The life of John Worth Kern

by Claude G. Bowers

“This is Mother Jones,” said the voice at the other end, “may I see the senator?”

And twenty minutes later the wonderful old woman walked into the room with the announcement:

“When I was imprisoned, threatened with death, and needed a friend and none seemed near you saved my life. Now you are in a fight and I came to report. Send me where you will.”

It was in incidents like this that Kern found sufficient compensation for all the abuse that was lavished upon him by men of the type of Kirby of the Manufacturers’ Association.

At the state convention of the Federation of Labor this eighty-year-old woman appeared unexpectedly, aroused the delegates to the highest pitch of enthusiasm by her recital of Kern’s services to labor and herself, and brought every delegate to his feet with the demand that all who thought it the duty of union labor to fight for the senator’s re-election stand up. And this scene was not according to the program planned by a little coterie of enemies.

After this Mother Jones swept through the mining towns and camps of the state, arousing enthusiasm for Kern everywhere she went, and fervently urging her “boys” to put on the armor in his behalf. And that which she did was done by other representatives of labor of less note.

It was the idea of local campaign managers in the various counties to pack Senator Kern and Senator Taggart into automobiles and hurry them from meeting to meeting for short speeches during the day, closing in at night at the county seat with a great demonstration. The first week disclosed the impossibility of the plan as far as Kern was concerned, and very soon afterward Senator Taggart, a younger man, was forced to notify the managers that he could not stand up under the strain. Entering the campaign with a distressing cough, the first week increased his affliction, and from that time on he was in a hopelessly crippled condition. His physician urged him to retire from the stump, but he persisted, buoyed up by his enthusiasm for the cause, and impelled to do so by the realization that a personal fight was being made upon him. The result was pathetic. Leaving a sick bed he would brave the hardships of travel, the inclemency of the weather, to fill an engagement with the intention of speaking briefly, but the inspiration and enthusiasm of the crowd would lead him on to the full exertion of his strength, and after a day or so he would be forced to return to his bed. Thus through October he passed from the sick room to the stump and back again, all the while growing weaker and sustained alone by his power of will. His greatest meetings were probably held at Terre Haute and Fort Wayne, in both of which cities he was greeted by great crowds notwithstanding a downpour of rain, and at the former place he spoke in a great tent where men stood for two hours with their feet in water. Notwithstanding the personal fight that was being made upon him by the powerful interests he had antagonized, he refrained in his speeches from special references to his own services and confined himself to laudation of the achievements of the national administration and playful ridicule of Hughes. Even the bitter personal attacks upon him in this, his last battle, failed to embitter him, and his last political addresses were singularly free from vituperation or abuse.

He closed his campaign in the last political speech of his career, after forty-four years upon the stump, at Brookville—and herein hangs a tale illustrative of the sentimental strain that was strong in him. It had been his custom for years to close at the little town of Brookville, and early in the campaign he had promised to continue the policy. The speaking campaign in Indianapolis had been strangely neglected and it was not until the Saturday night before the election that plans had been made for the final appeal of the two senatorial candidates at Tomlinson Hall. It thus became necessary, if Kern were to speak in Indianapolis at all, that he cancel his engagement for Brookville, but to the importunities of his friends who urged upon him the importance of the Indianapolis engagement he gave an indignant denial. “Certainly not,” he snapped as though some discreditable thing had been proposed, “I have been closing the campaign at Brookville for years, and I don’t propose to disappoint those people.”

The result was that he did not speak in Indianapolis once during the campaign.

Handicapped by physical weakness, lack of means, want of personal organization, and pursued by a peculiarly venomous opposition which was not political but personal and born of his friendship for organized labor, he struggled through, preserving his cheerfulness and hopefulness to the end, receiving the personal insults of the tribe of Kirby in silence, and only retaliating with kindly references to his opponent. When early in the evening on the day of the election it became apparent that he had been defeated his first act was to congratulate his opponent, a life-long friend, and to pay him a personal compliment through the press.