Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  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”

  MOST 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. announced that 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 and Andrée grew up, they played host to dinners and parties to raise money for the families of French soldier-artists, for the Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, the School Art League, the Unique Book and Handcraft Salon. All these events were held at the Clark mansion. As W.A. had threatened, the Clarks had set up their own social set, one mostly confined to their own home and directed at the arts and generosity.

  Because he opened his home so often to share its art and music, W.A. told the reporters, “I am not likely to be lonely.”

  SMILES AND FOND KISSES

  THE CLARK GIRLS were frequent transatlantic travelers, accustomed to the luxurious staterooms of the Cunard and White Star luxury liners. In 1911, newspapers across America carried a photo of Andrée, nearly nine years old, arm in arm with her niece of the same age, Katherine Morris, who was holding hands with Huguette, nearly five. They were standing on the deck of the RMS Adriatic, crossing the Atlantic to attend the coronation of George V, king of the United Kingdom, grandson of Queen Victoria and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II.

  The next summer, their crossing fo
r a vacation was delayed. In April 1912, before a trip to France, W.A. showed the girls a brochure with the floor plan of their first-class staterooms on a new White Star liner. The Clarks were booked for passage from New York to Ireland to Cherbourg. This crossing would be a treat, the second voyage of the largest ship afloat: the RMS Titanic.

  Instead, W.A. ended up meeting survivors of the Titanic in New York, and the family delayed their trip while they mourned a loss. Huguette’s first cousin Walter Miller Clark, the son of W.A.’s brother Ross, had gone down with the Titanic. Walter had been playing cards in the smoking room when the great ship scraped an iceberg. His wife, Virginia, was saved, bobbing in lifeboat No. 4 with the pregnant Madeleine Astor, watching the ship sink with their husbands among the 1,502 people lost in the icy North Atlantic.

  The Titanic launched another scandal for the Clarks, as Walter’s widow remarried five months after the sinking. She and Walter had an infant son, who was at home in Los Angeles when the Titanic sank. For months, the newspapers were filled with the resulting custody battle between the boy’s mother and his paternal grandparents over the “Millionaire Baby.” The parties eventually settled on joint custody.

  During the family’s annual summer vacation to France, W.A. and Anna took Andrée and Huguette to their Paris apartment on avenue Victor Hugo, then out by rail to a luxurious seaside resort called Trouville, near Deauville in Normandy. W.A.’s first family had summered in Trouville as far back as 1880, and this was a regular summer spot for his second family as well.

  IN CONVERSATION WITH HUGUETTE

  “We didn’t get on the Titanic,” Huguette explained matter-of-factly. “We were booked to go. But then actually it never got to New York, because it sank before it got in. So we took another boat out. I think it was the George Washington.”

  Huguette remarked on how sad she was at her cousin Walter’s death on the Titanic. Although she commented on Walter’s drinking problem and how his wife remarried so quickly after his death, her memories focused more on the reason for her family’s planned trip to France. Andrée was especially interested in attending a commemoration of the five hundredth year since Joan of Arc’s birth. “She wanted to be there for the Joan of Arc birthday.”

  The family rented a villa at the end of the beach, at 11B, rue des Roches Noires, facing the giant black rocks captured on canvas by Courbet and Boudin, whose paintings inspired the young Monet. While W.A. went on to business meetings in England and Vienna, Anna and the girls stayed in Trouville. Anna played her harp two or three hours a day, while Andrée and Huguette hunted among the black rocks for small crabs and shrimp, attended by their governess and tutor, Madame Sandré, who taught them how to swim. The tides at Trouville were gentle, making the area safe for swimming, though the water was cold even in August. The family also had the use of a yacht in the harbor.

  That summer was a high-water mark for the Clarks, and for France, with the entire family together and the nation enjoying the peace and prosperity of the Belle Epoque. Yet relations between France and Germany, already strained, were pushed into the headlines when the German gunboat Panther sailed into the French Moroccan port of Agadir. This provocation led to the expansion of British promises to protect France in case of a German attack. In a letter from Paris to his business manager in Montana, Clark observed that the “Socialists in Germany have become so strong that the Emperor might think that war is the only way to save his throne.”

  The Clarks had left anxiety behind at home as well. On March 22, 1914, when Huguette was eight, a parade of a thousand anarchists and union activists marched up Fifth Avenue from Madison Square to 107th Street, with orator Emma Goldman at the head of the parade, urging the poor to take what they need from the rich. With a banner vowing “demolitione,” the passing parade cursed the Clark mansion, where frightened servants gathered at the windows. The parade ended with the singing of “The Worker’s Marseillaise,” the revolutionary French national anthem (“The rich, the exploiters …”).

  Huguette often described the summers of 1911–14 in France as the idyllic days of her childhood. The family rented a castle called the château de Petit-Bourg, in the hamlet of that name, sixteen miles south of the center of Paris, known today as Evry-sur-Seine. Those were carefree days. Well-thumbed photos in Huguette’s album show her father decked out in casual white pants and a straw hat, standing in a wheat field; Anna, smiling, in a white summer dress on a park bench; Andrée striding in front of the castle with a broad grin; and little Huguette, at about age seven, sitting proudly on a horse with a white diamond-shaped mark on its nose.

