The life of John Worth Kern

by Claude G. Bowers

IV

The state senate of the session of 1895, due to the political upheaval of 1894, was Republican, and Kern found himself in the rôle of leader of the minority—the only time in his career where he appeared as such. It is significant of his personal popularity and standing among Republicans that the majority in the making of committee assignments placed him upon the judiciary committee from which he had been excluded by a Democratic lieutenant governor, and he was continued on the rules committee and of course with the committee dealing with legislation relating to Indianapolis. Neither the journal of the senate nor the newspapers of the time indicate that he was particularly persistent in his opposition until toward the close of the session. The proceedings of the majority were flagrantly partisan and in many other ways open to censure. The majority was lead by Albert W. Wishard, an Indianapolis lawyer and politician of high professional standing, one of the most brilliant men who ever served in the Indiana legislature, for whom Kern entertained a warm personal regard. The partisan bitterness, however, which developed toward the close of the session did not prevent the latter from warmly defending the Republican leader against the charge of feigning illness to escape a vote. This kind of chivalry characterized him throughout his life, but signally failed to protect him in later years from the most vicious personal attacks on the part of a large portion of the Republican press of the state.

This bitterness of partisan feeling was engendered by the Republican plan for the gerrymandering of the state. The bill agreed upon by the Republican caucus represented partisanship gone mad. The most grotesque combinations of counties were made for congressional and legislative purposes. The most vehement protests of the Democrats and of citizens of sufficiently independent character to resent injustice were of no avail. The Republicans, booted and spurred, rode rough shod over all opposition. A United States senator was to be elected the next year and nothing in the way of the juggling of legislative districts that would make more difficult the re-election of Daniel W. Voorhees was left undone. Appreciating the impossibility of preventing the consummation of the plan, Kern withheld his fire until the bill was put upon its passage, and then in an excoriating speech, all the more severe because every count in the indictment he drew was notoriously true, he voiced his protest in a general denunciation of the legislative record made by the party in power during the session. This speech is historically interesting, especially the following:

“In 1887 you denounced the rules of the senate adopted by the Democratic majority under the leadership of Green Smith as ‘outrageous, brutal and revolutionary,’ and yet on gaining power you re-enact those rules without the dotting of an i or the crossing of a t.

“In former years you have denounced the Democratic legislatures on account of the number of their employees; and yet here in the senate chamber senators can scarcely get in and out of the chamber without stumbling over the crowds of idle and useless employees who swarm about performing no service.

“You have denounced the Democratic ‘profligacy’ in the little items of expenditures about the general assembly, and yet I call your attention to the fact that of the twenty-eight sets of Burns’ statutes purchased by the senate for the state at the commencement of the session every set except three have been stolen and carried away.

“You lay claim to a record of economy and yet, leaving your officers with their princely salaries, you seek to make the record good by taking food and clothing and the comforts of life from those of God’s unfortunate children who are confined in the asylum of the insane, and those who are being educated and cared for in the institutions for the deaf and dumb and blind.

“You have claimed to favor the abolishment of the spoils system from the politics of the state and yet under your legislation of this session politics has been carried into the public schools for the first time in the history of the state.”

Interruption—“How about the Nicholson law?”

Kern—“I am obliged for the interruption. The Democratic party has never posed as the great and only party of morality and temperance. The Republican party has. Do you remember your recent campaign waged under the banner—the Home Against the Saloon? If the Democratic party had made such pretenses as these I am sure its members would not, when the Nicholson bill was called, as it was yesterday, have been found running in all directions like fox chases to dodge a vote. They would have had the courage of their convictions. The Democratic party in the last campaign had no deal with the liquor element of Evansville or elsewhere. It had no entangling alliances that drove its members out of the chamber when the roll is called in order that they might dodge the consequences of a vote. Republican senators here who have been loud in their pretenses of temperance and morality in the years gone by turn pale and tremble and run like hounds at the mere mention of the Nicholson bill. At last they have been smoked from under the cover of hypocrisy and are appalled at the sight of the light of day, which is finally turned upon them.

“The end of these false pretenses is come at last.... And that is why I say that at the close of this session, with this record, it is fitting that there should come this gerrymander which in its iniquity is sufficient to cause the old original Gerry to turn in his grave at the thought of his utter incapacity in that line when compared with the modern Republican reformers of Indiana.”