I
ON the Saturday before the Baltimore convention met Senator Kern, who had gone to Kerncliffe for a much-needed rest, returned to Washington in comparative ignorance of the developments in the convention city. The news that awaited his return was not of a pleasant nature.
The more important news he learned that hot afternoon as he sat in front of the Congress Hall Hotel was that the National Committee had selected Alton B. Parker of New York for the temporary chairmanship to deliver the keynote speech and that this had been challenged by Mr. Bryan, who had made it quite clear that he would fight. At that time he had no idea that he would be called upon to play any part in the contest other than to cast his individual vote in the convention. But there were various embarrassing angles to the situation thus presented. Many years before he had formed a personal friendship for Judge Parker and this friendship had grown with the years. The National Committeeman from Indiana had voted for Parker, which complicated the situation from the viewpoint of state politics. He entertained a momentary fear that the prospective fight might tend to the disruption of the party and the destruction of its prospects. But at the same time he understood perfectly the motives actuating Mr. Bryan and sympathized with them. With some forces known to be reactionary, lining up aggressively behind a man thought by the masses of the party west of the eastern mountains to be reactionary in his trend of thought, and with Mr. Bryan sounding the warning that the selection of that man for the temporary chairmanship would be a triumph for reaction, Senator Kern instantly knew his position in the fight. It was not a pleasant one; it came to be a far more important one than is generally known.
The National Committee had entrusted a sub-committee of eight to select the temporary chairman and this committee first proffered the position to Mr. Bryan, who declined, and then to Senator Kern, who refused to serve. It was the suggestion of both Mr. Bryan and Senator Kern that a thoroughly progressive Democrat, nationally known as such, should be chosen. The forces of Champ Clark had a candidate who measured up to the desired standard in Ollie James of Kentucky, then a member of the house, and the Wilson forces favored the election of Robert L. Henry, a representative from Texas, who also harmonized with Mr. Bryan’s idea of a temporary chairman. When the sub-committee met eight of the sixteen voted for Parker, three for James, three for Henry, one for Kern and one for O’Gorman. The one vote cast for Senator Kern was not the vote of the Indiana member, Mr. Taggart. The Indiana member did not vote for Kern because the senator had written him personally that he did not desire the position.
With this vote the fight passed to the full membership of the National Committee, and Bryan with a vigorous pen began a determined warfare through the press against the choice of the sub-committee. Realizing the importance of the issue, the Wilson followers, in view of Mr. Wilson’s telegram to Bryan accepting the latter’s view of the selection of Parker, withdrew the candidacy of Henry and went over to James. On the afternoon of the day before the full committee met in the evening, Bryan declared through the press that in the event the organization recommended Parker he would oppose him on the floor of the convention with another candidate. The issue was clean-cut. That night the full committee selected Parker by a vote of 32 to 20 for James and 2 for O’Gorman. The fight was on.
Mr. Bryan did not want to be the candidate against Parker. It was his plan to serve notice on the rank and file of the party throughout the country of the reactionary trend of the convention through a powerful speech he expected to make in presenting the name of his candidate. This he could not do were he himself the candidate. His first step was to ask Ollie James to permit the presentation of his name, but having been the avowed candidate before the committee of the Clark forces, the managers of the speaker of the house objected to James being a candidate. He then appealed to Senator O’Gorman, but found that he was pledged to Parker. Then it was he determined upon presenting the name of Senator Kern.
