Index

Iowa Historical Record 
v1-18; 1885-1902

C

Unless otherwise noted, biographies submitted by Richard Barton.

SAMUEL MERCER CLARK

Two Character Sketches.

I.

By Geo. D. Perkins.

AS sweet a life as ever run its fitful course in mortal frame has gone out with the death of Sam Clark. Those who knew and loved him will cling to the familiar name - generous, genial, brilliant dear old Sam. And yet not old - not 58 until October coming.

Samuel M. Clark was born on a farm in Van Buren county. All his life he passed in Iowa and in the neighborhood of his birth. His health was delicate always. As a boy, in the days of the civil war, he enlisted as a private soldier in Company H, Nineteenth Iowa volunteer infantry, but they would not muster him because of his ill health. He studied law with the late Judge Wright, in the old town of Keosauqua, and with John W. Rankin and George W. McCrary, of Keokuk, and he was admitted to the bar in 1864. But from school teaching and one thing and another he soon drifted into newspaper work, and for thirty-two years he was editor of the Keokuk Gate City. Howell & Clark was for many years the firm, the senior Howell being at one time a Senator in Congress. In those earlier days Keokuk presented an array of great men, and Sam Clark held a place among them, wise in his counsel, loyal in his friendships. He gave a score of years to the service of the public schools of his city and attained high rank over the State as a leader in educational work. In 1894 he was elected to Congress from the First District, succeeding the late Senator Gear; he was re-elected in 1896, and in 1898 declined to stand again as a candidate. For thirty years he was prominent in Republican politics. For four times in succession, beginning with 1872, he was a delegate to the national conventions of the party. He was nearly always in attendance upon the State conventions, and many of the platforms of the party are the product of his gifted pen. He was a public servant in the true sense of the term. His record of devotion to those things he believed true, to those interests he believed paramount, to those friends who stood the test of his unselfish analysis, was the crown and charm of his exalted life.

To have enjoyed the sanctuary and the confidence of this noble man was to be stayed in the aspirations and in the hopes of the time, and the memory of such rare privilege is a solace in the darkness that has come with the going out of his light.

He loved books as he loved men. From his companionship with these he enriched his own companionship. Out of the storehouse of his mind there welled up, as from an unroiled spring, treasures old and new. It was worth a journey at any time to take his hand, to look in his kindly eye, and to go apart with him to a quiet place, where he might talk. He had a gentle way. Ostentation was not a sin with him. He had learning, and with it the ways of a child.

He was friend with the birds, the trees, the shrubs, the ground upon which he trod and the struggling grass of it. The majesty of the great river flowing by gave him inspiration. His mind gathered riches from all things, as a bee gathers honey.

Day by day, month by month, year by year, he coined his treasures, or put them into blossom, and gave them unreservedly to the readers of the Gate City. He counted them all his bosom friends. He so loved them that he gave always and freely the best of his life that they might live with him.

He could speak as well as write. Out of the eloquence of his life he could happily project the eloquence of speech. His platform work, often at the peril of his health, was always for a cause.

He lived, withal, a heroic life. With a mind intensified by the weakness of his body he had constantly before him great purposes from which he was held back. The spirit was willing; the flesh was weak. Yet he suffered his limitations uncomplainingly. His cheery voice and sunny face put an eclipse upon his personal troubles. He was tenderly considerate of others; he would not add a feather weight, if so be he could help it, to the burdens of another life. He lived upon the hopeful side; he lived upon the sunny side. The riches of his philosophy made him a prince at home and abroad.

It is not easy, upon a sudden call, to write adequately of dear old Sam Clark. A measure of the life of the State has gone out. Iowa is not just the Iowa it was. A beautiful life has flickered out, and where it was is impenetrable darkness.

In his life he stood by many graves. His soul went forth many times to touch with benediction the soul of the mourner. It would be of peace in this moment to have his hand for amanuensis. But who shall write, in tenderness and justice, befitting tribute to him?

God help us every one.

II.

By G. Walter Barr.

Sixty years ago, in the characteristic house and environment of the pioneer, in Van Buren County, Iowa, there lived a Methodist minister from Virginia, whose father was born in Ireland. The minister's wife had been Miss Elizabeth Reynolds, and she was of a Maryland-Pennsylvania family whose genealogy touches much of the history of the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The godly minister with the poetic and belligerent Irish blood in his veins was Samuel Clarke, and his mother was a Mercer of the Old Dominion, who had married the Irishman who came to fight for the liberty of the colonies and saw the surrender of Yorktown.

