Letters of Franklin K. Lane | Page 4

parts
of the country, we have attempted, in this volume, to select chiefly
those letters which tell the story of Franklin K. Lane's life as it unfolded
itself in service to his country which was his passion. A few technical
letters have been included, because they represent some incomplete and
original phases of the work he attempted,--work, to which he brought
an intensity of interest and devotion that usually is given only to private

enterprise.
In editing his letters we have omitted much, but we have in no way
changed anything that he wrote. Even where, in his haste, there has
been an obvious slip of the pen, we have left it. Owing to his dictating
to many stenographers, with their varying methods of punctuation and
paragraphing, and because the letters that he wrote himself were often
dashed off on the train, in bed, or in a hurried five minutes before some
engagement, we found in them no uniformity of punctuation. In writing
hastily he used only a frequent dash and periods; these letters we have
made agree with those which were more formally written.
With the oncoming of war his correspondence enormously increased--
the more demanded of him, the more he seemed able to accomplish.
Upon opening his files it took us weeks to run through and destroy just
the requests for patronage, for commissions, passports, appointments as
chaplains, promotions, demands from artists who desired to work on
camouflage, farmers and chemists who wished exemption, requests for
appointments to the War Department; letters asking for every kind of a
position from that of night- watchman to that of Brigadier-General. For
his friends, and even those who had no special claim upon him, knew
that they could count on his interest in them.
One of his secretaries, Joseph J. Cotter, a man he greatly trusted, in
describing his office work says: "Whatever was of human interest,
interested Mr. Lane. His researches were by no means limited to the
Department of the Interior. For instance, I remember that at one time,
before the matter had been given any consideration in any other quarter,
he asked Secretary of Agriculture Houston to come to his office, in the
Interior Department, and went with him into the question of the number
of ships it would take to transport our soldiers to the other side. And as
a result of this conference, a plan was laid before the Secretary of War.
I remember this particularly because it necessitated my looking up
dead-weight tonnage, and other matters, with which I was entirely
unfamiliar. ...
"I have never known any one who could with equal facility follow an
intricate line of thought through repeated interruptions. I have seen Mr.
Lane, when interrupted in the middle of an involved sentence of
dictation, talk on some other subject for five or ten minutes and return
to his dictation, taking it up where he left it and completing the

sentence so that it could be typed as dictated, and this without the
stenographer's telling him at what point he had been interrupted."
His letters are peculiarly autobiographical, for whenever his active
mind was engaged on some personal, political, or philosophical
problem, his thought turned naturally to that friend with whom he
would most like to discuss the subject, and, if he could possibly make
the time, to him he wrote just what thoughts raced through his mind. To
Ambassador Page he wrote in 1918, "I have a very old-fashioned 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 in the same way." And in another letter he
says, "Now I have gossiped, and preached, and prophesied, and
mourned, and otherwise revealed what passes through a wandering
mind in half an hour, so I send you at the close of this screed, my
blessing, which is a poor gift."
At home on Sunday morning before the fire, he would often write
many letters--some of them twenty pages in length and some mere
scrappy notes. He wrote with a pencil on a pad on his knee, rapidly
stripping off the sheets for me to read, in his desire to share all that was
his, even his innermost thoughts.
To the many correspondents who have generously returned to me their
letters, and with no restrictions as to their use, I wish particularly to
express here my profound gratitude. The limits of one volume have
made it possible to use only a part of those received, deeply as I have
regretted the necessity of omitting any of them. In making these
acknowledgments I wish especially to thank John H. Wigmore, since to
him we owe all the early letters-- the only ones covering that