There were several reasons bearing on state politics which made the suggestion distasteful to Kern. He was interested in the nomination of Governor Marshall for the presidency, and the reasons which impelled the Clark forces to object to the candidacy of James made the idea unpleasant to the Indiana senator. All the various reasons were given Bryan in an effort to dissuade him from his plan to nominate Kern, but without effect. Meanwhile many of the senator’s friends became concerned over the proposal. While it did not operate in determining Kern’s state of mind, some of these friends, anticipating the long deadlock which occurred in the balloting for the presidency were convinced that should the convention be forced to go outside the list of avowed candidates no one would loom so promisingly as the Indiana senator, and they were anxious to prevent his prominence in connection with a fight. The strain told physically upon Kern. Many of his friends, and notably Senator Luke Lea of Tennessee, made frequent efforts to persuade the Nebraskan to nominate some other man. Mr. Kern himself had but little hope of their success. The night before the convention met while dining with Lea he made this clear. The Tennesseean made another trip to Bryan’s room and brought back the message that the latter had closed the subject with the remark, “I intend to nominate John to-morrow, and he will have to do what he thinks best about it.” It was after this that Kern himself made a last attempt. “He left my room,” writes Mr. Bryan to me, “late the night before the convention without a positive reply. He urged me to be a candidate, but did not decide the question whether he would accept. Next morning I heard a rumor that he might put me in nomination, but I had explained to him that I wanted to present to the convention the reasons why Parker should not be nominated and that I could only do that in a speech presenting the name of some one else. Not hearing directly from Kern, I presented his name and then he played his part, and it was a very skilful part.”
For the story of Senator Kern’s part between the time he left Mr. Bryan’s room late that night and the following morning I am indebted to Mrs. Kern, who was at the convention. He went directly to his own room and told Mrs. Kern everything that had transpired. He was so worried that he slept none that night, and his nervous condition brought on an illness that made sleep impossible. It was during that restless night that he planned his part on the morrow, and the first person to learn of his plans was Mrs. Kern, to whom he detailed his purpose early in the morning as he was sitting on the edge of his bed drawing on his shoes. With this exception he gave no indication of his intention. Contrary to the general assumption at the time that the scene in the convention that day had been planned by Mr. Bryan, the Commoner knew absolutely nothing about it until he witnessed it on the platform. “The plan was his own so far as I know,” Mr. Bryan tells me, “and no actor ever did his work more perfectly.”
Looking down from the gallery upon the convention that day one could easily imagine a storm-tossed sea. The excitement was intense. Great throngs futilely beat against the doors for admission. The day was intensely warm. The session was rich in the dramatic from the moment the venerable Cardinal Gibbons in his scarlet robes passed down the center aisle for the opening invocation until the result of the chairmanship fight was announced. The feeling on the part of Bryan’s enemies among the delegates had been intensified during the night, and there was some concern among the conservative and thoughtful lest the Commoner might be insulted so flagrantly as to result in a general resentment over the country.
When the familiar figure of the Commoner appeared in the convention he was given a remarkable ovation, and when a little later Senator Kern entered Bryan was given another demonstration. These exhibitions of devotion did not tend to sweeten the temper of his enemies, and when he appeared upon the platform to deliver his speech the hiss was not absent from the general turmoil. Seldom has the great orator appeared so majestic as he did in this fighting speech. There was something strangely hard, steel-like, in the man that those who had heard him frequently on less momentous occasions could not recognize. A more militant figure never faced a hostile crowd—and there were enough enemies in the convention to give it the appearance of hostility. Time and again he was compelled to pause by the hisses and imprecations, but he stood there immovable like a stonewall waiting for the storm to subside sufficiently for him to make his voice heard above the din. That speech made history—more so than the Cross of Gold speech in 1896. With the general purport of the speech we are not here concerned, for it is well known. But we are interested that in that portion of the speech having to do directly with Senator Kern. Here he said:
“It is only fair now that, when the hour of triumph has come, the song of victory should be sung by one whose heart has been in the fight. John W. Kern has been faithful every day during these sixteen years. It has cost him time, it has cost him money, and it has cost him the wear of body and of mind. He has been giving freely of all that he had. Four years ago, when the foundation was laid for the present victory, it was John W. Kern who stood with me and helped to bring into the campaign the idea of publicity before the election which has now swept the country until even the Republican party was compelled by public opinion to give it unanimous indorsement only a few weeks ago.
