Part 17

Taking it all in all it was the most impersonal job I ever had. I do not remember that Mr. Dana ever volunteered a word in all the many interviews I had with him except on the subject in hand, and that in answer to my questions. We never talked of the things which I knew he loved—pictures, orchids, poetry. It was a businesslike operation from start to finish. Probably it was his way of punishing me for being afraid of him.

Another and more important series which came out of the Lincoln work was Carl Schurz’s “Reminiscences.” Here I acted not as a ghost but as an editorial representative. Mr. Schurz had given me liberally for my story from his rich Lincoln experiences—the most important unpublished item being the part he played in helping Mr. Lincoln launch his plan for compensated emancipation.

As I reported these interviews the office became more and more convinced that here was a great series of reminiscences—just the kind of thing that Mr. McClure had hoped for when he first commissioned me to gather Lincoln material. Could Mr. Schurz be persuaded to write his reminiscences? When I broached the subject he almost immediately said: “No, no, I refused Gilder [Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the _Century_]. I cannot do it for anybody else.”

But I felt so convinced that he ought to do it that I persisted in my begging, and finally he began to yield. The handsome sum _McClure’s_ was willing to pay had something to do with it, for Mr. Schurz was not a rich man and here was a chance to leave to his family this extra money. Once he had made up his mind to the task, he thoroughly enjoyed it; and no one could have been more anxious to use material to suit the needs of the magazine. Working with him was a joy. He was gay, companionable, full of anecdotes, frank in comment. I remember him best at his summer home at Lake George where it was necessary for me to go two or three times to settle some editorial point. Here you would hear him in the morning as he was getting ready for breakfast giving the Valkyrie cries, singing motive after motive of the Wagnerian operas, in a clear youthful voice. Sometimes he would spring up from the table where he was at work, and seating himself at the piano would improvise dashingly until the mood which had taken him from his desk passed; then back to his labor.

The house stood in the upper corner of a park of fifty or sixty acres of woodland—not over-cleared—and open by winding paths down the hillside to the lake. Every turn, every rock had its name usually celebrating some Wagnerian scene, and as you passed Mr. Schurz would roll out the appropriate song. There never was a more lovable or youthful man of seventy than Carl Schurz.

The completion of the Life of Lincoln did not end my interest in the man. He had come to mean more to me as a human being than anybody I had studied. I never doubted his motives, and he never bored me. Still, whenever I have the opportunity I pick him up. The greatest regret of my professional life is that I shall not live to write another life of him. There is so much of him I never touched.

10 REDISCOVERING MY COUNTRY

The four years I put in on “The Life of Abraham Lincoln” did more than provide me with a continuing interest. They aroused my flagging sense that I had a country, that its problems were my problems. This sense had been strong in my years on _The Chautauquan_, but the period following had dimmed it. Now I was beginning to ask myself why we had gone the way we had since the Civil War. Was there not enough of suffering and of nobility in that calamity to quiet the greed and ambitions of men, to soften their hates, to arouse in them the will to follow Lincoln’s last counsels—“With malice toward none; with charity for all ... let us ... do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” But greed and hate and indifference to the sufferings and rights of others had been rampant since the war. Did war as a method of righting wrongs so loosen the controls which man in times of peace establishes over himself that he is incapable of exercising the charity, the peaceful adjustments for which Lincoln called? Was there always after war an unescapable crop of corruption, of thirst to punish and humiliate and exploit the conquered? Must men go back where they had started, go back with controls weakened and burdened with a load of new and unexpected problems? True, this war had ended slavery as a recognized institution, given the black man legal freedom, but how about opportunity, discipline for freedom? And then again was a war necessary to destroy slavery? Was it not already doomed? Lincoln thought so. Doomed because it was showing itself unsound economically as well as because it outraged man’s sense of justice and humanity. And how about the effect of this war on democracy? Were the problems it loosed less threatening to democratic ideals than slavery had been? Were they not possibly a more subtle form of slavery, more dangerous because less obvious?

A nice box of problems to tease me as I worked on Lincoln’s life and out of the corner of the eye watched what was going on in the country. The number of things in America I was beginning to want to find out about was certainly dimming the things in France I had wanted to find out about. Unquestionably these new interests were helping to wean me from the plan on which I had settled. The process was painful. More than once I told myself that the sacrifice of my ambitions, of my love for Paris, for my friends there, was too much to ask of myself. I could never replace those interests and associations; but I was replacing them and suffering as I realized what was happening, revolting that nothing in my life seemed to last, to be carried through. By nature I was faithful. To give my time to new friends, neglect old ones in spite of never forgetting them, as I never did, was disloyal. I was beginning to repeat dolefully as well as more and more cynically, _“Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe.”_

