DISSOLUTION

The W. a. Clark business empire was not built for longevity, collapsing soon after its founder handed it to his children.

While his Gilded Age contemporaries typically operated through hierarchies of executives and managers, creating vast corporate entities, W. A. ran his companies as essentially sole proprietorships, which he ruled autocratically. Having attended to every detail of his companies personally W. A. failed in succession planning.

In August 1928, three years after W. A. died, his heirs cashed out of the Clark interests in Montana, selling out to his longtime opponent, the Anaconda Company, which had taken over the Daly interests. Now the Clarks had no real connection to Montana except Will’s lakefront lodge. They stiU held the family’s largest asset, the United Verde copper mine in Arizona.

Sons were expected to take over a business, but W. A.’s two sons were dissolute in their personal habits and enthusiasms. And they were not blessed with their father’s longevity.

Charlie Clark, the older son and chairman of the United Verde Copper Company, lived like a European prince. His drinking, gambling, and womanizing were well chronicled. He had his own private racetrack at his San Mateo estate, El Palomar, and the longest private railcar ever built, which he sold to Howard Hughes. Charlie married three times and gave hardly anything to charity. He died of pneumonia in April 1933 in New York, at age sixty-one, having never achieved the sobriety his father hoped for him.

His younger brother had pursuits of a more intellectual sort. W. A. Jr., known as Will, had a law degree from the University of Virginia, ran minor industries with his father’s financing in Montana, and was vice president of the United Verde. After settling in Los Angeles in 1907, Will built an elaborate jewel-box Italian Renaissance library with rare books on shelves made of copper. He specialized in seventeenth - and eighteenth-century English literature, and also built perhaps the finest collection pertaining to Oscar Wilde. A music lover and skilled violinist. Will founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1919 and subsidized it for its first eight years of operation. He was also a major donor in the construction of the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor amphitheater.

Will died in June 1934 at age fifty-seven of a heart attack at his Mowitza Lodge in Montana. At his funeral in Los Angeles, his father’s favorite poem, “Thanatopsis,” was read by a Shakespearean actor. He was laid to rest in the most exquisite private mausoleum in Los Angeles, on an island in the center of a scenic pond at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.

Will’s reputation was marred after his death by the tell-all biography published by a college friend and former employee, William Mangam. Will was labeled as a binge drinker and a profligate and reckless homosexual and chaser of much younger men. Such claims were more shocking in the Los Angeles of the 1930s than today, and their truth has not been established. Mangam made other conjectures that turned out to be wrong. We have only his word, because Will’s papers were burned after his death.

His generosity is better documented. He willed his home compound and his library to the public institution that became the University of California, Los Angeles. He gave a building to the University of Nevada, Reno, to honor his first wife, and another to the University of Virginia to honor his second. A statue of Beethoven marks Will’s founding of the Philharmonic—in unusual fashion for a Clark, he said he didn’t want a statue of himself. The statue now stands forlornly in a remote corner of Pershing Square, a gathering area for the city’s homeless.

Will Clark left little to his relatives, and a large share of his estate went to the seventeen-year-old son of his housekeeper. George Pale, child of a Basque immigrant whose husband had abandoned her, was eight or nine when he met WiU, who paid for his schooling. They spent most weekends together, and George spent weeks during the summer at the lodge in Montana. After Will’s own son died in 1932, Will began to talk of adopting George, with George’s mother’s permission. He began signing his letters “Your father” and “Daddy Clark.” He also referred to George fondly as “Sonny” and “General Pershing,” reflecting the family’s fondness for the general who saved France. Will’s letters to young George show a touching paternal love. George explained, “Mr. Clark told me that I filled a void in his heart after the death of his son.” After receiving his inheritance, George married a trombonist’s daughter from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and named his first son Clark.

