Scandal
 
Benjamin F. Buck, whom Clark met through Larry Chittenden (the Texas poet-cowboy then in New York), though rumored to be a “grafter,” had a publishing company that produced Katz Awa as a fund-raiser for Clark’s project.  Unfortunately, Buck arranged that the charitable donations to both the Katz Awa fund and the larger relief fund went to himself, with Clark listed as Auditor and Treasurer, and thus held accountable.

According to Clark, four thousand dollars in donations went into Buck’s private bank account while “not a dollar of which, for four months, was I able to see or control.” It was only after Clark threatened to go to the District Attorney that Buck “did run to his Lawyer…and turn over to me the little he had left.” This was $389.98 plus some 10,000 unbound copies of Katz Awa.   

Then Buck turned to the ‘Big Fund,’ naming himself as secretary of the Executive Committee and luring George Southard of the Franklin Trust Co into the same impotent role of “auditor and Treasurer.”  On June 6, 1905 Clark wrote the editor of the New York Herald, that Bishop M. C. Harris, in Korea, “who helped to organize two of the relief funds with the writer before leaving for Japan, and to whom about $15,000 or $16,000 in cash has already been sent.” 

Ten days later a Sun headline screamed “Jap Relief Fund Friction” with a long story of outlining Clark’s concerns. Newspapers in New York and elsewhere were filled with accusations and recriminations as Clark and Buck presented their conflicting versions of the story. Soon “members of the financial and auditing committee had withdrawn the use of their names,” a planned benefit at the Academy of Music was postponed and ultimately, Japanese Consul General Uchida went to the police, who turned the case over to detectives.  

Meanwhile theatrical agent Mortimer Kaphan, sued Clark for the $500 he was out for the Academy benefit. A second suit was brought by Eugene H. Tower over “$200 for printing some of the circulars the clergyman has been sending out for months past regarding his Japanese Orphan Relief Fund” and for printing several thousand copies of Katz Awa (despite Buck being its publisher).

Buck presented his version in a long story in the Sun, to which Clark responded by opening his bankbook “to show that all the money be ever got for the fund was $886.38, of which he says about $500 was sent to Japan and about $400 is left in the Union Exchange Bank, where the account is in his own name and not in the name of the fund.”     

The New York Tribune called Clark the “fleeing philanthropist;” and the resulting and very public controversy made Clark anathema to Japanese officials who were just then in the middle of negotiating with President Roosevelt for a peace conference. When Clark sent his Japanese contacts an inscribed copy of Katz Awa and a circular on the benefit at the Academy of Music (with “Postponed until September” on the back), it was reported that “Mr. Sato said he would pay no attention to the communication. He added that last December Mr. Clark asked him for the autograph of the Emperor and that he refused to give it to him, fearing that it would be used as an endorsement of the benefit scheme.” 

Clark returned from the New Jersey shore with his Texas poet friend, Larry Chittenden and approached the district attorney about suing the Sun for libel but was told that the suit would be very hard to win. He hoped the State of New York would indict and try Buck, as the “Law is too expensive.”

Next: Clark and the Portsmouth Peace Conference