you know of opportunities there and believe me always your friend,
FRANK K. LANE
TO JOHN B. WIGMORE
Oakland, May 9, 1888
MY DEAR WIGMORE,--Of course I would have to stand my chances in
getting a position. Newspaper men, perhaps more than any other
class, are rated by ability. Civil Service Reform principles rule
in every good newspaper office to their fullest extent. When I
wrote you, I was unsettled as to my plans for the coming year. My
brother desired to spend a year or so in Boston and I thought of
accompanying him. He has changed his plans and so have I. ... I am
regularly on the Chronicle staff, chiefly writing sensational
stories. I get a regular salary of twenty-five dollars a week
besides some extras, and have as easy and pleasant a billet as
there is on the paper, though editorial work would be more to my
liking.
These arrangements do not interfere, however, with my Boston plan,
for sooner or later I shall breathe its intellectual atmosphere,
that I may outgrow provincialism and become intellectual by force
of habit rather than will. How long it will be before the wish can
be gratified I cannot tell. Probably next year. You see the law is
not altogether after my taste. I feel it a waste of time to spend
days quarreling like school-boys over a few hundred dollars. I
feel all the time as if I must be engaged in some life work which
will make more directly for the good of my fellows. I feel the
need which the world manifests for broader ideas in economics,
politics, the philosophy of life, and all social questions.
Feeling so, I cannot coop myself in a law library behind a pile of
briefs, spending my days and nights in search of some authority
which will save my client's dollar. I am unsettled, however, as to
my permanent work. ...
Oakland, September 20, 1888
... The copies of the Massachusetts law have been duly received
and put to the best of use. On my motion our Young Men's League
appointed a Committee to draft a law for presentation to the
Legislature. Judge Maguire, Ferd, [Footnote: Ferdinand Vassault, a
college friend. ] and two others, with myself, are on that
Committee and we are hard at work. I send to-day a copy of the
Examiner containing a ballot reform bill just introduced by the
Federated Trades. It is based on the New York law but is very
faulty. We are working with that bill as a basis, proposing
various and very necessary amendments. We hope to get our bill
adopted in Committee as a substitute for the one introduced, and
believe that the Federated Trades will be perfectly willing to
adopt our measure. ...
Tell me, please, how you select your election officials in your
large cities. Our mode of selection is really the weak point with
us, for no matter how good a law we might procure, its enforcement
would be left to "boss" tools--corruptionists of the worst
class. ...
Oakland, December 2, 1888
... Your letter breathes the sentiments of thousands of
Republicans who voted against Cleveland. They are now "just a
little" sorry that so good a man is beaten. I never quite
understood your political position. Your letter to Ferd giving
your reason was, I must say, not conclusive, for I cannot believe
that you can find a greater field of usefulness or power in the
Republican than in the Democratic party, surely not now that the
new Democracy--a party aggressive, filled with the reform spirit,
and right in the direction it takes, now that such a party is in
the field.
You surely ought to join us on the tariff fight, but then I wish
you the best of fortune whatever your choice. Ferd and several
others with myself are now organizing what will some day be a
great state, if not a great national institution. We call it the
Young Men's Democratic League [Footnote: This plan seems to have
been to enlarge the influence of the League mentioned in a former
letter.]--it is to be made up of young men from twenty-one to
forty-five; its scope--national politics, election of President
and Congressmen, and its immediate purpose to inform the people on
the tariff question. When our Constitution is published you shall
have one. We expect to organize branches all over the State and in
a year or two will be strong in the thousands.
Your election article was of a singular kind but VERY good. I have
loaned it out among the old crowd. I spoke of it to Judge
Sullivan, who is compiling authorities on the "intention of the
voter" as governing, where the spelling is wrong on a ballot.
