Chapter XX: The Real Kern: a Composite Portrait (2)

“It is doubtful if there is a public man between whom and the
newspaper fraternity there were so many confidences. He trusted
them, and they believed in him, even if they did not at all times
agree with his political policies. The political writers were
always pleased when they were assigned to ‘cover’ John Kern. He was
the best ‘copy’ in the United States, and day or night he was
always good for a story. Without journalistic experience himself,
he knew just what kind of news the public wanted. He always had his
ear to the ground, and many a good story for which the
correspondent received a telegram of thanks from his managing
editor was really worked out by Mr. Kern. He had no grades or
classes among his newspaper friends--the small town reporter looked
just as big to him as did the staff man from the metropolitan
dailies, and he would go just as far to help the small town
reporter as he would to assist the staff ‘star.’ My acquaintance
with Senator Kern began long years ago when I was a small town
reporter. In a particular town that need not be named a young
society man had been arrested, for what no one knew. The arrest was
very quietly made by Ed Rathbone, who figured years afterward in
Cuban affairs, and Rathbone tried to slip his prisoner out of town,
but the local reporters caught them at the railway station. With
considerable curtness he refused to talk with the reporters. A man
carefully dressed, and with a pleasant smile, standing near by
turned to Rathbone:

“‘Ed,’ said he, ‘there is no reason why these boys shouldn’t have
this item (that was before ‘items’ became dignified as ‘stories’).
‘It is in their territory and it will be interesting to the readers
of their papers, and anyhow it will come out as soon as you get to
Indianapolis and these boys will be scooped.’

“‘All right, John, you can tell them,’ replied Rathbone, walking
away.

“‘Well, boys,’ as we gathered around him, ‘this is what it is all
about’--and sitting on a baggage truck the stranger (I can see him
now as plainly as I did then more than thirty years ago) he told us
the story.

“‘Who are you, and what part in this affair do you take?’ one of
our party asked.

“‘I’m just an innocent bystander. My name is John W. Kern. I am a
lawyer up at Kokomo, and I bumped into this thing accidentally.’
Some of the small town reporters clustered about that baggage truck
listening to Mr. Kern’s recital of the story of the young man’s
arrest in later years became well known in journalistic work, and
the friendship for Mr. Kern that began on the railway platform was
never broken. Mr. Kern never changed that policy of dealing with
newspaper men. The correspondents who campaigned with Mr. Kern were
always sure of fair and equal treatment. He played no favorites.
When he gave out a story every one got it. Knowing that a careless
or indifferent reporter, or a representative of an unfriendly paper
could cause him great annoyance, and perhaps deep injury by not
truthfully quoting him, or twisting his language to a meaning other
than what he intended to say, Mr. Kern never asked the
correspondents with him to submit their dispatches before putting
them on the wire. He was willing to trust to their fairness and
honor.

“‘Gentlemen,’ he would say at the beginning of the tour, ‘I won’t
say anything that I do not wish published, and I know you won’t
send anything I don’t say.’ And among the hundreds of
correspondents who ‘covered’ Mr. Kern in his long political career
not one ever disappointed him. When John W. Kern was the principal
figure in the noise and music of the feast the newspaper men with
him were never forgotten. Reception committees might try to drag
him away, but he would not be dragged.

“‘There will be no show,’ he used to tell the eager committeemen,
each striving for the honor of leading him to his carriage or to
the speaker’s stand, ‘until the orchestra is ready. I want the
newspaper men put where they can see and hear.’ And he would not
move until the correspondents with him were provided for. Once he
was dragged to a boarding house by the reception committee, who
thought it would be a good political stroke to have Mr. Kern take
dinner with the boarding house keeper who was off the county
ticket. The newspaper men returning from the telegraph office were
met at the gate by Mr. Kern.

“‘Boys,’ he whispered, ‘don’t come in here. The grub is ghastly and
the board of health has gone fishing. If you must eat in this town
go to the hotel.’

