At the age of twenty-seven Baker felt he had exhausted the possibilities of the newspaper format. He craved “a wider field of activity,” a vehicle for in-depth research, a space for longer stories of lasting “import and value.” An avid reader of McClure’s from its inception, he had quickly become “a devoted admirer.” The magazine’s long and thoroughly researched articles, he noted with admiration, “were not merely about people . . . the people seemed to be there in person, alive and talking.” The innovative publication, in his opinion, was simply “something fresh and strong and living in a stodgy literary world.” After reading Tarbell’s series on Lincoln, Baker sent McClure’s a proposal for an article on his uncle, Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, the Secret Service member who had led the party that captured John Wilkes Booth. Tarbell promised to give it serious attention, and within days of its arrival, the piece was accepted for immediate publication. Intuiting that Baker might be a good fit for the magazine, McClure suggested that he come to New York and discuss ideas for further contributions.
“To say that I was awed at having a letter from the founder and editor of such a magazine was to put it mildly,” Baker related a half century later. Soon he received a letter from John S. Phillips with an enclosed “pass” on the New York Central Railroad. “It took my breath away,” he remembered. “So this was the magical way they did things in New York.” Of that first foray into New York, he related that “Mr. McClure had suddenly dashed off to Europe, as was his custom, but I had long and delightful talks with John Phillips and August Jaccaci, the art director, and Ida Tarbell and others of the staff. I went out with them to the jolly table at the old Ashland House where they lunched together, a spot that still glimmers bright in my memory. It all seemed like a marvelous new world, with a quality of enthusiasm and intellectual interest, I had never before encountered. Even with S. S. McClure absent, I suppose I was in the most stimulating, yes intoxicating, editorial atmosphere then existent in America—or anywhere else.”
In the months that followed, Baker submitted a half-dozen additional articles to McClure’s while continuing to work at the Chicago Record. When the coveted invitation to join the McClure’s staff finally arrived, he accepted at once, though he would miss his cohorts at the Record. “It ‘breaks me all up’ to leave after having been so long and so intimately connected with the paper,” he told his father. “I suppose the regret is natural and that it will wear off as I bend to other work. I hope so.” Once in New York, he never looked back. “This is a magnificent old town,” he assured his father. “I never worked so hard in my life as I am doing now.” He got along exceedingly well with the entire McClure’s staff. “I like them and they like me,” he proudly noted.
Baker was “a capital team worker,” Tarbell recalled. “He had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle or antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant rather than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr. Phillips. He had a joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy inner self than anything else about him.”
Baker’s cheerful, balanced temperament could likely be traced to a devoted father and a peaceful childhood in the frontier village of St. Croix, Wisconsin. The oldest of six sons, he shared his father’s love for “fishing and hunting” amid “the forests and the swift rivers and the lumber camps.” Joseph Stannard Baker, his father, had been educated at Oberlin and the University of Wisconsin. An honored member of the Secret Service during the Civil War, he married Alice Potter, a minister’s daughter from Lansing, and became the “resident agent” of a timber-rich swath of Wisconsin Territory owned by absentee landlords.
“Ours was a house of books,” Ray fondly recalled, noting with pride that his father’s library was the largest in the entire county. Every night, Baker would read aloud to his boys. “How well I remember the little gatherings just before bedtime,” Ray later wrote, “the lamp in the middle of the table, the book, whatever it was, open before him and the small audience, tousle-headed, with grimy legs drawn up under them, sitting with mouths open and eyes fixed upon the reader’s face! Whatever Father did, he did with gusto.” Baker’s animation and expressive voice made him “a prodigious story-teller, the best I ever knew. . . . We teased incessantly for stories and it was not unusual in the earlier days, for my father to have a roomful of people for his audience.”
Ray was still a child when his father gave him a silver dollar for completing Pilgrim’s Progress. No further bribery was ever required to fuel his passion for all manner of tales. By the time he was eleven, the boy loved nothing more than entering “into the lives and sorrows and joys” of others through books. “My reading was always a kind of living,” he explained later, “a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.”
The eldest child and his father’s favorite, Ray was expected to help shape the behavior of his younger siblings. Both in the classroom and at home he strove to be worthy of that trust. He was the top student in his grammar school class, performed household chores without complaint, and diligently participated in Sunday school classes. When his mother’s ill health briefly forced her into a sanitarium, Ray assumed responsibility for provisioning the household with food and supplies. For a time after her return, her condition seemed to improve, but the year Ray turned thirteen, Alice Baker died. Ray would never forget the shock of witnessing his father’s grief: “It went through me like the thrust of a sharp knife: it was more terrible than anything else that had happened. My father, that strong man, that refuge of safety and fearlessness, my father shaken with weeping.”
