the acting Premier,
and Sir Joseph Polk, the Under-Secretary of External Affairs, who,
by the way, was born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and
says that he heard our father preach."
But it was from his mother, whose maiden name was Caroline Burns,
and who was of direct Scotch ancestry, that Franklin Lane drew
most of his physical and many of his mental traits. From her he
derived the firmly-modeled structure of his face; the watchful
Scotch eyes; a fine white skin, that weathered to an even brown,
later in life; remarkably sound teeth, large and regular, giving
firm support to the round contour of the face; and the fresh line
of his lips, that was a marked family trait. A description of him,
when he was candidate for Governor of California, at thirty-eight,
was written by Grant Wallace. Cleared of some of the hot sweetness
of a campaign rhapsody it reads:--
"Picture a man a little above the average height ... with the deep
chest and deep voice that always go with the born leader of men;
the bigness and strength of the hands ... the clear eye and broad,
firm, and expressive mouth, and the massive head that suggests
irresistibly a combination of Napoleon and Ingersoll."
These two resemblances, to Napoleon and to Robert Ingersoll, were
frequently rediscovered by others, in later years.
The description concludes by saying, "That Lane is a man of
earnestness and vigorous action is shown in ... every movement.
You sit down to chat with him in his office. As he grows
interested in the subject, he kicks his chair back, thrusts his
hands way to the elbows in his trouser pockets and strides up and
down the room. With deepening interest he speaks more rapidly and
forcibly, and charges back and forth across the carpet with the
heavy tread of a grenadier." As an older man this impetuosity was
somewhat modified. What an early interviewer called his "frank
man-to-manness" became a manner of grave and cordial
concentration. With the warm, full grasp of his hand in greeting,
he gave his complete attention to the man before him. That, and
his rich, strong laugh of pleasure, and the varied play of his
moods of earnestness, gayety, and challenge, are what men remember
best.
Lane's native bent from the first was toward public life. His
citizenship was determined when his father decided to take his
family to California, to escape the severity of the Canadian
climate. In 1902, Franklin Lane was asked how he became an
American. "By virtue of my father's citizenship," he replied, "I
have been a resident of California since seven years of age,
excepting during a brief absence in New York and Washington."
In 1871, the mother, father, and four children, after visiting two
brothers of Mrs. Lane's on the way, finally reached the town of
Napa, California.
"They came," says an old schoolmate of Napa days, "bringing with
them enough of the appearance and mannerisms of their former
environment to make us youngsters 'sit up and take notice,' for
the children were dressed in kilts, topped by handsome black
velvet and silk plaid caps. However, these costumes were soon
discarded, for at school the children found themselves the center
of both good--and bad-natured gibes, until they were glad to dress
as was the custom here." The "Lane boys," he says, were then put
into knee-trousers, "and Franklin, who was large for his age and
quite stout, looked already too old for this style," and so
continued to be annoyed by the children, until he put a forcible
end to it. "He 'licked' one of the ringleaders," says the
chronicler, and won to peace. "As we grew to know Franklin ... his
right to act became accepted ... . There was always something
about his personality which made one feel his importance."
The little California community was impressed by the close
intimacy of the home-life of the Canadian family--closer than was
usual in hurriedly settled Western towns. The father found time to
take all three boys on daily walks. Another companion remembers
seeing them starting off together for a day's hunting and fishing.
But it was the mother, who read aloud to them and told them
stories and exacted quick obedience from them, who was the real
power in the house. There were regular family prayers, and family
singing of hymns and songs.
This last custom survived among the brothers and sister through
all the years. Even after all had families of their own, and many
cares, some chance reunion, or a little family dinner would, at
parting, quicken memory and, with hats and coats already on,
perhaps, in readiness to separate to their homes, they would stand
together and shout, in unison, some song of the hour or some of
their old Scotch melodies with that pleasant harmony of voices of
one timbre, heard only in family singing.
Lane had a baritone of stirring quality, coming straight from his
big lungs, and loved music all his life. In the last weeks of his
life he more than once wrote of his pleasure in his brother's
singing. At Rochester, a few days before his operation, he
reassured an anxious friend by writing, "My brother George is
here, with his splendid philosophy and his Scotch songs."
His love and loyalty to past ties, though great and persistent,
still left his ideal of loyalty unsatisfied. Toward the end of his
life he wrote, "Roots we all have and we must not be torn up from
them and flung about as if we were young things that could take
hold in any soil. I have been--America has been--too indifferent
to roots--home roots, school roots. ... We should love stability
and tradition as well as love adventure and advancement." But the
practical labors of his life were directed toward creating means
to modify tradition in favor of a larger sort of justice than the
past had known.
