from under a sun-bonnet, enshrined in all the glories of the
mountain redwoods, and I long to be with you if only to get some
of the freshness and joy of the California mountains into my
rather desolate soul.
How is the old clam? Do his lips come together in that precise
Prussian way, and does he order the universe about? Or does a new
spirit come over him when he gets with nature? Is she a soothing
mistress who smooths his stiff hair with her soft hand, and pats
his cheek and nestles him in her arms, and with her cool breath
makes him forget a federal, or any other kind, of reserve?
Why has nature been so unkind to me as to make me a lover but
always from afar, never to come near her, never to compel me to a
sweet surrender, never to give me peace and contentment, never to
so surround me as to keep out the world of fools and follies and
pharisees?
You know, I would like to write some servant girl novels. I
believe I could do it. My love-making would either be rather tame
and stiff or too intensely early Victorian. But I should like to
swing off into an ecstasy of large turgid words and let my mind
hear the mushy housemaid cry, "Isn't that just too sweet!" ...
I enclose a copy of my speech made at Brown University. Perhaps it
will interest that old farmer potato bug. He does not deserve to
have it said, but I miss him very much. Please obey him an you
love me. Cut out all social activities, giving yourself up to the
acquisition of a few more of the right kind of corpuscles in your
too-blue blood. As always, yours,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
To Mrs. Franklin K. Lane
Essex-on-Champlain
Washington, July 4, 1916
... There is no news that I can give you. The weather is very
warm. Politics is growing warmer. I think Heney will run for
Senator in California, probably against Hiram Johnson. Will
Crocker is also said to be a candidate for the Republican
nomination. I could get the nomination by saying that I would
accept. Phelan told me yesterday that he would see that all the
necessary money was raised,--that I could win in a walk.
Dockweiler says the same thing. The latter is here and we have
seen much of each other. What do you say if I run for Senator? I
really feel very much tempted to do it at times because things
have been made so uncomfortable by some of my fool colleagues who
have butted in on my affairs; and then I feel I would like the
excitement of the stump and to make the personal appeal once more.
You could go round with me over the State in an automobile. While
I would not insist upon your making speeches for me, I know that
your presence would add greatly to my success.
There is no telling what way this campaign may go. It may be a
landslide for Wilson, it may be a landslide the other way. We have
the hazards because we have the decision of questions. There is
bound to be a lot of objection to whatever course we take with
regard to Mexico. I fear from what Benjamin Ide Wheeler told me
the other day that Germany any day may decide to put her
submarines into active service again on the old lines, especially
if things on land go as they have been going lately against the
Teutons.
... I shall not decide in favor of accepting the nomination until
I hear from you. In the meantime don't lose any sleep over it. And
so my Nancy has a beau? Well, the little rascal must be given some
good advice now. So I shall turn my attention to her ...
F.K.L.
Washington, July 24, 1916
... To-day I have spent most quietly,--had Bill Wheeler up for
breakfast and then went to the Cosmos Club for lunch with
Dockweiler. He is very anxious to get a Catholic on the Mexican
Commission and so am I. I want Chief Justice White, but I fear the
President won't ask him ...
Dear old Dockweiler is an awfully good man ... From youth he has
gauged every act by his conception of the will of God, and in
doubt has asked God's representative, the priest. What a
comforting thing to have a church like that; it makes for
happiness, if it does not make for progress. Why is it that
progress must come from discontent? The latter is the divine spark
in man, no doubt,
"O to be satisfied, satisfied,
Only to lie at Thy feet."
is a hymn we used to sing in church. We yearn to be satisfied and
yet we know because we are not satisfied we grow . ...
