II
Senator Kern had scarcely warmed his seat in the senate before he found himself, together with seven other members of the committee on Privileges and Elections, engaged in the herculean task of investigating the charges of corruption in connection with the election of Senator Lorimer of Illinois. This required many months of ceaseless toil, and the case itself is one of the most fascinating and important in American history. Because of the enormous importance of the case and the fact that Senator Kern was forced by circumstances into the position of leadership of the forces persuaded of Lorimer’s guilt I shall touch upon this phase of his career in a separate chapter. During the period of the investigation he was necessarily withdrawn from active participation in other work of the senate, and while a member of the Finance committee in charge of the Canadian Reciprocity bill, to pass which congress had been called in extraordinary session, he was unable to participate in the hearings of the committee or the discussions on the floor to the extent that he otherwise would. During the interval, however, between the beginning of the Lorimer investigation and the final debate upon the reports of the committee he assumed a task that was very near to his heart in the championship of the Sherwood Dollar-a-Day pension bill in the senate, in the course of which he delivered the speech which attracted more general comment from the civil war veterans throughout the country than any other public utterance in forty years.
The Democratic state convention in which he was nominated for the senate had declared in favor of the immediate passage of a bill of this character, and during his campaign he had taken pains to especially indorse this plank and pledge himself to do all within his power to secure the enactment of such a law.
The election which sent Senator Kern to the senate restored the house of representatives to the Democrats for the first time in sixteen years, and General Sherwood, one of the most gallant soldiers of the civil war, who was made chairman of the Pension committee, undertook the formulation of a measure incorporating the dollar-a-day feature. This picturesque old warrier, almost eighty years of age, but as peppery in his advocacy of whatever he believed in as in the days of his youth, lived at the Congress Hall Hotel, where he came into intimate relations with Senator Kern, who undertook the leadership of the fight for the Sherwood bill after it reached the senate.
The senate, however, was still Republican, and when the house bill reached the senate it was promptly side-tracked for a less liberal measure prepared by Senator McCumber, chairman of the Pension committee of the upper chamber. When the Sherwood bill provided for a straight dollar-a-day for all the remaining veterans of the civil war, the McCumber measure was based upon a scale determined by age and length of service, but providing for a dollar a day for all totally incapacitated for manual labor through disease or wounds of service origin. It was wholly unsatisfactory to the soldiers, but met the approval of the politicians and the pure patriots of the parlor and the library and editorial sanctums. And it was understood to have the approval of the president. There was not the slightest possibility for the passage of any other bill.
This, however, did not deter Senator Kern from making a spirited plea for the more liberal measure from the house. It was his first set speech in the senate, and while comparatively short was prepared with considerable care—written with a pencil upon a pad in his beautiful chirography. During the delivery of the speech that afternoon, March 16, 1912, General Sherwood sat a few seats distant, his trumpet to his ear, nodding vigorous assent, and he was given close attention by his colleagues, but there was nothing in its reception in the senate chamber to suggest the really remarkable effect it had upon the soldiers from Massachusetts to California. The press associations carried but a meager part of the speech, but it was enough to strike a responsive chord in the men most vitally affected. The day following its delivery hundreds of letters expressive of gratitude poured in upon the senator from Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and West Virginia; the next day brought hundreds from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky; and so on until the sixth day, when they arrived as numerously from Oregon and California. No speech on the pension question had attracted such widespread attention in more than a generation. Resolutions from hundreds of Grand Army posts soon followed; and then, with the publication, and distribution by request of the speech, letters from scores of posts telling of meetings devoted to the reading of the speech for the benefit of those too old to read. This speech is treasured, no doubt, to-day by thousands of these old men all over the country.