“It was John W. Kern who stood with me on that Denver platform that demanded the election of senators by a direct vote of the people, when a Republican national convention had turned it down by a vote of seven to one, and now he is in the United States senate, where he is measuring up to the high expectations of a great party.
“He helped in the fight for the amendment authorizing an income tax, and he has lived to see a president who was opposed to us take that plank out of our platform and put it through the house and senate and to see thirty-four states of the union ratify it. And now he is leading the fight in the United States senate to purge that body of Senator Lorimer, who typifies the supremacy of corruption in politics.
“What better man could we have to open a convention?
“What better man could we have to represent the spirit of progressive Democracy?”
As Mr. Bryan was concluding his remarkable speech Senator Kern appeared upon the platform. No one knew his intent. And when the Commoner sat down, both cheered and hissed, and Kern claimed the recognition of the chair, a hush of expectancy fell upon the great convention. Throughout his speech, in some respects one of the most dramatic and effective ever delivered at a national convention, he was given the most respectful attention. Pale and wan from his sleepless night, he looked frail, but his voice was in excellent condition, and the interest of the delegates in his message was so intense that little difficulty was found in hearing him in the most remote portions of the gallery. As he referred to the time in his youth when, in 1872 he attended a Democratic national convention in Baltimore and said that the enthusiasm for Democracy in his young heart then was “no greater than that which glowed in his old heart now” he made a subtle appeal. His almost affectionate reference to his personal friendship for Judge Parker predisposed the followers of the New Yorker to a friendly attitude toward the speaker. And when he made his dramatic personal appeal to Parker, seated in the New York delegation, to join with him in the interest of harmony in withdrawing, and in deciding upon some one of numerous men he mentioned, the scene was almost theatrical. Here and there were murmurs, and Parker was seen engaged in earnest, animated conversation with his colleagues. There is no record of the nature of that conversation. There can be little doubt, however, that had he been an absolutely free agent at that moment, with no sense of obligations to those who were supporting him, he would have responded in the spirit in which the proposition was submitted. With Kern standing in silence waiting for the hoped-for answer, with Parker surrounded by gesticulative men, with the convention growing nervous under the tension, the scene was almost theatrical. And when, on finding that Parker would not respond, Kern turned to Charles F. Murphy, the Tammany chief, referring to him as “the leader of the New York Democracy, who holds that democracy in the hollow of his hand” and made the appeal to him, it was as though a bomb had been dropped from the ceiling. Receiving no response from Murphy, who sat in his seat stolid and unmoved, the attitude of Kern changed instantly from supplication to defiance, and with the declaration that if the contest must be “between the people and the powers,” there was but one man to lead, and withdrew his own name and nominated Bryan it was like the startling effect of an unexpected thunderbolt. This remarkable speech follows:
“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention—I desire a hearing in order that I may state my reason for not desiring to enter the contest for temporary chairman of this convention. I believe that by forty years of service to my party I have earned the right to a hearing at the hands of a Democratic convention. I hail from the state of Indiana, which will shortly present to this convention for its consideration the name of one of the best, truest, and most gallant Democrats on earth, in the person of the Hon. Thomas R. Marshall, the governor of that state.
“I desire to take no part in this convention that will in any wise militate against him or against his interests, which all true Indiana Democrats this day loyally support. I have been for many years a personal friend of the gentleman who has been named by the national committee. Many years ago, when Judge Parker and I were much younger than we are now, we met in a hotel in Europe and became warm personal friends. That was long before his elevation to the chief justiceship of the court of appeals of his state. Since that time I have enjoyed his friendship. He had had mine. I have accepted the hospitality of his home, and in 1904, when he was a candidate for the presidential nomination, moved largely by that personal friendship, I enlisted under his standard for the nomination long before the convention, and went through that great battle at St. Louis in his behalf. In that campaign, in response to a request of Judge Parker personally made to me, I, on account of my friendship for him, took the standard of a losing cause as candidate for governor of Indiana, and carried it on to defeat, but I hope not an inglorious defeat. In 1908 Judge Parker canvassed in my state for vice-president. Last year when I was a candidate for the national ticket, on which I was a candidate for the senate, in the midst of a heated contest, Judge Parker traveled from New York to Indianapolis to make a speech in my behalf.
