Franklin Knight Lane (July 15, 1864 – May 18, 1921) was an American progressive politician from California. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as United States Secretary of the Interior from 1913 to 1920. He also served as a commissioner of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and was the Democratic nominee for Governor of California in 1902, losing a narrow race in what was then a heavily Republican state.
Lane was born July 15, 1864, near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in what was then a British colony but is now part of Canada. In 1871, his family moved to California. After attending the University of California while working part-time as a reporter, Lane became a New York correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, and later became editor and part owner of a newspaper. Elected City Attorney of San Francisco in 1898, a post he held for five years, Lane ran in 1902 for governor and in 1903 for mayor of San Francisco, losing both races. In 1903, he received the support of the Democratic minority in the California State Legislature during the legislature's vote to elect a United States Senator from California.
Appointed a commissioner of the Interstate Commerce Commission by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 and confirmed by the Senate the following year, Lane was reappointed in 1909 by President William Howard Taft. His fellow commissioners elected him as chairman in January 1913. The following month, Lane accepted President-elect Woodrow Wilson's nomination to become Secretary of the Interior, a position in which he served almost seven years until his resignation in early 1920. Lane's record on conservation was mixed: he supported the controversial Hetch Hetchy Reservoir project in Yosemite National Park, which flooded a valley esteemed by many conservationists, but also presided over the establishment of the National Park Service.
The former secretary died of heart disease at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, on May 18, 1921. Because of two decades of poorly paid government service and the expenses of his final illness, he left no estate, and a public fund was established to support his widow. Newspapers reported that had he not been born in what is now Canada, he would have become president. In spite of that limitation, Lane was offered support for the Democratic nomination for vice president, though he was constitutionally ineligible for that office as well.
Early life
Lane was born in DeSable, west of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on July 15, 1864, the first of four children of Christopher Lane and the former Caroline Burns. Christopher Lane was a preacher who owned a farm outside Charlottetown; when his voice began to fail, he became a dentist. The elder Lane, disliking the island colony's cold climate, moved with his family to Napa, California, in 1871, and to Oakland in 1876, where Franklin graduated from Oakland High School. Franklin Lane was hired to work in the printing office of the Oakland Times, then worked as a reporter, and in 1884 campaigned for the Prohibition Party. From 1884 to 1886, he attended the University of California at Berkeley, though he did not graduate. Lane later wrote, "I put myself through college by working on vacation and after hours, and I am very glad I did it." He later received honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from the University of California, from New York University, Brown University, and the University of North Carolina. After leaving college, he worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1889, he was admitted to the California Bar, having attended Hastings Law School.
Rather than practicing law, Lane moved to New York City to continue his newspaper career as a correspondent for the Chronicle. There he became a protégé of the reformer Henry George and a member of New York's Reform Club. He returned to the West Coast in 1891 as editor and part owner of the Tacoma News. He was successful in driving a corrupt chief of police into exile in Alaska, but the business venture as a whole was unsuccessful, and the paper declared bankruptcy in 1894, a victim of the poor economy and Lane's espousal of Democratic and Populist Party causes. In 1893, Lane married Anne Wintermute; they had two children, Franklin Knight Lane, Jr. and Nancy Lane Kauffman.
Lane moved back to California in late 1894, and began to practice law in San Francisco with his brother George. He also wrote for Arthur McEwen's Letter, a newspaper which crusaded against corruption, especially in the San Francisco Bay area and in the Southern Pacific Railroad. In 1897–98, he served on the Committee of One Hundred, a group which was tasked with drafting a new city charter. The charter required the city to own its own water supply.
California politician
In 1898, Lane, running as a Democrat, was elected to the combined position of City and County Attorney, defeating California's sitting Attorney General, W. F. Fitzgerald, by 832 votes in a year that otherwise saw most offices across the state fall to the Republicans. He was re-elected in 1899 and 1901.
Lane ran for Governor of California in 1902 on the Democratic and Non-Partisan tickets. At a time when California was dominated by the Republican Party, he lost by less than a percentage point to George Pardee. (Theodore Roosevelt won the state by 35 points two years later.) Between 8,000 and 10,000 votes were disqualified on various technicalities, possibly costing him the election. During the campaign, the influential San Francisco Examiner slanted its news coverage against him. Examiner owner William Randolph Hearst later denied responsibility for this policy, and stated that if Lane ever needed anything, he should send Hearst a telegram. Lane retorted that if Hearst received a telegram purportedly signed by Lane, asking him to do anything, he could be sure it was a forgery.
