Empty Mansions (15 page)

I
N
M
ONTANA
, Governor Robert B. Smith, a lawyer by training, didn’t suspect a thing. He was offered a side job, an easy $2,000 for a bit of freelance work examining the title to a valuable mining claim. All he had to do was take the train from Helena to San Francisco, a trip that happened to keep him out of Montana for several days. Thus began a most daring political scheme.

In Washington, before the full Senate could ratify the committee’s decision to throw him out, W. A. Clark gave a tearful speech to the Senate on May 15, 1900, condemning “
the most devilish persecution that any man has ever been subjected to in the history of any civilized country.” He said the men who had paid off their debts during the legislative session must have come by it honestly. He likened his situation to the renowned case of Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who had been presumed guilty of treason, convicted based on false evidence, and imprisoned before finally being exonerated.

He closed with a flourish: “I was never in all my life, except by such characters as are now pursuing me, charged with a dishonorable act, and I propose to leave to my children a legacy, worth more than gold, that of an unblemished name.”

And then, after weeks of saying he would never quit, he surprised the Senate by revealing that he had written a resignation letter.

Here’s how the entire scheme unfolded.

The headlines in the
New York Herald
captured the plot: “
Clark Resigns; Then Appointed. Daly Caught Napping. All a Series of Surprises.”

After the scheme was found out, W.A.’s supporters said that he had no idea of the shenanigans done on his behalf, that reckless son Charlie must have been responsible. It aided their narrative that Charlie drank and gambled and womanized too much, and failed to repay loans. (Several years later, in 1908, W.A. wrote with optimism to a friend, “
Chas is with me and is in fine shape and has not drunk anything spirituous.… I am happy over it and I do hope it will last always.”) Charlie is usually credited with making the comment during the campaign, “We’ll put the old man in the Senate or in the poorhouse.”

The idea that Charlie was to blame was bolstered when he was implicated in 1902 in another scandal in which he was accused of offering $250,000 to a judge to fix a case. Before he could be served with a warrant, he left Butte for San Francisco, leaving behind his lovely French château not far from his father’s mansion. For many years thereafter,
Charlie dared not enter the state of Montana.

W.A.’s correspondence, however, shows that he was intimately involved in this cynical scheme to lure the governor out of the state, as he was intimately involved in all his business. On April 28, 1900, before he resigned, he wrote to a fervent supporter, John S. M. Neill, editor of the friendly
Helena Independent
. Responding to Neill’s description of the plans, W.A. objected at that point, not on moral grounds but on practical ones: “
I have canvassed the proposition referred to in your letter. The plan of getting a certain party out of the State while action might be taken by another is not feasible.”

After the plan was indeed executed and W.A. was appointed to succeed himself, he wrote again to Neill, this time approvingly, with his usual confidence that he was in the right: “
The appointment by the Governor improves the situation and has thrown consternation into the ranks of the enemy. So far as we have been able to discover there is no legal reason why the Senate should not immediately order the oath of office administered upon the presentation of the credentials made in accordance with the appointment of Governor Spriggs.”

Cleverness was not enough. Governor Smith heard the news in San Francisco, was back in Helena in three days, and sent notice to the Senate to disregard this “
contemptible trickery.” The seat stayed vacant, leaving the people of Montana missing a voice in the Senate for the next fourteen months.

“
This man, Clark, has been convicted by the United States Senate of perjury, bribery, and fraud,” Governor Smith told the newspapers, somewhat overstating the case, “and it is an insult to the Senate to send him back to that body. It is a disgrace, a shame and humiliation upon the people of Montana, and the Senate should adopt the resolution and show him that they do not want him there, as it seems he can take the hint in no other way.”

• • •

The comical events made Montana a laughing-stock, and had
long-lasting effects on W.A. and on the nation.

For the United States, the Montana episode strengthened the voices calling for an end to the Founding Fathers’ design for state legislators to
choose U.S. senators. The Clark case was an important event in the long march toward the
Seventeenth Amendment, ratified by the states in 1913. This amendment gave the people the power to elect senators.

For W. A. Clark, the election scheme left a blot on his reputation. His supporters, then and now, argue that frontier politics were notoriously corrupt. Clark’s partisans echoed his claim that he had to put up his own money to get elected, fighting fire with fire, to stop Daly money from controlling the state.

The voice of history, however, was summed up, or influenced, by Mark Twain’s evisceration of W. A. Clark as a shame to the American nation. W.A. could have been the greatest Horatio Alger character, the boy who made good by hard work, education, and luck, but his was a legacy squandered in pursuit of political power and baronial extravagance. “
Life was good to William A. Clark,” wrote Montana historian Michael Malone, “but due to his own excesses, history has been unkind.”

