Empty Mansions

living proof that in America the avenues to corporate wealth were open even to one born in a log cabin.
    W. A. Clark, politician, was ridiculed on magazine covers as a payer of bribes, the epitome of backroom graft, and a crass mixture of ostentatious vanity, extravagance, and Washington plutocracy, living proof that in America the avenues to civic power were open only to those with the most greenbacks.
    An indefatigable worker, W.A. carried on at a pace that today seems impossible, especially in an era when travel was by steamship and railroad, and communication by letter and telegram. During the first decade of the 1900s, for example, he maintained homes in Paris and Montana; built and furnished the most expensive house in New York City; constructed out of his own pocket a major railroad between Los Angeles harbor and Salt Lake City; subdivided and marketed lots for the city of Las Vegas; oversaw the operation of copper mines in several western states; ran streetcar and electric power companies in the West and a bronze foundry and copper wire factory in the East; grew sugar beets in California; published several newspapers; owned a bank with a good national reputation; was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate, then was reelected and served six more years; fought off a paternity suit filed by a young woman he had met at the Democratic National Convention; traveled through Europe collecting art; maintained good relations with his adult children; married a young wife and sired two daughters. All while in his sixties.
    Though often chosen as a leader because of his intelligence, resolve, and deep pockets, he was not blessed with a magnetic disposition. W.A. was introverted and extremely private, a closemouthed man who acted as if he didn’t give a damn what people thought of him. If people didn’t like what he did, they were wrong. And yet he did give a damn about some things, including family, art, and social prominence. He was a seeker of public attention, not a great orator but a persistent one.Hecheerfully took center stage to lead the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at public events and didn’t limit himself to the familiar first stanza.
    In the pocket of his cutaway coat, W.A. carried two grades of cigars, fine ones for himself and lesser ones to give away.
“TO BETTER MY CONDITION”

 
    W. A. C LARK COULD HONESTLY SAY he rose from a log cabin to the most magnificent mansion on Fifth Avenue, a handy trajectory in America’s tradition of Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories. Yet W.A.’s beginnings were not so impoverished as he let on.
    Will Clark, as W.A. was known as a boy, was indeed born in a four-room log cabin on January 8, 1839, but his grandfather owned a 172-acre farm in a remote corner of southwestern Pennsylvania called Dunbar Township. That’s southeast of Pittsburgh, about two miles outside the small city of Connellsville, then known for its iron furnaces. This area was becoming connected to a wider world. One of Will’s chores was tohaul farm produce into town to sell to travelerswho were leaving by flatboat on the Youghiogheny River, which led to the Monongahela, then the Ohio, and westward into the expanding nation.
    Those were hard times. The nation had fallen into a seven-year economic depression beginning with the panic of 1837. It was not easy to see that the world was on the cusp of the second industrial revolution, when America would begin to take its place as a great power. In 1838, the year before W.A.’s birth, Samuel Morse demonstrated the first long-distance telegraph. A year after his birth, the first customer bought one of Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reapers for harvesting grain. The number of stars on the American flag had doubled from the original thirteen, reaching twenty-six with the addition of Arkansas in 1836 and Michigan in 1837. The people of Dunbar Township were buying their first books written by Americans. Will’s father had obtained an account of the westward journey fifty years earlier by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (no relation).
    “The scenes of my joyous childhood,” W.A. reminisced some seventy-five years later, were “outlined then by a very limited horizon. Nevertheless, I can recall ambitious speculations engendered in my mind when on winter evenings my father read the thrilling adventuresof Lewis and Clark’s explorations.… This had the effect of strengthening my preconceived but ill-defined idea of adventure. And I