The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
special old corner in all that is left of my heart. And one of
these days well indulge ourselves in a good time--a long pull
together again.
I have been reading William James' Letters--and real literature
they are--far better than all your novels. What a great Man--a
mind, plus a man. Not to have known James in the last generation
is to have missed its greatest intellect; Roosevelt and James and
Henry George were the three greatest forces of the last thirty
years. Sometime when you come across a good photo or engraving or
wood-cut, or something, of James, will you buy it and send it to
me? I want a human one--not a professional one. I guess he
couldn't be the pedantic kind anyway.
Billy Phillips has a new baby-boy born Monday.
My plan is to leave here in a week, go to Washington and see
Nancy, and get a glimpse of some of my old people in the
Department, thence to South Carolina and then probably California
for two or three months. Ah me--most people would think this
luxury--I think it hell! But it may be for my great spiritual
good. Certainly if I could have you to walk with for these months,
and more of William James to read, I could take a step or two
forward.
Have also been reading a bit of Buddhism lately. It is too
negative--that is almost its chief if not its only defect, as an
attitude toward life. It won't make things move but it will make
souls content. And I can't get away from the thought that we are
here as conquerors, not as pacifists. I can't be the latter, save
in the desire.
Peabody dropped in yesterday from Chicago. (I have forgotten
whether you knew him well or not.) Able chap, fond of me, as I of
him. My boy works for him. He sent me a gorgeous edition of
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy which I have always wanted, largely
because it is one of the curiosities of the world. ...
Write me as often as your Quaker spirit moves you to utterance.
Your dinner got quite a send-off in these papers, which is
something, for New York to recognize Boston! Terribly tough job
though. Poor babies! Hard to believe in a good God and a kind God,
isn't it?
I hear talk of shoving Hoover outside the breastworks. Fools!
Fools! Best for him but worse for the country. Whole question of
Republican success turns on the largeness of Harding. I don't ask
a Lincoln--much less will do. If he is only a smooth-footed
politician he will fail. So far he has been the gentleman. ...
My love to your whole circle, from Grandmother down.
Affectionately,
F. K. L.
To John G. Gehring
Rochester, Minnesota, December 31, [1920]
MY DEAR PADRE,--It is the last night of an unhappy year. Never do
I wish for such another. No joy--defeat, dreary waiting. These
words describe not merely my personal history and attitude but
fairly picture those of the world. It took guts to live through
such an unillumined, non-productive, soul-depressing year. Did
any good come out of it? Yes, to me just one thing good--I came to
know you, your Lady and the beauteousness of Bethel. And after all
a man does not do any better in any year than make a friend. No
man makes seventy friends in a life-time, does he? So I must not
repine nor let the year go out in bitterness. On the credit side
of my account book I have something that can be carried over into
1921, whereas most people can only carry over Hope.
I hope there is something significant and more than suggestive in
my turning up here on the last day of the year for examination--
"Getting a ready on" for a New Year--that's what you would
optimistically shout if you were here, I know. And that is my
Goodbye word to 1920--"You haven't beaten me, and I have lived to
take your brush."
I am being ground and wound and twisted and fed into and out of
the Mayo mill, and a great mill it is. Of course they are giving
me a private view, so to speak. Distinguished consideration is a
modest word for the way in which I am treated--not because of my
worth but because of my friends--. Those men are greater as
organizers, I believe, than as workmen, which is saying much
indeed, for they are the surgeons supreme. ... Two to three
hundred people, new people, a day pass through [their shop]. Sixty
to seventy thousand a year received, examined, diagnosed, treated
perhaps, operated on (fifty per cent), and cared for. The
machinery for this is colossal and superbly arranged.
Dr. Mayo told me to come over at two o'clock and register. ... I
stood in line and was duly registered, telling name, and other
such facts, non-medical. Then a special guide took me to Dr. Mayo,
who had already heard my story at the hotel but who, wished it in
writing. Accordingly, I was presented to a group of the staff and
one man assigned as my escort. I answered him a thousand
questions, touching my physical life for fifty-six years. Then to
the tonsil man, who saw a distinct "focus," now there, a focus in
the tonsils! Nose and ears without focus or focii or focuses. Down
an elevator, through a labyrinth of halls, down an inclined plane,
up a flight of steps, two turns to the left and then a group of
the grumpiest girls I ever saw or heard or felt. They were good
looking, too, but they didn't care to win favor with mere males.
They had a higher purpose, no doubt. They openly sneered at my
doctor escort. They lifted their eyebrows at my good-looking young
son, and they told me precisely where to sit down. I was not
spoken to further. My ear was punched and blood was taken in tubes
and on slides by young ladies who did not care how much of my
blood they spilled or extracted. They were so business-like, so
mechanical, so dehumanized, these young ladies with microscopes!
One said cryptically "57," another said "53." I was full of
curiosity but I did not ask a question. They tapped me as if I
were a spring--a fountain filled with blood--and gave me neither
information, gaiety or entertainment in exchange. Each one I am
convinced has by this life of near-crime, which she pursues for a
living, become capable of actual murder.
