Clark McAdams was an American editor, newspaper humorist, and conservationist.
Background
Clark McAdams was born near Otterville, Jersey County, Illinois. He was a great-grandson of Thomas McAdams, a Scotch Presbyterian emigrant to Philadelphia about 1795, who was a volunteer in the War of 1812 and took part in the siege of Detroit and the battle of New Orleans. He was the eldest son and third among eight talented children of William McAdams, a native of Middletown, Ohio, and his wife, Annie Eliza Curtis of Galena, Ill. His farmer father, who had gathered geological specimens in the West as others prospected for gold, was more interested in archeology than in agriculture, and one of the boy's first occupations was picking up Indian relics along the lower Illinois River for his father's museum collections.
Education
When Clark was nine his family removed to nearby Alton, Ill. , where he attended public school. He also attended the Shurtleff College.
Career
McAdams began his newspaper career as a two-dollar-a-week printer's devil for the Alton Democrat, delivered papers, and later learned to set type. A part-time reporter while in high school, he quit Shurtleff College, Alton, after a year, in order to supplement the meager financial returns which his father derived from scientific pursuits. In 1898 he wrote in the name of his brother, John, Alton correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a highly imaginative story about a large snake allegedly committing depredations in the vicinity. It was this yarn that won him a place on the Post-Dispatch, thereafter his newspaper home except for a brief interval when he returned to Alton to edit the Alton Republican. On the Post-Dispatch McAdams was successively a reporter, feature writer, interviewer, drama critic, columnist, editorial writer, editor of the editorial page and contributing editor. Under his deft hand and decorated with his lyrics and humorous verse, McAdams' "Just A Minute" column of prose and light verse became a much enjoyed and widely quoted feature of the Post-Dispatch editorial page. For more than twenty years it presented, as his regular contributions, the homespun philosophy and political comment of "Mr. Antwine" at a Missouri crossroads store, modern discourses of "Socrates" and the "panatela" verses (so called because of their slender construction with only two or three words on a line), which William Marion Reedy described as "the only new form of poetry in four hundred years. " McAdams' verses, "In Uganda, " which satirized the African hunt of Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, were relished by the former President, and in 1919, when the League of Nations debate was at its height, Senator John Sharp Williams read to his colleagues, as "a piece of exquisite humor, " the columnist's mock-serious "Senate debate" on the child's prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep". Perhaps the most incisive of his comments was a brief sentence on the social struggle: "The issue is between the Country and the Country Club". This statement of "the issue" was the basis of McAdams' editorial writing to which he devoted himself beginning in 1925. As debate on the recovery measures continued, differences over policy arose between him and his publisher with the result that McAdams was relieved in July 1934 of the direction of the editorial page and was given the post of contributing editor. He continued to write trenchant editorials until his death the next year. Several of his editorials were printed as pamphlets by the Post-Dispatch and were widely distributed. He taught journalism in Washington University, St. Louis, 1925-27. In 1931 he was invited to be editor of the Nation. Unusual vigor enabled McAdams to keep up many outside interests. After an illness of several months caused by abdominal cancer he died at his home in his sixty-second year. His body was cremated, and the ashes were placed in the mausoleum at Valhalla Cemetery, St. Louis.
Achievements
Clark Mcadams has been listed as a notable writer, editor by Marquis Who's Who.
Views
Clark hated pretense and pomposity, prejudice and privilege, and he exposed them all with his editorial shafts. Especially he championed civil liberties, municipal ownership, wild-life conservation, strict governmental regulation in behalf of consumers, and vigilance against faithlessness in public office. Thus he worked with the same zeal to protect the trumpeter swan, to repeal prohibition, to save Sacco and Vanzetti, and to bring out the full facts of the national political scandals of the nineteen twenties. Succeeding George S. Johns as editorial page editor in 1929, he was sharply critical of the Hoover administration's handling of the economic crisis and enthusiastically welcomed the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He saw in the New Deal an opportunity to "remake" the United States in the interests of the masses of the people, a task he called "A True Labor of Hercules, " in a major editorial (November 5, 1933).
Personality
Clark's usual method of editorial composition was to dictate as he walked about the room; thus relieved of the mechanics of writing he frequently produced a prodigious amount of editorial copy in a short time.
A lover of the out-of-doors, he spent as much time hunting, fishing, swimming, and tramping in the Ozarks whose streams he guarded against exploiters and elsewhere as his work would permit. He was an excellent wing shot and was the owner of fine quail and duck retrievers. He also carried on his father's archeological interests; in 1902 he was a member of the scientific expedition which investigated the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings and he published "The Archeology of Illinois". A witty public speaker and a hearty storyteller, McAdams delighted in outings and parties and the food and drink and talk that went with them.
His first name was Isaac but he dropped it in boyhood when, so he said, the kinsman for whom he was named died without leaving him an "inheritance. " Describing him as to a large extent "what his opportunity and the Post-Dispatch made him" and correctly noting that his staff gave him "undivided loyalty and affection, " Oswald Garrison Villard, appraised him as "one of the few remaining great journalists. "
Interests
Clark's hobby in his last years was motion-picture photography of wild flowers.
Connections
Clark's wife was Laura Swanwick Baker, a native of Alton, whom he married July 12, 1904. She survived him without issue.
