Ray Stannard Baker

• Ray Stannard Baker
• Born: April 17, 1870
• Died: July 12, 1946

Progressive journalist, was born in Lansing, Michigan, the first of six sons of Joseph Stannard Baker and Alice (Potter) Baker. He was of Yankee stock, and his paternal ancestors included Alexander Baker, who left England for Boston in 1635, and Joseph Stannard, who settled in Connecticut in 1662. His great-great-grandfather, Capt. Remember Baker, an early settler in western Vermont, was killed while scouting for the Green Mountain Boys in 1775. During the Civil War, his father served in the Secret Service and commanded a cavalry company, attaining the rank of major. After the war, he moved from western New York State to Lansing, Michigan, where he met and married Alice Potter, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. When Ray Stannard Baker was five years old, the family moved to St. Croix Falls in northern Wisconsin; there his father began a career as a land agent.

Baker was raised in a comfortable, middle-class home, surrounded by books. Joseph Baker, a man of dogmatic beliefs and strict personal habits, reinforced the frontier atmosphere of rugged individualism and stimulated his son’s love of learning. Alice Baker was a deeply religious woman, ill-suited by health and temperament to the life of the frontier. An invalid throughout her son’s childhood, she died when he was thirteen.

In 1885 Baker entered Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing, where he fell under the spell of the noted botanist Dr. William James Beal. He did not, however, acquire a scientist’s vocation but returned home after graduating in 1889 with a B.S. degree to spend three unrewarding years in his father’s business. In 1892 he entered law school at the University of Michigan but found more stimulation in the journalism classes of Fred Newton Scott than in his legal studies. Baker abandoned law after one semester and went off to Chicago, where he found a job as a cub reporter for The Chicago News-Record, an independent newspaper that was attracting writers of the caliber of Eugene Field, Brand Whitlock, and George Ade.

At the age of twenty-two, Baker—the product of frontier Wisconsin—launched his journalistic career in a city bursting with the dynamic energy and social ills of modern urban society. His subsequent intellectual development would be remarkably congruent with the growing pains of a nation that was adjusting its traditional, rural ideas and institutions to the new realities of an urban-industrial order. The optimistic, individualistic outlook that he brought from his upbringing was tested but not shaken by his experiences as a Chicago reporter. As an increasingly sympathetic observer, he marched along with Jacob Coxey’s Army of the jobless in 1893 and visited the homes of Eugene Debs’s striking Pullman workers; but he did not, at that time, question the basic virtue of the economic system that produced these victims of poverty and exploitation.

Baker soon felt sufficiently secure in his new vocation to pursue the courtship of Jessie Irene Beal, the daughter of his former botany professor. They were married on January 1, 1896. Their marriage produced four children: Alice Beal, James Stannard, Roger Denio, and Rachel Moore.

In February 1898 Baker left the News-Record and moved to New York to join the staff of McClure’s magazine, the vanguard of the “new journalism.” Like his associates Lincoln Steffens and Ida M. Tarbell, he soon became known for the style of incisive investigative reporting that was later called muckraking. Although his earliest contributions were uncritical celebrations of the vitality of capitalism, his conscientious reporting brought him closer to observation of the inequality and injustice that lay beneath the surface of American prosperity. He became a socially responsible reporter-reformer, helping to expose the venality and corruption that were the targets of the progressive movement. His focus shifted from the theme of individual responsibility and obedience to the law, to an activist reformer’s concern with government regulation of the power of giant corporations.

An example of his early style is found in his coverage of a strike. Baker arrived in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at the end of October 1902, just as the bitter anthracite coal strike of that year was ending. He stayed on for a month to cover the aftermath of the struggle, concentrating his attention on the plight of the 7,000 workers who refused to join the union. His article, “The Right to Work,” which appeared in the January 1903 issue of McClure’s, was critical of the violent methods of the members of the United Mine Workers. It was cited by S. S. McClure, along with articles by Tarbell and Steffens, as an example of the “literature of exposure” that would be the trademark of the magazine.

By 1905 Baker was at the height of his journalistic influence. His articles on the railroad trust were followed by President Theodore Roosevelt, who sought his advice during the congressional struggle for government regulation. In 1906, after internal strife at McClure’s, Baker joined a group of associates who had resigned to take control of The American Magazine.

In addition to his “Railroads on Trial” series, Baker wrote a popular series of sketches for McClure’s on American businessmen and businesses, which included portraits of J. P. Morgan and the new United States Steel Corporation (1901). He earned a national reputation for his articles on industrial relations, which included accounts of the Pennsylvania coal strike (1903); violence in the Colorado minefields (1904); and the plight of garment workers on the Lower East Side of New York City (1904).