“In his campaigns Mr. Kern always prepared a schedule of his own
itinerary, and used to fret a great deal if trains were late or
wheeled transportation was not promptly on hand. He was always
called in the morning at least an hour before train time, and part
of his regular work before breakfast was to see that the baggage of
the correspondents was ready to be taken to the station--he would
not trust anybody but himself to look after the baggage, and he was
always impatient until breakfast was served. At one hotel the
waiter was slow because the waiter and cook were one and the same.
Mr. Kern’s watch was propped against a glass of water on the table.
He became nervous and restless and finally shouted to the landlord,
who was sweeping out the office:

“‘Pete, I’ve only got fifteen minutes to make that train--can’t you
hurry breakfast a little?’

“‘Don’t worry, John,’ came back through the dust clouds in the
office. ‘You can eat all there is in the house and still have
plenty of time for your train.’

“This put Mr. Kern in a good humor, and he made his railroad
connection all right.

“On another occasion the party with Mr. Kern had to cross a small
river on an old-fashioned ferry. In midstream the rope broke and
the craft began floating on the current. Mr. Kern struck up ‘Life
on the Ocean Wave’ and the correspondents joined in with him. It
was the first time correspondents knew Senator Kern was a singer,
and for that matter none of them ever heard him attempt to sing
again. Kin Hubbard, who was in the party, drew a cartoon of the
float down the river for _The Indianapolis News_, which pleased Mr.
Kern greatly and he always declared that the cartoon was Hubbard’s
masterpiece.

“He had a most wonderful memory for names, faces and incidents, and
his speeches were generally punctuated with entertaining stories, a
greater part of which he usually located in the vicinity of Kokomo.
There was always a story to properly illustrate a point, and if the
anecdote related by John W. Kern could be compiled in one volume it
would make a book as huge as Webster’s Unabridged. And these
stories were not of a kind that offended or hurt, and the occasion
for their use was always appropriate. He had a way, too, of
rebuilding a speech with new words, and sometimes the
correspondents who were with him perhaps for weeks and had heard
him speak many times would burden the wires with a warmed-over
speech, to the distraction of the managing editors and the delight
of the copy editors, whose mission is to knock and destroy.

“When Mr. Kern was the nominee for vice-president on the Democratic
ticket he was frequently alluded to by Republican papers as
‘Alfalfa John.’ But there are only a few people who know that Mr.
Kern himself was the originator of the term. We landed at the
Auditorium Hotel in Chicago direct from Denver and Mr. Kern gave
audience to a large number of reporters, and among them several
‘sob sisters’ (which is the craft name for women journalists). One
of these, a piquant little creature with fluffy hair from _The
Chicago Tribune_, startled the nominee for vice-president by
suddenly asking:

“‘Mr. Kern, what is the actual color of your whiskers?’

“‘I really don’t know,’ replied Mr. Kern in all seriousness, ‘I
have never seen them, except in a mirror, and you know how
deceptive looking glasses are after one has past forty years. Down
in Kokomo, Indiana, the boys call them alfalfa.’

“The next morning a splendid word portrait of Mr. Kern appeared in
_The Tribune_ in which he was portrayed as ‘Alfalfa John,’ and the
name clung to him all through the campaign.

“To write the full story of campaigning with John W. Kern would be
to write many pages of political history. Ambitious perhaps he was,
but I have known many instances where he smothered his own
ambitions to advance the interest of his own political party. He
never was called that he did not answer, and he never was asked to
go that he failed. I have known him, tired and weary and racked
with pain, to crawl from his bed at three o’clock in the morning
and ride miles that he might address children at a country school
house, who were anxious to hear him. All through his political
campaigns, strenuous as some of them were, his kindly disposition,
his inexplicable sweetness of manner, was never ruffled. I never
knew him to say a cross word, even in his most impatient moments,
and the blare of bands and the pomp of political parades he never
forgot his home. At Denver, when his nomination for vice-president
was assured, when statesmen were trying to grasp his hand, and a
platoon of newspaper men were climbing over each other to get a
word with him, Mr. Kern turned to me:

“‘Won’t you please telegraph the good news to Mrs. Kern,’ he said.

