Doesn't it seem to you that we are coming to be altogether too dependent on the President? That office will be ruined. Every one with a sore thumb has come into the habit of running to the President. This is all wrong, all wrong. He cannot do his job well now. And he is only nominally doing it, and only nominally has been doing it for years. But each month seems to add to his duties as arbiter of everything from clothes to strikes, from baseball to disarmament.
I see a tremendous field for a body of a few ripe minds who would talk so little, and so wisely, and so collectively, that they could get and hold the ear of the country, governmental and otherwise.
I outlined for Mezes, in your old job, a series of lectures by Americans who have done things on Why America is Worth While—and he has expanded it into a whole course on America, so that I believe he will have something new and great—teaching history, geology, art, everything, by the history of that thing in America, and how it came to come here, or be here, or what it means here.
Well, I have written you a book and must stop—I don't know where to address you but will send this to the Times. Please remember me to Mr. Ochs—who can see things, and here's hoping it won't be long before we meet. Yours always,
FRANKLIN K. LANE
To James H. Barry San Francisco Star
Rochester, Minnesota, May 5, [1921]
MY DEAR JIM,—I have nothing of importance to say, except that I am to be operated on tomorrow and hope for the best, for Dr. Will Mayo is to do the operating, and I am not in a very run-down condition.
I find myself quite serene, for I can look forward even to the very worst result with the feeling that there is no one to meet me over there to whom I've done any wrong. And while I haven't done my best, my score hasn't been blank. I honestly believe I've added a farthing or two to the talent that was given me.
My brother George is here, with his splendid philosophy and his Scotch songs; and Ned, my boy, and his bride have just come back, so that Anne and I are very well content that things are just as they should be. I go to St. Mary's Hospital where they have nuns for nurses, and when time comes for recuperation I shall go to the near-by estate of my old friend, Severance, the big St. Paul lawyer, whom I have known these thirty years.