The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
What interest does New York take in such things anyway? There are
second-hand stores there but they must be filled with novels and
such trumpery. No one in New York ever read Gibbon--ninety-nine
percent never heard of him. So why should I send to New York? No,
Boston is the place. There is the city of the Erudite, the Home of
Lodge, and incidentally of Parkman, Bancroft, Thayer, Morse,
Fiske, and all others who have minds to throw back into the other
days, and make pictures of what has been. Every house there has
its Gibbon, of course, and some must, in the course of nature,
fall into the hands of the dealers. So to Boston,--and who else
but Jack Hallowell who knows what a book is, how in respectability
it should be bound, and what size book is a pleasure and what a
burden. A man of learning, identified with scholarship, through
his athletic course in Harvard, and withal a man of business who
will not pay more than a thing is worth. Ideal! Hence the letter
and consequent trouble to good Jack Hallowell, who as per usual
"done his damnedest for a friend," as Bret Harte says, in writing
a perfect epitaph. ...
The reason I sent twelve dollars needs explanation. I put that
limit because a very handsome edition of eleven volumes sold for
that price to a friend of mine. It was red morocco, tooled, etc.,
and I thought surely twelve dollars would buy something as good as
I needed.
Now you have the whole mysterious story. Make the most of it as
Patrick Henry suggested to George III.
I have your dear Mother's book and will write her when I have read
it. I also have a letter saying that Hoover has named me as
treasurer of his twenty-three million or billion fund. ...
Thank you for your kindness and write me as often as you can. ...
F. K. L.
TO ROBERT LANSING
Bethel, Maine, November 10, [1920]
MY DEAR LANSING,--It is good to see that letter-head, but aren't
you afraid to enter into competition with Mr. Tumulty, who has
now, I see, bought the old Shepard mansion and will settle in
Washington. How do they do it with the high cost of living what it
is? ... The transmutation of brass into gold is becoming a
commonplace.
To-night's paper speaks of Knox as probable Secretary of State.
... Tell me where the opposition is to come from--who are to lead
us? ... All possible leaders have been submerged, squelched,
drowned out, in the past eight years. I wish the whole country had
gone unanimously for Harding. Then we might have started on a
fresh, clean footing to create two parties that represent liberal
and conservative thought. As it is, I think you will see Hearst
and Johnson and La Follette try to capture the radicals of both
parties and make a new party of their own. Then I shall be with
all the rascals I have been fighting since boyhood--the Wall
Street rascals--as against the other group. But maybe the Lord
cares a bit for us after all.
I mend very slowly, but I delight in your recovery and wonder at
it. ... I do beg you will give me all the gossip of Washington
that you can, for I am here in a wilderness, beautiful but not
exciting. As always,
F. K. L.
To Carl Snyder
Bethel, November 13, [1920]
Dear Carl,--This is extremely disagreeable business, this of
repairs and restoration. I suppose I am doing fairly well
considering that I have been more than half a century getting my
gearings askew and awry. But I am taking orders now and say "Thank
you," when I get them. Just when I shall be well enough to take
hold again is not yet discoverable.
Strange how little news there is when you are above the clouds.
One must be local to be interested in ninety percent of what the
papers print. Make me a hermit for a year and I could see things
in the large I believe, and ignore the trifles which obscure real
vision. But a monk must be checked by a butcher. The ideal must be
translated into the possible. "Man cannot live on bread alone"--
nor on manna.
Outside it is snowing beautifully, across an insistent sun, the
fire is crackling and I do not know that I am ill but for the
staring bottles before me.
Give me a line when you have a free minute--and take to your
Beautiful Lady my warm regards.
F. K. L.
To William R. Wheeler
Bethel, 17 [November], 1920
My dear Bill,--...I am mighty sorry to hear about the Lady Alice
Isabel. Funny that these women are like some damn fools, like
myself, and do things too strenuously, and then go bang. Damn that
Irish temperament, anyway! 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!
I can't tell you anything new about myself. I hope it is not a
delusion that I am growing slowly better. I cultivate that idea
anyway. ...
It was a slaughter, the election, and properly did it come to us.
Now be wise and you can have this land for many years. But foolish
conceit will put you out in four. ...I wish you Republicans had
carried all the South. I am glad for Lenroot--very! ... But
Phelan's defeat has about broken my heart and for Henderson and
Chamberlain and Thomas I am especially grieved. Well, it will be a
changed world in Washington, and I'm sorry I can't be in it and of
it.
Anne has gone to Washington to see Nancy who has not been well, so
I am alone but not for long. I get on all right. God bless you, my
dear old chap, and do rest awhile beneath your own fig tree. My
love to Alice. Affectionately as always,
F. K. L.
To George Otis Smith
Bethel, [November] 18, [1920]
Dear George Otis,--I love this Maine of yours. It is beautiful,
and its people are good stuff--strong, wholesome, intelligent
young men. I like them greatly. I'd be content to sit right down
here and wait for whatever is to come. It is a place of serenity.
