This marked the beginning of the general reorganization of the Democrats of the senate. The representatives of the old regime readily recognized the necessity of making concessions, and in the selection of the steering committee, or committee on committees, the new senator from Indiana was included. This within itself was a distinction seldom, until then, accorded a new member.
It was in connection with his work on this committee that Senator Kern met the greatest embarrassment of his senatorial career, resulting in some unjust criticism on the part of his political enemies in Indiana. The determination of the personnel of the important Finance committee, it was his desire that his colleague, Senator Shively, should have a place on this committee. Not only did the senior senator desire the assignment, but he was peculiarly fitted for it by a lifetime of study of fiscal legislation. No man connected with the public life of Indiana for a generation had possessed such a mastery of the intricacies of tariff legislation. He had unhappily been deprived of the opportunity of participating actively in the discussions of the Payne-Aldrich bill by the physical breakdown which had followed almost immediately his entrance to the senate, and he had felt it keenly. But his special qualifications for service on this committee were well known by all his colleagues, and he had the further qualification of having served on the Ways and Means committee of the house. For some reason a stubborn opposition to the appointment of Senator Shively developed, and to make the situation more embarrassing it was proposed by Senator Kern’s colleagues on the committee that he should accept a place on the Finance committee. In the meanwhile some senators, understanding Kern’s position, called upon Shively with a frank statement of the situation, with the view to getting his indorsement of Kern’s acceptance, but the senior senator, not unnaturally miffed by the attitude of the steering committee, maintained silence. At this the senators who made the attempt returned to the meeting of the committee, and, in the absence of Kern, and knowing his position, placed him upon the Finance committee. These facts are set forth because of the disposition of Senator Kern’s enemies to create the impression that he had used his position on the steering committee to further his own interests at the expense of his colleague. Of interest in this connection is the fact that two years later when elected to the leadership of the senate and the chairmanship of the steering committee he voluntarily retired from the Finance committee in favor of his colleague, while permitting him to retain the equally important assignment as ranking member of the committee on Foreign Relations. Notwithstanding the persistent efforts of petty busy-bodies in Indiana to alienate the two senators, their relations warmed with their years of association in the senate and were never closer than when, on the solicitation of the dying Shively, Senator Kern called at the White House to urge the appointment as ambassador to Chili of Joseph H. Shea, who had managed Shively’s campaign for the senate against Kern in the legislature of 1909.
Thus within a month after taking the oath as a senator Kern found himself in the enviable position of holding places on the Steering and Finance committees—a most unusual experience for a new senator. Among his other assignments was to the committee on Privileges and Elections, with which he was most intimately identified through his career in the senate. Before most new senators could be expected to learn their way about the capitol Kern was numbered among the leaders.
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.