His capacity for organized association developed rapidly.  He had part in school orations, amateur plays, school and Sunday school clubs.  Many of these he seems to have initiated, so that, with his school work, his life was full.  He says somewhere that by the time he was sixteen he was earning his own way.  His great delight in people, and especially in the thrust and parry of controversial talk, held him from the solitary pleasures of fishing and hunting, so keenly relished by his two younger brothers.  One of them said of him, “Frank can’t even enjoy a view from a mountain-peak without wanting to call some one up to share it with him.”  He writes of his feeling about solitary nature to his friend George Dorr, in 1917, in connection with improvements for the new National Park, near Bar Harbor, “A wilderness, no matter how impressive or beautiful does not satisfy this soul of mine (if I have that kind of a thing).  It is a challenge to man.  It says, ‘Master me!  Put me to use!  Make me more than I am!’” About his “need of a world of men,” he was equally candid.  To his wife he writes, “I am going to dinner, and before I go alone into a lonesome club, I must send a word to you. ...  The world is all people to me.  I lean upon them.  They induce thought and fancy.  They give color to my life.  Thrown on myself I am a stranded bark."...

His love for cooperation and for action, “dramatic action,” some one says, never left him.  In his last illness, in apolitical crisis, he rallied the energy of younger men.  He wrote of the need of a Democratic program, suggested a group of compelling names, “or any other group,” he adds, “put up the plan and ask them what they think of it—­tentatively—­just a quiet chat, but start!” And about the same matter he wrote, “The time has come.  Now strike!”

To a friend wavering over her fitness for a piece of projected work, he said drily, “There is only one way to do a thing, and that is to do it.”  Late in life, the summation of this creed of action seemed to come when he confessed, “I cannot get over the feeling that we are here as conquerors, not as pacifists.”

And words, written and spoken words, were to him, of course, the instrument of conquest.  But the search for the fit and shining word for his mark did not become research.  In a droll letter, about how he put simpler English into the Department of the Interior, he tells of finding a letter written by one of the lawyers of the Department to an Indian about his title to land, that was “so involved and elaborately braided and beaded and fringed that I could not understand it myself.”  So he sent the ornate letter back and had it put into “straightaway English.”