Franklin Knight Lane

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.

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.

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.