Sullivan ran for Supreme Justice and ran thousands ahead of his
ticket (the Democratic) but thinks that he was defeated by votes
thrown out in Alameda and Los Angeles counties because of
irregularities in the ballot--in one case his initials were
printed "J. D." instead of "J, F."--in another instance, his name
was printed a little below the title of the office, because of the
narrowness of the ticket. If these ballots were counted for him he
thinks he would have won. ...
Fourteen years later, when the electoral count was made of
Franklin K. Lane's ballots for Governor of the State of
California, between eight and ten thousand ballots were thrown out
on similar ground of "irregularities," and he was counted out,
"the intention of the voter" being again frustrated.
To John H. Wigmore
San Francisco, California, January 29, 1889
My dear Wigmore,-- ... I want to report progress. We now have our
bill complete. ... The bill I send has been adopted by the
Federated Trades and will be substituted by them for their bill
now before the House. ...
On Saturday evening there will be one of those huge "spontaneous"
mass meetings (which require so much preparation) in support and
endorsement of the bill. The most prominent men in both Houses of
the Legislature will speak. ...
San Francisco, February 17, 1889
... I never have been busier in my life than in the last two
weeks. Ballot Reform has taken up a very great portion of my time.
I have just returned from a lobbying trip to Sacramento. The bill
will not pass, though the best men in both Houses favor it. I went
up on the invitation of the chairman of the Assembly Committee to
address the Committee. I spoke for an hour and a half. At the end
of that time only one man in the group openly opposed the scheme,
and he confessed that the bill would do just what I claimed for
it, and made this confession to the Committee. "But," said he, "it
tends to the disintegration of political parties and as they are
essential to our life we must not help on their destruction." ...
The Committee of the Senate decided without any debate on the bill
to report adversely to it. I got them to reconsider their vote,
and we will have a hearing at any rate before the bill is killed.
The Legislature is altogether for boodle. ...
Your book has been of the greatest assistance to me. I virtually
made my speech from it and left the book with the chairman of the
Committee at his special request. ... If it had come out a month
sooner we would have stood fifty per cent better chance of getting
the bill through, because the papers would have come to the front
so much sooner and we would have been thirty days ahead with our
bill. I tell you I felt quite proud in addressing the
distinguished legislature to refer to "my friend Wigmore's book."
...
San Francisco, May 10, 1889
... I am coming nearer to you. On Monday I leave to take up my
residence in New York, as correspondent for the San Francisco
Chronicle. I do not know where I will be located, but mail
addressed to me at the Hoffman House will reach me when I arrive,
which will be in about ten days.
My purpose is to breathe a new atmosphere for a while so that I
may broaden. We must make arrangements soon to meet. I want to
know your New York reform friends. ...
New York, June 21, 1889
... This lapse of a couple of weeks means that I have been
enjoying the delights of a New York summer, in which only slaves
work and many of these find refuge in suicide. ...
Not a single reformer, big or little, have I yet met. Your friend
Bishop [Footnote: Joseph Bucklin Bishop, editor of Theodore
Roosevelt and His Time.] I have not called on, though I have twice
started to do so, and have been switched off. ... I will go within
a couple of days for the spirit must be revived. One day early in
this week I had an intense desire to visit you immediately and was
almost on the verge of letting things go and rush off, but duty
held me. ...
I see that Bellamy has captured Higginson, Savage, and others and
that they are going to work over the Kinsley-Maurice business.
Well, I would to God it would work. Something to make life happier
and steadier for these poor women and men who toil and never get
beyond a piece of meat and a cot! There is justification here for
a social-economic revolution and it will come, too, if things are
not bettered.
If you have a stray thought let me know it and soon.
Your friend,
F. K. L.
Lane's desire for stimulating companionship in New York was
quickly gratified. A spontaneous association of friendships, based
upon a young delight in life and a vast curiosity of the mind,
sprang up among a little group of men of very diverse types. All
were strangers in New York with no immediate home ties. "Women
played no part in our lives," one of them recalls. "We came
together to discuss plays, poetry, politics, anything and
everything--the great actors, comic operas, the songs of the
streets, science, politics." John Crawford Burns, Lane, Brydon
Lamb, Curt Pfeiffer formed the nucleus of what spread out
irregularly into larger groupings.