“‘Certainly, but what shall I say?’

“‘I don’t need to tell you how happy I am, or what word to send to
my wife--you have a wife at home--just tell my wife what you would
say to your wife under the same circumstances.’

“That was John W. Kern, honest, trusting, with faith in his
friends, and with the picture of his home ever before him. The
newspaper fraternity lost a good friend when Death ushered John W.
Kern through the Gates of Life.

“We all must die.
And leave ourselves, no, it matters not where, when
Nor how, so we die well; and can that man that does
Need lamentation for him.”

X

No picture of Kern would be complete which did not delineate him in his professional character. While actively engaged in political activities from the hour of his admission to the bar until his election to the senate in 1911, he never abandoned the practice of the law, or lost his love for the profession. No one knew him more intimately in this rôle than Leon O. Bailey, now engaged in the practice with former United States Senator Charles A. Towne in New York City, with whom he was associated during the first ten years of his residence in Indianapolis. It will be observed that in the portrait presented in the analysis of Mr. Bailey there is nothing that does not harmonize in a general way with the pictures we have had of the Man, the Companion, the Campaigner, and the Student:

“‘Was Kern a great lawyer?’ I would not justly record my own
knowledge of the man’s mental qualities, or give response to my own
judgment, did I not answer this query in the affirmative.

“As a boy he possessed a thirst for knowledge and certainly up to
the time of my intimate association with him terminated, was one of
the most consistent, energetic and untiring students within my
knowledge of men. He was logical, of retentive memory, a voracious
reader of good literature, always delving and digging into his law
books, with which he was ever surrounded, and thorough to the last
word in his analysis of questions submitted for his investigation.
It is very easy to see that with his mental habits above mentioned,
when combined with the qualities of humanity and personal magnetism
for which the world best knew him, Kern was, in the very nature of
things, a great lawyer. It was my extreme good fortune, during my
twenty-odd years in Indiana, to have enjoyed an intimate
acquaintance with such great lawyers as Thomas A. Hendricks (in
whose office I was a student for three years), Major Jonathan W.
Gordon, Daniel W. Voorhees, David Turpie, Joseph E. McDonald,
Conrad Baker, Byron K. Elliott, Addison C. Harris, William A.
Ketcham, all judges of the Supreme Courts, and scores of brilliant
members of the Indiana bar; and it is in comparison with these men
that I rate Kern well up in the list. He was forceful before a
jury, not only because of his eloquence and pleasing personality,
but because of the candid and scrupulous manner with which he
explained every principle and applied every fact of importance to
be taken into consideration. His presentation, always manifestly
trustworthy, carried conviction that always follows a logical and
consistent development of the truth. Kern never could or did resort
to tricks or pretense of any sort, but in every important battle
met his enemy in the open and planted his batteries upon the rock
foundation of truth and of the legal principles fairly applicable
to the facts established. Like Oscar B. Hord, of the great firm of
Baker, Hord and Hendricks, he was one of the most adroit
cross-examiners at the Indiana bar. His skill in this particular
constituted one of his most potent weapons in the court room. One
of his rules was: ‘We have little to fear from our friends in a
lawsuit. The danger usually lies behind the armor mask of falsehood
or deception worn by the enemy. If this can be destroyed or
penetrated we are safe.’ His method of handling an unfriendly or
unwilling, timid or refractory witness was an interesting study. In
this his quick and accurate judgment of men was of the greatest
assistance. A perfect knowledge of his case, the exact line to be
developed, and danger points to be avoided, were the first
essentials, and absolute self poise the second. He never prejudiced
a jury by an attitude of brutality toward an adverse witness. His
affability at the beginning was usually rewarded with important
admissions, then came the rapid-fire questions, a method commonly
adopted by him, which in most instances brought confusion and often
anger to the witness. Kern’s experience lead him to assert that ‘a
witness that loses his temper loses his influence.’ He did not
include in this rule those whose resentment was justly aroused by
the ill treatment of counsel. Kern regarded this feature of his
trial work as a distinct art and almost felt contempt for a lawyer
who failed to appreciate its great value or possess the necessary
skill for obtaining the best results. So much of interest did he
feel in, and real importance attach to, this question that he often
spoke of his intention, at some time, of giving his observations to
the profession in a suitable book to be entitled ‘The Ideal
Cross-Examiner.’ Master as he was of the subject, it is unfortunate
he never found time to put this purpose, which would have been a
distinct pleasure to him, into execution.