This family tree bore Samuel Mercer Clark, who dropped the final "e" from his name, but kept all the patriotism, poetry, humor, pride, shrewdness, belligerency and force of character that came to him from the Irishman, the Virginian, the Pennsylvanian removed to Maryland, the line of army officers, and the follower of John Wesley.

The boy born in Van Buren County grew up in the environment of wild nature, - the beautiful valley of the Des Moines River. He took the environment into his ego; and in later years men marvelled at the complexity of his character, because they did not appreciate the forces of which he was the resultant. He arrived in the world on October 11, 1841, and was the seventh child of the minister and his wife who had one son later. When he died, August 11, 1900, he was first in Iowa journalism, first in the hearts of his fellow citizens in his home town, first in one department of the literature of the middle west, and first and last of a kind of man to whom the State showed every honor. He had shortened his name again to Sam. M. Clark, and thus it stood as the name of a journalist, poet-philosopher, statesman, educator, orator, scholar and gentleman.

He grew up in the sunlight of the fields, and amid the mysteries of the fencerow and the forest; he never got away from nature; he knew her inner heart.

As a part of nature, he studied men; as a part of religion, he studied character; as a part of eternal life, he developed his own soul. As the wild flowers and the shifting sunbeams gave him their reflected colors, men of the body politic reflected upon him the genius of American institutions and gave him civic honors. He was not yet nineteen years old when he made political speeches for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, when that meant literally speaking from the stump all over Van Buren County. He got the completeness of politics that first year, for the candidate for County Treasurer for whom he worked hardest on promise of being appointed deputy gave the place to another. When the boy went to town to take the place he found that politics has its disappointments and broken pledges. His future seemed ruined; and he went back to farming and wood chopping as the work of his life. But the fit of despondency soon passed and was succeeded by a better view of affairs and the determination to force the heights of success instead of depending upon a guide and the alpenstock of another. He worked hard in the country schools and afterwards entered a little college at West Point, in Lee County. It was a school of education rather than a machine for turning out parchments cut square and tied with colored ribbons. There his schooling stopped, but his study never stopped until the day he died. He read the best of literature, the deepest of philosophy, the broadest of history; he read omnivorously and continuously; and in some wonderful way he managed to digest the immense amount of information which he thus obtained. He also read events around him. His alma mater was the world. His text books were the writings of the wise of all ages and the actions of the wise and unwise of his own time.

The examining surgeon would not let the small weak body, top heavy with its brain, enter the army of the North in the Civil War. Before this he had begun to read law. George S. Wright, of Keosauqua, was his first preceptor; and in 1863, he went to the law office of the great firm of Rankin & McCrary, at Keokuk. In June, I864, he was admitted to the bar. All these dates are close together, and show with what tremendous energy the mind of the man was struggling upward, without much directness of purpose toward any certain point, but always upward.

Hence, it was natural that the next opportunity which came should be grasped because it put another round of the ladder within his reach. A week had not passed after his admission to the bar of Iowa, before he eagerly accepted the invitation of James B. Howell, another great man, to take a position on the newspaper of southern Iowa, The Gate City, of Keokuk. These two men worked together on the paper like man and wife, and when Mr. Howell went to Washington as United States Senator and later as Judge of the Court of Claims, Mr. Clark was left alone in the editorial room of The Gate City. He appreciated Mr. Howell, and not long before his death, in one of his philosophic moods, he said that of all the men he had met in his long and wide life, James B. Howell was the greatest.

The struggling young mind had at last found its place. It was on The Gate City that Mr. Clark did his life work. The conduct of a great newspaper meant activity in politics. Mr. Clark attended every State convention but one from 1864 to 1900. He was a delegate to the national republican conventions of 1872, 1876 and 1880. He was commissioner of education from the United States to the Paris Exposition of 1889. He was postmaster for several terms. He was elected to Congress from the First District to succeed John H. Gear in 1894 by the largest majority the district ever gave any man; and was unanimously nominated for a second term, election coming as a matter of course. At the end of that term he was compelled to decline renomination on account of failing health. Then, too, he was a member of the board of education in Keokuk for twenty-one years, and was its president for fourteen years. This service began in 1877, and is after all his highest honor from the people. For in Keokuk, election to the school board is kept sacredly as the greenest laurel the citizens ever give their most honored fellows - an honor never sought but presented as an honor cum laude to him who is conceived to be most worthy. In 1883 he was elected unanimously to this position, a gilding to the crown which nobody else ever received. He left the board of education in 1898 on account of his absence in Washington and his failing health.