John Crawford Burns, who was slightly older than the rest, a
purist, and something of a "dour Scot," was a man of conservative
and cultivated tastes and the dean of the group. He was in a
business house that imported linens, and lived in a "glorious room
with two outside windows, and ample seating capacity," so the
friends often met there and learned something of Gothic
architecture and of the abominations of slang, in spite of
themselves. With Burns, and of his firm, was Brydon Lamb, "also of
Scotch descent, but born in America, a delightful combination of
strength, sweetness and light. The simple grace of his manner, his
unhurried speech, his urbanity, captivated us all. We loved him
for what he was, and we considered him our arbiter elegantiarum"
Of Lane at that period the same friend writes, "I remember a fine,
stocky, muscular presence with a striking head. A massive,
commanding man, he was, a persuasive and compelling leader." But
none of the men had any sense of anything but complete friendly,
boyish equality. "Lane was," Pfeiffer says, "interested in human
beings, not problems, excepting as their solution might be made
serviceable to the needs of individuals. He had great tolerance
for the most unusual opinions. I don't think Lane ever had much
interest in the dogmas of science, religion, or philosophy; he
lived by the spirit of them, that cannot be expressed in formulae.
He had the peculiar sensitiveness of a poet for words, for colors
and sounds, and for moral beauty, and blended with it the
statesman's observant awareness of conditions in the world of
affairs."
At the beginning of their friendship, in 1889, Curt Pfeiffer
himself was only nineteen years old, a youth whose family had come
from Holland and Germany. He appeared in the boarding-house on
32nd near Broadway, where Burns lived, fresh from three months at
the Paris Exposition, a vacation that had followed a course of
scientific study at Zurich, Switzerland. The wonders of Paris,
a-glitter with the blaze of undreamed-of electrical beauty, and the
greater wonder of the scientific discoveries and speculations, of
the eighties, as taught at the University of Zurich, gave the
young traveler an instant place among the others. Because of his
love for exact statement and his scientific approach in
discussion, young as he was, he contributed something very real to
the group whose chief preoccupation--aside from the joy of living-
was with art, government, and literature.
They read separately, and when a book seemed intolerably good to
the discoverer, he brought it in and insisted on their reading
parts of it together. Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns,
Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on
primitive law, and Emerson! The relation of the men was almost
impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life.
Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged
but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole,
sharper angles of mental refraction--breaking the ray of truth
they sought into more of its component colors.
Pfeiffer recalls that "one Saturday night, under the influence of
reading from the Vedic Hymns, and a talk on astronomy, we went up
on the roof of our boarding-place, and observed a complete
revolution of the starry heavens, from dusk to dawn. We drifted
into talk, ... and when we finally descended to our beds on Sunday
morning, we found ourselves drenched to the skin from the
drizzling dew. We never forgot that experience, but we never
repeated it either."
His political interests brought Lane into the Reform Club where
Progress and Poverty, Henry George's new book, was the center for
discussion upon the whole problem of the distribution of taxation.
Lane and Henry George established a cordial friendship.
John Crawford Burns says that in 1889 "Lane's chief hero was
Cleveland, and his oracle Godkin, of the EVENING POST"--later, the
NATION. "When I knew him in New York he represented a San
Francisco newspaper, the CHRONICLE, I think, as correspondent. He
was not whole-heartedly in sympathy with his proprietor, nor
indeed with the sensational aspect of journalism, and he always
scoffed at the idea of newspaper writers constituting a modern
priesthood. He laughingly justified his association with the
CHRONICLE by saying he gave tone to it. For this and other
services, he received, I think, two thousand dollars a year, which
even thirty years ago did not admit of luxury and riotous living."
