By R.E. Powell
Raleigh, May 19—Thrice during Governor Morrison’s administration, death has entered the supreme court and this morning at 8:30 Chief Justice Walter Clark, the iron man of the bench, went out under an apoplectic stroke.
The death of the noted jurist, Confederate captain, author, and outstanding liberalist of the state, came quickly upon the morning papers, announcement that his honor had fallen into unconsciousness at noon of the day before. The shock of the community was intense. The apparent health of the chief was written in every feature of a life which has withstood an amazing wear of work and years. Several times in the past two years Judge Clark has shown the inevitable “break,” but this wonderful human organism wasn’t the thing to make ?? to age. His body, even his mind, was ever young and everybody who knew him guessed that when he quit, it would be a paralysis which first destroyed his power to think.
It was regarded a circumstance of unusual interest that there should have met here today a group of men whose purposes have received from Judge Clark their greater strength. The farmers’ union and the state federation of labor never fund psychological moment so obtruded upon them. The spirit which actuates their organizations they have found many times dissented into respect and later enacted into law. The leaders of that movement found in the chief justice’s death solemn admonition to carry on.
The life of Walter Clark as a purely statistical narrative would be one of the most romantic in the state’s annals. At 15 a driller of Confederates, at 16 a soldier, at ?? a lieutenant colonel, at bare age a lawyer, at 43 a judge when judges were still one of the seven ages of men, at 47 a supreme court justice, at 48 the nominee of all parties when political blood was hottest and partisanship was fiercest, and at 56 the highest judge of the realm, all junctures in his life full of dramatic interest, yet all of them making his a sort of clinic in democracy, the champion of a people who never failed him and whom he never failed. He was as though he lived to prove that even a moderately literate electorate could be trusted.
The Chief Justice’s ascension to the bench came at a time when his predilections would have been regarded as aristocratic rather than democratic. His legal experience did not lead him to championship of the people in mass. Like Roosevelt, he was of patrician birth. He was born a gentleman of the first rank. But he never wrote in his more recent 30 years a line which did not reek of regard for the great mass of men and his prestige as chief justice placed him in position to make perhaps the largest single contribution to the democratic spirit of the state. Often he talked and wrote in vain which greatly displeased his best friends, but friend and foe alike today proclaim him the unimpeachable protagonist of men.
The state’s business virtually suspended today, Wake court adjourned, the offices did routine business, the flags dropped and the drapery of the walls took place. Unusual opportunity for reflection on the life of Judge Clark was thus afforded. Everybody remembered him as the young choice of his district, the appointee on the high bench, the nominee of all parties, and finally the candidate for the highest place in the 1902 campaign. That was a notable contest in which Thomas Hill of Halifax, offered himself as the independent candidate again, his fellow countryman. The campaign was enlivened by the great pen of Joseph P. Caldwell of Charlotte, and the astonishingly clever contributions of Henry A. Page. But it was a bad juncture for independentism and Chief Justice Clark won overwhelmingly.
The history of the bench is much the record of Chief Justice Clark. First place, has been more steadily at the work than any man who ever sat on the court. Nine years ago, when celebrating some anniversary, he had never lost a day from work. It is recalled today that other business may have called him off once since that time. It was character for him to go the last.
Judge Clark was of course a lawyer of great learning, but he was not more interested in the law than in life, which is so much bigger than any organization of life. The mental hygienist always found in him refreshingly conversant soul, I formed on every modern theory mind illness. The theologue never caught him napping on issues of religion. The litterateur was astonished at the freshness of his reading, the scientist marveled at his interest in the realm. Always he was affiliated with civic movement and in addition to being a great lawyer, judge, student, and widely known author, he was a great citizen whose life touched every possible point of civic interest.
Though a gentleman of greatest courtesy, Chief Justice Clark found himself so often in acrimonious debate that he often received credit for illiberalism and intolerance. He found it difficult to treat with men who belatedly acknowledged the sweep of democracy and put themselves in its way. Today men everywhere were crediting him with having saved North Carolina from corporation control such as is so often ascribed to states of the New Jersey, Georgia, Alabaman and Pennsylvania stripe. The chief justice thought no such thing of himself. He was conscious of his own effort to fight back the inroads upon legislation attempted by the great commercial interests of his time, but he never dreamed that his success was so great. He never lived to be free of the fear that big business and politics in his state had an alliance which tested all of the powers of the state to see and seeing to destroy.
That, then is the history of his life—a belief, a Jeffersonian faith in the folks—and a desire to fight for their rights. Often his utterances from the bench savored of “mob appeal,” that is to say, he seemed sometimes to threaten men with the power of the mass. But those who read him carelessly invariably miss the point. He never incited the citizenship to low-thinking, he sought to lift its vision as high as his own. He had every opportunity to cater to its racial rancor and its religious sectarianisms. But the negro had no more fearless spokesman and the Roman Catholic no stronger friend.
No ordinary man went out this morning. A public servant with 40 years of marvelous contacts was His Honor Walter Clark.
From the front page of the Durham Morning Herald, May 20, 1924
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