The Pullman workers appealed for support to the American Railway Union (ARU), headed by Eugene Debs. Initially reluctant to help, Debs was finally convinced by reports of the excessive prices workers were forced to pay for rent, utilities, and food; the predatory hold of the Pullman monopoly must be broken. Baker took an immediate liking to Debs, believing him unselfishly committed to the cause. The ARU gave the company five days to arbitrate a settlement, but Pullman declared that there was “nothing to arbitrate.” He insisted that “workers have nothing to do with the amount of wages they shall receive; that is solely the business of the company.” The powerful union responded with a boycott of all Pullman cars, disrupting railroad traffic across the nation. When railroad managers attempted to replace the strikers with non-union men, riots broke out.
The managers then requested and received a federal injunction against the boycott, ostensibly on grounds of protecting the delivery of mail. Despite the injunction, the boycott continued until President Grover Cleveland, over the objection of Illinois governor Altgeld, sent in federal troops, thereby escalating the violence. Trains were overturned and fires started. The federal troops opened fire. Dozens were killed and wounded. Debs was jailed for ignoring the injunction. By the end of August 1894, more than three months after it had begun, the strike collapsed with nothing gained for the workers.
Baker well understood that mobs could not run amok, “putting the torch to millions of dollars’ worth of property,” yet his feelings of support remained firm for the striking workers whose stories he had come to know. Clearly, Joseph Stannard Baker did not share his son’s empathy for the strikers. “It does seem to me as if the laboring classes were possessed of the devil,” he wrote in early July. “I believe in the free application of rifle balls, grape and canister to mobs.” Ray held his ground. Asked to testify before a federal panel that fall, he asserted that he was “in the midst of the mob” when the violence began and that “at no time” did he witness the involvement of a member of the railway union or a striker. On the contrary, the men who overturned the cars were “toughs and outsiders.” Moreover, when the federal troops arrived, they fired into the crowd with no warning, killing and wounding innocent spectators. While most of the newspapers blamed the strikers and created the impression that the federal troops had saved Chicago from anarchy, Baker carefully recounted what he had observed.
The young journalist believed that his “honeymoon as a newspaper reporter ended with the Pullman strike.” He “had been wonderfully fortunate” to that point, he realized: “I had been able to work on subjects that interested me profoundly ever since my days in the university—the new problems of unemployment and the relationships of labor and capital.” But in the aftermath of the protracted and distressing Pullman strike, even those editors sensitive to labor issues sensed that their readers “were profoundly relieved to have the trouble ended,” no longer wishing to hear about labor’s struggles. Baker found himself covering murders, fires, and robberies. He felt that he was stifling.
The dramatic 1896 campaign between Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republican William McKinley provided a welcome diversion. After witnessing Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the Chicago Wigwam, Baker concluded that the candidate was “the greatest popular orator [he] had ever heard.” Though his father vociferously derided Bryan and his Populist followers, Baker was deeply impressed when he went to see him at the Palmer House. “The essential impression he made,” Baker later recalled, “was one of deep sincerity.” McKinley won a convincing victory, claiming every state outside the West and the South, and Baker found himself once again covering “the commonplace” rather than “the spectacular.”
Two years earlier, Ray had married Jessie Beal, with whom he had corresponded since their college days. He was feeling “somewhat low” as he contemplated how he might support his wife and new child on his newspaper salary and doubted if he “was getting anywhere at all as a writer.” At this stressful juncture, the fortuitous offer from S. S. McClure prompted elation. “Suddenly and joyously” Ray Stannard Baker was transported to a world “full of strange and wonderful new things,” and he was “at the heart of it, especially commissioned to look at it, hear about it, and above all, to write about it.”
TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, EDITOR of a small country newspaper in Emporia, Kansas, ironically came to the attention of S. S. McClure through a scathing anti-Populist editorial that he would later disavow when he became an ardent progressive. “What’s the Matter with Kansas?,” written in the heat of the election between McKinley and Bryan, ridiculed his home state for endorsing Bryan’s “wild-eyed” rhetoric that pitted the rich against the poor and was sure to drive out capital and extinguish the possibility of progress. “That’s the stuff!” he jeered. “Give the prosperous man the dickens! Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffing out of the creditors. . . . Whoop it up for the ragged trousers; put the lazy, greasy fizzle, who can’t pay his debts, on the altar, and bow down and worship him.”
White’s editorial was republished in dozens of newspapers throughout the country. The sardonic tone caught the fancy of Mark Hanna, McKinley’s campaign manager, who had it reprinted and distributed “more widely than any other circular in the campaign.” Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tom Reed, without even knowing White’s name, sent a laudatory note to the editor of the little paper. “I haven’t seen as much sense in one column in a dozen years,” he declared. Suddenly, the rotund, florid young man who had labored at his obscure midwestern newspaper became a national figure.
McClure jotted down the name William Allen White; some weeks later, having also read a small volume of short stories White had recently published, he brought the young man to New York. “I had seen cities,” White later recalled, “Kansas City, St. Louis, Denver, Chicago, but even in 1897 the New York sky line as I ferried across to the Twenty-third Street slip, made my country eyes bug out with excitement.”
