Fifty Years of Begging: Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke and Christian Children’S Fund

By J. Calvitt Clarke III PhD

A consummate and innovative entrepreneur and fundraiser, by the 1950s Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke was running the worlds largest Protestant organization dedicated to the welfare of children. Yet while Dr. Clarkes life and accomplishments make him one of the twentieth centurys foremost and beloved figures in philanthropy, his legacy is sometimes recorded with confusion, contradiction, and even outright error.

In Fifty Years of Begging, Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke III, author and grandson to Dr. Clarke, navigates the complexities of Dr. Clarkes personality and intellectual lifeand yes, even their contradictionsto offer a detailed and heartfelt profile of this compelling man. Based on hundreds of newspapers and extensive archival researchincluding a large cache of family papersFifty Years of Begging is inspired by Dr. Clarkes own badly fragmented and scattered manuscript of his unfinished memoirs.

Although both Dr. Clarke and his grandson called Richmond their home, while growing up the author did not know his grandfather well. On the other hand, his work on his grandfather Clarkes biography did set him on an exciting and enjoyable road of discovery, one that would reveal Dr. J. Calvitt Clarkes proud heritage and lasting legacy of philanthropy and service.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jan 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480855496

J. Calvitt Clarke III PhD

J. Calvitt Clarke III received his doctoral degree in Russian and Soviet history from the University of Maryland in College Park. Early in his career he spent significant time teaching aboard US Navy ships and at US military bases in Italy, Spain, and the Mediterranean, and once returned to the States, Dr. Clarke taught history for eighteen years at Jacksonville University in Florida. He retired as professor emeritus of history, and he has served on the board of directors for Children, Incorporated. Today Dr. Clarke lives in Lexington, Virginia, with his wife, Mariko Asakawa. Together they have a daughter, Tiffany.

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Also by J. Calvitt Clarke

Professor Emeritus of History

Jacksonville University

Russia and Italy Against Hitler: The Bolshevik-Fascist Rapprochement of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Alliance of the Colored Peoples: Ethiopia & Japan before World War II. Woodbridge, Suffolk, GB: James Currey, 2011.

Fifty Years of Begging

Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke and Christian Children’s Fund

J. Calvitt Clarke III, PhD

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Copyright © 2018 J. Calvitt Clarke III, PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Archway Publishing

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5547-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5548-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-5549-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017919806

Archway Publishing rev. date: 1/8/2018

Cover image: At the home of President Syngman Rhee of the Republic of Korea in 1957. Mrs. Clarke admires the Presidential Commendation and Ribbon Rhee had just presented to Dr. Clarke.

To Mariko Asakawa and Tiffany Asakawa Clarke

If we love our neighbor as we love our self, how much of the pain in the world would be softened. If we lived in a world of kindness instead of self-seeking. We make much of our own hell, when we could make a bit of heaven. If the world were governed by human kindness, the rose vine would grow up to our window and some morning we would open our eyes to find a rose greeting us.¹

Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke, founder, Christian Children’s Fund

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Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke, 1941

Abbreviations

ACASR - American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief

BD - Board of Directors

CCF - China’s Children Fund

CCF - Christian Children’s Fund

CFI - ChildFund International

CHIM - Christian Herald Industrial Mission

CI - Children, Incorporated

DD - Doctor of Divinity

EC - Executive Committee

FMC - Foreign Missions Conference of North America

NCC - National Council of Churches of Christ

NCWA - National Child Welfare Association of China

NER - Near East Relief

NIB - National Information Bureau

PLA - People’s Liberation Army of China

PWRCB - President’s War Relief Control Board

RNL - Richmond News Leader

RTD - Richmond Times-Dispatch

SCF - Save the Children Fund of America

UCR - United China Relief

UN - United Nations

YMCA - Young Men’s Christian Association

Foreword

In both the business and nonprofit worlds, the buzz these days is all about start-ups. While starting up something is challenging enough, starting up a nonprofit in the midst of the Great Depression that lasts more than seventy-seven years is an extraordinary feat. A brave visionary, Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke accomplished that miracle with the founding of China’s Children Fund in 1938. Today, that fledgling agency has evolved into a global network of child-centered development organizations, the ChildFund Alliance, which collectively improves the lives of more than fifteen million children and family members in fifty-eight countries around the world, raising more than $650 million to support that work.

