The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political Part 11

Will you support me for Supreme Court Justice? I see that I am mentioned. Between us, I am entirely ineligible, having a sense of humor. As always yours,

LANE

TO SIDNEY E. MEZES PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

Washington, February 15,1912

MY DEAR SID,--Your weather has been no worse than ours, I want you to understand; in fact, not so bad. I think the glacial period is returning and the ice cap is moving down from the North Pole.

The Supreme Bench I could not get because I am a Democrat, and the President could not afford to appoint another Democrat on the Bench. I do not know when McKenna goes out, and I am not going to be disturbed about it anyway. If I had not been unlucky enough to be born in Canada I could be nominated for President this year.

Things are in a devil of a condition. We could have elected Wilson, hands down, if it had not been for Hearst's malevolent influence. He is at the bottom of all this deviltry. His aim is to kill Wilson off and nominate Clark, and Clark is in the lead now, I think. G.o.d knows whether he can beat Taft or not. It looks to me as if Taft will be nominated. I have a feeling somehow that the Roosevelt boom won't materialize.

My love to the Missis and to Mr. House. As always yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

TO JOHN H. WIGMORE

Washington, February 19, 1912

MY DEAR JOHN,--For two weeks there has been standing on my desk a most elegantly bound set of your CASES ON TORTS sent to me by Little, Brown & Co. at your request. You do not need to be told, I know, how much I appreciate a thing that comes from you and how poverty stricken I am when it comes to making adequate return. I can prove that I have been working hard, but my work does not crystallize into anything which is worth sending to a friend.

The fact is that I have never worked as hard in my life as I have lately. I get to my office about nine, and without going out of my room (for I take my lunch at my desk), stay until six, and work at home every night until half past eleven, and then take a volume of essays or poems to bed with me for half or three-quarters of an hour, and so to sleep.

If the man in the White House had as much sense as I have, he would name you for the Supreme Bench without asking, and "draft"

you, as Roosevelt says. By the way, I gave the suggestion of "draft" in a talk I had with him a month or so ago.

The political situation is interesting, but altogether un-lovely.

... It looks as if Clark might be the nominee on the Democratic side. Taft is gaining in strength, and somehow I cannot feel that Roosevelt will ever be in it, although you know how I like him.

The situation seems a bit artificial.

Give my love to Mrs. John. As always yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

TO GEORGE W. LANE

Washington, February 23, 1912

MY DEAR GEORGE,-- ... Yesterday I delivered an address before the University of Virginia on A Western View of Tradition--which when it is printed I will send out to you--and in the afternoon was taken up to Jefferson's home, Monticello. It is on a mountain, the top of which he sc.r.a.ped off. It overlooks the whole surrounding country, most of which at that time he owned. He planned the whole house himself, even to the remotest details, the cornices and the carvings on the mantels, the kind of lumber of which the floors were to be made, the character of the timbers used, the carving of the capitals on the columns, the folding ladder that was used to wind up the clock over the doorway, the registers on the porch that recorded the direction in which the wind was coming, as moved by the weather-vane on the roof, the little elevator beside the fireplace ... and a thousand other details.

... I would like nothing better if I had any kind of skill in using my hands than to take a year off and build a house. It is a real religion to create something, and you do not need a great deal of money to make a very beautiful little place. You must have one large room, and the house must be on some elevation, and you must get water, water, and water. ... It is water that makes land valuable in California or anywhere else. Affectionately yours,

F. K. L.

TO CARL SNYDER

Washington, March 6, 1912

MY DEAR CARL,--I have this minute for the first time seen the copy of COLLIER'S, for February 24, 1912, and therefore for the first time my eyes lighted upon your most delicious roast of the Commerce Court. ...

I do not know what the outcome of this movement will be. The only settled policy of government is inertia. The House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, I believe, proposes to abolish the appropriation for the Court, which looks like a cowardly way to get at the thing, but perhaps it is most effective. However, I really doubt if they will have the nerve to do this. It is a mighty critical year, I think, in our history. It looks to me as if the reactionaries were going to get possession of both parties, and that a third party will be needed and n.o.body will have the nerve to start it. Roosevelt has got everything west of the Mississippi excepting Utah and Wyoming, in my judgment.

