Chapter XVIII: The Last Battle

The campaign in Indiana in 1916 was a cross between a comedy and a tragedy. A political battle had never before been so miserably mismanaged in the history of the state accustomed for half a century to fierce fights. By the middle of the summer the wiseacres of the east had lightly eliminated the state from their calculations and had busied themselves with plans for re-electing the president without the electoral vote of Indiana. The leaders at national headquarters predicated their pessimism concerning the state on the extensively advertised strength of the Republican state organization, and the unquestioned demoralization of the Democratic party in Marion county (Indianapolis). In the summer of 1915 Senator Kern had shared in this pessimism until he began his journeys out among the people throughout the state, and it was the common observation of veteran campaigners of conservative judgment that they had never in all their experience encountered among Democrats such enthusiasm for the president, or found among Republicans so many who were openly expressing their intention to vote the Democratic ticket. Comparing the state of feeling among the masses of the people with that prevalent during the campaign of 1904 preceding the overwhelming Republican landslide there was ample justification for the feeling that the state was ripe for a landslide to the Democrats. Where one Democrat declared his intention to vote for Roosevelt in 1904 there were twenty Republicans who were making no secret of their intention to vote for President Wilson in 1916. The sentiment was strong--all it needed was crystallization, organization, direction.

The state leaders, however, were discouraged from the beginning by the attitude of the national organization and the fear of German-American disaffection. The state organization was handicapped throughout by the lack of sufficient funds for ordinary organization purposes--and no hope of aid was held at any time by the national leaders. Throughout the summer months while the Democrats were marking time the Republicans were literally pouring money into Indiana, and this was being used with deadly effect in the work of organization and propaganda. A number of the wealthy Democrats of the state who had formerly contributed to the campaign fund were not in sympathy with the progressive and ameliatory policies of the Wilson administration. And the masses of the party were poor. In Indianapolis there were not among merchants in the shopping district half a dozen Democrats, and among the manufacturers an even smaller number. It was manifestly impossible for the Democrats to cope unaided with the wealthier Republicans of the state, energetically backed by the Republican national organization. The result was that the Democratic state organization was a shell. And the national organization refusing to recognize the responsibility of its own neglect used the inefficiency of the state organization as an excuse for turning its back on Indiana and pouring three times as much money into Pennsylvania and upper New York, where there was no possibility of winning, as would have been necessary to have placed the electoral vote of Indiana in the Democratic column.

But that was not the only blunder. Never in half a century have as few orators of national repute appeared upon the stump for the Democracy in the state of Hendricks, Voorhees and Kern. Mr. Bryan, who was probably worth ten thousand votes, and who had been the strongest figure on the stump in the state for twenty years, did not appear for a single speech. Ollie James, another prime favorite, was permitted to enter Indiana for two speeches. Two or three cabinet officers spoke once or twice. As far as speakers from the outside was concerned there was little to indicate to the casual observer that the old historic battle field was the scene of another struggle. And all the while the Republicans were pouring their most effective campaigners into the state. This was not satisfactory to the Indiana leaders, who made their protests against the neglect but without making the slightest impression.

To Senator Kern the most disheartening feature of the disposition to keep the best campaigners out of Indiana was his inability to secure the services of the more notable former leaders of the Progressive party, who were supporting the Democracy elsewhere. Late in the summer he had made an effort to impress upon Vance McCormick, the national chairman, the vital necessity of thus making an appeal on the strength of the progressive record of President Wilson to the erstwhile progressives. He had shown him that the Democratic vote in Indiana in 1912, when the state was carried by Wilson, was almost 100,000 short of the vote cast for Bryan in 1908, thus indicating that the majority of these had gone into the Progressive party. And he made it clear that the only hope of winning was to get these back and that it could only be done by fighting for them. At that time he exacted the promise that Francis J. Heney, Bainbridge Colby and other progressive orators would be sent into the progressive districts of the state, but the promise was not kept. To make it worse they were dated, advertised, and then withdrawn at the eleventh hour. Whatever may have been the reason the plain truth is that had the national organization deliberately designed to turn Indiana over to the Republicans, it could not have proceeded with more effectiveness than it did.

