A physician by training, Lane served as the head of the Oregon State Insane Asylum before being forced out by political enemies.

[3] The elder Lane was a successful participant in the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s who had returned to Oregon to invest his mining proceeds in construction of a lumber mill.

[4] In the election of 1860 Joseph Lane had achieved national prominence as the Vice Presidential running mate of John C. Breckinridge on the pro-slavery Southern Democratic Party ticket — with the pair carrying 11 states in a losing effort to Abraham Lincoln.

[3] Lane returned to Oregon after completing his post-graduate education, which included time spent in New York, Europe, and San Francisco.

[8] Lane returned to medical practice in Portland, working for the next decade as a "poor people's doctor," frequently on a pro bono basis.

[8] Lane was won over to the ideas of direct democracy and political reform that were part and parcel of the Progressive Era in the United States.

[10] As mayor, Lane was an enthusiastic host for a national convention in support of women's suffrage in 1905, and he was thereafter recognized as a friend of the movement for equality between the sexes.

[13] Lane was an advocate of direct democracy and led an unsuccessful voter referendum to establish municipal ownership of the Portland electric system.

Throughout his life Lane was committed to exposing and correcting the wrongs suffered by Native Americans at the hands of European immigrants to America.

[16] Intent on proving himself a man of the people, Harry Lane set what might be a record for campaign frugality in his victorious effort, with his entire race run for the princely sum of $75 plus travel expenses.

[14] Upon his election the increasingly radical Harry Lane wasted no time in hiring his son-in-law as his personal secretary and administrative assistant.

[17] Lane regarded the last of these as his most important work, criticizing longstanding government policy aimed at "civilizing" the Native American population.

[18]The poverty of the Indian population was through no fault of their own, Lane declared, with the Native American people prostrate while "the white man is astride them and is at work taking everything they have.

[11] He was skeptical about American claims of violation of property rights by the government and insurgent movements in Mexico and was an outspoken opponent of imperialism and for the national independence of the Philippines.

Late in 1915 Lane joined Socialist U.S. Representative Meyer London of New York in co-sponsoring a resolution criticizing the deepening sense of war-related fear and calling upon President Woodrow Wilson to convene a conference of neutral nations with a view to ending the European conflict.

[19] Lane was an outspoken opponent of Wilson's plan to arm merchant ships, arguing that the conservative Democratic President was thereby attempting to usurp the Congressional prerogative to declare war and to replace it with Executive authority.

Lane and his co-thinkers, including Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, became the targets of intense political hostility in the aftermath, however, with President Wilson demeaning them as "a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own" who nevertheless "rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.