The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
Katonah, Sunday, [September 25, 1920]
... We leave here on Wednesday (D. V.) for Bethel because you said
to. Now how soon will you follow--a day--a week? Not more!
You made up your mind that you would go there, and there is now to
be proof given whether your mind is weak or riding strong.
Anne is to have H. Beale there, and they move in circles barred to
me. So I shall sorely need someone who knows my language. And I am
not frivolous when I say that you and I need nothing more than a
religious faith of some kind. Mohammedan, Christian Science, or
what you will. We are both religious--deeply. We pray--we do
things for the good of men and women,--but we do not relate
ourselves properly to the Great Enveloping, Permeating Spirit. I
have sought to, vainly, for many years, and yet I have not been
persistent. "Seek and ye shall find!" I want to believe that the
God of Things as They Are is not wilfully cruel. Is He
indifferent?
Are we mastering something? Tell me! Do you know? What philosophy
have you come to?
Well, all this we can talk over when we reach Bethel. Say, do you
ever answer letters or is it your Queenly prerogative to drop your
sweethearts down the public oubliette?
F. K. L.
Washington, 27 [December, 1920]
My wife won't let me call on you, "not now, anyhow," she says. Oh,
you have so many enemies! Adolph and Mary, Senator and Mrs.
Kellogg, Chief Justice and Mrs. White, Dr. and Mrs. Gehring. All
are against you, and against me--all plotting, planning, and
conspiring with my wife to keep us apart. They know the hold you
have on me, that I had rather have you as my doctor than any one
else in the whole vasty Universe--but why sigh? I am to be torn
away on Wednesday and rushed to Rochester, where the Mayos will
take me in hand, and do their worst. I have great hope that they
may cut me into happiness, and carve me into health, and slice me
into strength.
So, as Anne wired, we shall not see you in Camden, nor Ralph nor
the Junior nor anything that is Ellis--not for some moons anyway.
... The reason for going to Mayos? To see if it is true that my
stomach and my gall bladder have become too intimate. Rochester is
the Reno where such divorces are granted.
I'd like to say I love you and the whole kit and caboodle, but my
wife won't let me.
F. K. L.
XIV
FRIENDS AND THE GREAT HOPE
1921
Need for Democratic Program--Religious Faith--Men who have Influenced
Thought--A Sounder Industrial Life --A Super-University for Ideas
--"I Accept"--Fragment
To Mrs. Philip C. Kaujfmann
Rochester, Minnesota, January 1,1921
To that little Fairy with whom a young fellow named Frank Lane
used to wander in the woods, hunting the homes of the Fairies,--
Greetings on her birthday! Has she found where they live? I
believe she has. They live where eyes are bright with love, and
hands are gentle and kind, where feelings are not hurt and there
is song hummed, and Play, a very real God, still lives,
... I think that we have got to see each other some how,
somewhere, because life is passing awfully fast and there is one
best thing in it--supremely, overwhelmingly best--and that is
affection. I've chased around after fame and work for others, but
I just wish I had spent pretty much all my time loving you and
Mother and Ned, and let everything else come way down on the list.
The people who really love us are so few, aren't they? Lots of
them like us, lots of them are glad to be with us, but few can be
counted on "world without end, Amen."
... This is surely a very uncertain and unsatisfactory world for
me right now. How much we all do like definiteness and how few are
willing to trust the future to the Great Spirit. We fuss and fume
as if it would do good rather than ill. Happiness is the thing we
all desire and it is to be had easily through a most simple
philosophy; do your best and then have faith that things will come
right. Happy people are those who live with happy thoughts; those
who see good in people and by brave and cheerful thinking are
superior to depression and bitterness.
The longer I live the more I am convinced that it is our duty to
be gay; not reckless, never that; not boisterous, but light-
hearted. It saves doctor's bills, brings success, and is the one
method, the natural method, by which we become really big, and by
that I mean superior to the evil forces that try to break us down.
... To be gay one must see how very little some things are, and
how very big other things are. And the big things are things like
love and goodness and unselfishness; and the little things are the
selfish mean things, self-indulgent things, things generally that
come out of one's vanity, one's love of one's self. Get rid of
that and life becomes a pretty good place. Envy, vanity, self-
indulgence--these are devils.
... I wish you would really sink yourself into some religion. To
start right is so important. You will miss much joy in life, I am
convinced, by not having a faith; something to live by, something
that explains the questions that rise each hour. Buddhism does not
claim to be supernatural, is not founded on miracles, and yet
Buddha taught the philosophy of Christ five hundred years before
He came. The central note is getting above self--real self-
mastery. Possessing, mastering your body and mind so that you do
not allow envy or hatred to possess you, and do not hanker after
"things," possessions, or fame or popularity, and keep strong hold
on wilfulness and anger and your passions. Its fundamental maxim
is that unhappiness and sorrow come from ignorance of Truth--and
Truth is found by submerging self. The body is not bad, the lusts
of the body and the mind are not bad, but the body is no more than
an envelop for the soul, its master.
Good-night to you both, you are fast asleep by now. ... In my long
days and nights I think so much about you, wondering what the Gods
have in store for her who has been so much to me. Much, much love
little one.