Resignation had no part in his political creed. "I hold with old
Cicero 'that the whole glory of virtue is in activity,'" comes
from him with the ring of authentic temperament. And of a friend's
biography he wrote, "What a fine life--all fight, interwoven with
fun and friendship."
[Illustration with caption: FRANKLIN K. LANE WITH HIS YOUNGER
BROTHERS, GEORGE AND FREDERIC]
All the anecdotes of his boyhood show him in action, moving among
his fellows, organizing, leading, and administering rough-and-
tumble justice.
From grammar school in Napa he went, for a time, to a private
school called Oak Mound. In vacation, when he was eleven years
old, he was earning money as messenger-boy, and at about that
time as general helper to one of the merchants of the little town.
He left in his old employer's mind the memory of a boy
"exceedingly bright and enterprising." He recalls a fight that he
was told about, between Lane "and a boy of about his size," "and
Frank licked him," the old merchant exults, "and as he walked away
he said, 'If you want any more, you can get it at the same
place.'"
It was in Napa--so he could not have been quite twelve years old--
that Lane started to study Spanish, so that he might talk more
freely to the ranchers, who drove to town in their rickety little
carts, to "trade" at the stores.
In 1876, the family moved from the full sunshine of the valley
town, with its roads muffled in pale dust, and its hillsides
lifting up the green of riotous vines, to Oakland, cool and
cloudy, with a climate to create and sustain vigor. In Oakland,
just across the bay from San Francisco, Lane entered the High
School. Again his schoolmates recall him with gusto. He was
muscular in build, "a good short-distance runner." His hands--
always very characteristic of the man--were large and well-made,
strong to grasp but not adroit in the smaller crafts of tinkering.
"He impressed me," an Oakland schoolmate writes, "as a sturdy
youngster who had confidence in himself and would undoubtedly get
what he went after. Earnest and straightforward in manner," and
always engrossed in the other boys, "when they walked down Twelfth
Street, on their way to school, they had their arms around each
other's shoulders, discussing subjects of 'vast importance.'"
His capacity for organized association developed rapidly. He had
part in school orations, amateur plays, school and Sunday school
clubs. Many of these he seems to have initiated, so that, with his
school work, his life was full. He says somewhere that by the time
he was sixteen he was earning his own way. His great delight in
people, and especially in the thrust and parry of controversial
talk, held him from the solitary pleasures of fishing and hunting,
so keenly relished by his two younger brothers. One of them said
of him, "Frank can't even enjoy a view from a mountain-peak
without wanting to call some one up to share it with him." He
writes of his feeling about solitary nature to his friend George
Dorr, in 1917, in connection with improvements for the new
National Park, near Bar Harbor, "A wilderness, no matter how
impressive or beautiful does not satisfy this soul of mine (if I
have that kind of a thing). It is a challenge to man. It says,
'Master me! Put me to use! Make me more than I am!'" About his
"need of a world of men," he was equally candid. To his wife he
writes, "I am going to dinner, and before I go alone into a
lonesome club, I must send a word to you. ... The world is all
people to me. I lean upon them. They induce thought and fancy.
They give color to my life. Thrown on myself I am a stranded
bark."...
His love for cooperation and for action, "dramatic action," some
one says, never left him. In his last illness, in apolitical
crisis, he rallied the energy of younger men. He wrote of the need
of a Democratic program, suggested a group of compelling names,
"or any other group," he adds, "put up the plan and ask them what
they think of it--tentatively--just a quiet chat, but START!" And
about the same matter he wrote, "The time has come. Now strike!"
To a friend wavering over her fitness for a piece of projected
work, he said drily, "There is only one way to do a thing, and
that is to do it." Late in life, the summation of this creed of
action seemed to come when he confessed, "I cannot get over the
feeling that we are here as conquerors, not as pacifists."
And words, written and spoken words, were to him, of course, the
instrument of conquest. But the search for the fit and shining
word for his mark did not become research. In a droll letter,
about how he put simpler English into the Department of the
Interior, he tells of finding a letter written by one of the
lawyers of the Department to an Indian about his title to land,
that was "so involved and elaborately braided and beaded and
fringed that I could not understand it myself." So he sent the
ornate letter back and had it put into "straightaway English."
His own practicable English he believed he had learned through his
newspaper training. He first worked in the printing office of the
Oakland Times, then became a reporter for that paper. He went
campaigning and made speeches for the Prohibition candidate for
Governor in 1884--before he was twenty-one. The next year he was
reporting for the Alta California, edited by Colonel John P.