All this is what the written record shows, but it very inadequately indicates the position of Sam M. Clark in affairs and among the people. To Iowa he was at the same time what Horace Greeley was to the North and what Henry Clay was to Kentucky. To the day of his death hundreds of people read every line in The Gate City thinking he wrote it all and kept the books in the counting room. Hundreds and thousands of others followed his political guidance without swerving, believing that he was the star in the east to lead them to the cradle of the newer and better era of statesmanship. He was unique as a personal force; and the difficulties of describing him lie in the fact that as a force he was so complex that the calculus of psychology is hardly sufficient to solve the problem. Those who knew well one or two parts of him had only a few factors where there were a large number with the sign of infinity at the end.

As a publicist, he believed that the people are always right when they have had time and opportunity for judgment. And when the people expressed themselves before mature judgment and turned out to be wrong, Mr. Clark would place himself in the forefront of the mistaken line and would receive the sorest wounds and take the most blame. He cared no more for consistency than a woman cares for a last year's bonnet, and he changed his mind as often as new conditions arose to make something else better or more feasible. He conceived that government is for the happiness of the governed, rather than for exploiting systems of ethics; and sometimes he aroused the deepest ire of the truly good people who sought to make the government a tincture of their active principles of religion. As an educator, he hated fads like a countryman, and cursed cant like Carlyle. He was at once the most conservative of educators on the board of education, and the first to adopt those things which the next decade showed to be valuable inventions or discoveries in pedagogy. As a journalist (he was that and not a newspaper man, to use the newer nomenclature) he was in no sense an editor - that is a man who understands all the details of planning the issue of a newspaper - and he had no more idea of news value (which is a term now standing for the essence of newspaper work) than a sixteen year old girl has of the nature of men. This was largely because he did his work on the paper in his library at home. Men have served a term as reporter without ever seeing him at the office.

But after all his greatest work was done through the types of his paper. This is one of the most easily understood paradoxes in his life. No paper, not even Greeley's, ever had so much individuality as his. His was the last editorial page to be read first by subscribers, years after people quit noticing the editorials and turned to the "scare heads" in the news columns. The intangible, invisible, invincible force of the man was wonderful. The community in the throes of a convulsion would quietly follow him through a gateway and along a road of his choosing; and a movement that had gathered great force has dissolved like snow in the light and heat of a single editorial article. When The Gate City was exciting the smiles of the trained newspaper man, it was holding thousands of readers enrapt and making them respond to its suggestions as if they were somnambulistic. If he was not an editor, he was the greatest editorial writer that the west has ever seen. And this is the expressed opinion of all editors who knew his work for so many years. That The Gate City was Sam Clark is shown in this, that other Iowa papers generally made the credit line of reprinted articles read in his name rather than in the name of the paper.

What shall we say of him? One is driven to the despairing cry of Carlyle in beginning his chapter upon Joan of Arc. He was a composite of an inheritance, complex in itself, and an education which came from all the books in the world and travel all over America and Europe. Every printed line, every change of color from sunshine or cloud in his front yard, every exhibition of human nature by his associates, every seismal rumble in civilization, all these he absorbed into himself and made a part of himself. His environment affected him fundamentally, and his environment was constantly changing.

His perception was so extensive that, octopus like, he gathered in things from the farthest sources. He noticed the slightest change of color in a star above the atmosphere at the same time that he was watching the effect of emotions and cunning on the face of the man to whom he was talking on the porch. And what information he had was as accurate as it was sometimes unusual. When the proofreader found a proper noun which he had never seen before and was driven from an unsuccessful search in the dictionary to Mr. Clark himself, there would come from the writer of the editorial article not only its spelling, but a thousand words of detailed explanation of the thing which, colloquially speaking, nobody else ever heard of; and if the young proofreader was driven by his wonder and skepticism to the library, every fact mentioned by Mr. Clark was found to be accurate with mathematical precision. Nothing worried him so much as a slip, even in a date or minor fact.

His judgment was far seeing and true, because based upon wide experience - not only the experience of his varied life, but the experience of all who had gone before and left a record in history or letters.

The practical politicians said that he was a poor politician, just as the newspaper men said that he was not an editor; but he gained offices for years, just as he made his paper of great influence. The fact is, that if he had chosen to go into the valley and the shadow of practical politics he might have achieved wonders by his shrewdness and agility - unless he had failed because he had thereby thrown away the source of his greatest strength, his sincerity.