"The mystical hanker after something higher," is religion, and yet
it should not be all of religion; for man's own sake there should
be some cross to which one can cling, some Christ who can hear and
give peace to the waves. I wish I could be a Catholic, and yet I
can not feel that once you have a free spirit that it is right to
go back into the monastery, and shut yourself up away from doubts,
making your soul strong only through prayer. There are two
principles in the world fighting all the time, and the one makes
the other possible. There is no "perfect," there is a "better"
only. And in this fight one does not become better by prayer--
prayer is only the ammunition wagon, the supply train, where one
can get masks for poison gas and cartridges for the guns.
Pfeiffer said a good thing the other day, quite like him to say
it, too. We were talking of churches and he said he never went to
one because he did not believe in abasing or prostrating himself
before God, he saw no sense in it; God didn't respect one for it,
and moreover he was part of God himself and he couldn't prostrate
himself before himself. I asked him if he didn't recognize
humility as a virtue, and he said, "No, the higher you hold your
head the more God-like you are."
Humility, to me, seems to be the basis of sympathy. We stoop to
conquer in that we are not self-assertive and self-assured, for if
we "know" that we are right we can not know how others think or
feel. We can not grow.
You know there are two great classes of people, those who are
challenged by what they see, and those who are not. Now the only
kind who grow are the former. But what is it to grow? If we
"evermore come out by that same door wherein we went" surely there
is no object in being curious. Can there be growth when we are in
an endless circle? ...
Now after all my struggle, I fall back not on reason but on
instinct, on a primal desire, and perhaps this is my rudimentary
soul, the mystical hanker after something higher. That is a real
thing. The purpose of nature seems to be to put it into me and
make it very important to me. That being so I can not overlook it,
and must obey it. The thing that pleases me as I look back upon
it, is the thing I must do; that sets the standard for me; that is
morals and religion. If there is any chap who the day after sings
with joy over being a devil--that man I never heard of--but if he
takes delight in what he did that was fiendish, then he must
follow and should follow that bent until he SEES that it is
fiendish. He has to have more light. But I really don't believe
there is any such fellow, who clearly sees what he did and
rejoices in it. All of us sing, "I want to be an angel." THERE is
the whole of revelation, and all things that tend to make us
gratify that desire are good. I guess that is pragmatism, in words
of one syllable.
You see that all religion comes from a desire to know something
definite. We prayed logically, in the old time, to the devil and
tried to propitiate him, so that harm would not come to us. That
is stage number one in our climb. Then we find the good spirit and
pray to him to whip the devil, which is stage number two. Then we
ask the good spirit to give us strength to whip the devil
ourselves. That is stage number three. Buddha and Christ come in
the number three stage, and that is where we are. We may find, as
stage number four, that the good spirit is only a muscle in our
brain or a fluid in our nerves, which we strengthen, and become
masters of ourselves--greater, stronger, more clear-sighted--
without any OUTSIDE Great Spirit. That we are all things in
ourselves, and that we are, in making ourselves, making the God. I
fancy that is Pfeiffer's idea. It is Mezes', I believe. Then comes
in the mystery of transmitting that highly developed spirit. A
woman of such a super-soul may marry a man of most carnal nature
whose children are held down to earth and gross things, and her
fine spirit is lost, unless it lives elsewhere. So we come back to
the question, how is the good preserved? "Never any bright thing
dies," may be true, but if so it means an immortality of the
spirit. This is all confusion and despair. We do not see where we
are going. But we must climb, we must grow, we must do better, for
the same reason that our bodies must feed. The rest we leave with
all the other mysteries ...
July 28, 1916
I am going to dinner ... and before I go alone into a lonesome
club, I must send a word to you. Not that I have any particular
word to say, for my mind is heavy, nor that you will find in what
I may say anything that will illumine the way, but why should we
not talk? What! may a friend not call upon a friend in time of
vacancy to listen to his idle babble? O these pestiferous dealers
in facts and these prosy philosophers, the world must have
surcease from them and wander in the great spaces. To idle
together in the sweet fields of the mind--this is companionship,
when thoughts come not by bidding, and argument is taboo; to have
the mind as open as that of a child for all impressions, and speak
as the skylark sings, this is the mood that proves companionship.
