Champ Clark House: The Man Who Almost Beat Woodrow Wilson

James Beauchamp Clark, known to everyone as Champ, was one of the most powerful politicians Missouri ever produced. Born in Kentucky in eighteen fifty, he came to Missouri, studied law, and entered Congress in eighteen ninety-three, where he would serve more than a quarter century. Clark rose to become Speaker of the House from nineteen eleven to nineteen nineteen, a tenure that included shepherding Woodrow Wilson's first-term legislative agenda through the chamber.

In nineteen twelve he came within reach of the presidency itself, entering the Democratic National Convention as the frontrunner and holding a majority of delegates for much of the balloting before Wilson's support surged past his in the final rounds, with Wilson finally securing the nomination on the forty-sixth ballot. Clark died in office in nineteen twenty-one. His home here in Pike County, completed in eighteen eighty-eight, is preserved as a historic house museum, a quiet monument to a man who shaped early twentieth-century American politics from this corner of Missouri.