Irish, himself a fiery orator, of the denunciatory type. Colonel
Irish recalls that he was at once impressed with the "copious and
excellent vocabulary" of his ambitious reporter, who was, even
then, he says, "determined upon a high and useful career." In a
letter to Colonel Irish, in 1913, Lane wrote, "That simple little
card of yours was a good thing for me. It took me for a minute out
of the maelstrom of pressing business and carried me back, about
thirty years, to the time when I was a boy working for you--an
unbaked, ambitious chap, who did not know where he was going, but
was trying to get somewhere."
It is interesting to notice that in youth he did not suffer from
the usual phases of revolt from early teachings. His father was a
Prohibitionist, and Lane's first campaign was for a Prohibition
candidate for Governor; his father had been a preacher and Lane,
when very young, thought seriously of becoming a minister, so
seriously that he came before an examining board of the
Presbyterian church. After two hours of grilling, he was, though
found wanting, not rejected, but put upon a six months' probation
--the elders probably dreaded to lose so persuasive a tongue for
the sake of a little "insufficiency of damnation" in his creed.
One of his inquisitors, a Presbyterian minister, went from the
ordeal with Lane, and continued to try to convert him to the
tenets of Presbyterianism. Then suddenly, at some turn of the
talk, the clergyman abandoned his position and said carelessly,
"Well, Lane, why not become a Unitarian preacher?"
The boy who had been walking the floor at night in the struggle to
reconcile the teachings of the church with his own doubts--knowing
that Eternal Damnation was held to be the reward for doubt of
Christ's divinity--was so horrified by the casuistry of the man
who could be an orthodox minister and yet speak of preaching as
just one way to make a living, that he swung sharply from any wish
to enter the church.
The strictness of the orthodoxy of his home had not served to
alienate his sympathies, but he was chilled to the heart by this
indifference. He remembered the episode all his life with emotion,
but he was not embittered by it. He was young, a great lover,
greatly in love with life.
[Illustration with caption: FRANKLIN K. LANE AT EIGHTEEN]
In 1884, when he entered the University of California, it was as a
special not as a regular student. "I put myself through college,"
he writes to a boy seeking advice on education, "by working during
vacation and after hours, and I am very glad I did it." He seems
to have arranged all his college courses for the mornings and
carried his reporting and printing-office work the last half of
the day.
College at once offered a great forum for debate, and a richer
comradeship with men of strong mental fiber. Lane's eagerness in
discussion and love of large and sounding words made the students
call him "Demosthenes Lane." In his letters it is easy to trace
the gradual evolution from his early oratorical style into a final
form of free, imaginative expression of great simplicity.
Meanwhile, as he debated, he gathered to himself men who were to
be friends for the rest of his life. The "Sid" of the earliest
letters that we have is Dr. Sidney E. Mezes, now President of the
College of the City of New York, to whom one of his last letters
was addressed. His friendship for Dr. Wigmore, Dean of Law at the
Northwestern University, in Chicago, dates almost as far back.
In college, Lane seized what he most wanted in courses on
Philosophy and Economics. "His was a mind of many facets and
hospitable in its interest," says his college and lifelong friend,
Adolph C. Miller, "but his years at Berkeley were devoted mainly
to the study of Philosophy and Government, and kindred subjects.
He was a leading figure in the Political Science Club, and intent
in his pursuit of philosophy. Often he could be seen walking back
and forth in a room in the old Bacon library, set apart for the
more serious-minded students, with some philosophical book in
hand; every line of his face expressing deep concentration, the
occasional light in his eye clearly betraying the moment when he
was feeling the joy of understanding."
In two years, not waiting for formal graduation, Lane was back in
the world of public affairs that he had scarcely left. In the same
short-cut way he took his Hastings Law School work, and passed his
Supreme Court examination in 1888, in much less than the time
usually allowed for the work.
By the time he left the law school, "a full fledged, but not a
flying attorney," his desire for aggressive citizenship was fully
formed. In fact, the whole active campaign, that was his life, was
made by the light of early ideals, enlarged and reinterpreted as
his climb to power brought under his survey wider horizons.
