THE LETTERS OF FRANKLIN K. LANE [SIGNED] Personal and Political

Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Very Good. 1922. First Edition. Hardcover. Autograph; xxvi, 473 pages; Contents clean and secure in original blue cloth binding. Inscribed and signed on ffep from Anne W. Lane to Mary Jennings. Includes letters and correspondence of Franklin K. Lane, who served as Interstate Commerce Commissioner to both Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, and Secretary of the Interior under President Wilson. Franklin Knight Lane (1864 – 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'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 naturalists and conservationists, but he also presided over the establishment of the National Park Service. Mary Jennings was the wife of James Hennen Jennings (1854-1920), a mining engineer, born at Hawesville, KY. After attending private schools in London and Derbyshire, England, Jennings returned to Kentucky and set up a lumber business, but soon wanted to further his engineeering education. He graduated from the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University in 1877 with the degree C.E. Jennings then headed West and worked in gold and quicksilver mines in California for the next ten years. In 1887 he went to Venezuela for another mining job. Finally, his talents as an innovative mining engineer, took him to South Africa. During 1889-1905 he was consulting engineer of H. Eckstein, in Johannesburg, and Wemher Beit, in London. In the rough and tumble of South Africa, he managed to keep out of John Hays Hammond's conspiracy to overthrow to earn a fortune (the equivalent of about 10 million pounds in 2014) before he returned to America in 1905. ; Signed by One Author .