Thus was inaugurated one of the most exhaustive and significant investigations ever held by the United States senate, which was to delve deep into the most sinister influences that assail the integrity of free institutions, the debasing effect of bi-partisan combinations of politicians for personal gain, the corrupting influence of powerful financial elements upon the public life of the nation, the all-too frequent susceptibility of law makers to the blandishments of the bribe giver. For 102 days the committee was to listen to the unraveling of one of the most startling tales of political debauchery ever told. Before it was to file an incongruous company of witnesses—leaders of the United States senate, such as Aldrich and Penrose, potential political leaders like Roger A. Sullivan, governors and former governors, the millionaire and the beggar, the briber and the bribed, journalists and bartenders, detectives and street car conductors, drunkards and reformers, the high and low, the rich and poor, the good and bad. It was to become a participant in one of the most tremendous political dramas ever enacted in America—comedy treading on the heels of tragedy, to be followed by burlesque and vaudeville. It was to have a hundred million people, the perpetuity of whose institutions was at stake, as an audience, and they were to await with the keenest interest the moral of the play.
And in this drama Senator Kern was soon to play the most important rôle, from the viewpoint of those who believed the extermination of Lorimerism to be essential to the safety of free institutions. There was nothing theatrical about the setting of the play. With the exception of a few weeks in Chicago the committee held its hearings in a prosy, unadorned, and small room on the ground floor of the senate office building. The witness chair in the center in the front of the room—to one side the long table of the press correspondents, at which sat some of the cleverest men of the profession—on the opposite side the members of the committee, and stretching back to the wall chairs for the audience. These were often, for the most part, unoccupied, but usually they were filled and many were standing—attaches of the capitol who dropped in while on their errands to catch a few words of the witnesses. These attaches were for the most part intense partisans of the accused senator, who found ways of making their feeling felt. And strangely enough the greater part of the audience through those hot summer days of 1911 and the winter days of 1912 were intensely loyal to the blond boss—so much so that the capitol policeman stationed in the room was requested by a Lorimer partisan to move the parties who were not sufficiently demonstrative in their jubilation when the accused man scored.
In the front row sat Lorimer—bland, humble, the picture of innocent martyrdom—a pose he consistently maintained until he walked out of the senate at the behest of his colleagues and to the applause of the republic. Nothing so damaging as to disturb his composure, nothing so startling as to coax to his placid features an expression of surprise. And beside him sat the Symbol of his ruin—Edward Hines, the millionaire lumber man whose boast of having “put Lorimer over” whispered in the lobby of the Union League Club at Chicago resounded through the country. This strangely indiscreet, purse-proud exponent of Big Business at its worst hovered near Lorimer like a shadow. And there too beside him sat the clever, brilliant, sarcastic and witty Judge Henecy, his attorney—as resourceful and able as any lawyer in the country. Across the room at another table were the counsel of the committee, Healy and Marble, keen, alert, as resourceful as the judge and buttressed about by a better cause.
Senator Kern was not eager for the task the senate had assigned him. It meant his practical withdrawal from all other senate activities for an indefinite period, and his concentration as in a case in court upon every word of evidence adduced. While morally positive of Lorimer’s guilt from the beginning, he was early convinced, and his sense of duty gradually forced him into greater and greater prominence as a developer of the case against the accused. A man of kindly instincts, he had never relished the rôle of a prosecutor, and in his private practice of his profession had seldom appeared except in defense in criminal cases. But once convinced of Lorimer’s guilt, he determined that every possible avenue of information tending to uncover what he considered a great crime against American institutions should be followed to the end. It was early whispered about and generally credited that the second investigation, like the first, would end in a white wash. Very early he was startled to find from their general attitude that the majority of the committee were apparently not impressed by what he considered overwhelming evidence of guilt. The honesty of this attitude he never questioned, but, convinced himself, he set himself to the task of developing the evidence along the line of his own conviction. This led him to the position he unquestionably held at the conclusion of the hearings as the leader in the fight for the unseating of the blond boss.
