1912, and being passed over twice for a U. S. Supreme Court nomination by
President Woodrow Wilson. These slights seemingly emboldened Clark’s rhetoric
and increased his calls for radical reforms like public ownership. Clark railed
against trusts, private monopolies, and accumulations as a threat to the public and
government, believing that oversized corporate salaries, lobbyists, and funding
for legislative campaigns corrupted local, state, and federal government. Clark
saw the cure in public (democratic) ownership of monopolies, declaring, “Democracy
in government is almost impossible until we have a democracy in industrialism
to the extent of public ownership of all the great agencies such as transportation
by rail, water power, coal mines, and oil wells.”