The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
I had opened my eyes. "I had not died." I had come through the
Valley.
"I wonder what he got."
In the broad part of the ray was my wife smiling, and stretching
out to that unreachable door were others whom I recognized, all
smiling. Things were dim, but my mind seemed definite.
"What did he get?" I had expected eternal mysteries to be
unraveled. Either I would know, or not know, and I would not know
that I would not know.
"He got a gall-bladder filled with stones and a bad appendix, and
now you are to lie still."
Then to this the drama had come, the drama beyond all dramas--a
handful of brownish secretions and a couple of pieces of morbid
flesh!! Ah me!
I am doing well, cared for well, as happy as can be; have had none
of my angina pains since the operation. And as I lie here, I
contemplate [making] a frieze--a procession of doctors and nurses
and internes, of diagnosticians and technicians and experts and
mechanics and servitors and cooks--all, the great and the small,
in profile. They are to look like those who have made their
pretenses before me during the past year;--the solemn and the
stupid; the kindly, the reckless; the offhand; the erudite, the
practical; the many men with tubes and the many men with
electrical machines. Old Esculapius must begin the procession but
the Man with the Knife, regnant, heroic size, must end it.
What a great thing, what a pride, to have the two men of greatest
constructive imagination and courage in surgery in the world as
Americans, Dr. Charles and Dr. Will Mayo.
To Alexander Vogelsang
Rochester, Minnesota, May 14, [1921]
This is a line by my own hand, dear Aleck, just to show you that I
am still this much master of myself. ...
I am going through much pain. Inside I am a great boil. But Nature
is doing all she can, and I am helping. They think me a right
model sort of patient, for I made a showing of exceptional
recovery. When T.R. shaved the day after, I said, "Hip Hip!" Well,
I done it too! I guess as how I haven't been so very bad a boy all
these fifty-seven years or I couldn't play as good as "par" at
this game, and they say they have no better record than mine on
the books.
The National Geographic Society did a nice thing. Today I got a
resolution of the most sympathetic kind from them. Some gentlemen
still alive, eh?
I dictated a bit of a thing about my experience the other day to
Cotter--something to send off to the chaps who wrote or wired--and
sent you one. I hope it wasn't soft or slobby. Did you think it
was all right to come from a sick bed?
It will be three weeks or more yet of hospital, and then much of
recuperation. But I have no complaint. I feel a faith growing in
me, and I may yet draw my sword in some good fight.
Affectionately,
FRANK
To John W. Hallowell
Rochester, Minnesota, May 14, 1921
DEAR JACK,--I've been down into the Valley since I heard from you,
but I'm up once more and with new light in my eye, new faith in my
heart, more sense of the things that count and those that don't.
And affection, love for the good thing of any kind; loyalty, even
mistaken loyalty, these are the things that the Gods treasure.
They live longest. So I turn to give you my hand, dear boy,
I was most badly infected, but I really never felt better than
when I stepped out of the auto on to the hospital steps. And it
took some nerve for me to say, "Go to it," under such
circumstances. (I am patting myself on the back a bit now.)
Well, Glory be!--that step is taken and now I must fight to get
fit. They say I am making as good a record as a boy, as to
recovery, so all my Scotch whiskies, and big cigars and late
nights with you politicians have not ruined me.
Say dear things to your Mother for me, Jack, and give greetings to
all your family.
F. K. L.
To Robert Lansing
Rochester, 14 [May, 1921]
MY DEAR LANSING,--I am disturbed because you may be disturbed. As
I lie in bed I read and am read to, and some of the papers do not
treat you decently. The very ones that were loudest in their
declarations against W. W. at every stage, now suggest that you
might have quit his service if you didn't like it. I hope it will
not get under your skin ...
What comfort you would have given the enemy if you had resigned!
Have they thought of that? I came to the brink when the President
blew up my coal agreement to save three or four hundred million
dollars for the people, But I was stopped by the thought, "Give no
comfort to Berlin." ... Good night and good luck.
F.K.L.
Manuscript fragment written May 17, 1921, and found in his room.
Franklin K. Lane died May 18, 1921.
And if I had passed into that other land, whom would I have
sought--and what should I have done?
No doubt, first of all I would have sought the few loved ones
whose common life with me had given us matter for talk, and whom I
had known so well that I had loved dearly. Then perhaps there
might have [been] some gratifying of a cheap curiosity, some
searching and craning after the names that had been sierras along
my skyline. But I know now there would have been little of that.
It would not have been in me to have gone about asking Alexander
and Cromwell little questions. For what would signify the trifle
which made a personal fortune, that put a new name up upon some
pilaster men bowed to as they passed? Were Aristotle there,
holding in his hand the strings and cables that tied together all
the swinging and surging and lagging movements of the whole
earth's life--an informed, pregnant Aristotle,--Ah! there would be
the man to talk with! What satisfaction to see him take, like
reins from between his fingers the long ribbons of man's life and
trace it through the mystifying maze of all the wonderful
adventure of his coming up. The crooked made straight. The
'Daedalian plan' simplified by a look from above--smeared out as
it were by the splotch of some master thumb that made the whole
involuted, boggling thing one beautiful, straight line. And one
could see, as on a map of ocean currents, the swing and movements
of a thousand million years. I think that I would not expect that
he could tell the reason why the way began, nor where it would
end. That's divine business, yet for the free-going of the mind it
would lend such impulse, to see clearly. Thus much for curiosity!
The way up which we've stumbled.
But for my heart's content in that new land, I think I'd rather
loaf with Lincoln along a river bank. I know I could understand
him. I would not have to learn who were his friends and who his
enemies, what theories he was committed to, and what against. We
could just talk and open out our minds, and tell our doubts and
swap the longings of our hearts that others never heard of. He
wouldn't try to master me nor to make me feel how small I was. I'd
dare to ask him things and know that he felt awkward about them,
too. And I would find, I know I would, that he had hit his shin
just on those very stumps that had hit me. We'd talk of men a lot,
the kind they call the great. I would not find him scornful. Yet
boys that he knew in New Salem would somehow appear larger in
their souls, than some of these that I had called the great. His
wise eyes saw qualities that weighed more than smartness. Yes, we
would sit down where the bank sloped gently to the quiet stream
and glance at the picture of our people, the negroes being
lynched, the miners' civil war, labor's hold ups, employers'
ruthlessness, the subordination of humanity to industry,--
THE END