DAD
To Benjamin Ide Wheeler
Rochester, Minnesota, January I, 19L1
To the Wheelers with the warmest greetings of the Lanes! A bonny
year be this to you--a year of sunny faces--may you live
surrounded by those whom you love and damned indifferent to all
the rest!
I, Franklin K. Lane, am trying to find out if the last doctor in
New York was right. He said my trouble came from an improper
alliance between my gall-bladder and my pyloric orifice, and that
here in Rochester they could be summarily divorced. (If you don't
know where the pylorus is you may locate it as the N. W. 1/4 of
the N. W. 1/4 of the stomach. Until you reach fame you never have
a pylorus--and then it is most costly.) So here I am in a real
Reno, hoping that a knife will be able to "put me to work anew,"
... and writing this as a proof of "love and affection," whatever
the legally great may mean by the distinction. ...
And talking of language, have you read what Wells has to say in
his Outline of History on this subject? I found it very
interesting; probably all old stuff to you, however. Can there be
a science of language, or of anything that a human creates? I am
rather Bergsonian in my idea of the individual man--each is a
species.
Miller is very unhappy because [Governor] Harding may leave the
Board. He [Miller] will go if the new man is not satisfactory. But
I think he will be. For Harding will be conservative and a great
respecter of wealth. And Miller while a radical in many things is
a classicist as to Finance.
If Harding leaves out Hoover he will do himself and the country
harm, and Hoover good. At last the sun shines!
F. K. L.
To Lathrop Brown
Rochester, Minnesota, January 3, [1921]
Well, my dear young Spirit of the Renaissance, I am not yet dead,
not even dying. Slowly I am doing the stations of the Cross in
this most thorough institution. I am delighted with my experience.
Here is concentrated every form of torture and annoyance to which
one can be legally subjected. Cruel and unusual punishments are
forbidden by the Constitution, but I take it that one may yet take
torture and punishment, if he pays for it. All that I have ever
done, been or thought has been revealed--probed for, and found
out. ...
Truly, this is the most scientifically organized organization of
scientists that ever was. Henry Ford could not improve upon it.
Combine him with M. Pasteur, add a touch of one Edison, and a dose
of your friend, Charlie Schwab, and you have the Mayo Clinic, big,
systematized, modernized, machinized, doctorial plant, run by a
couple of master workmen. I am seeing it all, and am prepared for
any fate. Thus far I am no more than twenty-one years of age. My
organs seem to be working union hours and to react with proper
promptitude, self-respect and authority. Tomorrow I am to be
photographed and fluoroscoped--and then will come the verdict. If
it is the guillotine I shall go gaily, like one of your ancestors
in those tumbril days of France. What I fear is an order to
"rest," on a new diet. But I guess whatever is said will be the
last word--the Supreme Court decision. Fine reputation, that, for
two young chaps who never went to Harvard, eh, what?
Well, tell me the news. You have been silent too long. I long to
know of your further adventures in politics with one G. White. ...
And now, my dear Lathrop, may I extend to you the greetings of the
New Year. May you have a continuous and abiding and keen sense
that you are doing good, likewise doing well.
F. K. L.
To Mrs. George Ehle
Rochester, Minnesota, January, [1921]
It is only a little below freezing. The sky is grey. Snow, hard
and frozen over, covers the ground, sleighs go through the
streets, jingling their merry way. Boys throw each other down upon
the encrusted snow. Girls in red woolen caps pick their way
cautiously. Farm horses drawing sleds make their heavy way. And in
these sleds, families sitting on the heaped straw in the bed of
the wooden box, smiling mothers and happy babies, lined up
together, warm, protected from the wind. Trees outlined against
the sky, looking like dark coral rising out of a sea of snow into
the dull light. An old man, gaunt, bewhiskered, trudges along
confidently although he looks over eighty. A younger man,
evidently a stranger, feels his cautious way over the slippery
walk, covered with furs, hands, head, and body. After him a still
younger man, without an overcoat--a postman.
Can you see it all? Do you recognize the picture? Was it once part
of your life? This world is not so very bad when nature challenges
every one to fight for life. Nothing doing for me now! That's the
word. Too much risk. ...
Bless you, Lady Dear of the Understanding Eye. May we yet meet
upon the gentle banks of the Shepaug and there make medicine for
our poetic souls.
Anne has been a trump through these ten days of anxiety. Yours
affectionately,
F. K. L.
To Mrs. William Phillips
Rochester, Minnesota, January 11, [1921]
The black cat, yellow-eyes, came, dear Lady Caroline--came to me
here in a hospital and I put him on my table alongside my tiny
bust of Lincoln, which is the sacred place. I wish indeed those
eyes could see within this shell of mine and tell what it is that
twists my heart, physically turns it on its axis, so that its
polarity is changed. From mystery to mystery we have traveled the
past year, Anne, with her unfaltering trust, and I, a doubting
Thomas. We came here for an operation, but the doctors somewhat
doubt its wisdom at all, certainly not now, when pneumonia might
befall. So after ten hard days of closest examination I go forth
from this, the Supreme Court of Surgery in the Land, with no
decision. "Wait and see what good it has done to live without