The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political Part 56

For progressiveness--House and Parker. For Conservative Democracy --Wheeler and Lansing. For writing ability--Cobb and Eliot.

I know no women who think, particularly. ...

The kind of publicity we need is the advocacy by the National Committee, and by Democrats in Congress of first cla.s.s measures, known to be Democratic measures, part of a program.

I'll tell you how to get all the publicity you want when I see you--or White--a new kind, cheap, but requiring brains. ...

F. K L.

To Lathrop Brown

Los Angeles, January, [1921]

DEAR LATHROP,--(1) You are right as to standardization. The Devil devised it as a highway to socialism. It is the Bible of the great Tribe of Flatfoot, not for artists like you and myself. And speaking of programs, please read what Wells says in his first volume of Outline of History, on David, Solomon, Moses. It will delight your anti-semitic soul. ...

Yes, standardization is like all else, good--for a distance. The whole bally outfit of life is a matter of balance, maintained by war among the unintelligent bacilli and other primitives, and by will among men (goat feed for men, eh?) But do you get my point?

Something to it!

(2) George White will be eaten up first thing he knows, unless he moves. Your friend McAdoo is here declining the next nomination daily, speaking much, and, I understand, well. ... Why doesn't G.

W. get Frank Cobb and Hooker, of the Springfield Republican, and Van-Lear Black, and Senator Walsh, and Phelan, and Congressman Walton Moore together, or any other group, and put up his plan and ask them what they think of it tentatively,--just a quiet chat, but start.

He doesn't need to resign, if he can get someone as a quiet organizer "who will give all his time" to take up that job under him, with sub-organizers. Who is this genius who can organize inorganic matter, and give it life? Thought He was dead sometime!

"Wanted--A Miracle Man who can overcome a majority of seven million votes with a hearty handshake and a warm brown eye. Need have no program, no money. Must be a hypnotist who can make the people forget a few things and believe a few things that are not true. Must be able by reciting poetry to make the cunning capitalist see that he is safer in the hands of the Democrats than elsewhere, and at the same time educate the worker by a pa.s.s of the hand to know that it is decent to stay bought. Must have received the Gift of Tongues on the Day of Pentecost, so as to talk Yiddish, in New York; Portuguese and Gaelic, in Ma.s.sachusetts; Russian and German, in Chicago; Scandinavian, in the Northwest; Cotton and Calhoun, in the South; John Brown and wheat, in Kansas; gold and Murphy, on 14th Street; and translate Jesus Christ into Bolshevism, Individualism, Capitalism, Lodgeism, Wilsonism! Must be as honest as old Cleveland and as clear of purpose as Abraham Lincoln."

Put this want ad. in the papers and send me, by freight car, the replies. With my warmest,

F. K. L.

To Adolph C. Miller

Los Angeles, January 26, [1921]

DEAR ADOLPH,--I see that Harding [Footnote: Governor Harding of the Federal Reserve Board--a rumor of resignation.] is to leave you, and this is a note of sympathy. What will you do? Poor chap!

I know the satisfaction you have had out of working with him and now he follows Warburg, Delano, and Strauss. By Jove, that's why we can't make things go as other countries do--because we can't give our people enough to live on. This is at once the meanest and most generous of Republics. Mean collectively, generous individually.

He will wait until after March 4th. "Right oh!" I expect you to have some say as to his successor, especially as to the new Governor. And if you can't work with the new man you can lift your skirts and skip! Freedom of movement, a.s.sured as to all by Adam Smith, is exclusively the prerogative of the fortunate few. Don't be downhearted! You can't be as badly off as you were for several years. Just think how unlucky I am as compared with you, and pat yourself on the back and take one of the old time struts. Good belly! Good brains! Good pocket-book! Good friends near you! Good dog to walk with in the woods--and woods in which you can walk!

Good house, with your own books to look at you friendly-like. Oh boy, rejoice and be glad!

February 17, [1921]

We are most terribly disappointed. Your promised visit was a bright spot,--a sunshiny place--to which we have looked forward as to nothing else since we came here. Well, life is a series of such jars, and child-like I submit, but am not reconciled.

... Are you coming later? How is Mary? We really seem far away from our friends. The land is beautiful, but friends convert a shack into a palace, a desert into a heaven.

