"...the months between the 1916 election, when it became clear that Liberals would control the Senate, and Kern's death on August 17, 1917 during the Senate's summer recess while in convalescence at a small home he had bought in New Mexico at the urging of his friend, Colonel Bronson Cutting.
[1] He had been in poor health since well before the election and more than a few Democrats had urged him to stand aside for new blood in the 65th Congress, but ironically enough Kern's decision to remain the Senate Minority Leader on paper while distributing influence and day-to-day power in the minority to other senior Democrats wound up being the sounder move in the long term.
Kern's death left not a gaping hole of influence at the top of the caucus but rather a committee of experienced, talented Senators who when Democrats retook the Senate just over a year later in the 1918 midterm bloodbath could work well together and established an informal program of leading by consensus; George Turner,
[2] the titanic figure of Senate Democrats of this era even more so than Kern, cheekily nicknamed his leadership clique the "Grand Synod" and while the term originally just referred to him and his small coterie that essentially took over the Senate Democratic Caucus from Kern as a committee of equals, the name has since stuck through the decades to be an internal caucus nickname for any circle of powerful senior and tenured Democrats, particularly committee chairmen, who wield influence in the Senate equal to or perhaps even greater than the Majority or Minority leader (Liberals have occasionally made a corollary "Council of Elders," but it is much rarer to hear this term used within the Liberal Senate caucus or in the media).
The Synod of the late 1910s and early 1920s was a tight-knit group of Democrats primarily from the West, with Turner at the center, which included the infamous Sinophobe James D. Phelan of California, "Honest John" Shafroth of Colorado, the well-tenured Fountain Thompson of Dakota, Moses Alexander of Idaho, the famed rerformer Knute Nelson of Minnesota, Frank Newlands of Nevada and Bryan's protege in Richard Metcalfe of Nebraska. With the exception of Shafroth, all had close to a decade or more of experience in the body, most if not all were ranking members of their respective committees, and all were committed Western populists and progressives who nonetheless were wary of the mercurialism of personality politics as practiced by Hearst, Sulzer, Bryan and Kern. It was a newer generation of quieter, more dogged high priests of legislative art, and the core of this group, which would change with retirements, deaths and election results deep into the 1920s until Turner's retirement in 1924 formally disbanded the first Synod, made it their mission to press ahead with the work of the progressive movement in the twilight of their careers and saw their role as being that of depending less on personalism and charisma and more on building coalitions to enact the broadest reform agenda possible.
This stood in marked contrast to the Liberal caucus of the time. While the West was finally given their place at the head table as John E. Osborne of Wyoming
[3] was formally made Senate Minority Leader (he was not a member of the Synod, though he was close to many of them personally and in his views), real power flowed up from the committees; Boies Penrose, by contrast, further concentrated control of his caucus in his own hands, especially as his sparring partner Kern was replaced by Liberal Harry New, an appointment of the new Liberal Governor James Goodrich. Drunk on seeing his foil gone, Penrose spent much of late 1917 and most of 1918 ignoring members of his caucus, most infamously Robert La Follette, and antagonizing the opposition openly in what came to be a Senate infamous for its perceived corruption and bossism. The Democrats had pivoted seamlessly from Kern's consolidated leadership to one of broad input and consensus, while the Liberal caucus looked increasingly like Penrose's plaything. With the loss of the Senate by a landslide in 1918 - in which Indiana Democrats effortlessly recaptured Kern's seat via special election thanks to Samuel Ralston - and Penrose's death in 1921, Liberals were left with exactly the gaping leadership vacuum at the top that Kern could have represented without the creative thinking of men like Turner, Shafroth and Metcalfe.
As for Kern, he was buried at home in Alto, Indiana, and commemorated as one of his state's great orators, advocates and sons, with a number of public facilities named in his honor; and Democrats would not soon forget his importance, with legislation to name one of the three Senate office buildings in Philadelphia after him, and his name often affixed to the 1924 constitutional amendment that banned child labor, the great cause of his life that he would not live to see come to fruition..."
[4]
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Second Wave: The Postwar Progressive Revolution of 1917-31
[1] Shout out for
@BattlePig101 here!
[2] This may be my personal home state bias here, but yes CdM has gone from "the John Hay Fan Fiction thread" to "Epochal President William Randolph Hearst" to "Random-historical-footnote-from-Washington-state-wank" in no time
[3] Google him, you won't regret it
[4] Obviously a bit of foreshadowing around the coming "Second Wave" in this update, where I debated how to make Kern's foreshadowed death more interesting than just a footnote and continue the previous update's efforts to explore the fractious complicated politics of the Root era from a perspective other than Root's.