Jay Clarke tells the story about his extraordinary grandfather, with the rigor of an experienced historian and the art of a true storyteller. From Calvitt Clarke’s early days as a romance novelist to his painful departure from the organization he founded and loved, this biography captures not only the man but also the times in which he lived and toiled to make the world a better and safer place for children.

Anne Lynam Goddard

President and CEO

ChildFund International

I am honored that Jay Clarke asked me to write a Foreword to this wonderful book about his grandfather. In fact, Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke is among the most influential people in my life. Although I never met him, he has deeply influenced my life’s work and me as a person.

I spent just under a dozen years working for Christian Children’s Fund, and during that time, I learned much about Rev. Clarke. I often joined in presentations about his work, as leaders from CCF’s international affiliates visited Richmond. CCF’s brilliant historian, Joan Losen, put together dramatic programs in which various CCF employees would read quotes from Dr. Clarke and boast of how he founded China’s Children Fund in 1938.

In 2003, I moved from CCF to Children, Incorporated, the organization that Dr. Clarke’s daughter Jeanne Clarke Wood, founded. Mrs. Wood was at my initial interview, and she spoke about her father. She was proud of his accomplishments at CCF, and she was proud that she had been able to carry on his work through Children, Incorporated.

Children, Incorporated and ChildFund International—the renamed CCF—continue to improve the lives of children all over the world. They provide food, clothing, school supplies, medical assistance, and community development in areas of incredible need, and both offer hope, a key to surviving and overcoming deprivation. If not for Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke, neither organization would exist. The world owes him a huge debt of gratitude, and I am honored to be part of the far-reaching and still-unfolding story of Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke.

Ron Carter

President and CEO

Children, Incorporated

Acknowledgments

All works of history are collaborative efforts. It is impossible to thank by name every deserving soul, but several have been notably helpful. Anne Lynam Goddard, president and chief executive officer of ChildFund International (CFI) kindly allowed me access to the archives of Christian Children’s Fund in Richmond, Virginia. She also wrote a foreword, as did Ron Carter, president and CEO of Children, Incorporated. I am grateful to both.

Two of Christian Children’s Fund’s former employees who worked with Dr. Clarke, James C. Hostetler and Jerald Huntsinger, eagerly gave their time to speak with me, and I thank them.

Joan Losen, a longtime employee of CFI and now retired, generously offered her knowledge and encouragement. She did a first-rate job archiving many of CFI’s old records. Edward Gaynor at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia made available his holdings on Dr. Clarke. He also graciously accepted my donations of family papers into his collection, which included materials forwarded to me by Herman Wood and Margaret Stearns, Clarke’s grandson and grandniece respectively. John Jacob, the archivist at the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Archives, Washington and Lee University, School of Law, has always been helpful.

Many archivists and librarians searched their holdings and sent relevant materials and evaluations to me. These include Eric Biddy, library assistant, Meadville Lombard Theological School; Joseph Ditta, reference librarian, the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, the New York Historical Society; Lana Dumrauf, administrative assistant, Pittsburgh Presbytery; David R. Grinnell, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh; Sarah Hartwell, reading room supervisor, Dartmouth College, Rauner Special Collections Library; Sandra Hedrick, stated clerk, Presbytery of St. Augustine; Frank Peachey, Mennonite Central Committee, US Records and Library Manager; Charlene Peacock, reference archivist, Presbyterian Historical Society; Mary Webb Prophet, Denison University Libraries; Elizabeth Teaff, access services librarian, Washington and Lee University; Peter Weis, archivist, Mount Hermon School; Amy Welch, college archivist and outreach librarian, Washington and Jefferson College; Michelle Yarbrough, archives specialist, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center; the librarians at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the archivists at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University; and the librarians at Yale University, Divinity Library.

I managed to rope a couple of friends, one colleague, and one family member into reading my manuscript; I took advantage of their criticisms and suggestions. They are Chuck Carroll, Karen Carroll, Professor Hillary Kaell, and Marte Ring.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Educating the Young Man

Pride and Middletown: Family History

The Halcyon Days: Calvitt’s Youth

More Education: And Marriage

Chapter 2: Clarke Begins His Work

In the Shadow of the Great War: Clarke as Pastor

The International Social Gospel: Near East Relief

Chapter 3: The Clarkes Make Richmond Their Home

New Beginnings: Richmond and the China Child Welfare Association

Remarkable Energy: The Clarkes’ Civic Work in Richmond

More Grist for Novels: Save the Children Fund of America, Inc.

