Letters of Franklin K. Lane | Page 7

1888. Admitted to the Bar. 1889.
Special Newspaper Correspondent in New York for San Francisco
Chronicle. 1891. Bought interest in Tacoma News and edited that paper.
1892. Campaigned in New York for Cleveland. 1893. Married. 1895.
Returned to California. Practiced law. 1897-98. On Committee of One
Hundred to draft new Charter for San Francisco. 1898. Elected City and
County Attorney to interpret new Charter. 1899. Reelected City and
County Attorney. 1901. Reelected City and County Attorney. 1902.
Nominated for Governor of California on Democratic and Non-Partisan
Tickets. 1903. Democratic vote in Legislature for United States Senator.

1903. Nominated for Mayor of San Francisco. 1905. December.
Nominated by President Roosevelt as Interstate Commerce
Commissioner. 1906. June 29. Confirmed by Senate as Interstate
Commerce Commissioner. 1909. Reappointed by President Taft as
Interstate Commerce Commissioner. 1913. Appointed Secretary of the
Interior under President Wilson. 1916. Chairman American-Mexican
Joint Commission. 1918. Chairman Railroad Wage Commission. 1919.
Chairman Industrial Conference. 1920. March 1. Resigned from the
Cabinet. 1920. Vice-President of Pan-American Petroleum Company.
1921. May 18. Died at Rochester, Minnesota.

FAMILY NAMES
Franklin K. Lane was the eldest of four children. Father: Christopher S.
Lane. Mother: Caroline Burns. Brothers: George W. Lane. Frederic J.
Lane. Sister: Maude (Mrs. M. A. Andersen). He was married to Anne
Wintermute, and had two children: Franklin K. Lane, Jr. ("Ned").
Nancy Lane (Mrs. Philip C. Kauffmann).

THE LETTERS OF FRANKLIN K. LANE

I
INTRODUCTION
Youth--Education--Characteristics
Although Franklin Knight Lane was only fifty-seven years old when he
died, May 18, 1921, he had outlived, by many years, the men and
women who had most influenced the shaping of his early life. Of his
mother he wrote, in trying to comfort a friend, "The mystery and the
ordering of this world grows altogether inexplicable. ... It requires far
more religion or philosophy than I have, to say a real word that might
console one who has lost those who are dear to him. Ten years ago my
mother died, and I have never been reconciled to her loss." Again he
wrote of her, to his sister, when their brother Frederic--the joyous,
outdoor comrade of his youth--was in his last illness, "Dear Fritz, dear,
dear boy, how I wish I could be there with him, though I could do no
good. ... Each night I pray for him, and I am so much of a Catholic, that
I pray to the only Saint I know, or ever knew, and ask her to help. If she

lives, her mind can reach the minds of the doctors. ... I don't need her to
intercede with God, but I would like her to intercede with men. Why,
Oh! why, do we not know whether she is or not? Then all the Universe
would be explained to me."
From those who knew him best from childhood, no word of him is left,
and none from the two men whose strength and ideality colored his
morning at the University of California--Dr. George H. Howison, the
"darling Howison" of the William James' Letters, and Dr. Joseph H. Le
Conte, the wise and gentle geologist. "Names that were Sierras along
my skyline," Lane said of such men. To Dr. Howison he wrote in 1913,
when entering President Wilson's Cabinet, "No letter that I have ever
received has given me more real pleasure than yours, and no man has
been more of an inspiration than you."
The sealing of almost every source of intimate knowledge of the boy,
who was a mature man at twenty-two, has left the record of the early
period curiously scant. Fortunately, there are in his letters and speeches
some casual allusions to his childhood and youth, and a few facts and
anecdotes of the period from members of his family, from school,
college, and early newspaper associates. In 1888, the story begins to
gather form and coherence, for at that date we have the first of his own
letters that have been preserved, written to his lifelong friend, John H.
Wigmore. With many breaks, especially in the early chapters, the
sequence of events, and his moods toward them, pour from him with
increasing fullness and spontaneity, until the day before he died.
All the later record exists in his letters, most of them written almost as
unconsciously as the heart sends blood to the remotest members of the
body; and they come back, now, in slow diastole, bearing within
themselves evidence of the hour and day and place of their inception;
letters written with the stub of a pencil on copy-paper, at some
sleepless dawn; or, long ago, in the wide- spaced type of a primitive
traveling typewriter, and dated, perhaps, on the Western desert, while
he was on his way to secure water for thirsty settlers; or dashed off in
the glowing moment