It mattered not a bit that Twain himself may have been carrying water for W.A.’s opponents in business, and corrupt opponents at that. Twain cast his 1907 essay as though he’d happened upon an evening with Clark, suffering through the senator’s long, self-adoring pronouncements over dinner at the Union League Club in New York. Twain decried “the assfulness and complacency of this coarse and vulgar and incomparably ignorant peasant’s glorification of himself.” Despite his excesses, W.A. was no ignorant peasant. What Twain also failed to mention was that one of Clark’s main opponents in the Montana copper business, the Standard Oil man Henry Huttleston Rogers, had rescued a failed businessman named Samuel Clemens from bankruptcy. Clemens called Rogers “
my closest and most valuable friend.” The muckraker Ida Tarbell called the ruthless Rogers “
as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.” Rogers was CEO of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the company’s main financial strategist and the leader of its attempts to corner the worldwide market in copper.

In
one of the great stock swindles of the age, Rogers, Rockefeller, and their Standard Oil cronies moved into Montana copper in 1899, setting up the Amalgamated Copper Company, absorbing Daly’s Anaconda Copper. They were hoping to buy Clark’s Montana copper interests,
too, if the price was low enough, a goal they achieved in 1910. Rogers made his best friend, Samuel Clemens, one of the first people to get in on the stock.

“
For a week now, the Vienna papers have been excited over the great Copper combine,” Clemens wrote to Rogers on May 10, 1899, urging his patron to invest the money the writer had banked with him. “I feel perfectly sure that you are arranging to put that $52,000 under that hen as soon as the allotment of stock begins, and I am very glad of that.” Clemens urged, “Put it in! You don’t want all that money stacked up in your daily view; it is only a temptation to you. Am I going to be in the Board?”

The public shareholders of Amalgamated Copper put up most of the money for the company and were fleeced by stock manipulations. The Standard Oil men and their bank, National City Bank of New York, took the profits.
The man who hatched the plan, financier Thomas W. Lawson, lamented that Amalgamated was “responsible for more hell than any other trust or financial thing since the world began.” The inside shareholders, including Samuel Clemens, profited handsomely. “
You know how to make a copper hen lay a golden egg,” Clemens wrote to Rogers in delight.

The scathing essay by Clemens’s alter ego, the writer Mark Twain, wasn’t published until long after both men were gone. Twain may have written it only for his own pleasure. He may have been truthfully appalled by W.A., or jealous of his wealth. It’s also possible that he wrote it to impress his benefactor Rogers. The wallet of Samuel Clemens may have been doing the talking for Mark Twain.

The Amalgamated deal was one of the leading examples cited by supporters of a new wave of antitrust efforts in Washington. The twist is that this deal was just the sort of scheme by which the robber barons earned their name, and the sort that W. A. Clark abhorred.

Although Clark was a wealthy industrialist during the Gilded Age, that didn’t make him a robber baron. W.A. was a tough competitor in business, but he generally played by the rules of his age. He didn’t want any stockholders, who would be entitled to information. None of W. A. Clark’s enterprises profited from trusts or monopolies or stock manipulation, as did Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Rogers—and Mark Twain.

W.A. supported fair wages, even opposing wage reductions when copper prices fell, and as a result he didn’t suffer from strikes. He also offered model healthcare for workers, and when Daly opposed a law requiring safety cages in the mines, Clark supported it—even if only for political advantage. He also supported voting rights for women. “
I am in favor of giving to women everything that they want,” he said, “upon the principle that I have the utmost confidence in their intelligence.” Although he was accused of cutting timber on public land and fought to keep taxes paid by mines to nearly zero, he mostly paid his own way.

To the public, however, Twain’s motivation for attacking W.A. was beside the point. Clark’s too-clever trickery in politics made it irrelevant whether or not he had been abused by an unjust prosecution. He would remain in the American memory, to the extent he was remembered at all, as a copper king tarnished by political shenanigans.

W.A. could have found the explanation for this perception in his own library, in the words of Victor Hugo: “
True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.”

“TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES”
 

M
OST MEN
would have slunk off in shame after the Senate scandal, but eight months after his humiliation, W. A. Clark was elected to the U.S. Senate by the Montana legislature, perhaps honestly.

His election in January 1901 was aided by the decline of Marcus Daly, who died in November 1900 in New York City at age fifty-eight. It was also helped by W.A.’s timely support for reducing the workday of miners to eight hours instead of ten. His campaign button said simply, “W. A. Clark, U.S. Senator, 8 Hours.”

Senator Clark served quietly from March 1901 to March 1907, having the misfortune of being in the wrong party, a Democrat in a heavily Republican Congress, and in the wrong time, a Progressive Era dominated by Republican presidents. The Republicans soon had an energetic young man in the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, after William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901. W.A. campaigned for a Nicaraguan alternative to Roosevelt’s Panama Canal plan in 1904, hoping that route could be achieved more quickly. (Better shipping routes would help W.A.’s business interests in the West.) He supported Roosevelt’s Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 but criticized Roosevelt for his obsession with hunting, or killing animals for sport. His six years in the Senate are best remembered, however, for his opposition to Roosevelt’s conservationist campaign for national parks and forests.