The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political Part 38

MY DEAR DR. SHAW,--I have your letter of March 4th. The thing that a democracy is short on is foresight. We do not have enough men like the General Staff in Germany who can think ten and twenty years ahead. We are too much embedded and incrusted in the things that flow around us during the day, and think too little of the future.

For five, long, weary years, I have been agitating for the use of the water powers of the United States. We estimate the unused power in tens and tens of millions of horse-power. Right in New York you have in the Erie Ca.n.a.l 150,000 horse-power, and on the Niagara river you have probably a million unused. If you had a great dam across the river below the rapids we should have water power in chains, like fire horses in their stalls, that could be brought out at the time of need. But we are thinking in large figures these days, and while we used to be afraid to ask for a few hundred thousand dollars we now talk in millions, and some day we may realize that to put the cost of a week's war into power plants in the United States would be money well invested. ...

We have no law under which private capital feels justified in investing a dollar in a water power plant where public lands are involved, because the permit granted is revokable at the pleasure of the Secretary of the Interior, and capital does not enjoy the prospect of making its future returns dependent upon the good digestion of the Secretary. But if we get this bill, which I enclose, through, we will be able to handle the powers on all streams on the public lands and forests and on all navigable waters, and give a.s.surance to capital that it will be well taken care of if it makes the investment. ...

I am greatly pleased at the kind things you say about me. The longer I am in office the more of an appet.i.te I have for such food. Hoover [Footnote: Hoover at this time was Food Administrator.] can only commit one fatal mistake--to declare a taflfyless day. Cordially yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

To Edward J. Wheeler on February 1, 1917, he had written:--

"It is an outrage that we should have a total of nearly six million acres of land withdrawn for oil, three million for phosphates, and one million for water power sites, potash, etc., and allow session after session of Congress to pa.s.s without producing any legislation that will sensibly open these reserves to development. The extreme conservationists, who are really for holding the lands indefinitely in the Federal Government and unopened, and the extreme anti-conservationists, who are for turning all the public lands over to the States, have stood for years against a rational system of national development."

Although a great part of the energy of the Department of the Interior was, of necessity, diverted to forward war enterprises and to supply war necessities--chemical, metallurgical, statistical--Lane steadily pressed forward the conduct of the normal activities of the department. In his report for the year 1918, he briefly summarizes this work,--"The distribution, survey, and cla.s.sification of our national lands; the care of the Indian wards of the Nation, their education, and the development of their vast estate; the carrying forward of our reclamation projects; the awarding and issuance of patents to inventors; the construction of the Alaskan railroad and the supervision of the Territorial affairs of Alaska and Hawaii; the payment of pensions to Army and Navy veterans and their dependents; the promotion of education; the custody and management of the national parks; the conservation of the lives of those who work in mines, and the study and guidance of the mining and metallurgical industries."

To Walter H. Page

Was.h.i.+ngton, March 16, 1918

My dear Mr. Amba.s.sador,--I am the poorest of all living correspondents, in fact, I am a dead correspondent. I do not function. If it had not been so I would long since have answered your notes, which have been in my basket, but I have had no time for any personal correspondence, much as I delight in it, for I have a very old-fas.h.i.+oned love for writing from day to day what pops into my mind, contradicting each day what I said the day before, and gathering from my friends their impressions and their spirit the same way. For the first time in three months I have leisure enough ... to acknowledge a few of the acc.u.mulated personal letters.

Let me give you a glimpse of my day, just to compare it with your own and by way of contrasting life in two different spheres and on different sides of the ocean. I get to my office at nine in the morning and my day is broken up into fifteen-minute periods, during which I see either my own people or others. I really write none of my own letters, [Footnote: This referred to routine letters.] simply telling my secretaries whether the answer should be "yes" or "no." I lunch at my own desk and generally with my wife, who has charge of our war work in the Department. We have over thirteen hundred men who have gone out of this Department into the Army. ... My day is broken into by Cabinet meeting twice a week, meeting of the Council of National Defense twice a week, and latterly with long sessions every afternoon over the question of what railroad wages should be.

My office is a sort of place of last resort for those who are discouraged elsewhere, for Was.h.i.+ngton is no longer a city of set routine and fixed habit. It is at last the center of the nation.

New York is no longer even the financial center. The newspapers are edited from here. Society centers here. All the industrial chiefs of the nation spend most of their time here. It is easier to find a great cattle king or automobile manufacturer or a railroad president or a banker at the Sh.o.r.eham or the Willard Hotel than it is to find him in his own town. The surprising thing is that these great men who have made our country do not loom so large when brought to Was.h.i.+ngton and put to work. ... Every day I find some man of many millions who has been here for months and whose movements used to be a matter of newspaper notoriety, but I did not know, even, that he was here. I leave my office at seven o'clock, not having been out of it during the day except for a Cabinet or Council meeting, take a wink of sleep, change my clothes and go to a dinner, for this, as you will remember, is the one form of entertainment that Was.h.i.+ngton has permitted itself in the war. The dinners are Hooverized,--three courses, little or no wheat, little or no meat, little or no sugar, a few serve wine.

And round the table will always be found men in foreign uniforms, or some missionary from some great power who comes begging for boats or food. These dinners used to be places of great gossip, and chiefly anti-administration gossip, but the spirit of the people is one of unequaled loyalty. The Republicans are as glad to have Wilson as their President as are the Democrats, I think sometimes a little more glad, because many of the Democrats are disgruntled over patronage or something else. The women are ferocious in their hunt for spies, and their criticism is against what they think is indifference to this danger. Boys appear at these dinners in the great houses, because of their uniforms, who would never have been permitted even to come to the front door in other days, for all are potential heroes. Every woman carries her knitting, and it is seldom that you hear a croaker even among the most luxurious cla.s.s. Well, the dinner is over by half past ten, and I go home to an hour and a half's work, which has been sent from the office, and fall at last into a more or less troubled sleep. This is the daily round.

I have not been to New York since the war began. I made one trip across the continent speaking for the Liberty Loan, day and night.

And this life is pretty much the life of all of us here. The President keeps up his spirits by going to the theatre three or four times a week. There are no official functions at the White House, and everybody's teeth are set. The Allies need not doubt our resolution. England and France will break before we will, and I do not doubt their steadfast purpose. It is, as you said long ago, their fault that this war has come, for they did not realize the kind of an enemy they had, either in spirit, purpose, or strength. But we will increasingly strengthen that western gate so that the Huns will not break through.

We do things fast here, but I never realized before how slow we are in getting started. It takes a long time for us to get a new stride. I did not think that this was true industrially. I have known that it was true politically for a long time, because this was the most backward and most conservative of all the democracies. We take up new machinery of government so slowly. But industrially it is also true. When told to change step we s.h.i.+ft and stumble and halt and hesitate and go through all kinds of awkward misses. This has been true as to s.h.i.+ps and aeroplanes and guns, big and little, and uniforms. Whatever the government has done itself has been tied by endless red tape. It is hard for an army officer to get out of the desk habit, and caution, conservatism, sureness, seem even in time of crisis to be more important than a bit of daring. In my Department, I figure that it takes about seven years for the nerve of initiative and the nerve of imagination to atrophy, and so, perhaps, it is in other departments. It took five months for one of our war bureaus to get out a contract for a building that we were to build for them.

Fifteen men had to sign the contract. And of course we have been impatient. But things are bettering every day. The men in the camps are very impatient to get away. But where are the s.h.i.+ps to do all the work? The Republicans cannot chide us with all of the unpreparedness, for they stood in the way of our getting s.h.i.+ps three years ago. The G.o.ds have been against us in the way of weather so we have not brought down our supplies to the seaboard, but we have not had the s.h.i.+ps to take away that which was there; or coal, sometimes, for the s.h.i.+ps.

From now, however, you will see a steadier, surer movement of men, munitions, food, and s.h.i.+ps. The whole country is solidly, strongly with the President. There are men in Congress bitterly against him but they do not dare to raise their voices, because he has the people so resolutely with him. The Russian overthrow has been a good thing for us in one way. It will cost us perhaps a million lives, but it will prove to us the value of law and order. We are to have our troubles, and must change our system of life in the next few years.

A great oil man was in the office the other day and told me in a plain, matter-of-fact way, what must be done to win--the sacrifices that must be made--and he ended by saying, "After all, what is property?" This is a very pregnant question. It is not being asked in Russia alone. Who has the right to anything? My answer is, not the man, necessarily, who has it, but the man who can use it to good purpose. The way to find the latter man is the difficulty.

We will have national woman suffrage, national prohibition, continuing inheritance tax, continuing income tax, national life insurance, an increasing grip upon the railroads, their finances and their operation as well as their rates. Each primary resource, such as land and coal and iron and copper and oil, we will more carefully conserve. There will be no longer the opportunity for the individual along these lines that there has been. Industry must find some way of profit-sharing or it will be nationalized.

These things, however, must be regarded as incidents now; and the labor people, those with vision and in authority, are very willing to postpone the day of accounting until we know what the new order is to be like.

Well, I have rambled on, giving you a general look--in on my mind.

Don't let any of those people doubt the President, or doubt the American people. This is the very darkest day that we have seen.

But we believe in ourselves and we believe in our own kind, and believe in a something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,--slowly, stumblingly, but, as the centuries go, surely.

I have not yet seen the Archbishop of York. He has not been here.

But he has made a most favorable impression where he has been, and so have the English labor people.

Poor Spring-Rice did good work here. Was.h.i.+ngton felt very sad over his death, and is expecting that England will evidence her appreciation of the fact that he did nothing to estrange us by the way in which his widow is treated.

Reading has been received and fits in perfectly. With warm regards, as always, Cordially yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

To John Lyon Machine Gun Company Camp McClennen, Alabama

Was.h.i.+ngton, March 15,1918

MY DEAR JOHN,--I know how you must feel. Every particle of my own nature rebels against the horror of this war, or of any war, and against the dragooning by military men. I had rather die now and take my chances of h.e.l.l, than doom myself and Ned and those who are to come after, to living under a government which is as this government is now and as all governments must be now,--autocratic, governed by orders and commands. But this is the game, and we have got to play it, play it hard and play it through. Manifestly we cannot quit as Russia did without getting Russia's ill-fortune.

