The most distinguished member of this Washington group of scientists after Mr. Bell was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, at that time agonizing over the problem of flying.
When I first met Dr. Langley in 1894 he was working on his air runner or aerodrome, a machine which, as I gathered from the talk I heard and did not too well understand, was to run on the air as an engine does on rails. He finally came out with a machine weighing about twenty-five pounds made up of a pair of rigid wings, twelve to fifteen feet across, and an engine which weighed not over seven pounds. It had cost him four years’ work to develop the engine to that lightness. But would it fly? Could it be launched? Attempts were made from a houseboat down the river. These experiments were carried on with the utmost secrecy, for Dr. Langley was a taciturn man, proud, dignified, always awesome to me. He knew that there was a public that thought him a little touched in the head and wondered that the Government kept, as director of a great national institution, a man who held the crazy notion that one day people would fly, and who was willing to give his days and nights to proving it.
Dr. Bell took the most genuine and enthusiastic interest in Dr. Langley’s experiments, was always present, I think, when an attempt to launch the air runner was made. I recall his disappointment when it fell, his rejoicing when it did finally fly. This was one day in May of 1896. I have heard him tell how suddenly the air runner rose to one hundred feet and flew in a big circle. It did not fall but made a perfect landing. Again it was launched and again it flew; and this time it went over the land and over the treetops, came back to the river and when its power was exhausted settled quietly on the water.
Inside that little circle at Dr. Bell’s there was the consciousness of a great discovery, a certain solemnity that again it had been proved that labor, training, thought, patience, faith are not in vain.
Mr. McClure was as excited as any one of the Washington group over the news. He must immediately have an article from Dr. Langley himself, and I was commissioned to get it. I think perhaps it was a little strain on Dr. Langley’s good will to have a young woman come to him and say: “Now we want the whole story of how you have done this thing, what it means; but no scientific jargon, please. We want it told in language so simple that I can understand it, for if I can understand it all the world can.” Which, knowing me, he probably knew was true. He consented, and I had the privilege of talking with him occasionally about the article, of reading what he did and saying when necessary, “I don’t see quite what this or that means,” of seeing him docilely make it clear enough for me to understand. A year after the Langley contraption first flew we had in _McClure’s Magazine_ the whole story.
As a reward for my persistent effort to see that article come out to his satisfaction, he gave me what I think he considered the greatest treat he could give his friends. He took me to the Rock Creek Zoo after the crowds had gone and, with the help of the director, Dr. Baker, made the kangaroo jump and the hyena laugh.
But the public interest in his air runner, the fresh honors that now came to him did but little to wipe out the bitterness that ridicule had stirred in Dr. Langley. “There was a time,” he said as he was going to England to take a degree which Oxford University (I believe it was) was giving him, “there was a time when I should have been glad of this. It means little now.” Yet he had his moments of strong emotion. Rarely have I been more moved than at a dinner at Mr. Hubbard’s soon after the Greco-Turkish War began in 1897. A half-dozen men of seventy or thereabouts were at the table, among them Senator Hoar of Massachusetts, Major Powell, Edward Everett Hale, and Dr. Langley. They talked only of Greece and her helplessness before the Turk. They recalled the wave of sympathy which in their boyhood had swept over the country when the Turk attacked Greece. It was to Greece, said Senator Hoar, that he first gave money of his own, a long treasured twenty-five-cent piece. Dr. Hale and Dr. Langley fell to quoting Byron. Their voices shook as they declaimed,
“The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece!
· · · · ·
Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylae.”
“It was Byron,” said Dr. Langley with an emotion of which I had thought him incapable, “who first stirred in me an enthusiasm for man’s struggles for freedom, with a desire to join those who fight for it.” He thought Byron first opened England’s eyes to her duty to the oppressed of the Continent of Europe and at the same time opened the eyes of the Continent to the love of liberty, the sympathy with the helpless, in English literature. Certainly here was a Dr. Langley I had never before glimpsed.
This was not all of Washington I was seeing. As in Paris I set aside time for learning the city. How thin and young and awkward Washington seemed compared with the exhaustless life and treasures of Paris! Here was none of that wisdom of experience, that subtile cynicism, that pity and patience with men which made Paris like a great human being to me. Nor was there here the ripe charm of old palaces, quaint streets, hidden corners. Everything was new, sprawling in the open. But if Washington had little to offer but promise it had that in abundance, and it did not know its own lacks. It was too full of pride in what it had done since John Adams moved into the White House and Congress into the Capitol. And then I had a problem to think about—the Washington Lincoln knew—and I went about with him from White House to War Department, up to the Congress, down to the Arsenal, into this and that hospital, up to the Soldiers’ Home, over to Arlington. The pain and tragedy behind almost every step he took in the town dignified its unfinished streets, gave a meaning and a sanctity to its rawness. By such steps I told myself did Paris come through the centuries to be what she is.
But I did more than follow Lincoln about. I wanted to know the Washington of thirty years after Lincoln, and so I went to the Capitol when debates promised excitement, and I missed no great official show. When McKinley’s inauguration came in 1896 I arranged to see it all. Once, I told myself, will do forever for an inauguration—as it has done. I began after breakfast and did not stop until the Inaugural Ball was far on its way. A fine colorful sightseeing experience, leaving a series of pictures which have never quite faded. Years later one of these pictures brought me a curious bit of minor political history. I was trying to persuade Richard Olney to write the story of the Venezuela message for _McClure’s_ and remarked that the first time I met him was at the McKinley Inaugural Ball. To my surprise he flushed.
“Outgoing Cabinet members are not expected to attend the Inaugural Ball of a new President,” he said. (I hadn’t known that, or of course I should not have spoken.) “But there was a reason for my presence. General Miles, then head of the Army, had come to me to say that there were rumors of an attempt on McKinley’s life. ‘Suppose that both he and Hobart should be assassinated before a new Cabinet is appointed,’ he said. ‘You would be Acting President. You must go to the Ball, walk with Mrs. McKinley, and stay until the end.’ I didn’t like the idea, but General Miles insisted; so I went. But the new President walked with his wife, and I had to hang around, conscious that more than one Republican was saying, ‘What’s Olney doing here?’”
What was behind General Miles’ precaution, I never knew. The lives of presidents are always in danger, even in what we are pleased to call normal times, there being always plenty of grievances, real and fancied, to be squared. At the moment of the McKinley inauguration the despair and bitterness of many radicals over the defeat of Bryan were outspoken. The experience of the country with assassination in the thirty preceding years had been alarming. A man in General Miles’ position charged with the safety of the heads of the government must keep in mind all possibilities. It would, of course, have been easy to assassinate the President and Vice President at the Ball. Given clever and determined conspirators, there would have been a chance to seize the government while a new President was being elected. But with a determined man like Olney on the ground, backed by a watchful and sufficient military guard scattered through the great Patent Office where the Ball was held, a temporary government could have been formed while the murderer was being manacled.
How General Miles would have enjoyed such a coup! In the first years of McKinley’s administration I came to know him well, another one of the friendly acquaintances made in carrying out the varied tasks that came my way in my position as a contributing editor of _McClure’s Magazine_. For several years popular interest in military affairs had been growing. There were several reasons: doubt of the efficiency of our army, talk of revolution, and particularly our strained relations with Spain.