F. K. L.

To John G. Gehring

Pasadena, near Paradise, February 18

Before breakfast this morning, indeed before dressing, I sent you a message which was a combined confession, apologia, report, and appeal. I said, "I have done wrong, I apologize, I am slightly better, and I hope and pray you will not become downhearted." I also promised to write and here I am at it. But you would have had this letter just as early anyway, for this morning was to be yours and mine. All other mornings for two weeks and more have belonged to someone else. I have been pretending to work, by going to the office each day. And last night I said good-bye to the Napoleon of our inst.i.tution, who took his private car and rolled away to Mexico, to Galyeston first, thence by private yacht to Tampico, there to see his properties and spend two or three weeks.

... They desired us to go greatly, and ours would have been every possible comfort that one can have while traveling, ... but the tyrant Anne thought that as I was picking up a bit it was wrong to change conditions, and I yielded, hardly against my judgment, but strongly against my desire.

So here I am, the first hour after release, sitting on the porch of a villa, looking across a valley at amethyst mountains, crowned with a sprinkling of blue and white snow. The noises that come to me are not raucous;--the twitter of birds, a rooster crowing, a well-pump throbbing its heart out, the shouts of some children at play, a distant school bell, with no silver in its alloy, however, the swish of a wood-sawing machine in some back-yard. So my ears are not lonesome. Immediately before me is the gray-lavender bole of a tall eucalyptus, not a leaf or branch for fifty feet, and then a drooping cascade of blue-green feathers. Beyond it a few feet a red-blue eucalyptus, st.u.r.dy, branching almost at the ground and in blossom. These stand near the border of a drive which is marked by a cypress hedge, trimmed and proper, and beyond the drive, on the front of the terrace are magnolia and iron-wood and avocado and palm and spruce, rising up out of beds of carnations and geraniums, jasmine and pansies (all violet), and cherokee roses, five-petaled, white with golden centers, and rose colored-- (the wild rose with a university education, a year or two in Italy, and the care of a good maid). While beyond this terrace are orange, and tangerine, and lemon, and grapefruit with their green, yellow, and deep red-golden fruit pendant; and still further on, a fringe of blossoming pear trees tell you that this is not the tropics after all. The breeze is a gentle woman's hand, a soft touch, kindly, tender, emotional, but not disturbing. It is not lotus-eating time. I don't know that that time ever comes here.

Autos whisk through the woods, buildings are going up, the air is dry and has tang; it has challenge in it, but it does not give off the heady champagne of the air that the snow breathes out on your Millbrook hillside.

I remember as I looked from my window at the sunset at Bethel saying to myself, "Can there be any fairer spot than this?" And this morning as I saw the sun rise into the pink and blue of the sky, empurpling the shadowed hills and splashing rose leaves on the snowy mountains, I again said "Is there anything lovelier, anywhere?" Great blessing, these catholic eyes! Should the heart be equally catholic? There is a real problem in philosophy and sociology for you!

And now that you know how happily circ.u.mstanced I am as to environment your doctorial demand is for something as to the behavior of the organs and nerves which we call the physical man.

Well, I can't tell you much. I do not rise and walk half a block without that trigger being pulled, but the explosion is not dynamite, rather poor black powder, I should say. If I walk half a dozen blocks I stop a half a dozen times, and once or twice nibble at a precious pellet of nitro. At night I am wakened as of yore, but the agonizing, crushing pains do not come every night. ... I eat prunes and bran biscuit and coffee for breakfast; a bit of cooked fruit (and that in this land of oranges and alligator pears and ripe raspberries!), chicken and green peas, and bran biscuit and tea for lunch; a couple of green vegetables and bran biscuit and a small black, for dinner. And all this I write with a supreme sense of virtue, which Simon Stylites or St. Benedict could not more than parallel. As to smoking--a pipe, generous in size but of the mildest possible tobacco, after breakfast. A mild, large cigar after lunch, and pause here and worship--no cigar after dinner.

(But this latter is a Lenten innovation. I would not have you think I am preparing for immediate ascension.)

As to treatment, an osteopath and a Christian Scientist are my present complement. Each morning the former, and each evening the latter. The former to gratify myself, the latter to gratify a dear friend who "believed and was saved." The osteo is rational, the C.

S., with limitations and reservations. ...

