James Beauchamp Clark arrived in Missouri after graduation from the Cincinnati Law School in 1875. He obtained a position as an assistant superintendent of the Louisiana High School and also started participating in Democratic Party politics. In 1877, he was elected city attorney of Louisiana, Missouri. The next year, Clark moved to Bowling Green, then served for the next decade as the Pike County Prosecuting attorney. He also represented Pike County in the state legislature from 1888 to 1890.
To enhance both his political career and his income, Clark wrote a series for the BOWLING GREEN TIMES and the ST. LOUIS REPUBLIC titled "Pike County Tales." In 1900 the Associated Press syndicated his "Cloak Room Stories." Both series featured folksy anecdotes about small-town life, religion, and politics, but the "Cloak Room Stories" offered a national bent.
If you checked with any encyclopedia, you might will find an entry on Champ Clark, and it will typically highlight his narrow loss to Woodrow Wilson for the 1912 Democratic presidential nomination as the greatest event of his career. But people from Missouri, especially those in Pike County, remember the longtime congressman as a witty writer, an orator of national importance, a loyal advocate for the state's Ninth District, and as the only native son to serve as Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives.
If the 1912 Democratic Convention was required to adhere to the process of all conventions since 1936, then Clark most likely would have been the country's 28th president. He did not have a two-thirds margin, but he did have a majority of the delegate votes. William Jennings Bryan, on the 14th ballot, threw his support to Wilson; this shift in momentum was large enough to cause the shattering of the then existing tie. Woodrow Wilson then won the nomination on the 46th ballot. Two decades later, led by Senator Bennett Clark, Champ Clark's son, led a successful effort to change the requirements to a simple majority for nomination.
Elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1892. But it took until 1910 for Champ Clark to receive national recognition, when he lead a challenge to remove autocratic Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon. His (Clark's) congressional colleagues elected him Speaker of the House in 1911. They were witness and moved by Clark's outstanding parliamentary skills and oratorical abilities. Holding this position until spring 1919, Clark instituted an "open-ear" policy and allowed congressman increased freedom for discussion while in session.
James Beauchamp Clark lost his last bid for Congress in 1920 and died a few months later. In 1926 Missourian's honored the congressman's life and career with a life size statue, and erected in on the courthouse lawn in the county seat where he began, Bowling Green, Pike County, Missouri.