There was a great empire of a hundred and eighty million people.

They mobilized twenty-five million men. Six million of them are dead. The Czar was overthrown, a new government was set up, one of conservative socialism, and that was swept aside and a group of impractical socialists put in its stead, and where is Russia now?

Broken to bits, its population dying of hunger, its industries unworked, its soil untilled, and Germany coming on with her great feet, stamping down the few who are brave enough to interpose themselves between Germany and her end. If we were to quit, Germany would do to us, or try to do to us, what she has done to Russia.

If there ever was a real defensive war it is the one that we are engaged in, and we must sacrifice, and sacrifice, and sacrifice, not merely for the world's sake but for our own sake. Ned is in France. He went through England. He tells me that everybody is serious, solemn, purposeful. They would rather all die than live under Germany's mastery of the world.

The President is being bitterly criticized because he has taken every opportunity to talk of terms and of ways out, but I think he is right. He must make the people of the world feel that we are not foolishly, and in a headstrong way, fighting to get anything for ourselves or for anybody else, except the chance to live our own lives. And we will show these Germans something. Our capacity to produce aeroplanes is still altogether unrealized, and we will have great guns a few feet apart along the entire front. We can bomb German harbors where submarines are, and are made--that's the work that Ned is going in for,--and we will hold that western line until every resource is exhausted. And we will go through it one of these days, perhaps not this year. But we must go through it or else American s.h.i.+ps will live on the sea by consent of Germany, and Canada will become German territory. This is no dream. Give Germany Paris and Calais and she can exact terms from England. Why should she not ask for Canada? And give Germany Canada and what becomes of the United States? An army of Germans on our border, 5,000,000 men in arms in the United States always, the army and navy budget taking thirty or forty per cent of every man's income. Who wants to live in such a country? We are fighting the greatest war that history has ever seen, not merely in numbers but in principle. We are fighting to get rid of the most hateful survivals from the past. The overlord, the brusque and arrogant soldier, is the dominating factor in society and the government, the turning of men's thoughts away from the pursuit of the things of art and beauty and social beneficence into the one channel of making everything serve the military arm of the nation.

This will be a better world for the poor man when all is over. We must forget our dreams, what our own individual lives would have been, and with dash, and cheer, and courage, and willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice, set our jaws and go forward. The devil is in the saddle and we must pull him down, or else he will rule the world,--and you are to have a tug at his coat. And I envy you. I'd take your place in a minute, if I could. Remember that you are an individualist, not a collectivist naturally, but individuals are of no use now. The war can be made only by great groups who conform. The free spirit of man will have its way once more when this b.l.o.o.d.y war is done.

I am glad you wrote me, and I want you to feel that you always can write me, whatever is in your heart, and I will give you such answer as my busy days will permit. There is only one way to look at life and get any satisfaction out of it, and that is to bow to the inevitable. We all must be fatalists to that extent, and once a course has been determined upon, accept it and make the best of it. The life of the old gambler does not consist in holding a big hand but in playing a poor hand well. You and I are no longer masters of our own fortunes. All that we can do is to abide by the set rules of the game that is being played. I would change many things, but I am powerless, and because I am powerless I must say to myself each day, "All that G.o.d demands of me is that I shall do my best," and doing that, the responsibility is cast upon that Spirit which is the Great Commander. I like to feel at these times that there is a personal G.o.d and a personal devil, and there has been no better philosophy devised than that. G.o.d is not supreme, He is not omnipotent, He has His limitations, His struggles, His defeats, but there is no life unless you believe that He ultimately must win, that this world is going upward, not downward, that the devil is to be beaten,--the devil inside of ourselves, the devil of wilfulness, of waywardness, of cynicism, and the devil that is represented by the overbearing, cruel militarism and ruthless inhumanity of Germany. You are a soldier of the Lord, just as truly as Christ was.

I send you my affectionate regards, and with it goes the confidence that you will, with good cheer and resolution, play your part. Sincerely yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

This boy died in France. Lane wrote to his father of him:--

To Frank Lyon

Was.h.i.+ngton, [November 16, 1918]

DEAR FRANK,--Have just heard. Dear, dear Boy! I was so fond of him. He had a brave adventurous spirit. Well, he has gone out gloriously. There could be no finer way to go and no better time.

I know your own strength will be equal to this test--and the wife, poor woman, she too is brave. My heart goes out to you both very really, wholly. With much affection.

FRANKLIN K. LANE

To Miss Genevieve King

Was.h.i.+ngton, March 16, 1918

MY DEAR MISS KING,--These are times of terrible strain and stress, and we cannot easily fall back upon those sources of power which seem so distant and unavailing. I like to think of you as in our last talk in the Millers' drawing room, where you had a much better opportunity to express yourself than in the one that we later had out on the porch. You then seemed to live your thought and to have the capacity for its expression. I think of you, too, up on that beautiful mountainside, where things like war and guns and bandages and hospitals and men without arms and the lack of s.h.i.+ps, the need for saying goodbye, are so remote.