Empty Mansions

no proof in the record that W.A. ever said anything of the sort, the comment is attributed to him in dozens of books.
    Clark was determined to try again for the Senate, with or without the backing of Daly or the state Democratic committee. In the summer of 1898, his twenty-seven-year-old son, Charlie, a Yale graduate, helped organize his campaign committee. W.A. later admitted giving Charlie and others nearly $140,000 (about $4 million today) to run the campaign, without making any report of how it was spent.
    W.A. said that the money was used only for “legitimate” expenses, such as paying hotel bills for about three hundred friends and political operatives, paying men to accompany legislators so the Daly faction could not get to them, and compensating newspapers for their endorsements. Indeed, it was not unusual at the time for a candidate to buy a newspaper before an election, use the paper’s editorials to endorse himself, and then sell the newspaper back to the previous owner after the election was over.
    W.A. cast the 1898 Senate election as having one goal, “overthrowing the power of one man in the state of Montana: Mr. Daly.” If there was any evil in buying an election, he seemed to be saying, it was necessary in order to do good. He said that he did not seek the office but was persuaded to do so to end “this state of despotism.”
    “Nobody could expect to have any recognition whatever,” W.A. later said, “unless he bowed the knee and crawled in the dust to these people. It was impossible to break their power in that state unless large sums of money were used, legitimately, to do it.”
    For his part, Daly was said to have threatened “to run W. A. Clark and his family out of the state of Montana.” He denied making the statement, testifying, “I have not the slightest personal feelings against Mr. Clark or any member of his family, and it is a villainous lie.”
    The stage was set for a three-ring circus of a legislative session, one that would send W. A. Clark to Washington.
    • • •
    Violence broke out before the legislative session even began. During the election of the state legislators themselves in November 1898, two armed men burst into Butte’s Precinct 8, an Irish stronghold known as Dublin Gulch, in an attempt to steal either the ballot box or cash. One election judge was shot and killed. The Daly forces blamed Clark, calling him “the arch-boodler of the century.” Clark’s forces claimed that the robbery had been staged to discredit W.A.
    On January 9, 1899, the day before voting for the new U.S. senator began, a state senator named Fred Whiteside dropped a bombshell. On the floor of the state senate, he presented thirty crisp thousand-dollar bills that he claimed had been directed by Clark’s forces to be delivered to legislators. Whiteside, who had been a whistle-blower in a previous corruption case, said he had launched his own sting operation, putting out the word that he could be bribed. “My object was to break up the band of boodlers that have so long infested this state.”
    Whiteside described how the payoffs worked. One of Clark’s attorneys would show a legislator ten one-thousand-dollar bills,seal them inside an envelope, and then have the man write his initials on the outside. The attorney would keep the envelope and deliver it to the legislator only if he voted for Clark throughout the session, whether or not Clark won. It was bribery and blackmail rolled into one act.
    Whiteside said that he did not think Clark knew all the details but that W.A. did know in a general way what his men were doing. “There seems to be no end to the supply of money,” Whiteside testified. “I think they expected to use nearly $1 million, and, as near as I can judge, have already paid out about $200,000.… They ran short of money several times, because large-sized bills were hard to get.”
    He went on, quoting Clark’s campaign manager, John B. Wellcome. “Every man who votes for Clark is to be paid. And the man who votes for him without being well paid is a fool.”
    Clark’s newspaper,
The Butte Miner
, responded that it was all a Daly trick.
    A DAMNABLE CONSPIRACY—DALY CROWD SPRING THEIR PROMISED SENSATION—BUNGLING WORK AT THE OUTSET
    A BORTIVE A TTEMPT TO S TAMPEDE M EMBERS OF THE L EGISLATURE BY THE E XHIBITION OF M ONEY AND C HARGES OF B RIBERY —W HOLE T HING B EARS E VIDENCE OF H AVING B EEN C OOKED U P BY THE A RCH- C ONSPIRATORS
    And that was just