Lane's whole stay in New York was less than two years in length,
but the vital ideas that he shared with disinterested minds made
of this period the seed-bed for future intellectual growth.
In 1891, in spite of the delights of personal friendships, in New
York, Lane grew increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of
newspaper corresponding. He wanted a paper of his own, in which he
could express without reserve the ideals of social and political
betterment with which his mind was teeming. In this mood, the
first acclaim of the rapid growth of the pioneer towns of the far
Northwest reached him. He saw in this his opportunity, and acted
quickly and decisively. He gathered together his own savings,
borrowed from his friend, Sidney Mezes, a few more thousand
dollars and went to Tacoma, Washington, to buy the Tacoma Evening
News.
As soon as the transfer was well made, Lane threw himself
enthusiastically into the politics of the new town, already
suffering from boss rule. By his editorials he succeeded in
stirring up the City Hall, and drove into Alaskan exile the Chief
of Police--who, by the way, was said to have become immensely rich
in Alaska while Lane's paper was running into bankruptcy in
Tacoma. But Lane's misadventure was not wholly due to his civic
virtue. He had "bought in" at just the moment when the instruments
were tuning up for the prelude to the great panic crash of 1893.
Tacoma, and the whole Northwest, had been mainly developed by
casual investments of speculative Eastern capital, and this
capital, sensitive to change, was being withdrawn to meet home
needs. Investors, to protect real interests, were willing to
sacrifice their "little Western flyers," at almost any discount.
As the terminal of the new Northern Pacific Railroad, Tacoma--
lying on the bluffs overlooking the great inland sea of Puget
Sound, guardianed by the vastness of its mountain--was backed by
forests whose wealth could scarcely be exaggerated, even by
promoter's advertisements. She was noisily proclaimed to be the
"Gateway to the Orient," but trade was not yet firmly established
with the Orient, and, indeed, what was Washington's wealth of
uncut timber when the capital to develop it was slowly ebbing
Eastward?
No paper without heavy capitalization, could have sustained a
policy of political reform, when, in the picturesque vernacular of
the time and place, "the bottom had dropped out of the town." A
rival newspaper, the LEDGER, in order to retrench, began a war on
the Printers' Union, to break wages. Lane repudiated the effort
made to "rat" his paper and to force the Union out. He sustained
his men in their fight to keep the Union rate, and lent them his
presses to carry on their propaganda. In after years he said, "As
to my labor record, it is a consistent one of thirty years length,
ever since I stood by the Union in Tacoma, and went broke." Again
he wrote to an acquaintance, "I often think of the old days in
Tacoma. We were a fighting bunch, and I think most of us are
fighting for the same things that we fought for then; a little bit
more decency and less graft in affairs, and a chance for a man to
rise by ability and not by pull alone."
In April, 1893, Lane had married Anne Wintermute--he needed all
he could find of cheer in those depressing days. The whole town
was beaten to its knees by loss and fore-closure. Lane was
struggling to hold together his paper, and save his friend's
investment and his own little stake. The one bright interlude of
that time for him lay in reading, and in his new friendships. He
loved to chant aloud to a group of stranded young fellows gathered
in his rooms, in his gay trumpeting way, brave passages from the
Barrack-Room Ballads, of Kipling, that were lifting the spirits
of the English-speaking world with their freshness and daring.
Stevenson, too, with his polished optimism delighted Lane. "I can
remember," says one of the group, "just how I heard him read aloud
the last words from Stevenson's essay, Aes Triplex, in those
melancholy Tacoma days--'those happy days when we were so
miserable!'":--
"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done
good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign
it. ... Does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full
body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in
sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those
whom the Gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had
this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age
it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been
suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the
hot-fit of life, a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he
passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet
and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done
blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-
starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land."
Still believing in the good work he had meant with his whole
heart, Lane turned from the bankruptcy of his paper, sold at
auction, to write to his friend of new adventures.
