The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
friends often met there and learned something of Gothic
architecture and of the abominations of slang, in spite of
themselves. With Burns, and of his firm, was Brydon Lamb, "also of
Scotch descent, but born in America, a delightful combination of
strength, sweetness and light. The simple grace of his manner, his
unhurried speech, his urbanity, captivated us all. We loved him
for what he was, and we considered him our arbiter elegantiarum"
Of Lane at that period the same friend writes, "I remember a fine,
stocky, muscular presence with a striking head. A massive,
commanding man, he was, a persuasive and compelling leader." But
none of the men had any sense of anything but complete friendly,
boyish equality. "Lane was," Pfeiffer says, "interested in human
beings, not problems, excepting as their solution might be made
serviceable to the needs of individuals. He had great tolerance
for the most unusual opinions. I don't think Lane ever had much
interest in the dogmas of science, religion, or philosophy; he
lived by the spirit of them, that cannot be expressed in formulae.
He had the peculiar sensitiveness of a poet for words, for colors
and sounds, and for moral beauty, and blended with it the
statesman's observant awareness of conditions in the world of
affairs."
At the beginning of their friendship, in 1889, Curt Pfeiffer
himself was only nineteen years old, a youth whose family had come
from Holland and Germany. He appeared in the boarding-house on
32nd near Broadway, where Burns lived, fresh from three months at
the Paris Exposition, a vacation that had followed a course of
scientific study at Zurich, Switzerland. The wonders of Paris,
a-glitter with the blaze of undreamed-of electrical beauty, and the
greater wonder of the scientific discoveries and speculations, of
the eighties, as taught at the University of Zurich, gave the
young traveler an instant place among the others. Because of his
love for exact statement and his scientific approach in
discussion, young as he was, he contributed something very real to
the group whose chief preoccupation--aside from the joy of living-
was with art, government, and literature.
They read separately, and when a book seemed intolerably good to
the discoverer, he brought it in and insisted on their reading
parts of it together. Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns,
Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on
primitive law, and Emerson! The relation of the men was almost
impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life.
Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged
but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole,
sharper angles of mental refraction--breaking the ray of truth
they sought into more of its component colors.
Pfeiffer recalls that "one Saturday night, under the influence of
reading from the Vedic Hymns, and a talk on astronomy, we went up
on the roof of our boarding-place, and observed a complete
revolution of the starry heavens, from dusk to dawn. We drifted
into talk, ... and when we finally descended to our beds on Sunday
morning, we found ourselves drenched to the skin from the
drizzling dew. We never forgot that experience, but we never
repeated it either."
His political interests brought Lane into the Reform Club where
Progress and Poverty, Henry George's new book, was the center for
discussion upon the whole problem of the distribution of taxation.
Lane and Henry George established a cordial friendship.
John Crawford Burns says that in 1889 "Lane's chief hero was
Cleveland, and his oracle Godkin, of the EVENING POST"--later, the
NATION. "When I knew him in New York he represented a San
Francisco newspaper, the CHRONICLE, I think, as correspondent. He
was not whole-heartedly in sympathy with his proprietor, nor
indeed with the sensational aspect of journalism, and he always
scoffed at the idea of newspaper writers constituting a modern
priesthood. He laughingly justified his association with the
CHRONICLE by saying he gave tone to it. For this and other
services, he received, I think, two thousand dollars a year, which
even thirty years ago did not admit of luxury and riotous living."
Lane's whole stay in New York was less than two years in length,
but the vital ideas that he shared with disinterested minds made
of this period the seed-bed for future intellectual growth.
In 1891, in spite of the delights of personal friendships, in New
York, Lane grew increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of
newspaper corresponding. He wanted a paper of his own, in which he
could express without reserve the ideals of social and political
betterment with which his mind was teeming. In this mood, the
first acclaim of the rapid growth of the pioneer towns of the far
Northwest reached him. He saw in this his opportunity, and acted
quickly and decisively. He gathered together his own savings,
borrowed from his friend, Sidney Mezes, a few more thousand
dollars and went to Tacoma, Washington, to buy the Tacoma Evening
News.
As soon as the transfer was well made, Lane threw himself
enthusiastically into the politics of the new town, already
suffering from boss rule. By his editorials he succeeded in
stirring up the City Hall, and drove into Alaskan exile the Chief
of Police--who, by the way, was said to have become immensely rich
in Alaska while Lane's paper was running into bankruptcy in
Tacoma. But Lane's misadventure was not wholly due to his civic
virtue. He had "bought in" at just the moment when the instruments
were tuning up for the prelude to the great panic crash of 1893.