I shall be lonely to-night, going into a modern monastery and
driving home alone. The world is all people to me. I lean upon
them. They induce thought and fancy. They give color to my life.
They keep me from looking inward, where, alas! I never find that
which satisfies me. For of all men I am most critical of myself.
Others when they go to bed or sit by themselves may chuckle over
things well done; or find satisfaction in the inner life, as
George does; but not so with me. Thrown on myself I am a stranded
bark upon a foreign shore. And this I know is not as it should be.
Each one should learn to stand alone and find in contemplation and
in fancy the rich material with which to fashion some new fabric,
or build more solidly the substance of his soul.
I like to have you talk, as in your latest letter, of the making
of yourself. It seems so much more possible than that I could do
the same. But I am a miserable groping creature, cast on a sea of
doubt, rejecting one spar to grasp another, and crying all the
time against the storm, for help. I do not know another man who
has tortured himself so insistently with the problems that are
unsolvable. You are firmer in your grasp, and when you get
something you cling to it and push your way like a practical
person toward the shore, that shore of solid earth which is NOT,
but by the pushing you realize the illusion, or the reality, of
progress.
Here I am talking loosely of the greatest things, and perhaps
pedantically; well, we agreed to talk, didn't we, of anything and
everything? You have the birds, the lake, the mountains beyond,
the children next door, and the Fairy all our own, and I have my
desk to look at and outside brick blocks and the sky. If I ever do
hypnotize myself into any kind of faith, or find contentment in
any one thing, it will be the sky. The reason I like the water is
because it is so much like the sky. There is an amplitude in it
that gives me chance for infinite wanderings. The clouds and the
stars are somehow the most companionable of all things that do not
walk and talk.
Well, we have walked a bit together and have come to the edge of
the field where we look off and see the unending stretch of
prairie and the great dome. ...
FRANK
To William R. Wheeler
Washington, August 21, 1916
MY DEAR BILL,--Owing to your departure I have been laid up in bed,
ill for a week. You left on Thursday and on Friday night I went to
bed ... The doctors don't know what I had, excepting that I had
things with "itis" at the end of them. I have had allopaths,
Christian Scientists, osteopaths, and Dockweilers. The latter has
been my nurse at night, his chief service being to keep me
interested in the variety of his snoring. I really have had one
damn hell of a time. The whole back and top of my head blew out,
and I expected an eruption of lava to flow down my back. The only
explanation of it is a combination of air-drafts and a little too
much work and worry. I am now somewhat weak, but otherwise in
pretty good condition ...
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.
My regards to the Lady Alice Isabel. As always affectionately
yours,
FRANKLIN K. LAKE
To James Harlan
[August, 1916]
MY DEAR JIM,--I am writing you from my bed where I have been laid
up for a few days with a hard dose of tonsillitis. Don't know what
happened but the wicked bug got me and I have suffered more than
was good for my slender soul.
I am so glad to hear of your Mother's improvement. Bless her noble
heart! I hope she lives a long time to give you the inspiration of
that beautiful smile.
The Mexican business does not hasten as I had hoped. Brandeis'
withdrawal was a great surprise to us and I can't quite understand
it. Meantime the railroad situation engrosses our attention fully,
and Mexico can wait ...
Hughes' speeches have been a surprise and disappointment to me ...
One might fancy a candidate for Congress doing no better but not a
man of such record and position. I think your dear old party
relies upon holding the regular party men out of loyalty and
protection, and buying enough Democrats and crooks to get the
majority. But I don't believe it can be done. The Republican
organization is perfect, but the people are not as gullible as
once they were.
Tell me some more about the Latin-American. How much form should I
put on? Can you warm up to them? How do you get the truth out of
them? And how do you get them to stay by their word? What are they
suspicious of, silence or volubility? Do they expect you to ask
for more than you expect to get? Do they appreciate candor and
fair dealing, or must you be crafty and indirect? If they expect
the latter I am not the man for the job, but I can be patient and
listen. My love to the Lady Maud.