II
The line of cleavage on the committee was clear very soon after the hearings began. Feeling as he did early in the proceedings, that a majority of the committee would support a report favorable to the accused, Kern, intensely convinced of his guilt, keenly felt the responsibility which fell to him. This feeling was shared by two other members of the committee, Kenyon and Lea. It was during the period of the Lorimer hearing that the feeling of mutual respect and affection sprang up between the three men which continued until Senator Kern’s death. All three were new members of the senate, but Kern had a long career behind him and was more than sixty years old, while Kenyon and Lea were unusually young and comparatively new to public life. They were both of the same general type and this a type that strongly appealed to the older man—the clean-cut, buoyant, independent, courageous and incorruptible type, bubbling with the enthusiasms of youth, and ardently anxious to serve the country according to their light. Both were men of vigorous mentality, keen and alert and “spoiling for a fight” with such wrongs as might present themselves, and both were skilled lawyers and competent for the task assigned them. It was most natural that young men, new to the senate, and sharing in a desire to serve the people, should have drifted together; the fact that both drifted toward the veteran of sixty was wonderfully complimentary to the character of the older man. Their common hatred of political corruption, their common indifference to party lines where corruption was involved, their common contempt for the fetish of “senatorial courtesy” which has so frequently served a sinister end, and their common conviction of the guilt of the blond boss, gave them a common cause, and the three stood together, drawing closer all the while, throughout the long-drawn battle. When the committee was not in session the two younger senators frequently called at Kern’s office for informal discussions of the evidence. “My boys,” Kern called them. And to a somewhat less degree he became strongly attached to John Marble, the brilliant young lawyer employed by the committee as counsel. The fervor and whole-heartedness with which the lawyer threw himself into the preparation of his case and into the cross-examination of witnesses early won his admiration. He loved youth, with its shining armor, and especially when he conceived it to be “fighting the battles of the Lord.” The brunt of the actual battle against Lorimerism was thus waged by youth grouped about the venerable statesman to whose judgment it often looked for guidance on questionable points.
And Kern was well qualified for leadership. His almost half century of participation in politics and association with politicians had left little for him to learn of the ways and wiles of the breed. He knew how the game was played according to Springfield, for that capital of Illinois had no monopoly on the combination of bi-partisan politicians with unscrupulous business interests. It was not easy to deceive him. And here, too, his unusual gift at cross-examination which had been his forte in the trial of cases all his life was to stand him in good stead. He knew men, understood human nature, and was quick in the appraisement of the character and truthfulness of witnesses. Nature, acquirements and character combined to make him an important factor in the extirpation of Lorimerism.
III
An examination of the voluminous evidence in the case will disclose that the majority of the committee took little or no part in the examination of witnesses, and the major part, and practically all the cross-examination of Lorimer witnesses was done by the three members who came to the conclusion of Lorimer’s guilt, Kern, Kenyon and Lea. Senator Kern was the most active.
The theory on which Kern worked after a careful reading of the evidence before the Burrows committee and the Helm committee of the state senate of Illinois and the statement of Funk was about this: Edward Hines, interested in the lumber schedule of the Payne-Aldrich bill and lobbying in Washington, was urged by Aldrich and Penrose to help hurry a new Republican vote into the senate from Illinois to help out in the tariff fight. After conferences it was agreed that Lorimer should be the choice, and Hines undertook to put the agreement into effect. He financed the fight for Lorimer. The money was used through the management of Lee O’Neil Browne, the clever leader of the majority wing of the Democrats in the lower house of the legislature, and with the knowledge of Lorimer. He was absolutely positive that the wholesale defection of the Democrats to Lorimer could only have been the result of corrupt influence because the election of a reactionary Republican senator might, in view of the conditions surrounding the tariff fight in the senate, determine a national policy to which Democrats were elementally opposed and upon which they had made their campaign one year before. Had these Democrats gone to a Republican who would vote with Dolliver and Beveridge he might not have been so sure. Going to Lorimer, he was predisposed to the belief that money had been used. This frame of mind manifested itself repeatedly in all his examination of political witnesses. He appealed to Governor Deneen for one reason for Democrats deserting their party to vote for a reactionary Republican under conditions existing in Washington; to Yates, to Hopkins, to Stringer, to the members of the legislature who deserted and without once securing a plausible reply.