I believe I told you that the Brooklyn Park people adopted my suggestions generally and applied to the Legislature for improved en-trance & for certain preliminary powers that would enable them to apply next year for power to get the land wanted on the other side. They succeeded and I am now treating with them in Detail as to design. I ask $5000 for plan & $5000 per ann to commence at once and expenses to Europe this summer. The Plan is to be completed in Decr, then they are to use it to help them get the ground &c. All this, you see, gives easy time. They seem quiet inoffensive people—you know the prime mover, Stranahan perhaps. He has shown readiness to act now. I easily accept his excuses for not carrying out Viele’s plan.

Green keeps communicating with me, we meet in the street now. He cannot come to me, I cannot go to him. He is in a stew apparently, and would of course like to get me committed. I remind him of your withdrawal of resignation and its unsatisfactory result. I tell him we are out and are satisfied to remain so. My only object in communicating with him is to get information. He says he should be sorry if the present state of affairs should drift into an antagonism. I point out to him that the antagonism has existed for some time but that it has not been my policy to mention it. You see that the Commission must be in a queer state for [373]him, after the publication of my letter, to talk in this way. I tell him that I shall do nothing without consulting you.

I cannot of course tell how you are situated, or what risks you are inclined to take or whether you really want to go ahead, and give the public what they have a right to ask from a work of this kind, an organised system for supplying the demand it necessarily creates. At present all this is in a very defective state. The war has occupied the attention of the people and I suppose you know enough of human nature to be aware that nobody has begun to miss you much yet. If you were to walk down Broadway tomorrow, it would be all perfectly natural and your friends would be glad to see you. Nobody cares two straws for the mines in St. Francisco. As yet you are the representative man of the C.P. and not much else to New Yorkers, and very likely the majority of those who think of the matter at all suppose you still to be at work there. Most of the artists certainly till the last week or two thought that I was there as usual. You have taken so little pains to cultivate the art interest, that as yet of course you are personally somewhat unknown to your brother centurions. But all this is in good enough shape, as you can readily see.

In my proposition to the B.P.C., I did not—as I intended when I last wrote to you—distinctly say to them that I proposed to offer you the opportunity to combine in this matter as you offered me the opportunity to combine in the other. I had it in the draft, but Withers thought it better not to speak so decidedly and as it were to own the need, until sure of your willingness—in this he is right, for you can clearly see that when the link is once decidedly severed, it will be difficult to re-unite it & I shall have to make the best of my lonely position. At present, all is square and intelligible before the public and your park reputation is in a logical shape.

If I go on and do Brooklyn alone, well or ill, you suffer because the public naturally will say, if Olmsted really was the prime mover in the C.P. why is he not ready to go forward in the path that he started in. Moreover the C.P. slides into bad shape and I have either to take it or let it alone. I think I should have to let it alone but if I were to take it afresh, you of course would suffer. In this, as you see, all depends on your own present view of affairs. I have no end to gain but the advancement of the whole thing and its proper development. You I know want to manage the park. Of course you do, the artistic development requires it. I see that and have always seen it and never opposed you in any way. My position always was, do it first and manage it afterwards. If you want to be President of that old rattle trap C.P.C., why I suppose you could be it and live on the park till the end of your life, but you must have a plan of campaign.

The term Landscape Architect does not suit you, well I am sorry [374]for it. I think it is the art title. We want to set art ahead and make it command its position, administration, management, funds, commission, popularity and everything else—then we have a tangible something to stand on. As administration with art attached as a makeweight the thing is in wrong shape. My tie to you exclusive of personal attachment which does not influence me much in these days is an art tie. I recognise your ability and that you belong to that side, squarely and fairly. You have now a seven years reputation, long enough of course for anyone, and it remains to be seen whether you will use it or not. I shall not advise but, if when I return in the Fall you should happen to be here again disengaged and willing to devote a decade to Landscape art, why, there is the half of Brooklyn to begin on and all we can get besides but it must not be a pis aller. My position is that I have defended you from yourself and that “Olmsted & Vaux” is an institution that ought not to be a mere bubble to be blown away heedlessly. You see there is time to think things over. If you were here I suppose we could put in a good knock now but you are not and the chance may go by. Of course they will try and get some new man &c, but the apple of Sodom fair as it looks, is but an apple of Sodom, after all. Goodbye for today

I send you the C.P. manifesto enclosed, all fair to the outward eye. A slightly muddy reference to ability to be sure but—everything apparently serene and secure. As to management, no hint of the thing has been made. The issue is a forced issue on our part on the point of design; that this is intended to include management & everything else, nobody suspects. Green of course smells it. On this same Friday, Green asked me to see him at the C.P. office & I refused. I agreed to meet him in the street as I wrote you in my last—and what was the result. He walked up with me to 23rd, and offered anything. Would I take the Park. Would I take the Boulevard (whatever that may be, for I have not looked into the scheme), would I take the Zoological Garden. He supposed I should make conditions, what were the conditions. “He might tell me beforehand,” and here he plucked up a little bravado, “they must be pretty moderate.”

