Charles Hopkins Clark

Background

Charles Hopkins Clark was born on April 01, 1848 at Hartford, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Ezra and Mary (Hopkins) Clark, came of a long colonial ancestry.

Education

Clark was graduated at the Hartford Public High School in 1867 and at Yale College, with the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1871.

Career

In 1871 Clark entered the office of the Hartford Courant, published and edited by General Joseph R. Hawley and Charles Dudley Warner. General Hawley had a predilection for politics amounting to infatuation. His associate editor, Warner, devoted his life to letters. Thus Clark received his journalistic training where passionate political thought went hand in hand with good writing. Hawley fired the young recruit’s native delight in politics and fixed his enthusiasms upon the Republican party. Warner blue-penciled his copy. When Hawley was elected United States senator in 1881, Clark became the paper’s chief political writer.

In 1890 Hawley retired as publisher, Warner became president of the Hartford Courant Company and Clark its secretary. In 1892 he was made vice-president. Warner’s death in 1900 made Clark editor of the paper while Hawley became president of the publishing company. Hawley died in 1905 and the next year the editor became president and publisher as well.

Clark made his newspaper the medium for expressing his own individuality, and by a selection of news and by impassioned editorials, a daily brief for his party. Like Dana, Greeley, and Watterson, he became a forceful and militant practitioner of that dogmatic personal journalism which now is almost entirely a thing of the past among daily newspapers. So trenchant was his pen, so devastating his wit, so delicious his sarcasm and irony, that his dynamic and imperious personality stood out in every issue. Men in public life and fellow editors spoke of “Charlie Clark’s paper” as frequently as they called it by name. In fact the Courant was Clark and Clark was the Courant.

Never caring to be a candidate for office, still he fought the battles of the Republican party each day of every year. From 1910 until his death Clark was a director of the Associated Press, and from 1910 to 1925 a fellow of the Corporation of Yale University. He delivered the Bromley Lectures on Journalism at Yale in 1906 and contributed to the Critic, Scribtier’s Magazine, and the North American Review. Eight consecutive Republican national conventions, beginning with that of 1888, Clark attended as a reporter, and at all subsequent conventions of the party he was a delegate-at-large from Connecticut.

Achievements

• Charles Hopkins Clark was remembered for his fifty-four years of continuous service with Hartford Courant newspaper. Under his leadership, it became the most powerful newspaper in Connecticut and one of the leading Republican papers in the country.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Spool of Thread and How It Is Made (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from A Spool of Thread and How It Is Made And mu...)

  • Newspapers and periodicals of Connecticut,
  • The Bromley lectures at Yale, February 27 - March 5, 1907: The development of the newspaper, making and managing a newspaper
  • William Howard Taft

Connections

Clark was married twice: first, on December 15, 1873, to Ellen Root of Hartford, who died on Febrauary 28, 1895; second, on November 15, 1899, to Matilda Colt Root, a sister of his first wife.

Father:

Ezra Clark

Mother:

Mary (Hopkins) Clark

Spouse:

Matilda Colt Root

Spouse:

Ellen Root