Chapter 4: Dr. Clarke’s Didactic Love Novels

She Bartered Love for Vengeance! Rev. Clarke’s Publishers

I am a Meliorist: The Social Gospel

Chapter 5: Crime, Adventure, Faith, and Utopia

The Same Richard Grant? Clarke’s New Fiction

Churches Exist to Exist: A Reverend’s Doubts

God’s Children Live Under Many Roofs: Ecumenicalism

Utopian Visions: Doctor Time

Chapter 6: China’s Children Fund

A Chambersburg Barbershop: The Founding Story

Building on the Work of Others: First Steps

The View from Richmond: CCF During the War

Chapter 7: Peace Fails

Victory: Transition to Peacetime Work

CCF Reacts: Civil War in China

War’s Rhetoric Forgotten: CCF in Japan

Marketing Opportunities: The Korean War, June 1950–July 1953

Chapter 8: CCF and the Cold War

A New Civil Religion: Anti-Communism

Fighting the Cold War: Christian Children’s Fund as a Weapon

The Winds Beat against a High Tower: Facing Criticism

Chapter 9: The Fall of the Clarke Family

The New Deal Forgotten: Dr. Clarke’s Growing Conservatism

A Mom-and-Pop Organization: Facing Challenges

Not Going Gentle into that Good Night: The Clarkes Forced out of CCF

Epilogue: Children, Incorporated

Wood’s Memorial: Founding the New Organization

Sentiment: Evaluating a Life’s Work

Select Bibliography

Introduction

On Friday, July 17, 1970, Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke died in his adopted hometown of Richmond, Virginia. The Associated Press picked up the story, and the next day, newspapers across the country published the news.² Worthy recognitions of a worthy man, and across the world, many grieved for him, not as an abstraction but as a personal loss.

In their few words, however, these obituaries foisted on their readers many errors in the details of Clarke’s life. The facts given for his education were almost all untrue. Not least, although Clarke used the honorific Dr. for fifty years, he never did receive his Doctor of Divinity (DD) degree. Most of the dates given in the obituary were off. Even the founding date for China’s Children Fund (CCF), Clarke’s great gift to the world, was a year too early. One date the obituaries likely had correct was that for Clarke’s birth, 1887, even though throughout his life, he gave years ranging from 1886 to 1889 in official documents.³

While some of these misstatements might seem petty and like those found in many obituaries, these slips are just the tip of the iceberg. Lying beneath, confusion, contradiction, exaggeration, and outright error have blemished nearly all descriptions of Clarke’s life and work—including those in his promotional materials and his in-house biography published in 1961. The chronology and substance of his life are surprisingly tight knots to unravel. As one example, many have uncritically accepted the judgment of some at the National Council of Churches of Christ (NCC) and have wrongly seen Clarke’s Christian Children’s Fund (CCF) as a fundamentalist organization. There is nothing in Clarke’s theology and little in his programmatic work that supported the NCC’s concerns.

Beyond correcting errors, why write a biography of Dr. Clarke? Around his life swirled many of the seminal movements and crises of the twentieth century. Not only reacting to those events, he also strove to change for the better how they affected the world’s most humble, its children. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Rev. Clarke, during and after World War I, worked with the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR)—later Near East Relief (NER)—and in 1923, he helped found the Golden Rule Foundation, an outgrowth of NER. After briefly serving with the China Child Welfare Association, in 1932 Rev. Clarke helped found Save the Children Fund of America (SCF). In 1937 and 1938, he worked with Helen Keller and the American Foundation for the Blind. He next founded China’s Children Fund, which after World War II, he renamed Christian Children’s Fund. Today called ChildFund International, during his watch, it became the world’s largest, Protestant, nongovernmental organization dedicated to helping children. After the coup that forced him out of CCF in 1964, and at an age when others retire, Clarke with his wife and daughter set up Children, Incorporated (CI), another charity that continues to serve the world’s children. All this makes Clarke one of the twentieth century’s foremost and beloved figures in philanthropy.

Rev. Clarke’s efforts inspired other child welfare organizations. Devoting his remarkable skills as a speaker, promoter, and organizer, he helped develop and hone many of the fundraising techniques common in the field today. These include direct appeals to masses of private individuals, whose small gifts he pooled into significant funds to do significant work. Further, he helped fine-tune and make fashionable the idea of adoption by foster parents, which forged direct, even if geographically distant, bonds between adult sponsors and identified child recipients. The psychology is simple. Ameliorating a world riven by poverty is a daunting, even an impossible task, where donated funds can fall haplessly into a bottomless pit of need. But it is possible for one kind heart to make a big difference for one suffering child: Yet it is far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.⁴ This truth has unlocked the pocketbooks of millions. And millions are better off for it.