FRANK
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson
The White House
Washington, August 28, 1916
MY DEAR MR. PRESIDENT,--I have had talks this morning with three
men, all of them Democrats, all of them strongly for you under any
circumstances. None of them are related to railroads or to labor
unions. Two of them have recently been out of this city and
believe that they have a knowledge of the feeling of the country.
All express the same view and I want to tell it to you in case you
write a message to Congress.
They say that the people do not grasp the meaning of your
statement that society has made its judgment in favor of an eight-
hour day. This, the people think, is a matter that can be
arbitrated. They ask why can't it be arbitrated? They say that the
country feels that you have lined yourself up with the labor
unions irrevocably for an eight-hour day, as against the railroads
who wish to arbitrate the necessity for putting in an eight-hour
day immediately, and irrespective of the additional cost to the
railroads. They say that the men are attempting to bludgeon the
railroads into granting their demand which has not been shown to
the people to be reasonable. This demand is that the men should
have ten hours pay for eight hours work or less. They say that if
this question cannot be arbitrated, the railroads must yield on
every question and that freight rates and passenger rates instead
of going down, as they have for the past twenty years, must
inevitably increasingly go up. They say that the people do not
realize that you have been willing to entertain any proposition
made by the railroads, but that you have stood steadfastly for
something which the men have demanded.
Now, all of this indicates a lack of knowledge of what your
position has been. I am giving you the gist of these conversations
because they represent a point of view so that if you desire you
may meet such criticism.
You must remember, Mr. President, that the American people have
not had for fifty years a President who was not at this period in
a campaign bending all of his power to purely personal and
political ends. Your ideality and unselfishness are so rare that
things need to be made particularly clear to them. Faithfully
yours,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
In the beginning of September Lane was appointed Chairman of the
American-Mexican Joint Commission, the other Americans being Judge
George Gray, of Delaware, and John R. Mott, secretary of the Young
Men's Christian Association. The Mexican members were Luis
Cabrera, Minister of Finance, Alberto Pani, and Ignatio Bonillas,
afterward Ambassador to Washington.
It was the hope of the Administration that this Commission would
lay the foundation for a better understanding between America and
Mexico. The Commission started its work in New London, but later
as the hearings dragged on, they went to Atlantic City.
Just before this Commission was named, Lane wrote to his brother,
"I have been turned all topsy turvy by the Mexican situation. I
have suggested to the President the establishment of a commission
to deal with this matter upon a fundamental basis, but Carranza is
obsessed with the idea that he is a real god and not a tin god,
that he holds thunderbolts in his hands instead of confetti, and
he won't let us help him."
To Alexander Vogelsang
Acting Secretary of the Interior American-Mexican Joint Commission
September 29, 1916
MY DEAR ALECK,--Don't worry about yourself. Don't worry about the
office. You will be all right, and so will the office. I am not
worrying about you because I haven't got time to. I'll take your
job if you will take mine. The interpreting of a city charter is
nothing to the interpreting of the Mexican mind. Dealing with
Congress is not so difficult as dealing with Mexican statesmen. I
have had some jobs in my life, but none in which I was put to it
as I am in this. Now I have not only a question as to what to do
in the making of a nation, the development of its opportunity, the
education of its people, the establishment of its finances, and
the opening of its industries in the establishment of its
relations with other countries, but also the problem as to where
the men can be found that can carry out the program, once it is
made. If I were only Dictator I could handle the thing, I think,
all right. The hardest part of all is to convince a proud and
obstinate people that they really need any help.
... Remember me to the noble bunch of fellows who add loyalty to
pluck, pluck to capacity. Cordially yours,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
To Frederic J. Lane
American-Mexican Joint Commission
September 29, 1916
MY DEAR FRITZ,--I sent you a wire the other night just to let you
know that I was thinking of you. I am now steaming down Long
Island Sound in the midst of a rainstorm and with fog all around
us, in the Government's boat Sylph. We are on our way to Atlantic
City where the conference will continue, the hotel at New London
having been closed. ...