At first sight, White was totally smitten too by the McClure’s staff. McClure himself seemed “a powerhouse of energy,” a dynamo “full of ideas,” who “talked like a pair of scissors, clipping his sentences, sometimes his words.” White’s mother, Mary Ann Hatton, they discovered, had been Professor Hurd’s student at Knox College. And White connected at once with “fellow midwesterner” John Phillips, who invited him, along with Ida Tarbell, to a “gorgeous dinner” at a cozy restaurant way uptown. “These people knew Rudyard Kipling,” he noted with amazement. “They knew Robert Louis Stevenson. . . . The new English poets were their friends.”
McClure’s original staff members, for their part, were enchanted by the country editor with “the smile of a roguish little boy” and “the eyes of a poet.” Tarbell liked “his affection and loyalty for his state, his appreciation and understanding of everything that she does—wise and foolish.” Baker relished White’s “love of life” and contagious “high spirits.” McClure deluged him with concepts for new magazine pieces, and Phillips helped him distinguish the fool’s gold from the gold. Before leaving New York, White pledged to send the lion’s share of his future stories and articles to McClure’s. They reciprocated his good faith, urging him to “call on them whenever he needed help,” a promise kept when he mentioned he was trying to raise $5,000 to pay for a new home. McClure’s magazine instantly remitted White a check for all construction costs, plus an additional $1,000.
“The McClure group became for ten or fifteen years my New York fortress, spiritual, literary and, because they paid me well, financial,” White later wrote. McClure “was always Sam to me and John Phillips was always John, Miss Tarbell was always Ida M., and Jaccaci was always Jack. And I loved them all. There was no New England repression in our relations. They were cordial to the point of ardent. . . . They talked the Mississippi Valley vernacular. They thought as we thought in Emporia about men and things. They were making a magazine for our kind—the literate middle class. This group had real inf
luence.”
Baker was struck with admiration that White “never yielded to the temptation” of leaving Emporia, “the country and the people he knew best.” He frequently visited New York, “stayed as long as he wanted to stay . . . worked out plans for new articles and stories, and then went back to Kansas.” Yet the rapport and fellowship with the McClure group profoundly influenced his thinking: the provincial editor became cosmopolitan; the young conservative a progressive.
William Allen White’s youthful conservatism was nourished by the comfortable world of his childhood. His family lived in “the best house” in the small central Kansas town of El Dorado, where his father, a successful doctor and shopkeeper, enlarged the family fortunes by operating the town’s grandest hotel and speculating in real estate. “I look back upon my boyhood there in the big house,” White later said, “with a sense of well-being.” The “White House,” as it was called, boasted eleven rooms and a wraparound porch designed “to get a breeze from every angle.” Dr. White was elected to the city council and later served as mayor. He was “somebody,” White later said, fostering William’s “sense of belonging to the ruling class.”
His college-educated mother was thirty-six when she married forty-eight-year-old Doc White. Will, their only surviving child, was, by his own account, terribly spoiled. His “devoted and adoring” parents “bowed down” to accommodate his every desire. “In that Elysian childhood,” he recalled, “I was shielded from pain and sorrow and lived, if ever a human being did live, in a golden age.” In his local school, everyone liked him. “He was so good-natured,” one classmate recalled, “they could not do otherwise.” Summer days were spent diving and going fishing in the nearby river; autumn promised hunting in the surrounding woods; the onset of winter meant setting traps for birds and game, and ice-skating on the frozen river. It was a boy’s paradise, one that later he would work to faithfully re-create in nostalgic fiction.
White’s house, like Baker’s, was filled with books, and every night his mother read to him. “I remember as a child sitting in the chair, looking up to her while she read Dickens and George Eliot, Trollope, Charles Reed, and the Victorian English novels. My father, I remember, used to growl a good deal at the performance, and claimed that if my mother read to me so much I would never get so I would read for myself. But his prediction was sadly wrong. It was to those nights of reading and to the books that my mother had always about the house that I owe whatever I have of a love for good reading.”
Dr. White was a gentle and jovial man, fond of entertaining guests in his spacious house. Will particularly remembered those cheerful evenings when his family hosted friends, neighbors, and frequently “distinguished citizens—the politicians of the time, the governors, congressmen, senators, and judges who came to the town on their political pilgrimages.” The doctor’s geniality and the whirl of his social and professional activity obscured a chronic illness: Dr. White was suffering from severe diabetes, and after a two-week illness in the fall of 1882, he died. Will was fourteen. The entire town attended the funeral, with crowds of mourners converging on the house and congesting the surrounding sidewalks and streets. “I was not without my pride,” White recalled, “looking back as we made the turn half a mile from home and headed for the East Cemetery, to see the long line of carriages and wagons and carts still moving into the procession on Main Street.”