“I recall a very amusing instance of Kern’s cleverness in the
cross-examination of witnesses, which I may be excused for
relating. It well demonstrates his ability for quickly and
accurately taking the measurement of a witness. We were appearing
for the defendant in a damage suit for personal injuries. While
having reason to know that the claim of the plaintiff was based on
fraud, the truth being difficult of establishment, we realized our
client’s danger. The extent and nature of the plaintiff’s injury
had been elaborately and with much exaggeration, presented by a
bombastic and pretentious doctor, whose use of big words and highly
technical scientific terms, with little knowledge on his part as to
their meaning, were poured out in a flood before the jury. The
appearance of the witness, nevertheless, was impressive, and his
statements, freed from the slightest appearance of doubt, were
calculated to convince a jury not only of the speaker’s wisdom, but
the complete reliability of the conclusions he had reached. We both
knew the witness personally and were well aware of his real status
among the members of his profession. We not only knew that he was a
‘quack,’ and to a large extent illiterate despite his bold
assurance, but were convinced that he was deliberately attempting
to establish the plaintiff’s claim by falsehood. How to best show
the character of this man to the jury was Kern’s purpose, quickly
formed. He must wait until the ‘Doctor’ should be turned over for
cross-examination. Mr. Kern began with a few flattering
observations calculated to throw the witness off his guard and
then, as if to further exploit the scholarly attainments of the
witness (knowing full well he possessed none), the examiner quickly
asked:

“Doctor, in describing the sphincter muscles, please explain to the
court and jury the difference, if any, between the functions and
location in the human body of the “oribucularis oris” and the
“orbicularis ani.”

“The doctor, bewildered and as far at sea as a mortal can ever be,
overlooking the possibility of any trap, but thinking only of
keeping up his front to the jury, replied in his most affable and
composed manner:

“‘Practically none, Mr. Kern, practically none. The terms are used
quite interchangeably.’

“That question and answer removed the mask and was the end of the
plaintiff’s case. The doctor’s usefulness had been destroyed. As
the real meaning of the answer reached the presiding judge and
filtered through the minds of the jury, the dignity of the court
for the time was wholly lost. In thus exposing the ignorance and
presumption of his opponent’s chief witness, Kern had employed a
means not only expressive of his contempt for so great an impostor,
but one also gratifying to his own sense of humor.

“He was unselfish and never employed money as a standard in
measuring the ability, honor or integrity of men. He earned good
fees, but was never able to save, and like many public men of his
type and greatness, was seldom free from the worry and anxiety of
debt. Had his splendid talents and untiring energies been dominated
by greed or open to employment by class interests for corrupt
purposes, Kern might have amassed a fortune, instead of ending his
life a poor man, but such opportunities never attracted him and his
contempt for those who would lend their influence to base purposes
because of the profit involved was well known to his friends. Much
of his time was devoted without pay to the advancement of party,
and this, together with his professional work, made for him a full
and busy life. It was a clean, open and honorable one. He threw his
entire soul into every engagement and much of his best energies
were devoted to the interest of those who had grievances to remedy,
but little or no money for compensation. If worthy, and possessing
a just cause, this made little difference to Kern, and I have
heard him say: ‘I am too busy with the things I believe in and am
doing for the betterment of mankind to follow the sordid schemes of
the mere money-grabbers, and I am happier that it is so.’ How true
this philosophy of Kern, a man developed from the people, and yet
how difficult for most men to understand.”