The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political Part 2

MY DEAR WIGMORE,--Of course I would have to stand my chances in getting a position. Newspaper men, perhaps more than any other cla.s.s, 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 Va.s.sault, 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 subst.i.tute 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 cla.s.s. ...

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 inst.i.tution. 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 Const.i.tution 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 t.i.tle 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 subst.i.tuted by them for their bill now before the House. ...

On Sat.u.r.day evening there will be one of those huge "spontaneous"

ma.s.s meetings (which require so much preparation) in support and endors.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.s, though the best men in both Houses favor it. I went up on the invitation of the chairman of the a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sistance 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sociation 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 ma.s.sive, 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 a.s.sured, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 G.o.dkin, 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 const.i.tuting a modern priesthood. He laughingly justified his a.s.sociation 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts. 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.ds 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 pa.s.ses 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.