Tacoma, and the whole Northwest, had been mainly developed by
casual investments of speculative Eastern capital, and this
capital, sensitive to change, was being withdrawn to meet home
needs. Investors, to protect real interests, were willing to
sacrifice their "little Western flyers," at almost any discount.
As the terminal of the new Northern Pacific Railroad, Tacoma--
lying on the bluffs overlooking the great inland sea of Puget
Sound, guardianed by the vastness of its mountain--was backed by
forests whose wealth could scarcely be exaggerated, even by
promoter's advertisements. She was noisily proclaimed to be the
"Gateway to the Orient," but trade was not yet firmly established
with the Orient, and, indeed, what was Washington's wealth of
uncut timber when the capital to develop it was slowly ebbing
Eastward?
No paper without heavy capitalization, could have sustained a
policy of political reform, when, in the picturesque vernacular of
the time and place, "the bottom had dropped out of the town." A
rival newspaper, the LEDGER, in order to retrench, began a war on
the Printers' Union, to break wages. Lane repudiated the effort
made to "rat" his paper and to force the Union out. He sustained
his men in their fight to keep the Union rate, and lent them his
presses to carry on their propaganda. In after years he said, "As
to my labor record, it is a consistent one of thirty years length,
ever since I stood by the Union in Tacoma, and went broke." Again
he wrote to an acquaintance, "I often think of the old days in
Tacoma. We were a fighting bunch, and I think most of us are
fighting for the same things that we fought for then; a little bit
more decency and less graft in affairs, and a chance for a man to
rise by ability and not by pull alone."
In April, 1893, Lane had married Anne Wintermute--he needed all
he could find of cheer in those depressing days. The whole town
was beaten to its knees by loss and fore-closure. Lane was
struggling to hold together his paper, and save his friend's
investment and his own little stake. The one bright interlude of
that time for him lay in reading, and in his new friendships. He
loved to chant aloud to a group of stranded young fellows gathered
in his rooms, in his gay trumpeting way, brave passages from the
Barrack-Room Ballads, of Kipling, that were lifting the spirits
of the English-speaking world with their freshness and daring.
Stevenson, too, with his polished optimism delighted Lane. "I can
remember," says one of the group, "just how I heard him read aloud
the last words from Stevenson's essay, Aes Triplex, in those
melancholy Tacoma days--'those happy days when we were so
miserable!'":--
"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done
good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign
it. ... Does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full
body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in
sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those
whom the Gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had
this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age
it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been
suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the
hot-fit of life, a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he
passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet
and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done
blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-
starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land."
Still believing in the good work he had meant with his whole
heart, Lane turned from the bankruptcy of his paper, sold at
auction, to write to his friend of new adventures.
To John H. Wigmore
Tacoma, October 25, 1894
MY DEAR WIGMORE,--I have not heard from you for a year. You are in
my debt at least one, and I think two, letters. I have sent you an
occasional paper, just to let you know I was alive and I am
hazarding this letter to the old address. ...
My affairs here have not prospered and I am thinking of going
somewhere else. ... Do you think Japan has anything to offer a
man such as myself? Would there be any chance there for a
newspaper run by an American? Are there any wealthy Americans
there who would be likely to put up a few thousands for such an
enterprise? ... Life is not the "giddy, reeling dream of love and
fame" that it once was, and I have decided on gathering a few
essential dollars. Now Japan may not be the place I am looking
for, ... but unless I am greatly mistaken, a man who is up on
American affairs and alive to business opportunities could do well
in Japan. But then this is all a guess, and I want you to put me
right ...
Yours very truly,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
III
LAW PRACTICE AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES 1894-1906
Law--Drafting New City Charter--Elected as City and County
Attorney--Gubernatorial Campaign--Mayoralty Campaign--Earthquake
--Appointment as Interstate Commerce Commissioner
Late in the fall of 1894 Lane returned to San Francisco and for
some months associated himself with Arthur McEwen, on Arthur
McEwen's Letter, a lively political weekly which attacked various
forms of civic corruption in San Francisco, and made an especial
target of the Southern Pacific Railroad, then in practical control
of the State.
He also formed a law partnership with his brother, George W. Lane,
under the firm name of Lane and Lane. In 1895 a curious case,
estimated as involving about sixty million dollars worth of
property, was brought to the young attorneys. The Star, of San
Francisco, described the issue at stake by saying, "One Jose Noe
and four alleged grand-children of Jose Noe appear, who pretend
that they can show a clear title to an undivided one-half interest
in nearly forty-five hundred acres within the city, on which land
reside some five thousand or more owners, mostly men of small
means."
Upon investigation Lane and his brother became convinced that the
suit had been instituted as a blackmailing scheme, in an attempt
to force the owners to pay for quit-claim deeds; they took and