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Mr. Baker served President Hoover on the Wickersham Commission, finding for complete repeal of the 18th Amendment.
He was attorney for Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. in its unsuccessful attempt to merge with Bethlehem Steel.
He upheld freedom-of-the-press for the Scripps-Howard chain papers in the Kentucky coal fields.
He appeared before the War Policies Commission to oppose, unsuccessfully, the Baruch plan for "price-freezing" at the outbreak of hostilities.
He ably represented the Brothers VanSweringen in their railroad merger plans.
He serves the Baltimore & Ohio as a director, Western Reserve University as a trustee.
His law practice brings him in big fees (he asked $500,000 in a McCormick estate case) but at night he still likes to curl up quietly at home, smoking a cheap pipe crammed with rank tobacco and reading Latin or Greek for fun.
"Draft Horse" Mind— