The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
MY DEAR LATHROP,--I have yours of the eleventh. First question, as
to men and women for the Executive Committee,
Answer: Get men who can make a program, something that the party
can push, outside Congress, if too cowardly in. People who don't
want anything, if possible.
Think of these! (I don't say they will do, but they stand for
something.)
Charles W. Eliot. Benjamin Ide Wheeler. (Ex-President of the
University of California. Ex-Chairman, Democratic Committee,
Elmira, New York.) E. M. House. Frank L Cobb. John W. Davis.
Robert Lansing. R. Walton Moore. (Congressman from Virginia, big
fellow.) Gavin McNab. Governor Parker, of Louisiana. James D.
Phelan. Van-Lear Black.
For solid thought I'd choose out of that bunch--Eliot and Moore.
For cleverness--Black and McNab. For diplomacy--House and Davis.
For progressiveness--House and Parker. For Conservative Democracy
--Wheeler and Lansing. For writing ability--Cobb and Eliot.
I know no women who think, particularly. ...
The kind of publicity we need is the advocacy by the National
Committee, and by Democrats in Congress of first class measures,
known to be Democratic measures, part of a program.
I'll tell you how to get all the publicity you want when I see
you--or White--a new kind, cheap, but requiring brains. ...
F. K L.
To Lathrop Brown
Los Angeles, January, [1921]
DEAR LATHROP,--(1) You are right as to standardization. The Devil
devised it as a highway to socialism. It is the Bible of the great
Tribe of Flatfoot, not for artists like you and myself. And
speaking of programs, please read what Wells says in his first
volume of Outline of History, on David, Solomon, Moses. It will
delight your anti-semitic soul. ...
Yes, standardization is like all else, good--for a distance. The
whole bally outfit of life is a matter of balance, maintained by
war among the unintelligent bacilli and other primitives, and by
will among men (goat feed for men, eh?) But do you get my point?
Something to it!
(2) George White will be eaten up first thing he knows, unless he
moves. Your friend McAdoo is here declining the next nomination
daily, speaking much, and, I understand, well. ... Why doesn't G.
W. get Frank Cobb and Hooker, of the Springfield Republican, and
Van-Lear Black, and Senator Walsh, and Phelan, and Congressman
Walton Moore together, or any other group, and put up his plan and
ask them what they think of it tentatively,--just a quiet chat,
but start.
He doesn't need to resign, if he can get someone as a quiet
organizer "who will give all his time" to take up that job under
him, with sub-organizers. Who is this genius who can organize
inorganic matter, and give it life? Thought He was dead sometime!
"Wanted--A Miracle Man who can overcome a majority of seven
million votes with a hearty handshake and a warm brown eye. Need
have no program, no money. Must be a hypnotist who can make the
people forget a few things and believe a few things that are not
true. Must be able by reciting poetry to make the cunning
capitalist see that he is safer in the hands of the Democrats than
elsewhere, and at the same time educate the worker by a pass of
the hand to know that it is decent to stay bought. Must have
received the Gift of Tongues on the Day of Pentecost, so as to
talk Yiddish, in New York; Portuguese and Gaelic, in
Massachusetts; Russian and German, in Chicago; Scandinavian, in
the Northwest; Cotton and Calhoun, in the South; John Brown and
wheat, in Kansas; gold and Murphy, on 14th Street; and translate
Jesus Christ into Bolshevism, Individualism, Capitalism, Lodgeism,
Wilsonism! Must be as honest as old Cleveland and as clear of
purpose as Abraham Lincoln."
Put this want ad. in the papers and send me, by freight car, the
replies. With my warmest,
F. K. L.
To Adolph C. Miller
Los Angeles, January 26, [1921]
DEAR ADOLPH,--I see that Harding [Footnote: Governor Harding of
the Federal Reserve Board--a rumor of resignation.] is to leave
you, and this is a note of sympathy. What will you do? Poor chap!
I know the satisfaction you have had out of working with him and
now he follows Warburg, Delano, and Strauss. By Jove, that's why
we can't make things go as other countries do--because we can't
give our people enough to live on. This is at once the meanest and
most generous of Republics. Mean collectively, generous
individually.
He will wait until after March 4th. "Right oh!" I expect you to
have some say as to his successor, especially as to the new
Governor. And if you can't work with the new man you can lift your
skirts and skip! Freedom of movement, assured as to all by Adam
Smith, is exclusively the prerogative of the fortunate few. Don't
be downhearted! You can't be as badly off as you were for several
years. Just think how unlucky I am as compared with you, and pat
yourself on the back and take one of the old time struts. Good
belly! Good brains! Good pocket-book! Good friends near you! Good
dog to walk with in the woods--and woods in which you can walk!
Good house, with your own books to look at you friendly-like. Oh
boy, rejoice and be glad!
February 17, [1921]
We are most terribly disappointed. Your promised visit was a
bright spot,--a sunshiny place--to which we have looked forward as
to nothing else since we came here. Well, life is a series of such
jars, and child-like I submit, but am not reconciled.
... Are you coming later? How is Mary? We really seem far away
from our friends. The land is beautiful, but friends convert a
shack into a palace, a desert into a heaven.
F. K. L.
To John G. Gehring
Pasadena, near Paradise, February 18
Before breakfast this morning, indeed before dressing, I sent you
a message which was a combined confession, apologia, report, and
appeal. I said, "I have done wrong, I apologize, I am slightly
better, and I hope and pray you will not become downhearted." I
also promised to write and here I am at it. But you would have had
this letter just as early anyway, for this morning was to be yours
and mine. All other mornings for two weeks and more have belonged
to someone else. I have been pretending to work, by going to the
office each day. And last night I said good-bye to the Napoleon of
our institution, who took his private car and rolled away to
Mexico, to Galyeston first, thence by private yacht to Tampico,
there to see his properties and spend two or three weeks.
... They desired us to go greatly, and ours would have been every
possible comfort that one can have while traveling, ... but the
tyrant Anne thought that as I was picking up a bit it was wrong to
change conditions, and I yielded, hardly against my judgment, but
strongly against my desire.
So here I am, the first hour after release, sitting on the porch
of a villa, looking across a valley at amethyst mountains, crowned
with a sprinkling of blue and white snow. The noises that come to
me are not raucous;--the twitter of birds, a rooster crowing, a
well-pump throbbing its heart out, the shouts of some children at
play, a distant school bell, with no silver in its alloy, however,
the swish of a wood-sawing machine in some back-yard. So my ears
are not lonesome. Immediately before me is the gray-lavender bole
of a tall eucalyptus, not a leaf or branch for fifty feet, and
then a drooping cascade of blue-green feathers. Beyond it a few
feet a red-blue eucalyptus, sturdy, branching almost at the ground
and in blossom. These stand near the border of a drive which is
marked by a cypress hedge, trimmed and proper, and beyond the
drive, on the front of the terrace are magnolia and iron-wood and
avocado and palm and spruce, rising up out of beds of carnations
and geraniums, jasmine and pansies (all violet), and cherokee
roses, five-petaled, white with golden centers, and rose colored--
(the wild rose with a university education, a year or two in
Italy, and the care of a good maid). While beyond this terrace are
orange, and tangerine, and lemon, and grapefruit with their green,
yellow, and deep red-golden fruit pendant; and still further on, a
fringe of blossoming pear trees tell you that this is not the
tropics after all. The breeze is a gentle woman's hand, a soft
touch, kindly, tender, emotional, but not disturbing. It is not
lotus-eating time. I don't know that that time ever comes here.
Autos whisk through the woods, buildings are going up, the air is
dry and has tang; it has challenge in it, but it does not give off
the heady champagne of the air that the snow breathes out on your
Millbrook hillside.
I remember as I looked from my window at the sunset at Bethel
saying to myself, "Can there be any fairer spot than this?" And
this morning as I saw the sun rise into the pink and blue of the
sky, empurpling the shadowed hills and splashing rose leaves on
the snowy mountains, I again said "Is there anything lovelier,
anywhere?" Great blessing, these catholic eyes! Should the heart
be equally catholic? There is a real problem in philosophy and
sociology for you!
And now that you know how happily circumstanced I am as to
environment your doctorial demand is for something as to the
behavior of the organs and nerves which we call the physical man.
Well, I can't tell you much. I do not rise and walk half a block
without that trigger being pulled, but the explosion is not
dynamite, rather poor black powder, I should say. If I walk half a
dozen blocks I stop a half a dozen times, and once or twice nibble
at a precious pellet of nitro. At night I am wakened as of yore,
but the agonizing, crushing pains do not come every night. ... I
eat prunes and bran biscuit and coffee for breakfast; a bit of
cooked fruit (and that in this land of oranges and alligator pears
and ripe raspberries!), chicken and green peas, and bran biscuit
and tea for lunch; a couple of green vegetables and bran biscuit
and a small black, for dinner. And all this I write with a supreme
sense of virtue, which Simon Stylites or St. Benedict could not
more than parallel. As to smoking--a pipe, generous in size but of
the mildest possible tobacco, after breakfast. A mild, large cigar
after lunch, and pause here and worship--no cigar after dinner.
(But this latter is a Lenten innovation. I would not have you
think I am preparing for immediate ascension.)
As to treatment, an osteopath and a Christian Scientist are my
present complement. Each morning the former, and each evening the
latter. The former to gratify myself, the latter to gratify a dear
friend who "believed and was saved." The osteo is rational, the C.
S., with limitations and reservations. ...
The C. S. is a woman, the sister of an artist I used to know. If
she did not ask or expect that I believe certain things, we would
get on better. I can believe in God as the Principle of Life, that
seems scientific. I am willing to call Him Spirit, that is
Christian. That He is Supreme in the Universe, I admit. That sin
and sickness may with further light be overmastered I do not deny;
physical death, of course, seems to me a thing not worth bothering
about. But that God is all good, I cannot asseverate in the living
presence of a few Devils whom I know, unless I deny that He is
omnipresent and omnipotent, or unless I say that Bad is Good. God
cannot be good and all powerful without being also responsible for
Bad, and therefore be both Good and Bad. This I can believe, and
it brings me to Emerson's transcendentalism, which is set forth in
the Sphinx--"Deep Love lieth under these pictures of Time, which
fade in the light of their meaning sublime." In a word we are
growing into the Good. The Bad is not the ultimate, but is none
the less real. This is better than Manicheism, the Miltonian
contest between the Good Spirit and the Bad, which Wells also in