It looks to me at long range as if Johnson would surely carry
California. Whether Wilson will, or not, is a question. I hope to
God he may. Whether I shall get an opportunity to get out and
stump for him depends entirely upon this Commission, which is
holding me down hard. We are working from ten in the morning till
twelve at night, and not making as rapid progress as we should
because of the Latin-American temperament. They want to start a
government afresh down there; that is, go upon the theory that
there never was any government and that they now know how a
government should be formed and the kind of laws there should be,
disregarding all that is past, and basing their plans upon ideals
which sometimes are very impracticable. They distrust us. They
will not believe that we do not want to take some of their
territory.
I despair often, but I take new courage when I think of you, of
the struggle you are making and the brave way in which you are
making it. What a superbly glorious thing it would be if you could
master the hellish fiend that has attacked you! ...
My best love to you, dear Fritz, affectionately yours, F. K. L.
To Frank I. Cobb New York World
American-Mexican Joint Commission Atlantic City, November 11, 1916
MY DEAR COBB,--My very warm, earnest, and enthusiastic
congratulations to you. You made the best editorial campaign that
I have ever known to be made. I would give more for the editorial
support of the New York World than for that of any two papers that
I know of. The result in California turned, really as the result
in the entire West did, upon the real progressivism of the
progressives. It was not pique because Johnson was not recognized.
No man, not Johnson nor Roosevelt, carries the progressives in his
pocket. The progressives in the East were Perkins progressives who
could be delivered. THE WEST THINKS FOR ITSELF. Johnson could not
deliver California. Johnson made very strong speeches for Hughes.
The West is really progressive. ...
Speaking of the election, there are two things I want you to bear
distinctly in mind, my dear Mr. Cobb. One is that the states which
the Interior Department deals with are the states which elected
Mr. Wilson. ... And the second is that we kept the Mexican
situation from blowing up in a most critical part of the campaign,
which is also due to the Secretary of the Interior, damn you! In
fact, next to you, I think the Secretary of the Interior is the
most important part of this whole show! Cordially yours,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
To R. M. Fitzgerald American-Mexican Commission
Atlantic City, November 12, 1916
DEAR BOB,--I am very glad to get your telegram. I know that it
took work, judgment, and finesse to bring about the result that
was obtained in California. What a splendid thing it is to have
our state the pivotal state! The eastern papers are attempting to
make it appear that the state turned toward Wilson because of the
slight put upon Johnson by Hughes. These people in the East are
not large enough to understand that the people think for
themselves out West, and are not governed by little personalities,
that we don't play "Follow the leader," as they do here. The real
fact is that Roosevelt undertook to deliver the progressives and
could not do it in the West. Now we must hold all these forward-
looking people in line with us and make the Democratic party
realize the dream that you and I had of it when we were boys,
thirty years ago, and took part in our first campaign. There is
room for only two parties in the United States, the liberal and
the conservative, and ours must be the liberal party. Cordially
yours,
Franklin K. Lane
To James K. Moffitt
Atlantic City, November 12, 1916
My dear Jim,--It was fine of you to send me that telegram, and I
am not too modest to "allow" as Artemus Ward used to say, as how
the Interior Department is rather stuck up over the result. The
Department certainly had not been very popular in the West. ...
All of us will be taken a bit more seriously now, I guess. I wired
Cushing and the others who led in the fight and I am going to
write a note to Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who from the first, be it
said to his credit, claimed California for Wilson. Wheeler is
certainly a thoroughbred. I wish I could get your way soon and see
you all, and rejoice with you.
I have just received a telegram from Bryan, reading:--
"Shake. Many thanks. It was great. The West, a stone which the
builders rejected, has become the head of the corner." Cordially
yours,
Franklin K. Lane
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler
Atlantic City, November 14,1916