After only one year in high school, Ray passed the entrance examinations for college, allowing him to enter Michigan Agricultural College (later Michigan State) as a fifteen-year-old freshman. Like Ida Tarbell, Ray enjoyed the invaluable benefit of an inspired botany professor, William Beal, yet another acolyte (like Professors Hurd and Tingley) of Harvard’s Louis Agassiz. Ray’s first experience in Professor Beal’s laboratory made an indelible impression. Instructed to study a single plant specimen for several days under a compound microscope, he initially deemed the assignment “a great waste of time” when he could simply research the specimen in a botany text and enumerate its characteristics. Baker soon came to understand that Beal wanted his students to learn by investigating for themselves, by compiling “details and facts before principles and conclusions.” Beal, he would come to realize, taught “the one thing I needed most of all to know. This was to look at life before I talked about it: not to look at it second-hand, by way of books, but so far as possible to examine the thing itself.” The friendship he developed with his professor and mentor would last a lifetime; indeed, Baker would eventually marry Beal’s daughter, Jessie. And Beal’s methodology would serve as Baker’s lodestar throughout his long journalistic career.
The personable Baker was well liked in college. He stood five feet ten inches tall, with handsome features: blue eyes behind round spectacles, a straight nose, and a cleft chin. The intent scholarship that kept him at the top of his class did not preclude joining a fraternity, playing rugby, or serving as editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. He was a leader in student government and was selected to deliver one of the commencement orations.
That his father hoped he would return to St. Croix after college, learn the land business, and ultimately become his partner was long understood. “When the time comes I shall give you advice,” his father told him, “but I shall never attempt to force or urge you into any position or calling which is at all distasteful to you.” Tears filled young Ray’s eyes as he read those words, and he resolved “never to fail” his beloved father; upon graduation, he dutifully returne
d home to apprentice in Baker’s office. Sadly, he soon discovered that he “was not adapted to a business life.” He traveled with his father, keeping the books and bank accounts, but “did not live in it, as one must do if he is to be happy and truly successful in any employment.” Despite his efforts, he found his occupation increasingly distasteful: “I felt as though I were being crowded back into a kind of cocoon from which I had long ago worked free, and flown.”
Ray consoled himself by writing poems and stories and by recording thoughts in a journal, a habit he would continue all his life. Decades later, he wrote of the tremendous importance this private chronicle held for him: “Experience soon fades, thought degenerates into musing, even love may presently wither, but the honestly written expression, hot from the penpoint, of the contents of one’s mind, its observations, desires, doubts, faith, ambition, and the like, becomes at length a kind of immortality.” Ray endured two cheerless years in the office until his brother Harry, who found the land business far more congenial, replaced him. Harry’s decision to join their father freed Ray to continue his education.
Having enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Ray soon found himself drawn instead to courses in the English department. A gifted professor, Fred Newton Scott, became his mentor. Unlike traditional surveys of the literary canon, Scott’s seminar focused on a limited number of writers, subjecting their works to in-depth literary criticism. The progressive young professor believed, as did Howells and the realist school, that authors had a social responsibility to address the problems of their era. The test of a writer’s work, he told his students, must be its contribution to the “good working order” of society as a whole.
Baker signed up for a second seminar with Scott called “Rapid Writing,” one of the country’s earliest college programs to teach journalism. The popular class required that students pick one newspaper to follow daily and focus on a particular subject. Baker chose the Chicago Record, concentrating on the struggles between laboring men and employers in that city. Immersed in coverage of the fight to establish workers’ rights in the new industrial order, he began to question the laissez-faire economic principles inherited from his Republican father. Though he already had read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, the book’s remedy—a single tax on land—was “anathema” to his father, whose very livelihood was founded upon the ownership of land. Ray was still trying to reconcile these conflicting ideas when he encountered Professor Scott.
Numerous stories in the Chicago Record that semester reflected the growing tension between labor and capital, as well as an economic stagnation that signaled the impending depression of 1893. Every morning, Ray read and analyzed news articles and editorials, writing his own reports “with the greatest fervor,” eagerly anticipating Scott’s exacting appraisals. “For the first time in my life I was getting honest and direct criticism,” he recalled, “and it was like a draught of clear water to a thirsty spirit.”
By the semester’s close, Baker realized that his desire to study law had evaporated, and he was certain his future lay in journalism. “I did not make this break-away without many hesitations,” he admitted. “I knew how disappointed my father would be.” Unable to confront Joseph, he set out for Chicago, ostensibly seeking summer employment as a reporter, though in actuality he already hoped to make journalism his career. When he presented himself to the editor of the Chicago Record, Baker was told that there were no regular openings, but he could await possible assignments in the city room. After many weeks, his opportunity arrived. The regular labor reporter was out on a story one afternoon when word came that the waiters in a popular restaurant had gone out on strike. Baker received the assignment. When he turned the article in, the assistant night editor delivered words he would never forget. “Great stuff, Baker,” he exclaimed, “great stuff.” With bolstered confidence, Baker canvassed the neighborhoods of Chicago. His explorations resulted in a series of human interest stories, “glimpses, street scenes, common little incidents of the daily life of a great city, which could be treated more or less lightly or humorously.” Pleased with Baker’s work, the Record offered him a regular position that fall.
