The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
The best of things can not live unless they are fought for, and
while I do not think that their socialism was the best of
anything, it was their dream. ... With much love, my dear boy,
your DAD
To George W. Lane February 16, 1918
MY DEAR GEORGE,--... Things are going much better with the War
Department. My expectation is that this war will resolve itself
into three things, in this order:--ships for food, aeroplanes, big
guns. We must, as you know, do all that we can to keep up the
morale of our own people. There is a considerable percentage of
pacifists, and of the weak-hearted ones, who would like to have a
peace now upon any terms, but the treatment that Russia is
receiving, after she had thrown down her arms, indicates what may
be expected by any nation that quits now.
... The prospects for democratization of Germany is not as good as
it was a year ago, when we came in, because of their success in
arms due to Russia's debacle. The people will not overthrow a
government which is successful, nor will they be inclined to
desert a system which adds to Germany's glory. It is a fight, a
long fight, a fight of tremendous sacrifice, that we are in for. I
said a year ago that it would be two years. Then I thought that
Russia would put up some kind of front. Now I say two years from
this time and possibly a great deal longer. Lord Northcliffe
thinks four or six or eight years.
Ned writes me that things are very gloomy and glum in England and
in Ireland, where he has been. He was out in an air raid, in
several of them, in London, not up in the air, but from the ground
could see no trace of the airships that were dropping bombs on the
town. The Germans seem to have discovered some way by which they
can tell where they are without being able to see the lights of
the city, for now they have bombarded Paris when it was protected,
on a dark night, by a blanket of fog, and London also under the
same conditions. The compass is not much good, the deviations are
so great. It may be that the clever Huns have found some way of
piloting themselves surely. We are starting two campaigns through
the Bureau of Education which may interest you. One is for school
gardens. To have the children organized, each one to plant a
garden. The plan is to raise vegetables which will save things
that can be sent over to the armies, and also give the children a
sense of being in the war. Another thing we are trying to do is
educate the foreign born and the native born who cannot read or
write English. If you are interested in either of these two things
we will send you literature, and you can name your own district,
and we will put you at work. ...
Well, my dear fellow, I long very much for the sun and the
sweetness of California these days, but I could not enjoy myself
if I were there, because I am at such tension that I must be doing
every day. Do write me often, even though I do not answer.
Affectionately yours,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
TO ALBERT SHAW
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Washington, March 7, 1918
MY DEAR DR. SHAW,--I have your letter of March 4th. The thing that
a democracy is short on is foresight. We do not have enough men
like the General Staff in Germany who can think ten and twenty
years ahead. We are too much embedded and incrusted in the things
that flow around us during the day, and think too little of the
future.
For five, long, weary years, I have been agitating for the use of
the water powers of the United States. We estimate the unused
power in tens and tens of millions of horse-power. Right in New
York you have in the Erie Canal 150,000 horse-power, and on the
Niagara river you have probably a million unused. If you had a
great dam across the river below the rapids we should have water
power in chains, like fire horses in their stalls, that could be
brought out at the time of need. But we are thinking in large
figures these days, and while we used to be afraid to ask for a
few hundred thousand dollars we now talk in millions, and some day
we may realize that to put the cost of a week's war into power
plants in the United States would be money well invested. ...
We have no law under which private capital feels justified in
investing a dollar in a water power plant where public lands are
involved, because the permit granted is revokable at the pleasure
of the Secretary of the Interior, and capital does not enjoy the
prospect of making its future returns dependent upon the good
digestion of the Secretary. But if we get this bill, which I
enclose, through, we will be able to handle the powers on all
streams on the public lands and forests and on all navigable
waters, and give assurance to capital that it will be well taken
care of if it makes the investment. ...
I am greatly pleased at the kind things you say about me. The
longer I am in office the more of an appetite I have for such
food. Hoover [Footnote: Hoover at this time was Food
Administrator.] can only commit one fatal mistake--to declare a
taflfyless day. Cordially yours,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
To Edward J. Wheeler on February 1, 1917, he had written:--
"It is an outrage that we should have a total of nearly six
million acres of land withdrawn for oil, three million for
phosphates, and one million for water power sites, potash, etc.,
and allow session after session of Congress to pass without
producing any legislation that will sensibly open these reserves
to development. The extreme conservationists, who are really for
holding the lands indefinitely in the Federal Government and
unopened, and the extreme anti-conservationists, who are for
turning all the public lands over to the States, have stood for
years against a rational system of national development."