Thus has my first day gone. It is cold here--slushy underfoot,
snow dirty, sky dark. How different from a place we know!
There are one hundred and fifty physicians and surgeons in the
clinic, and Heaven knows how many hundred employees. No hospitals
are owned and run by the Mayos; all these are private, outside
affairs. The side tracks are filled with private cars of the
wealthy. Scores of residences, large, small, fine, and shabby are
little hospitals. The town has grown 5,000 in five years, all on
account of the Mayos, these two sons of a great country doctor who
without a college education have gathered the world's talent to
them.
I am tomorrow to be medically examined further, to the revealing
of my terrible past, my perturbed present, and pacific future. The
result of which necromancy I shall duly report. I am afraid that
they will not find that an operation will do good, if so I shall
truly despair. And if they decide for the knife, I shall go to the
guillotine like the gayest Marquis of the ancient regime. Yes, I
should do better for I have my chance, and he, poor chap, had
none.
I received your Christmas present in the spirit that sent it. I
can't say "No! No!"--for I preach mixing pleasure with business.
Things are all wrong when we don't. I will never repay you. If I
could, or did, you would receive none of the blessings that come
from giving gifts. The truth is, we knew each other years ago,
perhaps centuries ago, and you have done a good turn to an old
friend for which the old friend is glad, because it makes the tie
more binding.
I told you I would send Wells' history to you, and to it I have
added one of the greatest of human documents, William James'
Letters. I hope you love the largeness of the man, to be large and
playful and useful, I say, man, can you beat that combination? I
believe I know another beside James who meets the specifications.
And strangely enough he, too, evolved from physician to
psychologist, to philosopher.
Well, here's hoping that he and his High-Souled Partner meet with
many joys and few sorrows in 1921.
F. K. L.
XIII
LETTERS TO ELIZABETH 1919-1920
To Mrs. Ralph Ellis
[Camden, North Carolina, March, 1919]
MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--And so they call you a Bolshevik! a parlor
Bolshevik! Well, I am not surprised for your talk gives
justification for calling you almost anything, except a dull
person. When one is adventurous in mind and in speech--perfectly
willing to pioneer into all sorts of mountains and morasses--the
stay-at-homes always furnish them with purposes that they never
had and throw them into all kinds of loose company. I have
forgotten whether or no there was a Mrs. Columbus, but if the Old
Man on his return spoke an admiring word of the Indian girls he
saw on Santo Domingo you may be sure that he was at once regarded
as having outdone that Biblical hero who exclaimed, "Vanity of
Vanities, all is Vanity!," after having run his personal attachees
up into the thousand.
Yes, the very solemn truth is that adventuring is dangerous
business, and mental adventuring most dangerous of all. We forgive
those who do things that are strange, really more readily than
those who talk of doing them. People are really afraid of talk,
and rightly so, I believe. The mind that goes reaching out and up
and around and through is a disturber, it bumps into every kind of
fixed notion and takes off a chip here and there, it probes into
all sorts of mysteries and opens them to find that they are hollow
wind-bag affairs, tho' always held as holy of holies heretofore.
To think, to speculate, to wonder, to query--these imply
imagination, and the Devil has just one function in this Universe
--to destroy, to kill, or suppress or to divert or prevent the
imagination. Imagination is the Divine Spark, and old Beelzebub
has had his hands full ever since that spark was born. "As you
were," is his one military command. His diabolical energy is
challenged to its utmost when he hears the words "Forward March!"
There is not much--ANYTHING--of beauty or nobility or achievement
in the world that he has not fought, and all of it has been the
fruit of imagination, the working of the creative mind. You see I
come very near to believing in that old personal Devil which my
Presbyterian father saw so vividly, and which our friend Wells has
recently discovered, Satan is smart, and that is a very dreadful
thing to be, I never like to hear the Yankee called smart, it is a
term of reproach. I don't like to think of a Smart Set. And my
refuge is in the knowledge that there is just one thing that
destroys smartness and that is, to put it in a very high-sounding
word, Nobility. There is the test we can all put to ourselves--and
it really is conscience and ethics and religion all in one--is the
idea smart or is it noble? I'd take my chances of going to Heaven
on the conformity of conduct to that criterion.
But all this seems a far way from Parlor Bolshevism--yet it is
not so far. For it all comes down to this. The Lord he prompts us
to think and to advance, and the Devil he urges us to be smart, to
switch our thinkings, our very right thinkings, our progressive
impulses, to side tracks that will serve his ends.
And that is just what is happening to a lot of the finest minds.
Men and women who see clearly that things are wrong, who have
enough insight and knowledge to get a glimpse into the unnecessary
suffering of the world and who mentally come down with a slap-bang
declaration that this must stop, are allowing themselves to be
called by a name that history will execrate, and to smooth over
and palliate and defend things that are bad, out of which good
will not come.
You have no love for Czarism any more than you have for Kaiserism.