The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
College at once offered a great forum for debate, and a richer
comradeship with men of strong mental fiber. Lane's eagerness in
discussion and love of large and sounding words made the students
call him "Demosthenes Lane." In his letters it is easy to trace
the gradual evolution from his early oratorical style into a final
form of free, imaginative expression of great simplicity.
Meanwhile, as he debated, he gathered to himself men who were to
be friends for the rest of his life. The "Sid" of the earliest
letters that we have is Dr. Sidney E. Mezes, now President of the
College of the City of New York, to whom one of his last letters
was addressed. His friendship for Dr. Wigmore, Dean of Law at the
Northwestern University, in Chicago, dates almost as far back.
In college, Lane seized what he most wanted in courses on
Philosophy and Economics. "His was a mind of many facets and
hospitable in its interest," says his college and lifelong friend,
Adolph C. Miller, "but his years at Berkeley were devoted mainly
to the study of Philosophy and Government, and kindred subjects.
He was a leading figure in the Political Science Club, and intent
in his pursuit of philosophy. Often he could be seen walking back
and forth in a room in the old Bacon library, set apart for the
more serious-minded students, with some philosophical book in
hand; every line of his face expressing deep concentration, the
occasional light in his eye clearly betraying the moment when he
was feeling the joy of understanding."
In two years, not waiting for formal graduation, Lane was back in
the world of public affairs that he had scarcely left. In the same
short-cut way he took his Hastings Law School work, and passed his
Supreme Court examination in 1888, in much less than the time
usually allowed for the work.
By the time he left the law school, "a full fledged, but not a
flying attorney," his desire for aggressive citizenship was fully
formed. In fact, the whole active campaign, that was his life, was
made by the light of early ideals, enlarged and reinterpreted as
his climb to power brought under his survey wider horizons.
The sketchiest summary of his early and late activities brings out
the singleness of the central purpose moving through his life. His
first fight, in 1888, for Ballot Reform was made that the will of
the people of the State might be honestly interpreted; later, in
Tacoma, Washington, he sided with his printers, against his
interest as owner, in their fight to maintain union wages; once
more in San Francisco, he took, without a retaining fee, the case
of the blackmailed householders whose titles were threatened by
the pretensions of the Noe claimants, and with his brother,
cleared title to all of their small homes; he joined, with his
friend, Arthur McEwen, in an editorial campaign against the
Southern Pacific, in the day of its tyrannous power over all the
shippers of California; later he drafted into the charter of San
Francisco new provisions to improve the wages of all city
employees; as its young city and county attorney, he aggressively
protected the city against street railway encroachments,
successfully enforcing the law against infractions; as Interstate
Commerce Commissioner, he disentangled a network of injustices in
the relations between shippers and railroads, exposed rebating and
demurrage evils; formulated new procedures in deflating,
reorganizing, and zoning the business of all the express companies
in the country; as Secretary of the Interior, he confirmed to the
people a fuller use of Federal Lands, and National Park Reserves,
laid the foundation for the development, on public domain, of
water powers, and the leasing of Government oil lands, and built
the Government railroad in Alaska; during the War, he contributed
to the Council of National Defense his inexhaustible enthusiasm
for cooperation, with definite plans for swift action, to focus
National resources to meet war needs; and finally, his last
carefully elaborated plan--killed by a partisan Congress--was to
place returned soldiers upon the land under conditions of hopeful
and decent independence. These were some of the "glories" of
activity into which he poured the resources of his energy and
imagination.
But no catalogue of the work or the salient mental characteristics
of Franklin Lane gives a picture of the man, without taking into
account his temperament, for that colored every hour of his life,
and every act of his career. The things that he knew seized his
imagination. Even when a middle-aged man he sang, like a
troubadour, of the fertility of the soil; he was stirred by the
virtue and energy of what he saw and touched; his heart leaped at
the thought of the power of water ready to be unlocked for man's
use--most happy in that the thing that was his he could love.
"To lose faith in the future of oil!" he cries, in the midst of a
sober statistical letter, "Why! that is as unthinkable as to lose
faith in your hands. Oil, coal, electricity, what are these but
multiplied and more adaptable, super-serviceable hands? They may
temporarily be unemployed, but the world can't go round without
them." A man who feels poetry in petroleum suffers from no wistful
"desire of the moth for the star." To his full sense of life the
moth and the star are of one essential substance, parts of one
glorious conquerable creation--and the moth just a fleck of star-
dust, with silly wings.
In truth, both then and throughout most of the days of his life he
was completely oriented in this world, at home here, with his
strong feet planted upon reality. He liked so many homely things,
that his friendly glance responded to common sunlight without
astigmatism.
That his sympathies should have outrun his repugnances was of
great practical moment in what he was able to achieve in a life
shortened at both ends, for though he had to lose time by earning
his own professional equipment, he lost little energy in friction.
He wrote to a political aspirant for high office, in 1921, "Pick a
few enemies and pick them with discretion. Chiefly be FOR things."