Never above equating Christianity and America itself, Clarke’s work placed him at the intersection of America’s nongovernmental organizations and its official foreign and domestic policy. Beyond giving sponsors a sense of doing good, supporting Clarke’s work allowed them to feel like they were actively promoting America’s heartfelt values and its international goals. They could help ease the pain suffered by Armenians and others from Turkish depredations during World War I. They could join the global struggle against Communism after that war. Sponsors could fight the Great Depression in America’s most disadvantaged localities, above all in Appalachia. They could find common cause with the Chinese against Japanese aggression in the 1930s and 1940s and contribute to America’s victory in the Second World War. After that war, they could help the United States salve the bestial wounds scarring Europe and Asia. As the Cold War cast its dark pall, they could rejoin the fight against Communism in China. Although America lost that battle, sponsors could still fight for freedom against Red aggression during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Their work not yet done, they could fight on in Latin and South America from the 1950s through the end of the twentieth century.

What drove Rev. Clarke to offer his life to serving others? Fortunately, he left many clues. He was a significant author of popular literature, publishing more than two dozen novels between 1933 and 1960. Some he wrote under his own name, most under pseudonyms. He touted only the former in the publicity packets he gave to those hosting his speaking engagements and to local newspapers. Precious few, even those among his friends and work associates, knew about the latter. His early romances, in particular, reflected his commitment to the Social Gospel, feminism, and New Deal politics, and they continued his preaching ministry after he had left the pulpit. Additionally, many of his unpublished manuscripts have survived, some complete, most in fragments. One is an intriguing autobiographical novel, which likely served as an aide-mémoire for an autobiography Clarke began three decades later. Further, another novel fragment contains strong autobiographical threads. Altogether, Rev. Clarke’s published and unpublished works shined a bright light on what drove him to make the welfare of children his life’s passion.

Clarke’s fiction not only dramatized the contradictions and tensions plaguing larger society but also those bedeviling his own psyche. Most conspicuously, human sexuality absorbed him. His young female characters aggressively explored their sexual awakenings amid the changing mores of the first several decades of the twentieth century. One manuscript carried this theme into the 1950s. Even Clarke’s seminary students, reverends, and missionaries faced the same earthly temptations as did his more secular souls. The strengths and weaknesses of human character also fascinated him, and he detested hypocrisy—too often in unfortunate abundance among those of a religious bent.

Unsurprisingly, religion was always important to Rev. Clarke—even when he questioned his faith, which he did profoundly in his writing. While he grounded his charity appeals in an ecumenical, Protestant Christianity, he also found other, more worldly motives to encourage people to give. Today, religious commitment is no longer the only catalyst to humanitarian work. In fact, Clarke embraced and helped awaken in the twentieth century this secular concern for the world’s disadvantaged. The name change in 2009 of his organization—thirty-nine years after his death—from Christian Children’s Fund to ChildFund International marks a vital step in this transition.

There is one last, broad justification for a biography of Clarke—the inadequacy of previous texts describing him and his work. Edmund W. Janss wrote Yankee Si! as something of a biography. An in-house work, CCF published his book in 1961, and Clarke sent copies to his contributors as a fundraising tool. Two momentous events followed its publication: his release from CCF and his founding of Children, Incorporated. Further, Janss’ remarkable unreliability in some crucial areas of Clarke’s life demands a new biography. Two others have written books on Christian Children’s Fund and Dr. Clarke, and these too were in-house works. John C. Caldwell published Children of Calamity in 1957, and Larry E. Tise with Kristin Helmore wrote A Book about Children: The World of Christian Children’s Fund, 1938–1991 in 1991.⁵ The former focused on CCF rather than on Clarke, and the latter was also light on Clarke’s biography and borrowed heavily from the two earlier works.

Fortunately, there is more material on Dr. Clarke. Several caches of primary materials add much to understanding him and his life. ChildFund in Richmond has preserved many of the documents produced from its founding as China’s Children Fund and its continuation as Christian Children’s Fund. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville holds a trove of personal notes, letters, and photographs. The collection also includes manuscripts of his fiction writing plus all-important fragments of Clarke’s unpublished autobiography, which he called Fifty Years of Begging. I have taken his title for my biography of him. I also had access to the family’s papers, which include letters, journals, photographs, and his two fictional, autobiographical works. All the images in this biography come from these documents. I have donated most of this collection to the University of Virginia. I have also collected, collated, annotated, and placed Dr. Clarke’s unpublished literary works online.⁶ Finally, Dr. Clarke was a public man, and many newspapers and newsletters recorded his life and provided him a platform for promoting his work.