Journalist Grant Wallace wrote of Lane at the time of the gubernatorial campaign:
At the time, the state legislatures still elected United States Senators, and in 1903, Lane received the vote of the state legislature's Democratic minority in the Senate election. However, the majority Republicans backed incumbent George Clement Perkins, who was duly re-elected. Later that year, City Attorney Lane ran for mayor of San Francisco, but again was defeated, finishing third in the race. He returned to the private practice of law, and would not again stand for elective office.
Even before the mayoral election, there was support for Lane as a potential Democratic candidate for vice president, though since he was born in what was by then a Canadian province he was ineligible under the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In an era when political convention delegates were far more free to make their own choices than they are today, Lane wrote that he had heard that he could gain the support of the New York delegation, which he declined to do. While returning to California from a trip to Washington, D.C., as an advocate for the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir project, he stopped in Austin, Texas, to confer with Democratic leaders and address the legislature. The New York Times saw this as part of a campaign to secure the vice-presidential nomination, and stated that he had been promised help from Texas.
Interstate Commerce Commission
Appointment and confirmation
The railroad companies, which were loosely regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), exercised great power in California because of the lack of alternate means of shipping freight. Lane had taken cases against those corporations in his law practice, and, in his gubernatorial campaign, had argued that they had too much power. In early 1904, Benjamin Wheeler, president of the University of California, suggested to President Roosevelt that Lane would be an admirable choice to serve on the ICC. Roosevelt agreed, and promised to name him to the next ICC vacancy. When that vacancy occurred in early 1905, Roosevelt forgot his promise and instead named retiring five-term Senator Francis Cockrell of Missouri. Wheeler wrote to remind Roosevelt that he had said he would name Lane. Roosevelt apologized for his oversight, but noted that, as he had just been re-elected, "I shall make ample amends to Lane later".
In December 1905, Commissioner Joseph W. Fifer resigned from the ICC and on December 6, 1905, President Roosevelt named Lane to fill the remaining four years in his term. Opposition to the appointment came from Republicans, who pointed out that were the nominee to be confirmed by the Senate, three of the five commissioners would be from the minority Democratic Party. Historian Bill G. Reid, in his journal article about Lane, suggests that Lane's liberal record was a factor in the Senate's hesitation to confirm him. The dispute held up Senate approval. However, Republican Congressman William Peters Hepburn proposed legislation which, though its primary purpose was increased railroad regulation, would expand the Commission by two members. Roosevelt indicated that he would appoint Republicans to the new positions, and opposition to Lane's nomination dissipated. The resultant Hepburn Act was signed by President Roosevelt on June 29, 1906, while his nominee was confirmed the same day and was sworn in on July 2, 1906.
The City of San Francisco suffered a severe earthquake on April 18, 1906. Lane, who was living in north Berkeley while awaiting Senate confirmation, hurried to the city within hours of the earthquake to do what he could to help. Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz immediately appointed him to the Committee of Fifty to deal with the devastation of the earthquake and subsequent fire, and plan the rebuilding of the city. According to Lane's friend, writer Will Irwin, Lane did not content himself with committee work, but personally fought the fire, helping to save much of the Western Addition. In late April, the commissioner-designate took the train east to Washington, where he unsuccessfully fought to obtain Federal money to help the city's recovery.
Commission work
The new commissioner spent the second half of 1906 attending ICC hearings around the country. The Hepburn Act had given the Commission broad powers over the railroads, and the Commission worked to deal not only with past railroad abuses, but to strike a balance between the desires of railroads and those of shippers.
There was a severe shortage of coal in the Upper Midwest in late 1906, especially in North Dakota, and President Roosevelt ordered an investigation. Railroad companies were accused of failing to send cars with coal to that region that could then be used to transport grain from that region to Great Lakes ports. It was alleged the companies were waiting for the lakes to freeze over before sending cars so that the grain would have to be transported by rail all the way to market instead of by water transport. Lane led the inquiry and held hearings in Chicago, and concluded that the car shortage was due to demand for cars further west, and that it would actually cause area railways to lose money since they could not transport the grain to port. In January 1907, he submitted his report to Roosevelt, which set out the causes of the shortage. He found that fifty million bushels of grain still remained on North Dakota farms or in the state's grain elevators, because of lack of space in eastbound railroad cars. He recommended that railroad companies pool their cars with neighboring lines.
The Commission spent much of 1907 investigating the railroads and other companies owned by Edward H. Harriman, holding hearings across the country. In October, Lane determined that the Southern Pacific Railroad, one of Harriman's lines, was engaged in rebating, a practice of effectively giving special rates to favored shippers that had been outlawed by the Hepburn Act.