Travel and Tragedy 

Meanwhile, the Clark family’s home life was devastated by the drowning of their 11-year-old son, Henry (in photo, right). To recover, he spent two months in the Bible Institute (Evangelic) in Chicago. While there, Louise Clark wrote to him that two other small boys had died while on an Episcopal Sunday School picnic on the Rock River. Clark’s later appeals on behalf of the widows and orphans of the Russo-Japanese War may have echoed this personal loss. 

In photo, the Clark children: Edith (rear), Henry (right), Robert (middle left), and Lucius (lower left) advertising "Clark's Tours Around the World." From Your Choice of Trips for 1897 by E. Warren Clark (Rockford, IL, 1897), courtesy Wisconsin Historical Society.

In December 1899 the local paper announced “two Japanese, Ishida and Kimura” were “in Rockford on invitation of Rev. E. Warren Clark” to “provide a pleasing entertainment at the State Street Baptist Church” with the familiar “stereopticon views of Japanese scenes, moving pictures, tableaux of the Mikado’s court, sword dance and other features.” Yet, it was also said that one was a lawyer and that Mr. Clark brought him here to use his best endeavor to persuade Mrs. Clark to sign certain legal papers, preliminary to a separation from his wife.” In 1900 his wife successfully sued for separate maintenance over of lack of support and two years later Clark sued in Florida for divorce.  

Turn of the Century Wanderings 

In the summers of 1902 and 1903, he ministered in Saratoga, New York and offered lectures to paying summer hotel audience, meeting the rich and famous. In the winter Clark returned to Shidzuoka Plantation near Tallahassee where he experimented with good works and cultivating famous men.  Meanwhile he dreamed he might get “Congregationalized” (avoiding Bishops) in a little New England town, “and then be transferred to the doshisha in Japan. I would be glad to spend my few remaining years there.”  

Suffering from “La Grippe” over the winter of 1904 Clark found himself the guest of Mr. James M. Munyon, a homeopathic patent medicine tycoon from Philadelphia (often found guilty of fraud for his unsubstantiated claims for his medicines). Munyon exacted a testimonial from him for his Paw-Paw elixir. This advertisement appeared in newspapers across the country in December 1903 and continued to be used as late as August 1904.  

But in 1904, the Russo – Japanese War was bringing greater interest in Japan from Americans and Clark tried to lure Griffis into joining him on another round-the–world trip through Japan.  But before he could arrange it, Munyon offered to take Clark to Europe with all expenses paid. He apparently hoped to set Clark up as his European agent in London, Paris or Geneva. Instead, Clark used the free trip around European capitols to collect images of the Russo-Japanese War that he could make into magic lantern slides. 

                                                                                      

As he wrote on his return trip in Sept. 1904, "I have made a SUPERB collection of War Views and reliable photographs in Europe, showing the Progress of the War, and the 'Pictorial Spirit of the European Press.' The London Graphic Illustrated, Black and White; Sphere; Cassells, and the French and German Papers are infinitely ahead of the American Press in this matter. It has taken me three months to select this splendid material, and it required five hours for me to arrange and systemize the pictures…   This war is not of mere ephemeral interest, but is a Lesson to all Nations of what awful results the implements of Modern warfare can accomplish.“ 

 Stereopticon glass slides of the War.

Returning to the U.S. he stayed in New York City because he had received an urgent appeal from Japan for help in raising funds for the Japanese widows and orphans created by the war.  By December 1904 he had pulled together a group of prominent American religious leaders under the nominal chairmanship of the former Columbia University president and past mayor of New York, Seth Low, to lend their names to a “Japan Relief Fund.”  

The New York Sun quoted the “Rev. E. Warren Clark, treasurer” of what had now become “the Young People's Relief Fund” for the suffering and orphaned children of Japan. “In the town of Sendai, a place, I suppose, of some 60,000 inhabitants, there were 2.000 families made destitute by the war. The same proportion holds good all over the country. No matter how great the exertions of the Japanese charitable societies and the Japanese authorities, it is impossible to keep up with this rising tide of misery.” 

In December Clark also produced his small book, Katz Awa, the Bismarck of Japan. Clark wrote all 94 pages in 6 days, drawing on the rediscovered “historical gold mine in the personal sketch of his life, a translation of which Katz presented me in 1896 in Tokio.” Published by B. F. Buck & Co., the sales receipts were to have benefited a separate “Katz Awa” charitable fund, sometimes called the “little fund” to differentiate it from the larger relief effort. “In the first six weeks,” he wrote Griff, “We have sold 9,836 copies of Katz Awa, and have taken in, in cash, over $3,442.60.”

Every cent was intended for the cause, as was over six months of Clark‘s unpaid time. Meanwhile, a published appeal for “the big fund” was sent to 33,000 churches and Sunday schools across the country in the two weeks before Christmas. According to the appeal, those funds would be “cabled for distribution to Bishop Harris,
Methodist Bishop of Japan and Korea, who is now on his way to Japan.”

A letter to the New York Times by S.P. Franks criticized the appeal, noting there “is no reason the Russians starving do not deserve the help of the Americans as much as the Japanese do. . . .. Let the many benevolent Christian organizations of this country do the same for their Russian fellow Christians.”  So on December 20, a revised appeal in the Times noted the group now sought “contributions in aid of the sick and wounded of both Japanese and Russian armies and of widows and orphans in Japan.”     

On January 20, 1905 Charles Cuthbert Hall, president of the Union Theological Seminary, wrote Griff that, “The Japanese Relief Fund has been a little slow but I think is going to be started in a day or two and will be effective.” The Rector of New York’s Grace Church, the Rev. W. R. Huntington, also apologized for not getting the circulars in the mail before Christmas. “The one thing that reconciles me to the delay, “ he wrote, “Is the intelligence from the east with respect to the Russian soldiers surrendered at Port Arthur. The fact that so many of them are going to Japan will lend weight to the appeal with those who are sensitive about helping one side.” 

In February Clark received a letter from Mrs. Clara Whitney Kaji (wife of Katz Awa’s son) promoting the idea that he offer a paying lecture at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science, with “Tableaux-Vivante, war pictures and Bioscope Motion-Pictures.”  His title was “From Shidz-u-o-ka Feudalism to the Fall of Port Arthur.”  Just before Easter, an appeal went out to churches across the land offering his Katz Awa book. The money was mailed to the publisher, with “checks, money orders or remittances independent of the booklet” to be sent to the Orphan Fund in Japan."  Unfortunately mismanagement of that intent proved heavily damaging to Clark's reputation.

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