San Francisco, May 10, 1889
... I am coming nearer to you. On Monday I leave to take up my residence in New York, as correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. I do not know where I will be located, but mail addressed to me at the Hoffman House will reach me when I arrive, which will be in about ten days.
My purpose is to breathe a new atmosphere for a while so that I may broaden. We must make arrangements soon to meet. I want to know your New York reform friends. ...
New York, June 21, 1889
... This lapse of a couple of weeks means that I have been enjoying the delights of a New York summer, in which only slaves work and many of these find refuge in suicide. ...
Not a single reformer, big or little, have I yet met. Your friend Bishop [Footnote: Joseph Bucklin Bishop, editor of Theodore Roosevelt and His Time.] I have not called on, though I have twice started to do so, and have been switched off. ... I will go within a couple of days for the spirit must be revived. One day early in this week I had an intense desire to visit you immediately and was almost on the verge of letting things go and rush off, but duty held me. ...
I see that Bellamy has captured Higginson, Savage, and others and that they are going to work over the Kinsley-Maurice business. Well, I would to God it would work. Something to make life happier and steadier for these poor women and men who toil and never get beyond a piece of meat and a cot! There is justification here for a social-economic revolution and it will come, too, if things are not bettered.
If you have a stray thought let me know it and soon.
Your friend,
F. K. L.
Lane's desire for stimulating companionship in New York was quickly gratified. A spontaneous association of friendships, based upon a young delight in life and a vast curiosity of the mind, sprang up among a little group of men of very diverse types. All were strangers in New York with no immediate home ties. "Women played no part in our lives," one of them recalls. "We came together to discuss plays, poetry, politics, anything and everything--the great actors, comic operas, the songs of the streets, science, politics." John Crawford Burns, Lane, Brydon Lamb, Curt Pfeiffer formed the nucleus of what spread out irregularly into larger groupings.
John Crawford Burns, who was slightly older than the rest, a purist, and something of a "dour Scot," was a man of conservative and cultivated tastes and the dean of the group. He was in a business house that imported linens, and lived in a "glorious room with two outside windows, and ample seating capacity," so the friends often met there and learned something of Gothic architecture and of the abominations of slang, in spite of themselves. With Burns, and of his firm, was Brydon Lamb, "also of Scotch descent, but born in America, a delightful combination of strength, sweetness and light. The simple grace of his manner, his unhurried speech, his urbanity, captivated us all. We loved him for what he was, and we considered him our arbiter elegantiarum" Of Lane at that period the same friend writes, "I remember a fine, stocky, muscular presence with a striking head. A massive, commanding man, he was, a persuasive and compelling leader." But none of the men had any sense of anything but complete friendly, boyish equality. "Lane was," Pfeiffer says, "interested in human beings, not problems, excepting as their solution might be made serviceable to the needs of individuals. He had great tolerance for the most unusual opinions. I don't think Lane ever had much interest in the dogmas of science, religion, or philosophy; he lived by the spirit of them, that cannot be expressed in formulae. He had the peculiar sensitiveness of a poet for words, for colors and sounds, and for moral beauty, and blended with it the statesman's observant awareness of conditions in the world of affairs."
At the beginning of their friendship, in 1889, Curt Pfeiffer himself was only nineteen years old, a youth whose family had come from Holland and Germany. He appeared in the boarding-house on 32nd near Broadway, where Burns lived, fresh from three months at the Paris Exposition, a vacation that had followed a course of scientific study at Zurich, Switzerland. The wonders of Paris, a-glitter with the blaze of undreamed-of electrical beauty, and the greater wonder of the scientific discoveries and speculations, of the eighties, as taught at the University of Zurich, gave the young traveler an instant place among the others. Because of his love for exact statement and his scientific approach in discussion, young as he was, he contributed something very real to the group whose chief preoccupation--aside from the joy of living- was with art, government, and literature.
