The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political Part 1

The Letters of Franklin K. Lane.

by Franklin K. Lane.

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 pa.s.sion. 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, pa.s.sports, 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 Amba.s.sador 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 pa.s.ses 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 sc.r.a.ppy 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 grat.i.tude. 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

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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sociates.

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- s.p.a.ced 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 ma.s.sive 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 rea.s.sured 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration 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 m.u.f.fled 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 st.u.r.dy 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 a.s.sociation 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."