The life of John Worth Kern

by Claude G. Bowers

This called for another trait which he possessed to an infinite degree—an untiring patience. Others might act on prejudice or impulse—he never did. And while others were often confusing the issue he was seeking the solution. And this quality was quite as prominent where his own personal interests were involved. Nothing could startle him into inconsidered action. He took his time. He was in the habit of permitting his political enemies to exhaust their ammunition while he, unmoved, apparently indifferent, almost oblivious to the attack, withheld his fire. And very often the result was that he did not think it worth while to fire. Frequently he struck, when forced to fight, with such subtlety that the wounded adversary did not know whence the blow had come. He could hear of these attacks with scarcely any show of curiosity, and almost invariably without comment, unless it be in the nature of a witticism. He first gauged his foe and planned his battle accordingly—aiming unerringly at the vulnerable heel.

There was something almost uncanny in his ability to ignore an attack and appear to be in ignorance of an affront.

II

Throughout his life Senator Kern was a voluminous letter-writer and notwithstanding the extent of his correspondence he stubbornly refused to resort to such labor-saving devices as stenography until toward the close of his life when overwhelmed with the multiplicity of duties. It was his life-long habit to reply to every letter he received, no matter how trivial its nature, with pen and ink. With him letter writing was not a lost art and he liked to write when he had the time.

There was an art to a Kern letter. He knew how, better than most men of his generation, to put personality, individuality, atmosphere into a note. No one ever put more tenderness into a letter of sympathy, more jollity into one of congratulation, more comradry into a letter to a friend or occasionally more biting sarcasm or sting into one to an enemy. Enveloped in tobacco smoke, he would write slowly by the hour, with infinite patience, painstaking in his phrasing, and his chirography was as clear, individual and beautiful as that of James Whitcomb Riley. To the vast majority of letters that reached him in connection with the routine business of the senate he did not personally reply for that would have been an impossibility, but letters of a fault-finding nature were by his direction always called to his attention. In some cases where the motive was apparent he made no reply, but in cases where the writer was laboring under a misapprehension, or honestly differed in his views, he would write at length with pen and ink, setting his correspondent right. Nor did it make any difference whether the correspondent was known to him personally or by reputation or not, if he was a constituent he went upon the theory that he was entitled to a response. These letters almost invariably brought apologetic replies, and many warm friends and supporters were made from among strangers who were thus impressed with the honesty of his own views and his genuine desire for the respect and good will of his fellow men.

His method of preparing such speeches as were formally prepared was also unique. Except for especially important occasions it was not his custom to write political speeches or special occasion addresses. He would arrange the headlines in his mind and nothing more.

Unlike most public men he did not dictate the speeches he prepared, but he would shut himself up in his room with a supply of cigars, a rough scratch pad and several sharpened pencils and write them slowly and carefully in the same beautiful chirography which gave such character to his letters. Even in the longest and most important of these there was scarcely any eliminations or additions—the copy was clean. They might have been copied rather than created, judging from the absence of erasures or emendations.

III

There was a deep undercurrent of religious reverence in Senator Kern which did not flout itself upon the surface. Reference has been made to his conversion at a revival meeting during his boyhood when for a time he became ardent in his devotion to religious duties, and while this phase passed, he retained through life a profound reverence for sacred things. During the greater portion of his life, while retaining his membership with the Presbyterian church, he was not much given to church attendance. This was not due to any compromise with his faith. He was not interested in dogma or creed. He cared little for the outer manifestations of the spirit of worship. He seldom quoted from the Bible in his speeches and had a horror of the politician who attempts to capitalize his religion. The thought of the life beyond was to him too solemn for conversational purposes. He never or seldom discussed it. But he never permitted himself to doubt it. His veneration for the cloth asserted itself less in tributes to the dignity of the clergy than in his occasional excoriations of members of the clergy who lowered their dignity and compromised their religion by lending themselves to the support of inhumanity. For the minister from Lawrence, Massachusetts, who appeared for the mill owners at the strike hearings in Washington to gravely assure the committee that there was a good moral effect in throwing children of twelve and thirteen into factories to labor for a pittance while paying the mill owners for the cold water that they drank rather than permit them to play “in the streets” in the sunshine he had no words with which to express his contempt. The only letter protesting against the passage of the child labor law that he cared to notice was from a minister of the cotton mill section—and it blazed with indignant protest against—not the protest, but the source of it.

He had the average man’s appreciation of the occasional value of an explicative, but he never lightly played with the name of his Creator. And he had a quiet contempt for the man who did.