That he will be able to get the nomination I am not so sure; but he does not care a tinker's d.a.m.n whether he gets it himself or not. That is the worst of it because the people won't give anything to a man that he does not want. ... Well, we are living in mighty interesting times anyway.

As always yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

On February 22, 1912, Lane delivered the annual address at the University of Virginia. He spoke on American Tradition, saying that as Americans are physically, industrially, and socially the "heirs of all the ages" our supreme tradition is a "hatred of injustice." That one of the great experiments that a Democracy should make is to find a more equitable distribution of wealth "without destroying individual initiative or blasting individual capacity and imagination." This address brought a letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Justice of the Supreme Court.

TO FRANKLIN K. LANE

March 17, 1912

MY DEAR SIR,--Let me thank you at once for your Virginia address, which I have just received and just read--read with the greatest pleasure. I admire its eloquence, its imagination, its style. I sympathize with its att.i.tude and with most of its implications. I gain heart from its tone of hope. I am old--by the calendar at least--and at times am more melancholy, so that it does me good to hear the note of courage. One implication may carry conclusions to which I think I ought to note my disagreement,--the reference to unequal distribution. I think the prevailing fallacy is to confound ownership with consumption of products. Ownership is a gate, not a stopping place. You tell me little when you tell me that Rockefeller or the United States is the owner. What I want to know is who consumes the annual product, and for many years I have been saying and believing that to think straight one should look at the stream of annual products and ask what change one would make in that under any REGIME. The luxuries of the few are a drop in the bucket--the crowd now has all there is. The difference between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. The real problem, under socialism as well as under individualism, is to ascertain, under the external economic and inevitable conditions, the equilibrium of social desires. The real struggle is between the different groups of producers of the several objects of social desire. The bogey capital is simply the force of all the other groups against the one that is selling its product, trying to get that product for the least it can. Capital is society purchasing and consuming-- Labor is society producing. The laborers unfortunately are often encouraged to think capital something up in the sky which they are waiting for a Franklin to bring down into their jars. I think that is a humbug and lament that I so rarely hear what seem to me the commonplaces that I have uttered, expressed. Your fine address has set me on my hobby and you have fallen a victim to the charm of your own words. Very truly, yours,

O. W. HOLMES

P. S. Of course I am speaking only of economics not of political or sentimental considerations--both very real, but as to which all that one can say is, if you are sure that you want to go to the show and have money enough to buy a ticket, go ahead, but don't delude yourself with the notion that you are doing an economic act. I make the only return I can in the form of the single speech I have made for the last nine years.

TO OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT

Washington, March 20, 1912

MY DEAR MR. JUSTICE,--I sincerely thank you for the warmth and generosity of your comment on my Virginia speech. Your economic philosophy is fundamentally, I think, the same as mine--that the wealth produced is a social product. And men may honestly differ as to how best that stream of foods and other satisfactions may be increased in volume, or more widely distributed. May I carry your figure of the stream further by suggesting that the riparian owner in England has the superior right, but in an arid country the common law rule is abandoned because under new conditions it does not make for the greatest public good? The land adjoining feels the need of the water, and society takes from one to give to the other.

The last century was devoted to steaming up in production. This century, it appears to me, will devote itself more definitely to distribution. It is nonsense, of course, to say that because the rich grow richer the poor grow poorer; but the poor are not the same poor, they, too, have found new desires. Civilization has given them new wants. Those desires will not be satisfied with largesse, and with the machinery of government in their hands the people are bound to experiment along economic lines. They will certainly find that they get most when they preserve the captain of industry, but may it not be that his imagination and forethought may be commanded by society at a lower share of the gross than he has heretofore received, or in exchange for something of a different, perhaps of a sentimental nature? ...

Please pardon this typewritten note, but my own hand, unlike your copper-plate, is absolutely illegible. I have been raised in a typewriter age.

Again thanking you for your letter, believe me, with the highest regard, faithfully yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

TO JOHN H. WIGMORE