“We have been during all these years, and are now, personal friends. The greatest desire of my heart is the hope of a Democratic victory. I attended a national convention in Baltimore in 1872, before I had cast my vote, and my young heart was filled with no more enthusiasm for success that year than my old heart is now. I believe that Judge Parker is as earnestly in favor, as earnestly desirous of Democratic success this year as I am.
“There are only a little over a thousand delegates in this convention; there are seven million Democrats between the oceans. There are millions of Democrats scattered from one end of this country to the other who at this hour are all looking with aching hearts upon the signs of discord that prevail here when there ought to be forerunners of victory in the shouts of this convention. Is there a man here who does not earnestly desire harmony to the end that there may be victory?
“I am going to appeal now and here for that kind of harmony which will change the sadness which at this hour exists in millions of Democratic homes into shouts of joy and gladness.
“My friend, Judge Parker, sits before me in this convention, he representing the national committee, I representing, not another faction, thank God, but representing perhaps another section, and we two men have it within our power to send these words of gladness flashing throughout the republic. If my friend will join with me now and here in the selection of a man satisfactory to us both; if he will stand in this presence with me and agree that that distinguished New Yorker who has brought more honor to the Empire state in the United States senate than it has had since the days of Frederick Kernan—James A. O’Gorman—this discord will cease in a moment and the great Democratic party will present a united front. Or if he will agree that that splendid representative from the state of Texas in that same body, Charles A. Culberson shall preside, or if he will agree upon that splendid parliamentarian, Henry D. Clayton of Alabama, or if he will agree upon that young Tennesseean, whose name is known in every home where chivalry abides—Luke Lea—this matter will be settled in a moment. Or if he will agree upon the blue-eyed statesman from Ohio, Governor James E. Campbell; or if he will agree upon the reformer governor of Missouri, ex-Governor Folk; or if he will agree on my own colleague, the stalwart Democrat from Indiana, Benjamin F. Shively, all this discord will cease.
“Will some one for Judge Parker, will Judge Parker himself, meet me on this ground and aid in the solution of this problem, a solution of which means victory to the party and relief to the taxpayers of the country?
“My fellow Democrats, you will not promote harmony, you will not point the way to victory, by jeering or deriding the name of the man who led your fortunes in 1908. You may put him to the wheel, you may humiliate him here, but in so doing you will bring pain to the hearts of six million men in America who would gladly die for him. You may kill him, but you do not commit homicide when you kill him; you commit suicide.
“My friends, I have submitted a proposition to Judge Parker; I submit it to the man, the leader of the New York Democracy who holds that Democracy in the hollow of his hand. What response have I? (A pause.) If there is to be no response, then let the responsibility rest where it belongs. If Alton B. Parker will come here now and join me in this request for harmony, his will be the most honored of all the names amongst American Democrats.
“If there is to be no response, if the responsibility is to rest there, if this is to be a contest between the people and the powers, if it is to be a contest such as has been described, a contest which I pray God may be averted, then the cause to which I belong is so great a cause that I am not fit to be its leader. If my proposition for harmony is to be ignored, and this deplorable battle is to go on, there is only one man fit to lead the hosts of progress, and that is the man who has been at the forefront for sixteen years, the great American tribune, William Jennings Bryan. If you will have nothing else, if that must be the issue, then the leader must be worthy of the cause, and that leader must be William Jennings Bryan.”