Baker wrote in a brisk and lively style and his articles still read well today. They are heavily anecdotal, and the reader gets the sense of the author at work, seeking understanding as he works through his narrative. Baker was criticized by his editor John S. Phillips for a tendency to emphasize generalization at the expense of facts. In November 1904, he wrote in his journal: “That journalist will fail who depends upon digging all his article out of the situation; more than half of every good article the journalist digs out of himself.”

In spite of his growing reputation, Baker spent the next four years in intense and painful self-examination. Impatient with the progress of reform, he lost confidence in Roosevelt, especially after the president publicly attacked the “muckrakers.” While abandoning the individualistic creed in which he had been reared, Baker sought a moral and spiritual movement to take its place. He was attracted to, but ultimately rejected socialism, and then looked to the Christian Social Gospel movement as an antidote to the excesses of capitalist competition.

There was also a part of Baker that sought escape from the struggles of modern urban America to the rural certainties of his childhood. His ambivalence was most apparent in the appearance, in 1906, of his alter ego, the farmer-philosopher “David Grayson.” Baker had moved his family to his college town, East Lansing, but in 1910 he settled permanently in Amherst, Massachusetts. In these retreats, he penned, under the Grayson pseudonym, “Adventures in Contentment,” which, in book form, enjoyed a best-selling popularity that never came to Baker under his own name. Significantly, these sentimental country sketches first appeared when Baker was probing the most serious national issue, race relations, in a pioneering series of firsthand reports that were collected in Following the Color Line (1908).

Baker briefly entered the mainstream of reform politics as a member of the inner circle of advisers around the insurgent leader Senator Robert M. La Follette. In 1912, when the senator’s presidential hopes were crushed by Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy, Baker angrily threw his support to the Democratic nominee, Woodrow Wilson, beginning a lifelong political and personal association. After supporting American neutrality during the first years of World War I, Baker agreed with Wilson’s decision to enter the war in 1917.

In 1918 Baker served as special commissioner for the State Department on missions to England and the Continent; then, in the following year, he was appointed director of the American delegation’s press bureau at the Paris Peace Conference. During the congressional struggle over ratification of the Versailles treaty, Baker championed the president in What Wilson Did in Paris (1919); and in 1922 there appeared his three-volume Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, followed by The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson in six volumes (1925-27), which he coedited with William E. Dodd. As the authorized biographer of Wilson, Baker devoted fifteen years to preparing the eight-volume Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (1927-39), a monumental yet basically uncritical work, which received the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.

During his final years, Baker completed two autobiographical volumes: Native American (1941) and American Chronicle (1945), in which “Graysonian” optimism belied the internal struggle that marked his evolution as a journalist and reformer. He died of heart disease at seventy-six and was buried in Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst.

In his quest for moral leadership and economic and social reform, Baker was “a sensitive barometer of his times.” Beginning his career with the conventional values of a rugged individualist, he moved steadily in the direction of a social responsibility that favored state intervention in the public interest. Writing on labor, capital, the “Negro Question,” and religion, Baker mirrored the concerns, and shared the limitations, of the reformers during the progressive era.

The main collection of Baker papers, in the Library of Congress, includes seventy volumes of his personal notebooks. Two smaller collections are at the Firestone Library, Princeton University, and the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. R. B. Napier’s unpublished bibliography of Baker’s writings (at the Library of Congress and Princeton) may be augmented by A. K. Peter’s bibliography (1935) for the Jones Library. Some of Baker’s articles were revised to form Our New Prosperity (1900); others were collected in Seen in Germany (1901) and The Spiritual Unrest (1910). As “David Grayson,” Baker published nine volumes, from Adventures in Contentment (1907) to Under My Elm (1942). There are two full-length biographies of Baker: R. C. Bannister Jr., Ray Stannard Baker: The Mind and Thought of a Progressive (1966), which studies Baker’s intellectual development over the course of his entire career, with an emphasis the tension between Baker and “David Grayson”; and J. E. Semonche, Ray Stannard Baker: A Quest for Democracy in Modern America, 1870-1918, which examines the context of his journalistic career. Baker’s “romance with socialism” is described in D. Chalmers, “Ray Stannard Baker’s Search for Reform,” Journal of the History of Ideas, June 1958. For accounts of Baker’s muckraking career, see D. M. Chalmers, The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers (1964); J. Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974); P. Lyon, Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. McClure (1963); H. S. Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers (1970). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974).