The sketchiest summary of his early and late activities brings out
the singleness of the central purpose moving through his life. His
first fight, in 1888, for Ballot Reform was made that the will of
the people of the State might be honestly interpreted; later, in
Tacoma, Washington, he sided with his printers, against his
interest as owner, in their fight to maintain union wages; once
more in San Francisco, he took, without a retaining fee, the case
of the blackmailed householders whose titles were threatened by
the pretensions of the Noe claimants, and with his brother,
cleared title to all of their small homes; he joined, with his
friend, Arthur McEwen, in an editorial campaign against the
Southern Pacific, in the day of its tyrannous power over all the
shippers of California; later he drafted into the charter of San
Francisco new provisions to improve the wages of all city
employees; as its young city and county attorney, he aggressively
protected the city against street railway encroachments,
successfully enforcing the law against infractions; as Interstate
Commerce Commissioner, he disentangled a network of injustices in
the relations between shippers and railroads, exposed rebating and
demurrage evils; formulated new procedures in deflating,
reorganizing, and zoning the business of all the express companies
in the country; as Secretary of the Interior, he confirmed to the
people a fuller use of Federal Lands, and National Park Reserves,
laid the foundation for the development, on public domain, of
water powers, and the leasing of Government oil lands, and built
the Government railroad in Alaska; during the War, he contributed
to the Council of National Defense his inexhaustible enthusiasm
for cooperation, with definite plans for swift action, to focus
National resources to meet war needs; and finally, his last
carefully elaborated plan--killed by a partisan Congress--was to
place returned soldiers upon the land under conditions of hopeful
and decent independence. These were some of the "glories" of
activity into which he poured the resources of his energy and
imagination.
But no catalogue of the work or the salient mental characteristics
of Franklin Lane gives a picture of the man, without taking into
account his temperament, for that colored every hour of his life,
and every act of his career. The things that he knew seized his
imagination. Even when a middle-aged man he sang, like a
troubadour, of the fertility of the soil; he was stirred by the
virtue and energy of what he saw and touched; his heart leaped at
the thought of the power of water ready to be unlocked for man's
use--most happy in that the thing that was his he could love.
"To lose faith in the future of oil!" he cries, in the midst of a
sober statistical letter, "Why! that is as unthinkable as to lose
faith in your hands. Oil, coal, electricity, what are these but
multiplied and more adaptable, super-serviceable hands? They may
temporarily be unemployed, but the world can't go round without
them." A man who feels poetry in petroleum suffers from no wistful
"desire of the moth for the star." To his full sense of life the
moth and the star are of one essential substance, parts of one
glorious conquerable creation--and the moth just a fleck of star-
dust, with silly wings.
In truth, both then and throughout most of the days of his life he
was completely oriented in this world, at home here, with his
strong feet planted upon reality. He liked so many homely things,
that his friendly glance responded to common sunlight without
astigmatism.
That his sympathies should have outrun his repugnances was of
great practical moment in what he was able to achieve in a life
shortened at both ends, for though he had to lose time by earning
his own professional equipment, he lost little energy in friction.
He wrote to a political aspirant for high office, in 1921, "Pick a
few enemies and pick them with discretion. Chiefly be FOR things."
To a man who was making a personal attack on an adversary of
Lane's, while in 1914, as Secretary of the Interior, he was
engrossed in establishing his "conservation-by-use" policy, in
opposition to the older and narrower policy of conservation by
withdrawal, Lane wrote, "I have never seen any good come by
blurring an issue by personal conflict or antagonisms. ... I have
no time to waste in fighting people ... to fight for a thing the
best way is to show its advantages, and the need for it ... and my
only solicitude is that the things I care for should not be held
back by personal disputes." ...
This lesson he had learned more from his own temperament than from
political expediency. It was bound up in his love of efficiency
and also in his sense of humor. During this same hot conservation
controversy he writes to an old friend, "I have no intention of
saying anything in reply to Pinchot. He wrote me thirty pages to
prove that I was a liar, and rather than read that again I will
admit the fact."
This preoccupation with the main issue, in getting beneficial
results was one thing that made him glad to acclaim and use the
gifts of other men. Through his sympathies he could follow as well
as lead, and he caught enthusiasms as well as kindled them. He
believed in enthusiasm for itself, and because he saw in it one of
the great potencies of life. In writing of D'Annunzio's placing
Italy beside the Allies, he rejoices in the beautiful spectacle of
the spirit of a whole people "blown into flame by a poet-patriot."
But "the ideal," he urges, "must be translated into the possible.
Man cannot live by bread alone--nor on manna."
His gay and challenging attitude toward life expressed only one
mood, for he paid, as men must, for intense buoyancy of temper by
black despairs. "Damn that Irish temperament, anyway!" he writes.
"O God, that I had been made a stolid, phlegmatic, non-nervous,
self-satisfied Britisher, instead of a wild cross between a crazy
Irishman with dreams, desires, fancies--and a dour Scot with his
conscience and his logical bitterness against himself--and his
eternal drive!"