As Kern concluded, weak from a sleepless night and an enervating ailment, a friend took him by the arm and led him, “ashen hued and sick,” as the press reports described his appearance, from the stage. He passed within arm’s reach of Bryan, but not a word was exchanged between the two, nor even a look. The move Kern made was as much of a surprise to Bryan as to Parker. It was not a prearranged affair. There was no sharp practice in it. But it was an earnest effort of a loyal Democrat to pour oil upon the troubled waters and prevent a battle between members of the same army. As he spoke the expression on Bryan’s face clearly denoted his surprise. As he proceeded the expression of surprised anxiety gradually gave way to one of satisfaction and then to frank admiration. And when he was led from the stage, the Commoner in a dramatic manner accepted the commission which had been handed back to him. Had Bryan been a candidate originally the progressives of the country would not have had the warning of the reactionary plot. Had Kern remained silent and permitted the convention to vote between himself and Judge Parker without first submitting his series of compromise proposals, any of which should have been acceptable, the country might not have understood that there was a “rule or ruin” policy behind the men who presented Parker’s name. Thus Kern’s speech was quite as effective and important as that of Bryan.
Still it was not Senator Kern’s purpose to embarrass Judge Parker, in whose personal devotion to the party he had the most perfect confidence. He did entertain the hope that the New York jurist would meet him on the ground of a general conciliation. But when it became apparent that Parker was so situated that he could not respond to what must have been his natural impulse, and Kern made his appeal to Charles F. Murphy it was not so much with the thought that he might accept as with the intention to placing the responsibility and giving it “a local habitation and a name.”
Among Kern’s enemies there was a disposition to disseminate the idea that his action had compromised his personal popularity. Nothing could have been farther from the fact. The United Press on the following day properly gauged the effect when it said that “Kern’s efforts to obtain harmony in his personal appeal to Parker to withdraw in the interest of the party has added to his popularity among the men who championed Parker’s cause.”
That night he saw Bryan for the first time after the late parting of the night before. Accompanied by Mrs. Kern he called at Bryan’s rooms, where he found the Commoner in the center of his reception room surrounded by a crowd. Catching sight of the senator, Bryan broke through the crowd, his face wreathed in the Bryanic smile, and placing his arm affectionately about Kern’s shoulders, he said delightedly:
“How did you ever come to think of it? That was the smartest thing you ever did.”
Mr. Bryan publicly expressed his view of the performance in his newspaper article of the next morning:
“I think the reader, when he has fully digested this scheme (Kern’s) will admit that it is about as good an illustration as has been seen in many a day of the manner in which tact and patriotism can be combined. After I had put Senator Kern in nomination against Parker, he took the platform and made a most forcible and eloquent plea for harmony in the convention. He called attention to the great issues involved and to the importance of presenting a united front. He then presented a list of names.... He called upon Parker, who sat just in front of him, to join him in withdrawing in favor of any one of these men in order that the convention might operate without discord. It was a dramatic moment. Such an opportunity seldom comes to a man. If Parker had accepted it it would have made him the hero of the convention. There was a stir in his neighborhood in a moment. The bosses flocked about him, and the convention looked on in breathless anxiety, but he did not withdraw. The opportunity passed unimproved. Senator Kern then appealed to Mr. Murphy to induce Judge Parker to withdraw, but Mr. Murphy was not in a compromising mood. This was the only thing that Senator Kern did, the good faith of which could be questioned. I am afraid that he had no great expectation of melting the stony heart of the Tammany boss. At any rate nothing came of the generous offer made by Mr. Kern except that it shifted to the shoulders of Judge Parker and his supporters entire responsibility for any discord that might grow out of the contest.”
Such is the true story of Kern’s part in the great fight over the temporary chairmanship which did more to determine the progressive trend of the convention than everything else combined. The defeat of Bryan by a small margin aroused the rank and file of the party everywhere, and the wires to Baltimore were burdened with thousands of indignant telegrams of protest which made a profound impression upon the delegates and made quite impossible a repetition of such a fight, on such an issue, and with such a result.