A Methodist who knew him through and through said that Mr. Clark was the most religious man he ever knew; and a surface skimming skeptic said that only Universalism would save him. This shows how Mr. Clark kept his soul to himself and looked farther into the kingdom of God than most men. A few hours before he died, the man who could say "damn" with great unction when it seemed necessary, spoke to a young man as follows:

"People have called me an agnostic. I claim to be a believer. The life of Jesus has been an inspiration to me; but because my mind could not grasp the dogmas that were put before it, I have been fenced by them without the enclosure. My christianity is satisfactory to me, and if my end should come I go satisfied. This has been a beautiful world, and though I have suffered much, I go satisfied."

The religion he lived was one of deep philosophy, sweet poetry and much human nature. He loved well and true, and his hate carried a whiplash. He would forgive more thoroughly than most men for the asking; and he never forgot an unrequited wrong done him. He would criticise the clergy and fight for the church at the same time. He knew as much theology as a doctor of divinity and cared as little for it as a Digger Indian; but the greatest thing in the universe for him was the religion of the God of Moses and of Jesus of Nazareth. He told with gusto of a man who "lied like a gentleman," where a woman was concerned; he could make excuses for a thief of a certain environment, and would have assisted in the escape of some man who had broken another of the commandments; but to him, commandments were made for man, and not for God, and over all, permeating all, enlightening all and ruling all was the God who spoke at Sinai. While other good men emphasized their religion at prayer meeting, Mr. Clark emphasized his human nature in the columns of his paper where all might read.

Something of his character is found in the files of the paper for which he wrote for so many years. Its editorial page shows his scholarship, religion, heart, philosophy, poetry, manliness and womanliness, political acumen, and ambition. His literary style was unique and inimitable. It had the qualities of electricity which strikes from the sky to burst the oak and at other times glides through the filament to illuminate all the surroundings. It was an excellent style, but it started a new school; its analysis would make an interesting article for a literary journal, but can not be made here. It accomplished the purpose of all writing, which is the best criticism of it.

His newspaper editorials covered as wide a range as his studies had done. In politics, he was considered such an able writer that he wrote the platforms of Iowa republicans for years. In literature he was known as a critic of exceptional ability. In the countryside he was accepted as the painter of the people as they are. In the city he was worshiped as the high priest of the poetry of everyday life, although he wrote always in prose. In everything he was a philosopher who remembered the past and bent it to the necessity of the present. While his reading was omnivorous, it was never trifling, and he skipped the puerile. The allusions in his writings were usually to the essayists and historians and poets who wrote the English classics and seldom came from the dead languages.

Leaving his political writings, which had so much to do with shaping the course of the ship of state, Iowa, one turns with avidity to his everyday editorials of everyday life. He wrote of concrete things, and never went into transcendentalism. He wrote longer editorial articles than anybody of his generation; and he could say more in ten lines than anybody on the tripod. He would write a sermon in a few lines, and the next Sunday would have an article two columns long on the evolution of - a current religious idea. His philosophy and poetry were so combined that they were separated by an imaginary line, but the boundary was as distinct, after all, as the frontier of a state. His philosophy led him so far into the heart of things that it encountered love and beauty and enfolded them into a prose poem. After assimilating the philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Schopenhauer, he cast the books aside and made a philosophy of his own which was always optimistic in a practical way. He never descended to verse, but wrote like Ossian at times, and at other times had the delicacy of Maurice Thompson. The restrictions of meter and rhyme were unbearable to him, and he chafed under the unavoidable restrictions of the language and the bondage that he called the tyranny of the types. He had the freedom of a bird in his writing because he took it; and sometimes there would be in his editorial page expressions which made Walt Whitman seem like a purist, and Tolstoy read like a young ladies' mentor. There has been a good deal of talk lately about the literature of the West, but when in years to come the gems of English in the West are collected, some of his prose poems will be there. They do not belong to any class now recognized in literature, because they are his very own. They were published among the other editorials in The Gate City on Sundays, and they are too varied to illustrate by the scant quotation this space allows. About the time of his death, Iowa papers reprinted a number which he did not write because they appeared after his final illness took him from his work. The best one he ever wrote, perhaps, was about three hundred words on a summer night: he was racked with pain and could not sleep nor lie still in bed: he got up and wrote the article in his bedroom, and it contains nothing but brightness and the poetry of optimism as seen by one who saw more from the window of a chamber of pain than other men see in a lifetime of joy. His personal equation always appeared true in his writings, regardless of his sufferings at the time - and he suffered greatly at times, for he was never robust. He liked best to write about the heart of nature and the hearts of men: the things that are remembered the best belong in this class. One time he wrote of the scene in a country store, and its realism was superb - one can see yet the woman rubbing the edge of a piece of calico between her thumb and finger as she bargains with the clerk.