His exaggerations of hope and his moods of broken disappointment,
his ever-springing faith in men, and in the possibility of just
institutions, were more temperamental than logical. Moods of
astonished grief, when men showed greed and instability, gave
place to humorous and tolerant analysis of characters and events.
Even his loyalty to his friends was subject to the slight magnetic
deflections of a man of moods. He was true to them as the needle
to the pole; and with just the same piquing oscillations, before
the needle comes to rest at the inevitable North.
Because he had caught, in its capricious rhythms, the subtle
movements of human intercourse he trusted himself to express to
other men the natural man within his breast, without fear of
misconstruction. He contrived to humanize, in parts, even his
government reports. They brought him, year by year, touching
letters of gratitude from weary political writers. The patient,
logical Scot in him that said, "I am going to take this thing up
bit by bit without trying to get a whole philosophy into the
work," anchored him to the heaviest tasks as if he were a true-
born plodder, while the "wild Irishman" with dreams and desires
lighted the way with gleams of Will-o'-the-Wisp. The quicksilver
in the veins of the patient Mercutio of railroad rates and
demurrage charges lightened his work for himself and others. Just
as in the five years when he served San Francisco, as City and
County Attorney, he labored to such effect that not one of his
hundreds of legal opinions was reversed by the Supreme Court of
the State, so he toiled on these same Annual Reports, so immersed
that, as he says, "I even have to take the blamed stuff to bed
with me." Fourteen and sixteen hours at his official desk were not
his longest hours, and sometimes he snatched a dinner of shredded
biscuit from beside the day's accumulations of papers upon his
heaped-up desk. He laid upon himself the burden of labor,
examining and cross-examining men for hours upon a single point of
essential fact--quick to detect fraud and intolerant of humbug,--
but infinitely patient with those who were merely dull, evading no
drudgery, and, above all, never evading the dear pains of
building-up and maintaining friendship.
LOUISE HERRICK WALL
MARCH, 1922
II
POLITICS AND JOURNALISM
1884-1894
POLITICS--NEWSPAPER WORK--NEW YORK--BUYING INTO TACOMA NEWS--
MARRIAGE--SALE OF NEWSPAPER
FRANKLIN K. LANE'S earliest political association, in California,
after reaching manhood, was with John H. Wigmore. Wigmore had
returned from Harvard, in 1883, with a plan, already matured, for
Civic Reform. The Municipal Reform League, created by Wigmore,
Lane, and several other young men, was to follow the general
outline of boss control, by precinct and ward organization, the
difference being that the League members were to hold no offices,
enjoy no spoils, and work for clean city politics. Each member of
the inner circle was to take over and make himself responsible for
a definite city district, making a card index of the name of each
voter, taking a real part in all caucus meetings--in saloon
parlors or wherever they were held--and studying practical
politics at first hand. "Blind Boss Buckley" was the Democratic
dictator of San Francisco, and against his regime the initial
efforts of the League were directed.
It was a giant's task, an impossible task, for a small group of
newspaper writers and college undergraduates. The short career of
the Municipal Reform League ended when Wigmore went East to study
law, leaving Lane determined to increase his efficiency by earning
his way through college and the Hastings Law School.
The first letters of this volume follow the theme of the political
interests of the two young men.
TO JOHN H. WIGMORE
Oakland, February 27, 1888
MY DEAR WIGMORE,--I am thinking of getting back in your part of
the world myself, and this is what I especially wanted to write
you about. I desire to see the world, to rub off some of my
provincialisms, to broaden a little before I settle down to a
prosaic existence. So, as I say, I want to live in Boston awhile
and my only possibility of so doing is to get a position on some
Boston paper, something that will afford me a living and allow
some little time for social and literary life. However I don't
care much what the billet is. I can bring letters of
recommendation from all the good newspaper men in San Francisco,
both as to my ability at editorial work (I have done considerable
for the San Francisco NEWS LETTER and EXAMINER), and at all kinds
of reportorial work. ...
I passed the law examination before the Supreme Court last month,
so I am now a full-fledged--but not a flying, attorney. I have not
determined definitely on going into law. ...
Politically speaking we Mugwumps out here are happy. ...
California has been opposed to Cleveland on every one of his great
proposals (civil service reform, silver question, tariff reform),
and yet the Republicans must nominate a very strong man to get
this State this year. The people admire old Grover's strength so
much, he is a positive man and an honest man, and when the people
see these two exceptional virtues mixed happily in a candidate
they grow to love and admire him out of the very idealism of their
natures.