"...the hard winter in Philadelphia claimed the lives of two of the most senior and elderly figures of the Liberal Party, and served quickly to remind Hughes that even if there was a war going on, political dealing was still a reality on the home front, no matter how perilously close that front was.
As much as the war papered over the feuds between the conservative and progressive factions of the Liberal Party, and how much that mutual animosity was cooled by having Hughes as President with a foot planted in each camp and a Cabinet balanced well between both, the very substantive disagreements between them were still there, on everything from to what extent to pursue domestic reforms even as the war went on to appointments to how best to deal with Democrats in Congress. The differences were instructive, and as so often happened during the war, Hughes was often swayed by the more conciliatory progressive wing, best embodied by Speaker Mann, who had effectively formed a national unity government in the House with Minority Leader Clark, which they would swap positions in the following spring after the Democratic takeover of the House after the 1914 midterms. This was in sharp contrast to the Senate, where longtime Philadelphia and Pennsylvania party boss Boies Penrose, the caucus chairman, sparred imperiously with the prickly Democratic leader John Kern, who though not the firebrand radical of the previous decade any longer nonetheless held the conservative Penrose in utter contempt. What remained of the old, cliquey Liberal leadership had begun to quietly turn on Hughes and decided that Lodge's dismissal of him as a "Hearst with whiskers" may not have been far off the mark.
Hughes hated having to "manage" party intrigues like this, especially between the Speaker and Senate chairman who were not on speaking terms, with the war going on, and often leaned on Richard Yates to act as his enforcer in the Senate. This became more difficult with the sudden death of pneumonia of Shelby Moore Cullom, the long-serving senior Senator of Illinois who had held his seat for nearly thirty-three years upon his passing. Cullom had always been a party man first and an ideologue second; he had been a chief organizer of Blainism in Illinois in the 1880s, a party leader through much of the 1890s who had spearheaded the Blair Act and antitrust reform, and an elder statesman encouraging many of his fellow long-tenured Senators to modernize the party or drift into irrelevancy in the Hearst years. He was by the standards of 1914 no progressive, that was certain, but he had evolved and avoided controversy and was generally seen as honest and not personally corrupt. His death left a gaping hole in Illinois Liberalism, as there was a deep well of potential successors who wanted the seat, most prominently Governor Charles Deneen.
Illinois traditionally had a seat for Chicago and a seat for Downstate, and Cullom had held the Chicago seat while Yates was a downstate man; Yates was also a former Governor himself, was readying for his reelection campaign in the midst of war that autumn, and had emerged in less than a year as Hughes' chief confidant in the Senate, which gave him tremendous formal and informal power. As a result, Yates - a moderate progressive himself - took the view that the seat should go from somebody from his faction in Chicago, preferably Congressman Joseph Medill McCormick, who not coincidentally was the maternal grandson of the late founder and owner of the Chicago Tribune, his namesake grandfather Joseph Medill. However, it was Deneen who held appointment power, and Deneen - still term-limited by Illinois' single terms for Governors [1] - was interested in the Senate as a fallback to seeking the Presidency in either 1916 or 1920, depending on whether Hughes sought reelection. Deneen was for his part a progressive as well, and fumed privately at Yates' "presumptiveness" at trying to influence his choices and seize control of both wings of the Illinois Liberal progressive faction. Deneen's hope was to appoint his Lieutenant Governor, Lawrence Y. Sherman, to the position under the understanding that he would not seek election at the special election for the seat that fall in 1914 and allow Deneen to run, having appointed a new Lieutenant Governor - possibly McCormick? - in his stead. Yates feared that such a maneuver would split the party and be unseemly to the electorate, and was uninterested in any situation where his co-ticketmate - after all, he was appearing on the ballot in 1914 as well - could be a drag to the party and threaten two crucial Senate seats. Finally, Deneen relented and found a compromise with Yates - McCormick would be appointed to the Senate if Yates backed Sherman for Governor in 1916 rather than a downstate man from his machine, to which Yates agreed. The deal was brokered in part by Speaker Mann, a Chicago progressive himself who had been supportive of Yates as part of what soon came to be known as the "Congressional faction," and his own prestige at home took a serious hit as a result.
The Yates-Deneen compromise served neither man well; despite the straightforward agreement, both Deneen and Sherman resented being denied the Senate seat both coveted and quickly began working behind the scenes to defeat Yates men within the party machinery in Chicago and elsewhere, particularly through shrewd appointment powers. The progressive faction of the Illinois Liberals being split between the downstate Yates faction and Chicago Deneen faction contributed to its outmaneuvering by the conservative wing of the party [2] in 1916, which led to Frank Orrin Lowden's election that year as Governor and set the stage for his eventual disastrous nomination to the Presidency in 1920; it also contributed to McCormick's Senate defeat in 1918 and Yates' own in 1920 on the same ticket as Lowden, and neither Yates or Deneen would ever even sniff the Presidency after it had been presumed in 1914 that one or both was being groomed as a potential, eventual standard-bearer for the Liberal Party by Hughes.