Of all his years of writing only one generalization can be made. The governor of his actions was his heart. True, he could fight with a broadsword and never used foils or mask in merely fencing with an adversary; but the men with whom he fought the hardest battles were the ones with whom he felt the greatest sympathy. The only exception was toward the man who had done him unjust and personal harm; that man was carved with a scimitar and the fragments burnt to ashes. The reason that men say he was a poor politician is that he generally allowed his judgment to be overcome by his heart, and always let his selfishness be warped by his sympathy. He delighted to appall his party with a half column of praise of somebody in the opposition who was an actual or prospective candidate; the opposition press always had scrap books full of his praise of men whom he was later fighting in a political way; his answer always was that the candidate was a fine man, but the party he represented made it a calamity to elect him. Everybody smiled, because everybody knew that Sam. M. Clark could no more keep from warming the hearts of others with the radiant heat of his own than the rain from heaven can keep from falling on the just and the unjust alike.

This poetry of temperament and warmth of heart made him like a woman, as his strength of character and depth of philosophy made him a virile man. He would hurl thunderbolts with one hand and plant violets with the other. He came nearer a perfect understanding of woman-kind than any other man has reached; and more women read what he wrote than has been the good fortune of any other western editor. He married Kate Avery Farrar in 1868, and she died in 1885. He was in love with his wife with the fervor of a schoolboy until the day of his own death. He never coquetted with women and met them only intellectually; but all women who read him admired him, and some of the old subscribers to his paper looked upon his writings as being almost if not quite inspired. This was one reason of his ex-cathedra power in public affairs of all kinds.

He was ambitious to a high degree - ambitious for one thing which considered the political honors he received as of secondary importance. The height of his ambition was to be admired and honored and loved in the homes of his district. To this he attained, and he valued it more than to be president. There was something of his philosophy in this. He spoke once of a number of forgotten books and authors, and compared them with his own continuing influence upon the people around him. He had rather be in the citadel of regard of a thousand people nearest at hand than to be elected president of his country by hundreds of thousands of people who did not know him.

All his work in life was the outgrowth of, and was similar to, his work on his paper. In Congress he had a judicial mind, great tolerance for others, praise for many, and abiding faith in the people. One of his first speeches there was on trusts, and it was scholarly, clear, cogent, conclusive and illuminating as an argument made at a time when that economic problem had just been discovered. One of his last speeches was on the subject of territorial expansion, and its theme was that God intended this country to grow in its geography, and hence to keep the South Sea Islands was but to obey the law of Omnipotence which would be enforced anyhow. He also spoke on pensions, army reorganization and other matters in the gamut between the acme of logic and the acme of poetry found alike in his first and last addresses upon the floor of Congress. He never liked anything that took him away from The Gate City, and he did not enjoy his congressional career as much as he did writing for his paper.

He came home from Washington broken down in health. People had been expecting his frail body to succumb to the strain he put upon it for thirty years. He gradually gave up his work during the winter of 1899- 1900, and by slow gradations sank into the grave. He died August 11, 1900, in the home where most of his work had been done. To his one child, Arthur Farrar Clark, he left a heritage in the minds and hearts of the people, and a comfortable fortune. His funeral was a civic ceremony attended by public men from the farthest corners of the State and by literally everybody in Keokuk. By the side of the officials was a colored man and his wife weeping bitter tears; and never before or since has every part of the heterogenous mass that is called a city been represented as it was there. He was laid to rest in the beautiful Oakland cemetery with many men famed in national history as his neighbors.

His last public address was at Salem, Iowa, July 4, 1900.

His last editorial was a warm eulogy upon Judge A. J. McCrary, who was about to move from Keokuk to New York: it appeared July 29, 1900. He was then supposed to be too weak to write, but the incentive of saying a good word for a friend moved the pen in his hand. The next preceding article he published was a long review of a little book on Paido- Theology, by Rev. Dr. J. A. Boatman, of Keokuk. One of the last things he wrote was a column leader upon the life and services of Senator Gear, in the issue of July 15, I900.

His last words were spoken to a medical student at his bedside. Just before he died, Mr. Clark said:

"Throughout thy life always keep the infinity of spirit, and through all thy work do not lose sight of the Lord."

Iowa editors called him their dean, and every newspaper in Iowa published an article on his life and work. The sum total left much omitted. This sketch is an attempt to give a broad idea of the man; and at its end as in the beginning one is driven back to the same despairing cry, What shall we say of him? He was a great force, and like the other forces must be studied through his manifestations which still leave much that is puzzling except to the deepest delver, and too much that is paradoxical at first glance. To know him was a treat; to be associated with him was an education in itself.