There is no rush, yet people live and the necessary things get
done. It doesn't have any Ford factories, but I rather fancy it
makes the men who go West and make the factories.
The autumn has been one long procession of gay banners on the
hillsides, and now that the snow has come the pines are blue and
the mountains purple; and mountains five thousand feet high are
just as good, more companionable, than mountains fifteen thousand
feet high. What is more lovely, stately and of finer color than a
line of these receding hills which walk away from you, as if they
continued clear across the continent?
I must get out against my wish, to have a lot more testing done--
for this doctor differs with the others--and I rather think he is
right. But I hope to get back here and enjoy this air. No wonder
this stock was for prohibition, the air itself is an intoxicant,
especially when the snow is on the ground and it comes to you
gently; it is as bracing as a cocktail, not a sensuous wine like
the Santa Barbara air--tell Vogelsang this--but I presume more
like the High Sierras, where the fishing is good.
I shall read your speeches with the deepest interest. Keep up the
publicity. It affects Congress and it justifies the good doctrine
we have preached. Cordially,
F. K. Lane
Have read the speeches and they are everything they should be.
Right theory, clear statement, conclusive facts. A few too many
figures perhaps, you should keep your prime figures in the air
longer so they can be visualized. This may be called juggling
figures in the right sense.
Lane
To George W. Wickersham
Bethel, Maine, 18 [November, 1920]
My dear G. W.,--I have your good letter. By 'good' I mean many
things--well done as a bit of sketchy composition, a welcome
letter, kindly also in spirit, cheering, timely, telling of things
that interest the receiver, one, too, having the flavor of the
household whence it comes, altogether a good letter. I had one
also from Her; which I brutally answered with a preachment--in
pencil, too, for I can't write with comfort at a desk and, after
all, what have white paper and ink in common with these woods? I
am for harmony--a reconciler, like Harding. ...
Root, as you say, would give a good smack to the meal. The country
would at once say Harding knows how to set a good table. But tell
me--will he be a Taft? a McKinley? a Hayes? or a Grant? Pshaw! why
should I ask such a question? Who knows what a man will turn out
to be! Events may make him greater than any, or less. A war, a
bullet, a timely word of warning to a foreign power, a fierce
fight with some unliked home group, the right sort of a deal on
postal rates with newspapers and magazines--any one of these might
lift him into a national hero; while a sneaking act revealed, a
little too much caution, a period of business depression, would
send him tumbling out of the skies.
These be indeed no days for prophesying--Wilson gone, Clemenceau
gone, Venizelos gone,--Lloyd George alone left! The wise boy had
his election at the right moment, didn't he? Surely statesmanship
is four-fifths politics. Harding's danger, as I see it, will lie
in his timidity. He fears; and fear is the poison gas which comes
from the Devil's factory. Courage is oxygen, and Fear is carbon
monoxide. One comes from Heaven--so you find Wells says,--and the
other would turn the universe back into primeval chaos. Wilson, be
it said to his eternal glory, did not fear. They send word to me
from the inside that he believed in Cox's election up to the last
minute, although the whole Cabinet told him defeat was sure. He
"was right, and right would prevail"--surely such faith, even in
oneself, is almost genius!
I am glad you put Lincoln first in your list of great Americans. I
decided that question for myself when I came to hang some pictures
in my library. Washington or Lincoln on top? And Lincoln got it. I
have recently read all his speeches and papers, and the man is
true from the first day to the last. The same philosophy and the
same reasoning were good in 1861 as in 1841. He was large enough
for a great day--could any more be said of any one?
Lincoln made Seward and Chase and Stanton and Blair his mates. He
did not fear them. He wished to walk with the greatest, not with
trucklers and fawners, court satellites and panderers. His great
soul was not warm enough to fuse them--they were rebellious ore--
but his simplicities were not to be mastered by their elaborate
cogencies.
McKinley was simple in his nature, at bottom a dear boy of kind
heart, who put his hand into the big fist of Mark Hanna and was
led to glory.
Is Harding great and masterful in his simplicity, or trustful and
yielding? and if the latter where is the Hanna? Well, I don't want
to die in these next few months, anyway, till some questions are
answered. This would be a part of my Cabinet if I were Harding:--
Root, State; Hoover, Treasury; Warren of Michigan, Attorney-
General; Wood, War; Willard (of Baltimore)
You enviously write of my opportunity to read and contemplate. I
have done some of both. But that's a monk's life, and even a monk
has a cell of his own, and a bit of garden to play with; and he
can think upon a God that is his very own, an Israelitish
Providence; and, in his egotism, be content. Yes, with a cell and
a book and a garden and an intimate God, one should be satisfied
to forego even health. But I hold with old Cicero that the "whole
glory of virtue is in activity," and therefore I call my
discontent divine.
You speak of great Americans, and have named all four from
political life. I concur in your selection. Now what writers would
you say were most distinctly American in thought and most
influential upon our thought, men who a hundred years hence will
be regarded not great as literary men but as American social,