I told him we were in no position to make conditions, that I could do nothing without consulting you. Then would I take it conditional on your acceptance—time pressed. He must do something immediately— [376]this that & the other was needing attention. He meant either to carry it on—or go out of it, and he meant to carry it on—anglice he had a very serious fear that he was going to be kicked out of it by his duped associates and his nice annuity stopped. I told him we wanted to carry out our plans, we had no immediate purpose in view. He was in & must do his best. We were out and when we had time we would walk around & criticise. He said, Well then if you refuse I must do the best I can. I said, We refuse nothing. If the Board want to make an offer we can’t prevent them. You can’t quote us as having refused until we have the offer. You will have to put us in the wrong before you can make anything of that before the public.

And to this effect. He would hardly let me go to dinner. He is evidently nonplussed. You understand in this that I am not treating with him. Of course not. He is, as he has always been, my tool. I have relentlessly, remorselessly, led him or let him into this predicament, which was the best chance left for us, this utterly false position. You seemed to oppose him and played directly into his hands. I seemed to play directly into his hands and always intended to grind him to powder. In fact, I thought him but a poor stick anyway but who had deserved well from us and if I had had my way, he might have been provided for and no more made about it while the power rested with us. Surely you see that I valued your contribution to the work at its true rate. I sacrificed my own view to it. I did not estimate it as you did but knew that it was invaluable and that the work must fail without it. I also knew that if you expected to carry on public works by making the same demands on other people that you did on me—that your reputation would be difficult to sustain. I set the example of subordination & it was followed because I set the example, but the work must have fallen through if I had not happened accidentally to be in a mood for trying an experiment of this sort—for you were not at that time open to conviction. You always seemed to be fearing that between Green on one side & me on the other you would get no reputation at all. I allowed this to pass as the misconception of youth that you would outgrow. Coming into business at 40 with the spirit of a boy of 20, allowances had to be made by an old hand like me. I felt that Landscape Architecture was better than architecture & threw all I could into the work for which I was very incompletely educated. I also knew that you had the advantage in this and would outrank me if you also threw all you had into the scale and I tempted you in every way to do it—caring not a damn about the out-ranking but desiring an agreeable employment and to help supply a public need.

When you said you had so much (false) pride that your ambition would not permit you to take the position of Landscape Architect I certainly felt convinced that you belied your better conviction. I mean [377]when you first went to Washington or I would then and there unhesitatingly have set to work to plough you under with the firm conviction that you were no friend to art, no friend to the good cause and only a somewhat ambitious self seeker, but I felt then that you were an artist and that it was the art element in a large sense that made your administration valuable.

As I said before merely as administration I do not think it particularly comprehensive, calm, statesmanlike or well founded and with all the silent support it received from me, a support that it was entirely unsound to calculate on, it fell through for very intelligible reasons. The art in it was as pure as ever and was far reaching and sound in principle, the diplomacy or call it what you will—very defective & impatient. I never attended the meetings of the Board or sought to because I was afraid by my domineering habit and habitual position of power in my own business—that I should press you hard.

I also abstained from interesting artists in the work and making it popular in this way as it should have been—and as it would be very useful today if it were—because I felt that you were jealous of the, as you thought, opposition, art element, and had as much to carry as you well could manage. All this I postponed contrary to my judgment—on the general principle of the greater in preference to the less and I recognised then as I do today that your cooperation was the greater if it could be secured to the public at any price the work or I might be called on to pay for it. Bossing jobs is one thing and art another—and I have an instinctive hate to anything of the Nap III sort. It required a perceptive faculty of a somewhat penetrative character to see through your course of action to its true fountain head and I think I understood your position at least as well as you did yourself.

In all this I may be mistaken. You may be no artist. You may be Nap III in disguise. You may be a selfish fellow, who would like to get power & reputation on other men’s brains. You may be a money grubber. You may have no patience &c &c, but it is to be presumed by my acting as I do that I think differently and that I am under the impression that the humble modest artist spirit is within you. If so, and if you can, taking art in its widest sense, devote yourself to it, your chance was never better than it is today.

If you were here today, my scheme would be to make the Board cry peccavi, make what conditions we chose & go in as artists and keep the art management in the shade for a week or month or year or two till we had the whole thing done and then we or you if it turned out that that was the logical result could control the matter in its entirety. All this [378]is you see not only possible but it has always been possible. Events justify my convictions frequently stated. The subscriptions of all sorts you have, together with me, made to the work sustain it today and moreover bring the Brooklyn affair to our doors.

At the first shot, down comes their damnable stars and bars. If you were here and in your right mind up would go the Stars & stripes tomorrow: indeed, although I have no clue to what is passing on the Board, beyond my conversations with Green, I have little doubt but that you could even carry everything you want if it was thought wise at this time to press the management question. The hour has come, however, the crisis has arrived. I had to hurry it forward a little sooner than I intended on account of the fair opportunity for a clean statement and a good humored square hit, offered by the Exhibition. But where are you—Nowhere—where is our chance—perhaps nowhere. I have something almost approaching a bitter feeling as I think of this, and feel that if you love your rights ultimately and if the whole thing takes a permanently false shape it is because you were of little faith. However we must hope for the best. I responded to Green the next day in a formal letter which he will think I am going to publish but I am not.