They read separately, and when a book seemed intolerably good to the discoverer, he brought it in and insisted on their reading parts of it together. Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns, Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on primitive law, and Emerson! The relation of the men was almost impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life. Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole, sharper angles of mental refraction--breaking the ray of truth they sought into more of its component colors.
Pfeiffer recalls that "one Saturday night, under the influence of reading from the Vedic Hymns, and a talk on astronomy, we went up on the roof of our boarding-place, and observed a complete revolution of the starry heavens, from dusk to dawn. We drifted into talk, ... and when we finally descended to our beds on Sunday morning, we found ourselves drenched to the skin from the drizzling dew. We never forgot that experience, but we never repeated it either."
His political interests brought Lane into the Reform Club where Progress and Poverty, Henry George's new book, was the center for discussion upon the whole problem of the distribution of taxation. Lane and Henry George established a cordial friendship.
John Crawford Burns says that in 1889 "Lane's chief hero was Cleveland, and his oracle Godkin, of the EVENING POST"--later, the NATION. "When I knew him in New York he represented a San Francisco newspaper, the CHRONICLE, I think, as correspondent. He was not whole-heartedly in sympathy with his proprietor, nor indeed with the sensational aspect of journalism, and he always scoffed at the idea of newspaper writers constituting a modern priesthood. He laughingly justified his association with the CHRONICLE by saying he gave tone to it. For this and other services, he received, I think, two thousand dollars a year, which even thirty years ago did not admit of luxury and riotous living."
Lane's whole stay in New York was less than two years in length, but the vital ideas that he shared with disinterested minds made of this period the seed-bed for future intellectual growth.
In 1891, in spite of the delights of personal friendships, in New York, Lane grew increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of newspaper corresponding. He wanted a paper of his own, in which he could express without reserve the ideals of social and political betterment with which his mind was teeming. In this mood, the first acclaim of the rapid growth of the pioneer towns of the far Northwest reached him. He saw in this his opportunity, and acted quickly and decisively. He gathered together his own savings, borrowed from his friend, Sidney Mezes, a few more thousand dollars and went to Tacoma, Washington, to buy the Tacoma Evening News.
As soon as the transfer was well made, Lane threw himself enthusiastically into the politics of the new town, already suffering from boss rule. By his editorials he succeeded in stirring up the City Hall, and drove into Alaskan exile the Chief of Police--who, by the way, was said to have become immensely rich in Alaska while Lane's paper was running into bankruptcy in Tacoma. But Lane's misadventure was not wholly due to his civic virtue. He had "bought in" at just the moment when the instruments were tuning up for the prelude to the great panic crash of 1893. Tacoma, and the whole Northwest, had been mainly developed by casual investments of speculative Eastern capital, and this capital, sensitive to change, was being withdrawn to meet home needs. Investors, to protect real interests, were willing to sacrifice their "little Western flyers," at almost any discount.
As the terminal of the new Northern Pacific Railroad, Tacoma-- lying on the bluffs overlooking the great inland sea of Puget Sound, guardianed by the vastness of its mountain--was backed by forests whose wealth could scarcely be exaggerated, even by promoter's advertisements. She was noisily proclaimed to be the "Gateway to the Orient," but trade was not yet firmly established with the Orient, and, indeed, what was Washington's wealth of uncut timber when the capital to develop it was slowly ebbing Eastward?
No paper without heavy capitalization, could have sustained a policy of political reform, when, in the picturesque vernacular of the time and place, "the bottom had dropped out of the town." A rival newspaper, the LEDGER, in order to retrench, began a war on the Printers' Union, to break wages. Lane repudiated the effort made to "rat" his paper and to force the Union out. He sustained his men in their fight to keep the Union rate, and lent them his presses to carry on their propaganda. In after years he said, "As to my labor record, it is a consistent one of thirty years length, ever since I stood by the Union in Tacoma, and went broke." Again he wrote to an acquaintance, "I often think of the old days in Tacoma. We were a fighting bunch, and I think most of us are fighting for the same things that we fought for then; a little bit more decency and less graft in affairs, and a chance for a man to rise by ability and not by pull alone."