The robber baron who 'bought judges as other men buy food’

The robber barons of the gilded age, at the turn of the 20th century, were the most ruthless accumulators of wealth in the history of the United States, and none of them was less handicapped by moral scruples than W.A. Clark. He was up there near the pinnacle of acquisitiveness with Rockefeller but was not as legendary in popular imagination. While other pioneers were searching for gold, Clark developed copper-mining at the most opportune time, when there was a great and growing demand for copper for electrical wiring. The copper lode he discovered in Butte, Montana, produced 11 million tons and earned the town its nickname ‘The Richest Hill on Earth’.

In those days, US senators were appointed by the state legislators, rather than elected. Clark got himself sent to Washington, resigned from the senate when there were allegations of bribery and, with suspicious ease, was reappointed. ‘He is said to have bought legislatures and judges as other men buy food and raiment,’ wrote Mark Twain. ‘By his example he has so excused and sweetened corruption that in Montana it no longer has an offensive smell.’

Whatever Clark’s ethical standards really were, he was an extraordinarily astute entrepreneur, who found that there was ‘no lack of opportunity for those who were on alert for making money’. Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr relate how Clark extended his activities to Arizona and collected banks, railroads and newspapers, to become a multimillionaire in his thirties. He indulged in personal extravagance and domestic grandiosity on a scale he hoped would gain him admittance to the high society of New York’s exclusive ‘400’, an ambitious achievement he was denied.