By way of full disclosure, I am Dr. Clarke’s grandson, and for seven years—from 2004 to 2011—I served on the board of Children, Incorporated. My grandfather died when I was twenty-three, and although we both called Richmond our home, I cannot say I knew him well. Further, by inclination of personality and training as a historian, I have approached my research and writing on him as objectively as possible, as if he were any other figure whom I might choose as a subject. On the other hand, my work on his biography did set me on an exciting and enjoyable road of discovery. His life was more compelling than I had ever imagined. The complexities of his personality and intellectual life—yes, even their contradictions—make him more compelling and give him great depth. How little I knew him.

In writing this biography, I have tried to avoid anachronisms to understand better the flavor of Dr. Clarke’s life and his times. My reticence is most noticeable in those chapters describing his literary work. His characters sometimes spoke about niggers, negroes, darkies, half-breeds, coloreds, and Asiatics, all words most today would rightly condemn. That he used these terms should not obscure Clarke’s Progressive attitudes on racial issues, certainly for the times. Similarly, in his novels, Clarke wrote about girls, not, say, young women. The term businessmen defined those engaged in business. Businessperson did not exist, and chairman was an office women could hold—not chairwoman or today’s more anodyne chair. None of this diminishes Dr. Clarke’s efforts supporting the social, political, economic, and sexual equality of women. While Rev. Clarke wrote about sexuality and gender as having discrete categories, I suspect that if introduced to the concept of their fluidity, he would have been sympathetic. Last, China was in the Far East or the Orient—not in East Asia.

Foreign language names challenge anyone writing about the past. Different transliteration schemes alone create confusion. Then add imperialism’s self-centered habit of imposing its names on native territories. I have used the names Clarke himself used, although he was not always consistent, especially in spelling.

1

Educating the Young Man

Pride and Middletown: Family History

Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke was proud of his heritage, even if its details often eluded him. On Armistice Day ending the First World War, the thirty-one-year-old Clarke laconically celebrated the event with a letter to his mother, Ella Hamilton Clarke. Mostly about the mundane, he needed information for insurance—his mother had been in the hospital. He asked about his father’s birthplace, his mother’s maiden name and birthplace, and the names and nationalities of both his paternal and maternal grandparents. I am sorry to bother you with these questions, but there is lots of red tape in this world. If you can’t answer them correctly, don’t take time to look them up. Just do the best you can and let it go at that. In fact, only some of Clarke’s questions received handwritten answers—presumably his mother’s—and she mistakenly wrote that her husband had been born in Vicksburg, Mississippi.⁷ For all its pride, it is astonishing what the family did not know about itself.

Even so, much is known. Named after his father, Joseph Calvitt Clarke was born on June 30, 1887, in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1820s, one of his great-grandfathers, Joshua G. Clarke, had been Mississippi’s first chancellor. Written while serving from 1818 to 1821 on Mississippi’s first Supreme Court, his two known decisions fixed, at least for a while in Mississippi, some legal rights for slaves. One raised the issue of whether slaves became freedmen by having lived in the Northwest Territory under the Ordinance of 1787. Judge Clarke said yes. In the other, Clarke asserted that killing a slave could be called murder because even black slaves were, in fact, human beings. And in condemning the murderer to death by hanging, Clarke rejected the defense claim that slaves were outside common law.⁸

Dr. Clarke’s grandfather—Judge Clarke’s son—was the first of the next five generations to carry the name of Joseph Calvitt Clarke and sign his name as J. Calvitt Clarke. When a young man, he left Mississippi to seek his fortune in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he became a respected attorney, judge, and newspaper owner and editor. A supporter of the Whig political party, his editorials opposed abolition and favored the colonization movement for freed slaves. He opposed easy naturalization of foreign immigrants and vigorously supported temperance. This Clarke left the Episcopalian faith of his father and became a licensed preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Before dying in 1854, he also helped found and sustain a church among the slaves and freed blacks of New Orleans.⁹

Dr. Clarke’s father was born in the Clarke House in Lafayette, New Orleans, in March 1848. After the Civil War, he followed his widowed mother to Brooklyn. In May 1876, the Southern transplant married a twenty-one-year-old woman named Ella Hamilton at the home of her adoptive parents Benjamin and Mary Hamilton Bailey; Mary was, in fact, her biological aunt, whom Dr. Clarke called grandmother throughout his life.¹⁰ Born in 1855 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Ella was the daughter of Joseph Hamilton, Mary’s brother, and the granddaughter of Richard Hamilton, who had been a merchant seaman and privateer during the War of 1812.¹¹ While Ella and her natural father stayed in contact and while she never foreswore her Hamilton name for Bailey, there is no evidence that the young Clarke ever had any direct contact with his natural grandfather.