The timing of this flare-up was poor for another major reason, namely the near-simultaneous death of Chief Justice George F. Edmunds. While fleeing Washington, Edmunds had fallen and broken his ankle; while healing in Philadelphia over the Christmas holidays, he had tripped and fallen again, breaking several ribs, and his health had deteriorated rapidly thereafter; he would day on February 2, 1914, a day after his 86th birthday. Edmunds' death effectively marked the death knell of constitutional conservatism and strict constructionism on the Supreme Court, and even many Liberals were not particularly sad to see him go save for his fellow "stand-patters." In his remarks eulogizing Edmunds, Hughes noted that "he served this country ably for half a century, a record many men cannot match," and this was true - one can trace the history of the Liberal Party directly in Edmunds' service, from Republican radical in the Vermont state government to being a late-switcher to the Liberal Party as a Senator and then serving on the Supreme Court for as long as Cullom was in the Senate, four years as an Associate Justice and then the rest as Chief Justice, his record of service falling just shy of John Marshall's. Edmunds had increasingly slid into irrelevancy as the Court shifted to a jurisprudence of restraint and general deference to Congress, and was by the time of his death mostly regarded by many Liberals as having unintentionally boosting Hearst's reelection with poorly-timed and extreme opinions handed down from the bench before the 1908 elections. His death left Robert Lincoln and Judson Harmon as the last conservatives on the bench, and the Senate waited with anticipation to see how Hughes would shape the bench further.
The issue for Hughes was that many Liberal conservatives wanted one of their own; it would not change the balance of the Court, and a great number of them felt like they had compromised for the progressive Julian Mack the previous year and now wanted that favor returned. The President of the New York Bar, George Wickersham, was the candidate of choice for this faction - the problem was that Wickersham was deeply unpopular among Democrats for his anti-Semitic remarks against the confirmation of Justice Louis Brandeis to the Court. Hughes, keen to maintain his good relationship with Kern and not antagonize the Democratic Senate majority, instead went to Kern and asked him if there were any names, preferably associated with Liberals, he could think of who could get through a quick Senate appointment. Kern suggested the recently-promoted Attorney General William Kenyon, who despite having run in the 1912 Senate election against Iowa's freshman William Jamieson had impressed Iowa Democrats with his semi-populist campaign and was seen as honest and likely to rule similarly to Mack, Holmes and Morrow. Hughes agreed, and offered Kenyon the position of Associate Justice, which Kenyon, surprised by the offer, accepted.
Hughes had already decided on his replacement for Edmunds as Chief Justice - William Howard Taft, who had been an Associate Justice for sixteen years and was regarded as the Court's chief moderate but also an able administrator from his time as Solicitor General. Though Hughes was more sympathetic personally the jurisprudence of Justice Holmes, whom he was of course now personal friends with, Taft was younger and his moderation was a bone thrown to the Liberal conservatives, as was the second part of the package he hashed out with Kern - appointing Wickersham as Attorney General, to which Kern was reluctant but agreed, as he thought the one-two of Taft and Kenyon would nudge the Court further out of legislative affairs.
It became Kern who the whip operation fell to, then, as Yates was too distracted, and in the end the quick nominations of Taft and Kenyon were carried with a majority of Democrats and minority of Liberals, chiefly progressives and moderates such as La Follette, Roberts and McGovern. Conversely, the appointment of Wickersham to the Justice Department carried a mirror-image bipartisan coalition. None of the confirmations passed with the broad, consensus margins Hughes had hoped, and it was a mostly-forgotten but critically important episode in his Presidency.
While war matters chugged along with broad cooperation between the parties, the brief sojourn into domestic rivalries and massaging factional disputes badly if not fatally damaged the broad moderate coalition at the heart of Hughes' partnership with Congress. In addition to the collapse of Yates and Mann's influence at home by angering the state office Liberals back home in Illinois, Hughes partnering with Kern and leaving the Senate Liberals in the cold made his stature inside the national Liberal Party badly and permanently deteriorate, no matter how expedient it was. Kern's dealings with Hughes, for that matter, diminished his influence with many of his more radical Senate colleagues, particularly over the Wickersham confirmation that he personally aggressively whipped for, not wanting to go back on his word when Hughes had now delivered two progressive Justices unexpectedly in the first half of his term. The coming victories in the war would paper over the impact of the events of the winter of 1914 on domestic politics for some time, but the bosses in both parties had long memories, and the cooperative spirit Hughes had successfully engendered and used to navigate Taft and Kenyon on the Court would not outlive the war, to the massive detriment of everyone involved in the immediate postwar years..." [3]
- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes
[1] It was around this time this change IOTL
[2] If you're enjoying this backroom skullduggery, don't worry, we'll be getting the New York Democratic version of this later on, starring future at-some-point President Al Smith
[3] Some foreshadowing here