MY DEAR WIGMORE,—This is to be a mere bulletin. I am elected once again—10,500 majority, the largest received by any candidate. You expected me to run for Mayor I know. Well, it was offered me—the nomination, I mean—and all my campaign expenses promised. But I couldn't accept, having told the Labor Union people that I was a candidate for City Attorney and not for Mayor. This Labor Union Party is a new one, the outgrowth of the recent strike. They have elected their Mayor, a musician named Schmitz, a decent, conservative young man, who will surprise the decent moneyed people and anger the laboring people with his conservatism.[Footnote: Lane lived to smile at his too charitable characterization of this San Francisco Mayor.] I didn't have one single word of praise from a newspaper in the campaign. They hardly mentioned the fact that I was a candidate. It was jolly good therefore to win as I did.
And my congratulations to you, my honored friend, Dean Wigmore. Next year I am to publish my Opinions, a copy of which, of course, will go to you, but not by virtue of your office, old man. You are arriving, of course, but there is something better in store. A Federal Judgeship is the thing for you; and when I get into the Cabinet you shall have it. But don't wait till then. I'm gray and bald now and my boy patronizes me. So don't wait, but get your lines out, and one of these days you'll make it. Where next I shall land I don't know, probably in a law office, praying for clients. … Always yours,
F. K. L.
Lane's first majority in 1898 of 832 votes was increased to 10,500 in 1899, when he was re-elected; and two years later he won by a still larger majority. A number of his opinions, as City Attorney, were collected and bound in a volume, as none of them had been reversed by the Supreme Court of the State.
He took much pleasure in a dinner club that he helped to form. The members were University professors, lawyers, newspaper men, and a few business men. "But," says one of them, "in spirit they were poets, philosophers and prophets. They were aware that their solutions of problems vexing to the brains of other men, would be Utopian, but as they were not willing to be classed with ordinary Utopians they named their club Amaurot, after the capital of Utopia, thus signifying that while they dwelt in Utopia, they were not subject to it but were lords of it—the teachers of its wisdom and the makers of its laws."
His home life absorbed much of his leisure. He and his family had moved into a modest house on Gough Street, in San Francisco, with a view of the bay, Alcatraz Island, and the Marin Hills from the upstairs living-room window—for no house was a home to Lane that had no view—and in the back-yard, among its red geraniums and cosmos bushes, he played Treasure Island and Wild West with his boy.
In the summer of 1902, Lane was nominated as the Democratic and Non-Partisan candidate for Governor of California. At the Democratic Convention at Sacramento, an onlooker described the excitement among the delegates before a selection was made, "Throughout the night until late afternoon of the second day, without any clear solution of the problem, came the roll-call of the counties, then a wild stampede for the young City and County Attorney of San Francisco, who was borne to the platform. …
"It was Franklin K. Lane who stood a goodly and confident figure, waving a palm-leaf fan for quiet. He said:—
"'I was in the rear of the hall when Governor Budd made his speech and voiced the call of the party for a winner, and, in response to his call, I have taken this platform.'"
This note of joyous truculence, with the little out-thrust of the underlip, brought, as so often before and since, laughter and applause.