Empty Mansions

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 hadlong-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 tochoose U.S. senators. The Clark case was an important event in the long march toward theSeventeenth 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.
    Inone 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