The life of John Worth Kern

by Claude G. Bowers

This condition was all the more bitter to Andrew Furseth, for he knew and loved the sea and its romantic history and knew that seamen had once been free men. He determined to dedicate his life to doing for the seamen what Lincoln did for the slaves, and he landed on the Pacific coast of America.

“For the seamen of the world,” wrote John L. Mathews in Everybody’s Magazine, “the most important event of the nineteenth century was the coming ashore of Andrew Furseth.”

His first step was to challenge the greed of the shipping interests by organizing the seamen along the coast. The organization was small and its membership pitifully poor, and it faced the bitter hostility of powerful interests and a prejudiced or subsidized press.

Knowing that the seamen of the world would not be freed by his little organization alone, he went to Washington as its representative. That was in 1894. The following twenty-one years of Furseth’s life mark the greatness of the man. So low had the seaman fallen in the estimation of the world that this man with no other motive than to secure the enactment of legislation was under police espionage and for years was shadowed by detectives. His persecutors wasted money—his life was in the open. Year after year he pressed his case on members of the congress. Many were openly hostile. Some mildly curious. None greatly interested. Sometimes his bill was introduced and quietly smothered in committee. Sometimes he could find no one to present it. Men of less heroic mould have succumbed to despair. Furseth never despaired. He never stormed at fate. He persevered. He was like the character in Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea.

Working for a ridiculously small salary, when hard times came upon the country he voluntarily cut his own pay. With no small vices to feed, he found he could exist on next to nothing in a sailors’ boarding house. Asked once if he had laid anything aside for old age, he made an answer that deserves to live:

“When my work is finished, I hope to be finished. I have made no provision against old age, and I shall borrow no fears from time.”

At length he forced attention. The Democratic party in its Baltimore convention incorporated a plank in its platform which pledged the party to the abrogation of treaties obligating the United States to hunt down and return as criminals the deserters from foreign ships in American ports and to general legislation in the interest of the seamen. Senator Lafollette introduced the Seaman’s bill.

That, however, was only a beginning and did not necessarily signify anything. The bill was certain to encounter the most bitter opposition of the most powerful interests, and senators naturally ultra-conservative were certain to find plausible reasons for opposition in the protests of foreign governments. The only hope was in enlisting the active sympathy and interest of an influential leader of the majority, and Furseth was urged to present his case to Senator Kern.

I shall let Furseth tell the story of his first call on Kern:

“Shortly after the senator came to the senate I went to him and asked his permission to tell him about the seamen. He had no time then, but told me to come to his hotel. Upon my arrival at the appointed time I told him it would take me at least twenty minutes to give him some idea of what I had to say. He told me to go ahead. I did and I was with him for about an hour and a half. In a quiet easy way he encouraged me to talk, and I told him about the seaman’s daily life on the vessel, but more so on the shore. At sea, the terrible quarters, the ceaseless toil, the poor food, the general treatment and the longing to get away from the life which was degraded by involuntary servitude and a feeling of helplessness. On shore, the power of the Crimp to dictate our wages and take away what we were to earn in the form of advance or ‘allotment to the original creditor,’ as the thing was called; the power to compel us to go to sea in any vessel and with any kind of men—destitute poor devils who set our wages when we were hired and whose work we had to do at sea because they could not. With it all a feeling that we were forgotten by God and held in bitter contempt by men on shore. When I stopped he would ask a question and set me going again, and then he said—‘I shall see whether we can not help you.’