But in December 1892 he received an urgent summons from his father. Baker’s hearing, damaged in the war many years earlier, was deteriorating into deafness. It was Harry’s turn to enroll in college courses, and he needed his oldest son to come home. Ray tried to convince his father that his aspirations as a writer were neither pretentious nor frivolous, but his father’s needs prevailed and Ray found himself back in St. Croix. For nearly a year, he remained to assist his father until Harry’s winter break allowed a return to Chicago.
The depression was taking a grim toll on the city that winter. Baker was welcomed back to the Record to cover the plight of the unemployed. “There are thousands of homeless and starving men in the streets,” he told his father. “I have seen more misery in this last week than I ever saw in my life before.” This destitute urban population was unlike anything he had encountered. While there were “plenty of people on the frontier who were poor,” he noted, they had means of subsistence. “Land was to be had almost for the asking, logs were at hand for their houses, all the streams were full of fish, and all the hills full of game. . . . There was everywhere plenty of work.” The city offered no such opportunities. “The miserable living conditions, the long hours, the low wages, the universal insecurity, tended to tear down the personality, cheapen the man.”
As Harry prepared for the spring semester, Baker appealed once again to his oldest son. Ray had promised to return home “in the event of absolute necessity” to protect the family business, but leaving the newspaper would force him “to begin all over again at the bottom of the ladder” when he returned to Chicago. Moreover, he insisted, “there is no use in trying to run a business with your heart elsewhere.” While reluctant to return, he reassured his father of his loyalty: “I shall regard it as my first duty, whatever may happen to see that your business is protected and I think every one of the six boys feels in the same way.” Realizing his son’s devotion to his chosen vocation, Baker relented. Ray should remain in Chicago, and he would manage at home.
Supplied with a typewriter for the first time, Ray was sent to Massillon, Ohio, in mid-March 1894 to cover a crusade that would become known as Coxey’s Army. The fiery reformer Jacob Coxey planned a massive march on Washington to demand a government-sponsored public works program to put thousands of unemployed men to work building roads. Baker’s first articles reflected his paper’s editorial stance against the march—venting concern that a horde of vagrants and derelicts would wreak havoc as they marched through the countryside en route to the capital.
Yet as Baker trudged alongside the men, his attitude shifted. “I began to know some of them as Joe and Bill and George,” he related. “I soon had them talking about their homes in Iowa and Colorado and Illinois and Chicago and Pittsburgh—and the real problems they had to meet.” These were not “bums, tramps, and vagabonds” but “genuine farmers and workingmen,” driven in a time of depression by their inability to “earn a living.” Baker’s sympathetic articles brought hundreds of additional recruits to Coxey’s Army and revealed to him the incredible “power of the press.” Skeptics had predicted that the Army, outfitted with supplies for only a few days, would soon disintegrate. But at each scheduled stop “there appeared an impromptu local committee, sometimes including the mayor and other public men, with large supplies of bread, meat, milk, eggs, canned goods, coffee, tea.”
Following Coxey’s improbable army was “a grand adventure” for Baker and his fellow correspondents. Crossing the Allegheny Mountains, they found themselves in snow at least a foot deep. Although some marchers with ragged boots dropped out, the majority persevered, and at last, six weeks after they began, the motley Army reached Washington, D.C. Massive crowds thronged the streets as the procession headed toward the Capitol. Senators and congressmen looked on from the Capitol portico. A larg
e mounted police guard awaited and, as the marchers spilled onto the lawn, Baker reported, “the police seemed to lose their heads completely as they dashed into the crowds on their horses and slashed out with their clubs.” Coxey gained the Capitol steps and was beginning to address the crowd when he was arrested for trespassing and roughly carried away.
“Coxey’s eventful march from Massillon to the marble steps of the national Capitol closed today in riot and bloodshed,” Baker recorded, leaving in its wake public works bills “no nearer passage than they were a month ago.” A remark by a Massachusetts politician reflected the widespread hostility to the reforms among legislators. “The bill,” he claimed, “was immoral, for unemployment was an act of God.” With the arrest of Coxey, the Army “vanished in thin air,” and with it, hope for a political solution to unemployment. It would take the Great Depression of the 1930s to convince the New Deal Congress that Coxey’s approach had merit.
Immediately upon his return to Chicago, Baker was sent to Pullman, Illinois, the model town founded by the railroad industrialist George M. Pullman, developer of both the sleeping car and the dining car and president of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Baker had read rhapsodic descriptions of the experimental community where Pullman’s workers lived in Pullman-owned homes, shopped in Pullman stores, and worshipped in Pullman churches. He had long wanted to meet the “benevolent-looking, bearded man,” but he arrived in Pullman in 1894 to discover a scene of “the wildest confusion.” Three thousand factory workers were striking to protest substantial wage cuts. The company argued that it was losing money in the hard times, but workmen pointed out that regular dividends were still being paid out to stockholders. Indeed, it was later proved that the company’s dividend payouts were in excess of $2 million annually, while profits held steady at $25 million per year.