Ray Stannard Baker was a leading national journalist
whose belief in social reform led to a close personal and professional
relationship with
Woodrow Wilson.
Born in 1870 in Lansing, Michigan, Baker came from a
pioneer New England family that had moved west. A graduate of Michigan
State College in 1889, Baker enrolled in law school before turning to
literature and journalism. He began his newspaper career as a reporter
for the Chicago News-Record. During his six years at the paper,
Baker covered
the Pullman strike and the 1893 march
of a group of jobless men known as Coxey's Armyon Washington. Both
events helped push Baker toward an even stronger belief in social
reform.
In 1897, Baker began working for McClure's Magazine,
where he wrote a series of gripping exposés on pressing social issues.
Baker became famous for his muckraking articles, working in the company
of such accomplished investigative journalists as
Ida Tarbell the woman who
single-handedly revealed John D. Rockefeller's
unethical business tactics . In 1906,
Baker and other McClure staffers purchased the American
Magazine, where he served as an editor. In sharp contrast to
his tabloid writing, Baker also penned books of philosophical essays and
quiet country sketches which he published under the pseudonym David
Grayson. |
As a leading member of the
progressive movement Baker sought political allies to support social
reform. After visiting with Princeton president
Woodrow Wilson, Baker believed he had found a political candidate worthy
of his movement's support. After Wilson won
the presidential election of 1912,
Baker joined Wilson's circle of intimate friends. In 1918, Wilson
dispatched Baker to Europe as his special agent to study the war
situation. When the war ended, Baker acted as Wilson's press secretary
during the Paris Peace Conference, and later wrote a three-volume
history of the conference, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement.
Shortly before Wilson's death, the former president designated Baker as
his official biographer. Baker went to work on an eight-volume history
of Wilson's life that would be published from 1927 to 1939. The last two
volumes were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1940.
Troubled by heart problems for the last decade of his
life, Baker died of a heart attack in Amherst, Massachusetts in July
1946. |
Paul Harris refers to
the work of David Grayson (Ray Stannard Baker) in Harris' autobiography