To make matters all the worse the session of congress had been prolonged into early September and the close found Senator Kern in a state of physical exhaustion and under the necessity of taking a brief rest before entering the campaign. He returned to Indiana after a short time at Kerncliffe on the day that Charles E. Hughes spoke in Indianapolis. At the hour the Republican presidential nominee was speaking in Tomlinson Hall, Senator Kern sat before an open grate at his home and discussed the possibilities of his last battle with the realization that it would require his utmost exertions. He was not unmindful of the fact that the opposition to his re-election was not to be confined to those enlisted under the Republican banner, but that he was to face a special fight upon himself. Among a certain class of politicians he had never been popular, and some of these were openly going about abusing him and talking combinations against him. The activities of these men were regularly reported to him, but owing to their insignificance he attached but little importance to their work. But there was another element of opposition the strength of which he recognized. This was composed of the so-called “respectable” men of the business world who distrusted him because of his progressive, humanitarian views of social justice, and hated him because of the fights he had made repeatedly for the working classes. The organization exposed in its perfidy by the Mulhall disclosures had its ramifications into Indianapolis especially, but throughout the state as well. These men were bitter in their opposition. While they were composed for the most part of Republicans, they had their Democratic allies. It was a combination of a bi-partisan nature of the representatives of the idea embodied in the association, created for the purpose of destroying organized labor and influencing legislation by the most sinister methods in favor of special privileges for the few and against remedial legislation for the many. And these men who had disliked him from the time he was in the state senate hated him all the more because of his fight against Lorimer, which was a fight against their system; for his fight against the tyranny of the coal barons of West Virginia, in favor of the Child Labor bill, the Seamen’s bill, the Eight-Hour Railroad bill. And all the venom thus engendered they poured forth in denunciations of the senator for having dared appear as the legal representative of the Structural Iron and Steel Workers when on trial in the federal court. As Kern sat before the fire the night that Hughes was speaking to a cold crowd down town, he was far from underestimating the capacity of these men for harm. They had always been his enemies--and he theirs. They hated his views on social justice and he despised theirs. And he knew that they would leave no stone unturned to encompass his defeat. With the heat of the blazing fireplace beating upon his cheeks the semblance of the glow of health that night he seemed fit for the fight. But it was an illusion of the flames. The next morning it was all too apparent in his haggard features and distressing cough that he was a sick man. And his failure to carry out the plans he had been meditating a long time was due to his physical inability to rise to the occasion.

Confronted by a powerful foe, aside from the Republican party organization, he was compelled to enter the campaign without a personal organization or the funds with which to create one. No politician in the state had such a large personal following among the rank and file, but this was an unorganized and undirected mass.

The one bright feature of his campaign was the quick and eager response of organized labor--a response spontaneous, unsolicited. One afternoon while in his office discussing with a prominent national leader of organized labor the necessity of reaching the coal fields with the story of his work on the West Virginia matter he had just expressed the hope that Mother Jones might be induced to enter the state when the telephone bell rang.

“This is Mother Jones,” said the voice at the other end, “may I see the senator?”

And twenty minutes later the wonderful old woman walked into the room with the announcement:

“When I was imprisoned, threatened with death, and needed a friend and none seemed near you saved my life. Now you are in a fight and I came to report. Send me where you will.”

It was in incidents like this that Kern found sufficient compensation for all the abuse that was lavished upon him by men of the type of Kirby of the Manufacturers’ Association.

At the state convention of the Federation of Labor this eighty-year-old woman appeared unexpectedly, aroused the delegates to the highest pitch of enthusiasm by her recital of Kern’s services to labor and herself, and brought every delegate to his feet with the demand that all who thought it the duty of union labor to fight for the senator’s re-election stand up. And this scene was not according to the program planned by a little coterie of enemies.