To a man who was making a personal attack on an adversary of
Lane's, while in 1914, as Secretary of the Interior, he was
engrossed in establishing his "conservation-by-use" policy, in
opposition to the older and narrower policy of conservation by
withdrawal, Lane wrote, "I have never seen any good come by
blurring an issue by personal conflict or antagonisms. ... I have
no time to waste in fighting people ... to fight for a thing the
best way is to show its advantages, and the need for it ... and my
only solicitude is that the things I care for should not be held
back by personal disputes." ...
This lesson he had learned more from his own temperament than from
political expediency. It was bound up in his love of efficiency
and also in his sense of humor. During this same hot conservation
controversy he writes to an old friend, "I have no intention of
saying anything in reply to Pinchot. He wrote me thirty pages to
prove that I was a liar, and rather than read that again I will
admit the fact."
This preoccupation with the main issue, in getting beneficial
results was one thing that made him glad to acclaim and use the
gifts of other men. Through his sympathies he could follow as well
as lead, and he caught enthusiasms as well as kindled them. He
believed in enthusiasm for itself, and because he saw in it one of
the great potencies of life. In writing of D'Annunzio's placing
Italy beside the Allies, he rejoices in the beautiful spectacle of
the spirit of a whole people "blown into flame by a poet-patriot."
But "the ideal," he urges, "must be translated into the possible.
Man cannot live by bread alone--nor on manna."
His gay and challenging attitude toward life expressed only one
mood, for he paid, as men must, for intense buoyancy of temper by
black despairs. "Damn that Irish temperament, anyway!" he writes.
"O God, that I had been made a stolid, phlegmatic, non-nervous,
self-satisfied Britisher, instead of a wild cross between a crazy
Irishman with dreams, desires, fancies--and a dour Scot with his
conscience and his logical bitterness against himself--and his
eternal drive!"
His exaggerations of hope and his moods of broken disappointment,
his ever-springing faith in men, and in the possibility of just
institutions, were more temperamental than logical. Moods of
astonished grief, when men showed greed and instability, gave
place to humorous and tolerant analysis of characters and events.
Even his loyalty to his friends was subject to the slight magnetic
deflections of a man of moods. He was true to them as the needle
to the pole; and with just the same piquing oscillations, before
the needle comes to rest at the inevitable North.
Because he had caught, in its capricious rhythms, the subtle
movements of human intercourse he trusted himself to express to
other men the natural man within his breast, without fear of
misconstruction. He contrived to humanize, in parts, even his
government reports. They brought him, year by year, touching
letters of gratitude from weary political writers. The patient,
logical Scot in him that said, "I am going to take this thing up
bit by bit without trying to get a whole philosophy into the
work," anchored him to the heaviest tasks as if he were a true-
born plodder, while the "wild Irishman" with dreams and desires
lighted the way with gleams of Will-o'-the-Wisp. The quicksilver
in the veins of the patient Mercutio of railroad rates and
demurrage charges lightened his work for himself and others. Just
as in the five years when he served San Francisco, as City and
County Attorney, he labored to such effect that not one of his
hundreds of legal opinions was reversed by the Supreme Court of
the State, so he toiled on these same Annual Reports, so immersed
that, as he says, "I even have to take the blamed stuff to bed
with me." Fourteen and sixteen hours at his official desk were not
his longest hours, and sometimes he snatched a dinner of shredded
biscuit from beside the day's accumulations of papers upon his
heaped-up desk. He laid upon himself the burden of labor,
examining and cross-examining men for hours upon a single point of
essential fact--quick to detect fraud and intolerant of humbug,--
but infinitely patient with those who were merely dull, evading no
drudgery, and, above all, never evading the dear pains of
building-up and maintaining friendship.
LOUISE HERRICK WALL
MARCH, 1922
II
POLITICS AND JOURNALISM
1884-1894
POLITICS--NEWSPAPER WORK--NEW YORK--BUYING INTO TACOMA NEWS--
MARRIAGE--SALE OF NEWSPAPER
FRANKLIN K. LANE'S earliest political association, in California,
after reaching manhood, was with John H. Wigmore. Wigmore had
returned from Harvard, in 1883, with a plan, already matured, for
Civic Reform. The Municipal Reform League, created by Wigmore,
Lane, and several other young men, was to follow the general
outline of boss control, by precinct and ward organization, the
difference being that the League members were to hold no offices,
enjoy no spoils, and work for clean city politics. Each member of
the inner circle was to take over and make himself responsible for
a definite city district, making a card index of the name of each
voter, taking a real part in all caucus meetings--in saloon
parlors or wherever they were held--and studying practical
politics at first hand. "Blind Boss Buckley" was the Democratic
dictator of San Francisco, and against his regime the initial
efforts of the League were directed.
It was a giant's task, an impossible task, for a small group of
newspaper writers and college undergraduates. The short career of
the Municipal Reform League ended when Wigmore went East to study