The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
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
reassured 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."
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 muffled 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 sturdy
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 association 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."
And words, written and spoken words, were to him, of course, the
instrument of conquest. But the search for the fit and shining
word for his mark did not become research. In a droll letter,
about how he put simpler English into the Department of the
Interior, he tells of finding a letter written by one of the
lawyers of the Department to an Indian about his title to land,
that was "so involved and elaborately braided and beaded and
fringed that I could not understand it myself." So he sent the
ornate letter back and had it put into "straightaway English."
His own practicable English he believed he had learned through his
newspaper training. He first worked in the printing office of the
Oakland Times, then became a reporter for that paper. He went
campaigning and made speeches for the Prohibition candidate for
Governor in 1884--before he was twenty-one. The next year he was
reporting for the Alta California, edited by Colonel John P.
Irish, himself a fiery orator, of the denunciatory type. Colonel
Irish recalls that he was at once impressed with the "copious and
excellent vocabulary" of his ambitious reporter, who was, even
then, he says, "determined upon a high and useful career." In a
letter to Colonel Irish, in 1913, Lane wrote, "That simple little
card of yours was a good thing for me. It took me for a minute out
of the maelstrom of pressing business and carried me back, about
thirty years, to the time when I was a boy working for you--an
unbaked, ambitious chap, who did not know where he was going, but
was trying to get somewhere."
It is interesting to notice that in youth he did not suffer from
the usual phases of revolt from early teachings. His father was a
Prohibitionist, and Lane's first campaign was for a Prohibition
candidate for Governor; his father had been a preacher and Lane,
when very young, thought seriously of becoming a minister, so
seriously that he came before an examining board of the
Presbyterian church. After two hours of grilling, he was, though
found wanting, not rejected, but put upon a six months' probation
--the elders probably dreaded to lose so persuasive a tongue for
the sake of a little "insufficiency of damnation" in his creed.
One of his inquisitors, a Presbyterian minister, went from the
ordeal with Lane, and continued to try to convert him to the
tenets of Presbyterianism. Then suddenly, at some turn of the
talk, the clergyman abandoned his position and said carelessly,
"Well, Lane, why not become a Unitarian preacher?"
The boy who had been walking the floor at night in the struggle to
reconcile the teachings of the church with his own doubts--knowing
that Eternal Damnation was held to be the reward for doubt of
Christ's divinity--was so horrified by the casuistry of the man
who could be an orthodox minister and yet speak of preaching as
just one way to make a living, that he swung sharply from any wish
to enter the church.
The strictness of the orthodoxy of his home had not served to
alienate his sympathies, but he was chilled to the heart by this
indifference. He remembered the episode all his life with emotion,
but he was not embittered by it. He was young, a great lover,
greatly in love with life.
In 1884, when he entered the University of California, it was as a
special not as a regular student. "I put myself through college,"
he writes to a boy seeking advice on education, "by working during
vacation and after hours, and I am very glad I did it." He seems
to have arranged all his college courses for the mornings and
carried his reporting and printing-office work the last half of
the day.