The family’s best hope for an executive had been Will’s only child, the manager of the United Verde. W. A. Clark HI was known as BUly, or within the family as Tertius, the Latin word for third. In May 1932, at age twenty-nine, W. A. Clark HI died while taking flying lessons with Jack Lynch, a former barnstorming buddy of Charles Lindbergh. It’s not clear who was at the controls, but Clark and Lynch were practicing flying blind, with the windshield covered, just as Lindbergh had flown from New York to Paris in 1927 with a gas tank blocking his forward view. They crashed near Clemenceau, Arizona, not far from the United Verde mine. Tertius’s young wife saw the plane go down.

This run of male self-destruction left the empire in the hands of W. A.’s daughters, who showed little interest in business. Katherine died in 1933, May had no husband or son with business experience, and Huguette was in her twenties.

Although copper was at a historic low price during the Depression days of 1935? May and Huguette sold off the United Verde mine in Arizona. The last mine of W. A. Clark, who had built a model company town with good healthcare and fair wages for his workers, was sold to the Phelps Dodge Corporation, notorious for its anti-union activity.

W. A. Clark’s empire had been dissolved, and his name drifted toward obscurity. The abandoned home of his grandson W. A. HI outside the model mining town of Clarkdale remained vacant for eighty years. It was eventually used as a set for a low-budget film about a haunted brothel and in 2010 was destroyed by fire.

In Montana, the legacy of W. A. Clark is still debated.

First, mining is a proud part of the state’s history. Fourteen steel structures from the mines stiU rise over Butte today. These headframes were used to support the ten-ton cables that hoisted men, mules, and equipment in and out of the mines. The men called them gallows frames, employing the dark humor of workers toiling in a deadly environment. But they are the symbols of Butte as surely as the Eiffel Tower is Paris.

Butte is StiU paying for its copper past. The Clark Fork is today America’s largest Superfund environmental disaster site. The Clark Fork ends its 479-mUe journey at the Pend OreiUe River, where W. A. hauled the maU, exclaiming at the beauty, “The firmament sheweth His handiwork.” It begins that journey as Silver Bow Creek, near the Butte mines. Water and wind spread the copper arsenic, cadmium, nickel, and lead, from the mines and smelters of Butte and Anaconda more than a hundred miles downstream, kiUing fish and fouling drinking water. Remediation of the watershed has been under way for thirty years, at a cost of nearly a biUion dollars. One can stUl find blue-green sediment alongside the river.

Some locals lay more of the blame on Marcus Daly and his Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which remained in business longer and left more reminders. There’s “the Stack,” a massive brick smokestack built in 1919 and stUl standing in Anaconda, northwest of Butte, a relic nearly sixty stories tall and easUy large enough to fit the Washington Monument inside it. Today the Stack is the centerpiece of Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park, a monument too toxic to allow any visitors close by.

The successor to Daly’s Anaconda Company turned several Butte neighborhoods into an open strip mine, the Berkeley Pit, in 1955. After W. A.’s Columbia Gardens burned in a suspicious fire in 1973, the pit expanded, gobbling up the gardens so dear to W. A. and the community. The new owners, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO), shut down the mine in 1982 in the face of foreign competition, but the Berkeley Pit remained, slowly filling with water contaminated with sulfuric acid, arsenic, and lead. Now it’s a massive lake, a Superfund disaster site with a viewing stand for tourists. Hundreds of migrating snow geese died after landing in the pit, so recorded gunfire is played at intervals to keep birds away.

W. A. had his own smelter smokestack, the tallest in the world, spreading its arsenical debris far from his “smoky city.” Worse for his reputation, he moved to New York, selling most of his Montana mining interests to the Standard Oil men in 1910.

“The cumulative sentiment here,” said Keith Edgerton, a professor of history at Montana State University who is researching a Clark biography, “is that he made a fortune off of the state’s resources in the freewheeling laissez-faire times of the late nineteenth century, prostituted the political system with his wealth and power, exploited the working class for his own gain, left an environmental wreck behind, and took his millions to other places to benefit a handful of others. And in some ways, the state has never really recovered from it aU.”

Clark never acknowledged any awareness of such resentments. He described himself as one of “those men, those brave pioneers who have come out here and made the wilderness bloom as the rose, and opened up these great mountains and brought their hidden wealth to light.”