Empty Mansions

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.
    Clark left Washington after only a single term, having secured for life his coveted title of “Senator Clark.” In a farewell address to the Senate in 1907, he explained his view of the responsibilities of one generation to another in regard to the earth’s resources: “In rearing the great structure of empire on the Western Hemisphere we are obliged to avail ourselves of all the resources at our command. The requirements of this great utilitarian age demand it. Those who succeed us can well take care of themselves.”
    Back in New York full-time after leaving the Senate, W.A. announcedthat he was abandoning his plans to enter the Social 400. “My house in New York is now open, and we entertain our friends almost daily,” he told reporters in 1912. “But we seek our friends among people of artistic inclinations and from them we receive the pleasure which others may find in other forms of society, but which I do not consider worth my while.”
    W.A. and Anna appeared frequently in the social notes through the 1910s and early 1920s. In the home where Huguette