  The girls rode bicycles and explored the castle’s secret tunnels, which led down to the banks of the Seine. They were not alone on their adventures, always chaperoned by Madame Sandré, as the fear of kidnapping and other dangers was ever present. Their mother forced them inside every day for music lessons—the piano for both girls, as well as the harp for Andrée (like her mother) and the violin for Huguette. For good behavior, they received gold coins from their father as an allowance. Eighty years later, Huguette told the following story to her nurses.

  In late August 1914, with the German army sweeping through Belgium and approaching Paris from the east, word came from the ambassador that all American citizens must leave France. W.A. prepared to remove his family, but how to pay for the trip? The banks were closed, and he didn’t have enough cash to hire a car and driver. The mine owner and banker was worth well over $50 million. Yet at that moment, he was a little light in the wallet, even as the German First Army approached the outskirts of Paris, within fifty miles of Petit-Bourg.

  Andrée and Huguette came up with a clever solution: They handed over their gold coins, which W.A. used to hire a car to the coast. From there they found passage to England, departing on September 4. Two days later, the French and British engaged the Germans in the First Battle of the Marne, preventing the occupation of Paris and beginning four years of trench warfare. Safe in England as the great powers went into battle, W.A., Anna, Andrée, and Huguette enjoyed the mineral waters of the posh Royal Leamington Spa. W.A. had no fear of being drafted into service when America entered the Great War three years later, in 1917. His war, the one he was of age to serve in, had been the American Civil War.

  • • •

  During the war years of 1914–18, the girls escaped New York’s summer heat by taking vacations in the West, seeing the geysers at Yellowstone and staying at the family’s lakefront hideaway in Montana. Photos show them swimming and enjoying time with their half-brother Will and his retinue. Whatever strains his marriage to Anna may have caused, W.A.’s first and second families were vacationing together. The retreat, called Mowitza Lodge, after an American Indian word meaning “running deer,” was situated on Salmon Lake, northwest of Helena, a tranquil spot for swimming, hiking, and bird-watching among ponderosa pine, western larch, and Douglas fir. In the 1910s, the favorite game at the lodge was Ping-Pong, a British import that had taken Montana by storm.

  In September 1916, the girls signed Will’s guest book, first fourteen-year-old Andrée with a bold signature, listing her address nostalgically as Paris, France. Andrée said later that although her parents had been born in America, she was still a French girl. Ten-year-old Huguette followed, signing below her sister’s name in a distinctive, metronomic hand, each letter precisely the same height, and ending with a ditto, indicating her home as Paris, too. Both girls still spoke with a slight French accent.

  Photos from one of these trips show the sisters, always together, in bathing caps and knee-length swimming dresses on a pier, in matching hiking dresses, and with matching Kodak Brownie box cameras in the woods, and posing in fancy dresses and high-laced shoes. In two of the photos, Andrée is looking directly at the photographer, while Huguette is examining her own camera or looking shyly at the ground.

  A highlight of these annual trips to Montana was a return to Butte. They rode W.A.’s streetcar east to Columbia Gardens, W.A.’s gift to the people of
Butte in 1899. The brightest spot in a depressing town, the amusement park featured a dance pavilion, lake, and picnic area. With obvious pride, W.A. showed the girls his flower gardens. Wearing a black bow tie and a bowler hat, he had his picture taken with the girls, who stood in embroidered dresses, white gloves, and matching broad-brimmed hats.

  More than eighty years later, Huguette recalled putting on a hard hat and taking a ride down into one of her father’s mines in a four-man steel cage. At the height of copper production, around 1917, the Butte-Anaconda area had fourteen thousand men working underground, an amalgamation of Irish, Italians, Chinese, Serbians—the story was that immigrants looking for work were told, “Don’t stop in America, go straight to Butte.”

  In hard-rock mining, the men had the most dangerous occupation in America. Deep in Clark’s Belmont mine, workers wore long underwear and bib overalls to protect themselves from the 135-degree heat. Men rigging sticks of powder dynamite were warned to “tap ’er light,” but it wasn’t unusual for a finger to be found still sporting a wedding ring. Diggers were crushed by falling timbers. Motormen and swampers were suffocated when trapped by underground fires. Rail benders stood in acidic water so strong it would eat anything metal. Because drilling produced black dust, the drills were called widow makers. “We were,” as one old miner named Tom Holter put it, “damn close to hell.”

  In August 1917, the same summer that the Clark girls took a sojourn in Butte, a union organizer named Frank Little was working for the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, speaking out against U.S. entry into World War I. Relations between the union workers and the mine owners were complicated. In 1892, men at W.A.’s Original mine gave him a walking stick with an engraved silver top as a sign of their affection. Yet the mine yards were surrounded by ten-foot electrified fences in case of union trouble.