Upon his high school graduation, White enrolled in the College of Emporia, sixty miles away. There he first encountered the new literature of realism through the serialization of William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance, the same novel McClure had devoured at John Phillips’s home. “Here,” White recalled, “was a novel different from the Dickens I adored.” The young freshman “read it and reread it” that spring, feeling that “a new door” had opened. When he returned home that summer, White got a job with the local paper, the El Dorado Democrat. His responsibilities were limited to sweeping floors, doing odd jobs, and helping the typesetters, but he was enchanted by the world of journalism, certain he had found his “life’s calling.”
The following year, White transferred to the University of Kansas, and his mother rented out their El Dorado house so she could “establish a home” for her beloved son in Lawrence. White thoroughly enjoyed his years at the university, where he developed a lifelong friendship with his political science professor, Dr. James H. Canfield. A gifted teacher who taught history, sociology, and economics as well as political science, Canfield encouraged “a babble of clamoring voices” in classes built on discussion rather than lectures. In these classes, White first understood the inequities wrought by the high protective tariff, the standard of the Republican Party. In the years ahead, Canfield encouraged White to read books on socialism and to follow the works of the Progressive economist Richard Ely, father of Reform Darwinism. Ely argued that what businessmen claimed to be the “natural laws” of economics were in fact tools “in the hands of the greedy and the avaricious for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes.” Had White focused more on his schoolwork, he might have absorbed more of Canfield’s philosophy, but he readily acknowledged that his extracurricular passions—his social life and after-hours work for the Lawrence Journal—consumed far more time and attention than his classes. “As I look back at it, classroom pictures blur in my memory of the university,” White wrote. “Fraternity meetings are clear; political excursions are etched deeply; parties, little dances, picnics and what, in the student nomenclature of the time, was called ‘girling,’ I recall vividly. Also, I was downtown much of the time writing my news items for the Lawrence Journal, taking my copy for the Weekly University Courier to the printer, covering local events for the St. Louis and Kansas City papers.” He found himself cutting class after class and realized he had somehow “ceased to be a student and had become a reporter.” Failing to pass a required mathematics exam for the third time, he left the university without a degree.
Despite his mother’s chagrin, she accompanied William back to El Dorado, where he went to work at the El Dorado Republican. Though his father had been a Democrat, White had by this time adopted his mother’s allegiance to the Republican Party, a commitment he would ardently maintain throughout his life. Charged with generating local stories and editorials, the twenty-two-year-old reporter found himself in the midst of the Populist uprising.
The boom times that had accompanied White’s childhood years had vanished for the majority of Kansas farmers, who found themselves caught between usurious interest rates on debts to eastern bankers and the predatory, monopolistic practices of both the grain elevator companies that stored their crops and the railroads that carried them to market. In many sections of the West and Midwest, where only one elevator company or railroad served the area, farmers were forced to pay whatever price these companies demanded. “We have three crops,” a Nebraska newspaper editor lamented, “corn, freight rates, and interest. The farmers farm the land, and the businessmen farm the farmers.”
The grim hardships endured by farming families galvanized the so-called Grangers movement. They successfully pressured state legislatures to regulate exorbitant elevator and railroad rates, but these laws were swiftly challenged in the courts, where corporate influence was pervasive. The Grangers secured a spectacular, albeit temporary, triumph in the 1877 case of Munn v. Illinois. The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the constitutionality of an Illinois state law regulating excessive elevator rates. The Court agreed that Illinois was simply exercising its “police power” to regulate private property “affected with a public interest.” Nine years later, however, in Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois, the Supreme Court effectively reversed its decision. The justices denied the state’s regulatory power in a case concerning inflated railroad rates on grounds that only Congress had the right to dictate commerce between states. In the years that followed, the Court would remain an uncompromising barrier to state regulation of business in the public interest.
Responding to t
he public outcry that followed the Wabash decision, Congress filled the regulatory void in 1887 by passing the Interstate Commerce Act, which created an Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to ensure that railroad rates were “reasonable and just.” The practice of granting rebates to favored big shippers, which essentially destroyed smaller competitors, was outlawed. But the legislation did not authorize the commission to set specific rates, a fatal omission that allowed railroad barons to challenge the ICC rulings in the courts at every turn, thereby rendering the law largely ineffective. In time, railroad executives actually found the law useful. “It satisfies the public clamor for a government supervision of railroads,” one corporate lawyer, Richard Olney, wrote, “at the same time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal.”
Though widespread bitterness against the concentration of economic power led to the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, that law likewise remained a paper tiger while the trusts continued to grow. “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty,” Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote in Wealth Against Commonwealth, an influential 1902 indictment of the trusts. “The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State . . . and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.”
In 1890, the Farmers’ Alliance, which had succeeded the Grangers, successfully fielded slates of radical candidates in the West and Midwest. Mary Lease, a formidable proponent of reform, traveled around Kansas on behalf of Alliance candidates. “Wall Street owns the country,” she charged. “It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.” She angrily dismissed claims that the farmers’ troubles stemmed from a surfeit of produce. “Overproduction!—when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 10,000 shop-girls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them!”