To John H. Wigmore
Tacoma, October 25, 1894
MY DEAR WIGMORE,--I have not heard from you for a year. You are in
my debt at least one, and I think two, letters. I have sent you an
occasional paper, just to let you know I was alive and I am
hazarding this letter to the old address. ...
My affairs here have not prospered and I am thinking of going
somewhere else. ... Do you think Japan has anything to offer a
man such as myself? Would there be any chance there for a
newspaper run by an American? Are there any wealthy Americans
there who would be likely to put up a few thousands for such an
enterprise? ... Life is not the "giddy, reeling dream of love and
fame" that it once was, and I have decided on gathering a few
essential dollars. Now Japan may not be the place I am looking
for, ... but unless I am greatly mistaken, a man who is up on
American affairs and alive to business opportunities could do well
in Japan. But then this is all a guess, and I want you to put me
right ...
Yours very truly,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
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
Late in the fall of 1894 Lane returned to San Francisco and for
some months associated himself with Arthur McEwen, on Arthur
McEwen's Letter, a lively political weekly which attacked various
forms of civic corruption in San Francisco, and made an especial
target of the Southern Pacific Railroad, then in practical control
of the State.
He also formed a law partnership with his brother, George W. Lane,
under the firm name of Lane and Lane. In 1895 a curious case,
estimated as involving about sixty million dollars worth of
property, was brought to the young attorneys. The Star, of San
Francisco, described the issue at stake by saying, "One Jose Noe
and four alleged grand-children of Jose Noe appear, who pretend
that they can show a clear title to an undivided one-half interest
in nearly forty-five hundred acres within the city, on which land
reside some five thousand or more owners, mostly men of small
means."
Upon investigation Lane and his brother became convinced that the
suit had been instituted as a blackmailing scheme, in an attempt
to force the owners to pay for quit-claim deeds; they took and
energetically fought the case for the defendants, without asking
for a retainer. Their clients formed themselves into what they
called the San Miguel Defense Association. In a year the title of
the householders to their little homes was established beyond
peradventure.
With the warmth of Latin gratitude this service was remembered. In
1898 when Lane ran for his first political office, as City and
County Attorney, the San Miguel Defense Association revived its
energies, formed a Franklin K. Lane Campaign Club and sent out
vivid circulars about Franklin K. Lane, "who nobly fought for us.
... It is now our turn to stand by him and see that he is elected
by a very large majority." Their proclamation ended with the
appeal, "Vote for Franklin K. Lane, the Foe to Blackmailers."
As Lane's plurality in this first election was eight hundred and
thirty-two votes, there is little doubt that his grateful clients
played a real part in that success.
The Tacoma printers had also sent a testimonial, which was widely
distributed in the campaign, as to Lane's friendship to labor,
saying that they, in gratitude, had made him an honorary member of
their Typographical Union. The campaign was made on the rights of
the plain people, for its chief issue.
In the letter that follows, Lane, in 1913, tells of his formal
entry into politics, in 1898.
To P. T. Spurgcon Herald, McClure Newspaper Syndicate
Washington, December 30, 1913
DEAR MR. SPURGEON,--In reply to your inquiry of December 29,
permit me to say that I got into politics in this way:--
One day, while on my way to lunch, I met Mayor Phelan, of San
Francisco, who asked me if I would become a member of the
committee to draft a charter for the city. I said I would, and was
appointed. At that time I was practising law and had no idea
whatever that I would at any time run for public office, or take
any considerable part in public affairs. I helped to draft the
charter, and as it had to be submitted to the people for
ratification, I stumped the city for it. Later, when the first
election was held under it, my friends on the charter committee
insisted that I should accept the Democratic nomination for City
Attorney. Under the charter, the City Attorney was the legal
adviser of all the city and county officials, and it was his
business to define and construe this organic law, and the friends
of the charter wished some one who was in sympathy with the
instrument to give it initial construction.