Clarke, Marian W. (Marian Williams), 1880-1953

Marian Williams Clarke (July 29, 1880 – April 8, 1953) was an American politician. A member of the Republican Party, she was elected to the United States House of Representatives from New York, serving from December 1933 to January 1935. She was the second woman elected to Congress from New York, after Ruth Baker Pratt.

Born Marian K. Williams in Standing Stone, Pennsylvania, her family moved west to Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1891. Marian Williams attended art school at the University of Nebraska and graduated with a BA from Colorado College in 1902. As an undergraduate at Colorado College, she enrolled in a public speaking class taught by John Clarke. With her strength as a writer, she worked three years as a reporter for a Colorado Springs newspaper following graduation. Marian Williams married Clarke in 1905, and the couple moved to New York City, where John worked for several mining companies before graduating from Brooklyn Law School in 1911. After earning his law degree, John Clarke worked in the mining department of the Carnegie Steel Corporation and for several other mining interests. In 1915 they moved to John Clarke’s native Delaware County, in upstate New York. He pursued a newfound interest in agriculture and forestry, operating “Arbor Hill,” a farm near Delhi, New York.

In 1920 John Clarke easily won election as a U.S. Representative from a conservative New York district covering the city of Binghamton and surrounding counties, serving from 1921 to 1925 and from 1927 to 1933. Marian Clarke played an active role in her husband’s congressional career in Washington, DC. She recalled that her political experience also included her work as a “general factotum” in her husband’s office. On November 5, 1933, while returning home from a wedding along snowy back roads, John Clarke died in a head-on auto wreck. Less than a month after her husband’s death, Marian Clarke was selected at a meeting of district Republican leaders in Sidney, New York, as the GOP nominee to fill out her husband’s vacant term. Marian Clarke was comfortably elected at the end of December.

During her short stint as a Representative, Clarke exhibited limited legislative effectiveness due to her relative political inexperience and because Democrats greatly outnumbered Republicans in the House. In 1934 she declined to run for the GOP renomination. The eventual Republican nominee, Bert Lord, a lumber businessman from Afton, New York, and former state commissioner of motor vehicles, won handily that fall. Upon her retirement from the House, Clarke returned to Arbor Hill. She remained active in GOP politics and served as an alternate to the 1936 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Tragedy struck Marian Clarke again when her only son died in an auto wreck in 1939. She lived most of the remainder of her life in relative seclusion at Arbor Hill. Clarke died in Cooperstown, New York, on April 8, 1953.