The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
To C. S. Jackson.
To John Crawford Burns.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To Mrs. Louise Herrick Wall.
To Mrs. M. A. Andersen.
To George W. Lane.
To Daniel J. O'Neill.
To Hamlin Garland.
To Hugo K. Asher.
To Admiral Gary Grayson.
To Herbert C. Pell, Jr.
To Hon. Woodrow Wilson.
To Frank W. Mondell.
To Robert W. De Forest.
XII. POLITICAL COUNSEL--LINCOLN'S EYES. 1920
Suggestions to Democratic Nominee for President--On Election of
Senators--Lost Leaders--Lincoln's Eyes--William James's Letters
LETTERS:
To William Phelps Eno.
To Roland Cotton Smith.
To James M. Cox.
To Timothy Spellacy.
To Edward L. Doheny.
To Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To Mrs. George Ehle.
To Isadore B. Dockweiler.
To Hall McAllister.
To Mrs. George Ehle.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To John W. Hallowell.
To John W. Hallowell.
To Robert Lansing.
To Carl Snyder.
To William R. Wheeler.
To George Otis Smith.
To George W. Wickersham.
Lincoln's Eyes.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Timothy Spellacy.
To Frank I. Cobb.
To John G. Gehring.
To John W. Hallowell.
To John G. Gehring.
XIII. LETTERS TO ELIZABETH. 1919-1920
LETTERS:
To Mrs. Ralph Ellis.
XIV. FRIENDS AND THE GREAT HOPE. 1921
Need for Democratic Program--Religious Faith--Men who have Influenced
Thought--A Sounder Industrial Life --A Super-University for Ideas
--"I Accept"--Fragment
LETTERS:
To Mrs. Philip C. Kauffmann.
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Mrs. George Ehle.
To Mrs. William Phillips.
To James H. Barry.
To Michael A. Spellacy.
To William R. Wheeler.
To V. C. Scott O'Connor.
Letter sent to several friends.
To John G. Gehring.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Lathrop Brown.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To John G. Gehring.
To John W. Hallowell.
To Curt G. Pfeiffer.
To John G. Gehring.
To D. M. Reynolds.
To Mrs. Cordenio Severance.
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To James S. Harlan.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To Lathrop Brown.
To John G. Gehring.
To John H. Wigmore.
To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To John W. Hallowell.
To John G. Gehring.
To Hall McAllister.
To Mrs. Frederic Peterson.
To Roland Cotton Smith.
To John G. Gehring.
To Adolph C. Miller.
To Robert Lansing.
To James D. Phelan.
To Mr. and Mrs. Louis Hertle.
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To John Finley.
To James H. Barry.
To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To friends who had telegraphed and written for news.--"I accept."
To Alexander Vogelsang.
To John W. Hallowell.
To Robert Lansing.
Fragment.
ILLUSTRATIONS
FRANKLIN K. LANE
FRANKLIN K. LANE With his younger brothers, George and Frederic.
FRANKLIN K. LANE At eighteen.
FRANKLIN K. LANE As City and County Attorney.
FRANKLIN K. LANE, MRS. LANE, MRS. MILLER, AND ADOLPH C. MILLER
FRANKLIN K. LANE WITH Ethan Allen, Superintendent of Rainier
National Park, Washington
FRANKLIN K. LANE AND George B. Dorr
In Lafayette National Park, Mount Desert Island, Maine.
FRANKLIN K. LANE IN 1917 Taken in Lafayette National Park.
"LANE PEAK," Tatoosh Range, Rainier National Park
DATES
1864. July 15. Born near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
1871-76. Taken to California. Went to Grammar School at Napa,
California.
1876. Went to Oakland, California. Oakland High School.
1884-86. University of California, Berkeley, California. Special student.
1885. Reporting on Alta California in San Francisco for John P. Irish.
1887. Studied Hastings Law School.
1888. Admitted to the Bar.
1889. Special Newspaper Correspondent in New York for San
Francisco Chronicle.
1891. Bought interest in Tacoma News and edited that paper.
1892. Campaigned in New York for Cleveland.
1893. Married.
1895. Returned to California. Practiced law.
1897-98. On Committee of One Hundred to draft new Charter for San
Francisco.
1898. Elected City and County Attorney to interpret new Charter.
1899. Reelected City and County Attorney.
1901. Reelected City and County Attorney.
1902. Nominated for Governor of California on Democratic and
Non-Partisan Tickets.
1903. Democratic vote in Legislature for United States Senator.
1903. Nominated for Mayor of San Francisco.
1905. December. Nominated by President Roosevelt as Interstate
Commerce Commissioner.
1906. June 29. Confirmed by Senate as Interstate Commerce Commissioner.
1909. Reappointed by President Taft as Interstate Commerce Commissioner.
1913. Appointed Secretary of the Interior under President Wilson.
1916. Chairman American-Mexican Joint Commission.
1918. Chairman Railroad Wage Commission.
1919. Chairman Industrial Conference.
1920. March 1. Resigned from the Cabinet.
1920. Vice-President of Pan-American Petroleum Company.
1921. May 18. Died at Rochester, Minnesota.
FAMILY NAMES
Franklin K. Lane was the eldest of four children.
Father: Christopher S. Lane.
Mother: Caroline Burns.
Brothers: George W. Lane.
Frederic J. Lane.
Sister: Maude (Mrs. M. A. Andersen).
He was married to Anne Wintermute, and had two children:
Franklin K. Lane, Jr. ("Ned").
Nancy Lane (Mrs. Philip C. Kauffmann).
THE LETTERS OF FRANKLIN K. LANE
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 God, 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 associates.
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-
spaced 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 massive 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