Although a great part of the energy of the Department of the
Interior was, of necessity, diverted to forward war enterprises
and to supply war necessities--chemical, metallurgical,
statistical--Lane steadily pressed forward the conduct of the
normal activities of the department. In his report for the year
1918, he briefly summarizes this work,--"The distribution, survey,
and classification of our national lands; the care of the Indian
wards of the Nation, their education, and the development of their
vast estate; the carrying forward of our reclamation projects; the
awarding and issuance of patents to inventors; the construction of
the Alaskan railroad and the supervision of the Territorial
affairs of Alaska and Hawaii; the payment of pensions to Army and
Navy veterans and their dependents; the promotion of education;
the custody and management of the national parks; the conservation
of the lives of those who work in mines, and the study and
guidance of the mining and metallurgical industries."
To Walter H. Page
Washington, March 16, 1918
My dear Mr. Ambassador,--I am the poorest of all living
correspondents, in fact, I am a dead correspondent. I do not
function. If it had not been so I would long since have answered
your notes, which have been in my basket, but I have had no time
for any personal correspondence, much as I delight in it, for I
have a very old-fashioned love for writing from day to day what
pops into my mind, contradicting each day what I said the day
before, and gathering from my friends their impressions and their
spirit the same way. For the first time in three months I have
leisure enough ... to acknowledge a few of the accumulated
personal letters.
Let me give you a glimpse of my day, just to compare it with your
own and by way of contrasting life in two different spheres and on
different sides of the ocean. I get to my office at nine in the
morning and my day is broken up into fifteen-minute periods,
during which I see either my own people or others. I really write
none of my own letters, [Footnote: This referred to routine
letters.] simply telling my secretaries whether the answer should
be "yes" or "no." I lunch at my own desk and generally with my
wife, who has charge of our war work in the Department. We have
over thirteen hundred men who have gone out of this Department
into the Army. ... My day is broken into by Cabinet meeting twice
a week, meeting of the Council of National Defense twice a week,
and latterly with long sessions every afternoon over the question
of what railroad wages should be.
My office is a sort of place of last resort for those who are
discouraged elsewhere, for Washington is no longer a city of set
routine and fixed habit. It is at last the center of the nation.
New York is no longer even the financial center. The newspapers
are edited from here. Society centers here. All the industrial
chiefs of the nation spend most of their time here. It is easier
to find a great cattle king or automobile manufacturer or a
railroad president or a banker at the Shoreham or the Willard
Hotel than it is to find him in his own town. The surprising thing
is that these great men who have made our country do not loom so
large when brought to Washington and put to work. ... Every day I
find some man of many millions who has been here for months and
whose movements used to be a matter of newspaper notoriety, but I
did not know, even, that he was here. I leave my office at seven
o'clock, not having been out of it during the day except for a
Cabinet or Council meeting, take a wink of sleep, change my
clothes and go to a dinner, for this, as you will remember, is the
one form of entertainment that Washington has permitted itself in
the war. The dinners are Hooverized,--three courses, little or no
wheat, little or no meat, little or no sugar, a few serve wine.
And round the table will always be found men in foreign uniforms,
or some missionary from some great power who comes begging for
boats or food. These dinners used to be places of great gossip,
and chiefly anti-administration gossip, but the spirit of the
people is one of unequaled loyalty. The Republicans are as glad to
have Wilson as their President as are the Democrats, I think
sometimes a little more glad, because many of the Democrats are
disgruntled over patronage or something else. The women are
ferocious in their hunt for spies, and their criticism is against
what they think is indifference to this danger. Boys appear at
these dinners in the great houses, because of their uniforms, who
would never have been permitted even to come to the front door in
other days, for all are potential heroes. Every woman carries her
knitting, and it is seldom that you hear a croaker even among the
most luxurious class. Well, the dinner is over by half past ten,
and I go home to an hour and a half's work, which has been sent
from the office, and fall at last into a more or less troubled
sleep. This is the daily round.
I have not been to New York since the war began. I made one trip
across the continent speaking for the Liberty Loan, day and night.
And this life is pretty much the life of all of us here. The
President keeps up his spirits by going to the theatre three or
four times a week. There are no official functions at the White
House, and everybody's teeth are set. The Allies need not doubt
our resolution. England and France will break before we will, and
I do not doubt their steadfast purpose. It is, as you said long
ago, their fault that this war has come, for they did not realize
the kind of an enemy they had, either in spirit, purpose, or
strength. But we will increasingly strengthen that western gate so
that the Huns will not break through.
We do things fast here, but I never realized before how slow we
are in getting started. It takes a long time for us to get a new
stride. I did not think that this was true industrially. I have
known that it was true politically for a long time, because this
was the most backward and most conservative of all the