The C. S. is a woman, the sister of an artist I used to know. If she did not ask or expect that I believe certain things, we would get on better. I can believe in G.o.d as the Principle of Life, that seems scientific. I am willing to call Him Spirit, that is Christian. That He is Supreme in the Universe, I admit. That sin and sickness may with further light be overmastered I do not deny; physical death, of course, seems to me a thing not worth bothering about. But that G.o.d is all good, I cannot a.s.severate in the living presence of a few Devils whom I know, unless I deny that He is omnipresent and omnipotent, or unless I say that Bad is Good. G.o.d cannot be good and all powerful without being also responsible for Bad, and therefore be both Good and Bad. This I can believe, and it brings me to Emerson's transcendentalism, which is set forth in the Sphinx--"Deep Love lieth under these pictures of Time, which fade in the light of their meaning sublime." In a word we are growing into the Good. The Bad is not the ultimate, but is none the less real. This is better than Manicheism, the Miltonian contest between the Good Spirit and the Bad, which Wells also in his Invisible King presents; a simple theory, understandable but not to my mind subject to careful scrutiny. There is but one G.o.d, one Force, one Principle, one Spirit, and it is working its way through, expressing itself as best it can. And Evil is a partial view, one phase of undevelopment, the muck through which, by G.o.d's own law, we must come; and indeed He could not have sent us any other way. This means that He is bound, too. Is this supposable?

Omnipresent? Yes! All pervading! In all! But Omnipotent? No, not in the sense that He could change the Order of Things, for He is the Order of Things Himself. Is there even in Him complete Freedom of Will, freedom to make a world other than this? One wishes, in a sense, to say so, but the horror of it! for then He is responsible for the cruelty of the ant-heap, the feeding of the carnivorous upon the vegetable eaters, the preying and persecution of the malevolent upon the kindly--and He could have made it all otherwise! With a Free Will He could have brought growth without pain, being omnipotent. Here we see G.o.d as a monster,--responsible for sweat shops and the Marne, in the sense that His will could have averted these things. So I say G.o.d is not Good, save in the sense that He is that sunrise this morning. But night cometh, when thieves break through and steal. More sunlight--that is the meaning of the phrase "G.o.d is Good"--a belief in a tendency, in the temporality of darkness, of night, a sureness that the day will come and "There will be no night there."

This is a long disquisition, but I just had to get it out of my system; yet I can't, it bothers, and confuses, and perplexes, and hinders, I believe. Better brush it away for practical purposes and have the Will to Believe, for thence cometh strength.

Pragmatically C. S. works out with certain people; and to them it is Truth. I wish it were so with my doubting mind, that I could believe. I am willing to be cured tho' I do not understand and cannot believe, and this they say they can do. But it has not been done with me.

Lunch broke into this discourse, and then a walk. This time on the other side of the house, the other side of the hill. There I found a new world. Palms, huge ones, thirty feet across, with their dead branches strewing the ground, making a coa.r.s.e woven carpet; and pines, large ones, yet not so gigantic as yours on the road beyond the creek; and acacia in full golden bloom, glorious, yet modest tree, a very rare, non-self-a.s.sertive tree, a truly Christian tree, beautiful but not prideful. Bamboo in great clumps, erect, yielding but not to be broken--wise, tenacious orientals! And I walked on the off-cast seed of the pepper, and beside cacti higher than my head with spears of crimson, and across a sweep of lawn over which oranges had been dropped, by the generosity of an up- hill row of trees that were saying, "We must make room for the next generation." The flowers (oxalis) and leaves I enclose made a mat, close clinging to the earth, a mat of white, red, and lavender resting on these clover-like leaves that rested in turn directly on the ground. And all about, a hundred plants I did not know, into which my footsteps sent quail and rabbit, that did not fear me really but could not quite say that Man is Love.

I have written you a long line, may it serve for a time as a word also to your dear Lady, whose letter and rare bit of verse I have also received. I do hope that you soon master whatever ails you.

Don't lose faith in yourself, above all things. Believe that you are all that your friends believe you to be--a Civilized Medicine Man. Be as deluded as we are. Affectionately,

LANE

To John W. Hallowell

Los Angeles, February 21, 1921 MY DEAR JACK,--It is Sunday morning, very early; the sun is trying to get out of bed, a mocking bird is hailing its effort with great gurgling. I am sitting near an open window looking down into orange trees, which are a very dark shadow, and I am just as happy in my heart as I can be with a b.u.m heart, and no home, and a scattered family. But --! Bad word that "but."

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, all America has been, too indifferent to roots--home roots, school roots, work roots. ... We should love stability and tradition as well as love adventure and advancement.

Your new job interests me, but I wonder if you will go with the Secretary of Commerce [Hoover], ... I guess he did right. But unless he gets to be the leading adviser he'll have to get out.

For I'm afraid we are to see too much politics--Republican Burlesonism in the saddle. Government by unanimous consent is not practicable, and it looked as if this were Harding's motto until Hoover's appointment. Hoover will be the man to whom the country will look for some guidance along progressive lines, and the country will expect too much, more than any man can deliver.