After this Mother Jones swept through the mining towns and camps of the state, arousing enthusiasm for Kern everywhere she went, and fervently urging her “boys” to put on the armor in his behalf. And that which she did was done by other representatives of labor of less note.

It was the idea of local campaign managers in the various counties to pack Senator Kern and Senator Taggart into automobiles and hurry them from meeting to meeting for short speeches during the day, closing in at night at the county seat with a great demonstration. The first week disclosed the impossibility of the plan as far as Kern was concerned, and very soon afterward Senator Taggart, a younger man, was forced to notify the managers that he could not stand up under the strain. Entering the campaign with a distressing cough, the first week increased his affliction, and from that time on he was in a hopelessly crippled condition. His physician urged him to retire from the stump, but he persisted, buoyed up by his enthusiasm for the cause, and impelled to do so by the realization that a personal fight was being made upon him. The result was pathetic. Leaving a sick bed he would brave the hardships of travel, the inclemency of the weather, to fill an engagement with the intention of speaking briefly, but the inspiration and enthusiasm of the crowd would lead him on to the full exertion of his strength, and after a day or so he would be forced to return to his bed. Thus through October he passed from the sick room to the stump and back again, all the while growing weaker and sustained alone by his power of will. His greatest meetings were probably held at Terre Haute and Fort Wayne, in both of which cities he was greeted by great crowds notwithstanding a downpour of rain, and at the former place he spoke in a great tent where men stood for two hours with their feet in water. Notwithstanding the personal fight that was being made upon him by the powerful interests he had antagonized, he refrained in his speeches from special references to his own services and confined himself to laudation of the achievements of the national administration and playful ridicule of Hughes. Even the bitter personal attacks upon him in this, his last battle, failed to embitter him, and his last political addresses were singularly free from vituperation or abuse.

He closed his campaign in the last political speech of his career, after forty-four years upon the stump, at Brookville--and herein hangs a tale illustrative of the sentimental strain that was strong in him. It had been his custom for years to close at the little town of Brookville, and early in the campaign he had promised to continue the policy. The speaking campaign in Indianapolis had been strangely neglected and it was not until the Saturday night before the election that plans had been made for the final appeal of the two senatorial candidates at Tomlinson Hall. It thus became necessary, if Kern were to speak in Indianapolis at all, that he cancel his engagement for Brookville, but to the importunities of his friends who urged upon him the importance of the Indianapolis engagement he gave an indignant denial. “Certainly not,” he snapped as though some discreditable thing had been proposed, “I have been closing the campaign at Brookville for years, and I don’t propose to disappoint those people.”

The result was that he did not speak in Indianapolis once during the campaign.

Handicapped by physical weakness, lack of means, want of personal organization, and pursued by a peculiarly venomous opposition which was not political but personal and born of his friendship for organized labor, he struggled through, preserving his cheerfulness and hopefulness to the end, receiving the personal insults of the tribe of Kirby in silence, and only retaliating with kindly references to his opponent. When early in the evening on the day of the election it became apparent that he had been defeated his first act was to congratulate his opponent, a life-long friend, and to pay him a personal compliment through the press.

I saw him the night following the election--a strikingly frail figure, a little sad but not too sad to smile and joke in his accustomed way, greatly disappointed but not so much so as to be embittered. After six years of the most strenuous service, yielding his strength ungrudgingly to the demands of his people, and vindicating the confidence of his supporters by attaining as commanding a position in the senate as was ever held by an Indiana senator, he now faced private life with equanimity, poor of purse, broken in health, and nearing three score years and ten.

His deepest concern that night was his failing health, and it was his intention when congress convened for the short session in December to resign the leadership and husband his strength. During the month of November he did not greatly improve and he returned to his post of duty in December in a serious condition.