Washington was helping in my weaning. The city as I knew it in the 1890’s is lost in the Washington of the 1930’s. The pivots on which it swings, the Capitol, the White House, were there then to be sure. So was the Washington Monument; but they stood by themselves, the near-by flanking unpretentious, often squalid. Today they are almost lost in the piles of marble heaped about them to accommodate the ambitions and creations of the last frantic twenty years. The town has stretched unbelievably to the northwest. Where once I knew wide lawns, wooded tracts, pleasant walks, are now acres upon acres of apartment houses and hotels. They have engulfed the delightful Woodley Lane where my friends the Hubbards lived in summer, and they have changed no less the quarter in which their fine town house stood—Connecticut Avenue where it merges into Dupont Circle. Great houses were only just beginning then to find their way into the Circle. George Westinghouse had built there, so had Mrs. Leiter of Chicago. Old Washingtonians sniffed at their houses and their ways, laughed at Mrs. Leiter’s “spinal staircase” as she was said to call it, and professed disgust at Mrs. Westinghouse’s “reported” white velvet tablecloths. They resented the invasion of rich women attracted by the social possibilities of a diplomatic circle, of rich men attracted by the field for lobbying furnished by a Congressional circle.

But of this side of Washington I saw nothing. My social life was shaped largely by the continued kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard. I had become almost one of the family, was freely invited to meet their friends. Their circle was wide, including diplomats and statesmen and eminent visitors, though its core was the large group of distinguished scientists which made up the working forces of the Smithsonian Institution, the Agriculture Department, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, the Observatory. An important group they were, and nobody in town appreciated them more or took more pains to show his appreciation than Mr. Hubbard. Naturally the center of this group was Alexander Graham Bell, married to the Hubbards’ daughter, Mabel.

The Bells lived across the Avenue from the Hubbards, and I soon had the good fortune to be welcomed there—a great privilege, for both Mr. and Mrs. Bell were rare persons. Mrs. Bell’s story is well known, but it was only in seeing her with her husband and daughters that one could realize what a fine intellect and what an unspoiled and courageous character she had. She had been deaf and dumb from infancy, and Mr. Hubbard had determined to open life to her. Among the teachers of speech he brought to her was a young man then at Boston University—Alexander Graham Bell. Under his tutelage she made rapid strides, and the two young people learned to love one another. At that time Mr. Bell was giving his nights to trying to “make iron talk.” I once heard Mr. Hubbard say that when he found Mr. Bell had made iron talk he told him he must develop his telephone to a practical point or he could not have Mabel. Probably no other argument would have persuaded Alexander Graham Bell, for he was the type of inventor whose interest flags when he has solved his problem. Let somebody else take care of the development. He would be off on a new voyage of discovery.

At the time I came into the circle Mr. Bell was, I think, the handsomest and certainly the most striking figure in Washington. It was amusing to hear people discussing who was the handsomest man in town. There were various candidates—General Miles, General Greely, Colonel John Foster; but while I conceded they all had their points no one of them had the distinction of Alexander Graham Bell, and no one of them certainly had the gay boyish appetite for what he found good in life. He was more like Massa Henry Watterson in that than anybody else I have ever known, though the activities and interests of the two were utterly different.

Mr. Bell’s plan of living was modeled to suit himself. Often he slept through the day when interruptions naturally came and the telephone most often rang! If restless at night he played the piano. Mrs. Bell could not hear, and the rest of the family, being young and devoted, were never disturbed. He was up and began his day around four to six. Often there were guests for dinner, for everybody of note the world over who came to Washington wanted to meet him. On Wednesdays after dinner there usually gathered a group of scientists and public men to talk things over. Mr. Bell was something to see at these dinners and gatherings, the finest social impresario I ever saw in action, so welcoming, appreciative, eager, receptive. I thought then I had never seen anybody so generous about what others were doing. He loved to draw out great stories of adventure and discovery and would silence all talkers when once such narrating was started. Partly this was because of Mrs. Bell, his intense desire that she enjoy everything that was going on; and she did, thanks to the intelligent devotion of her daughters, Elsie and Marian, the first now the wife of Gilbert Grosvenor, one of the founders and the present editor of the _National Geographic Magazine_, the second the wife of David Fairchild, botanist and explorer, the organizer in the Agriculture Department of the work now known as the Division of Foreign Plant Exploration and Introduction—two men to whom the public owes big debts for services.

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.

Interest was still further excited in 1896 by the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War, which, starting as a skirmish, soon grew until it looked as if it might involve all southeastern Europe, perhaps England, Russia. Obviously we should have an observer over there, and so in May General Miles and a staff started for the field. He studied the military organization of Turkey and of Greece, watched the armies lined up for battle, saw the end of the war. From Greece he and his staff went to London to represent the United States at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Following that great show he had attended the autumn maneuvers of the greatest of then existing armies, those of Russia, Germany, and France.