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Mary Hamilton Bailey, Clarke’s adoptive grandmother.

The young couple, Joseph Calvitt and Ella Hamilton Clarke, went to live on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, where her adoptive parents ran a boardinghouse. The home, like Brooklyn itself, was cosmopolitan, with boarders and servants from many countries. By 1880, the Clarkes had two children, Mary Louise and Richard Hamilton. Later in the decade, Ella gave birth to her last two sons, Robert Louis Keene and Joseph Calvitt.

According to Clarke, his father had been a successful broker on the New York Stock Exchange, but the state census of 1892 listed him merely as a clerk, residing with his family.¹² Sometime after then and likely well before 1900, tragedy struck the family—the father was committed to Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Middletown, New York. A traumatic decade of setbacks to America’s economy after 1887 likely contributed to his illness.

One of Clarke’s unpublished manuscript fragments, his autobiographical novel, Ex-Minister, poignantly described the madness of the once-successful James.

Father was in his late thirties, in the prime of life sitting all day in his chair rocking and rocking muttering to himself, the saliva dripping down the corners of his mouth. Although he sat in a corner of the one room grandma had allowed the five of them and only looked frightened when she approached and even ceased his muttering, she complained he was always in her way. There are institutions for the likes of him. … He should be sent away.

Clarke’s grandmother Bailey was doubtless cantankerous but was never quite as difficult as this fictional figure.

If mother timidly suggested she had no money to support him at an institution, she was reminded there were free lunatic asylums for the crazy and the state could support him. But mother always hoped her kindness and having the children about him might drive the clouds out of poor James’ mind and bring back her husband to her again.¹³

For Clarke’s fictional father, however, the unhappy day inevitably came.

James junior could remember the day two men came and took his father away. He saw his father struggling, refusing to go until force was necessary and he was half dragged half carried down the front brown stone steps. His murmurings then became loud cursings hurled at his captors and his wife while a little crowd of curious gathered in front of the house and some of the boys young James knew laughed at the funny man being driven away screaming from the windows of the closed carriage.¹⁴

This imagined memory had the elder James escaping and briefly returning home to inflict violence on his family. Recaptured, he committed suicide. At some point, surely before the escape, Clarke’s fantasy and reality had parted company.¹⁵

Clarke’s actual father remained at Middletown until his death, likely in late 1922 or shortly after. Meanwhile, the records of Clarke’s 1906 application and stay at the Mount Hermon School for Boys often showed him signing his name as J. Calvitt Clarke Jr., thereby implicitly acknowledging that his father was still alive.¹⁶ As late as 1912, he was still using Jr., but afterward he dropped it. Giving the lie to Clarke’s later claims that his father had died while he was young, in 1920, his brother Richard wrote him about inherited land in Florida and Texas. Of course, father being non compos mentis, he is incapacitated from disposing of his interest in the land, or using any of the rents. Lamenting the need for a court to appoint a trustee to represent him and his interests, Richard also suggested some embarrassment at their father’s condition. Such a step would, of course bring to light the whole transaction, and I wouldn’t be in favor of doing that … because I don’t know who it would hurt. Possibly you can get some information from Mother about it.¹⁷

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Ella Hamilton Clarke about 1915.

In fact, for many years before her husband died, Ella Clarke called herself a widow. Even so, in her will of September 1922, she directed her daughter as executrix to set aside $1,500 and use the income produced for the welfare of my husband during his life.¹⁸

One letter from his sick father to the adolescent Clarke survives. Written in 1900, Clarke Sr. expressed his deep love for his son and his desperate sense of isolation from his family.¹⁹ Despite the pathos of his father’s illness and long absence from the family, Clarke wistfully remembered him in his unpublished memoirs:

I have very few recollections of my father. He died when I was a small boy. There is one remembrance I cherish. He took me for a walk when it was snowing. He said the air was good with all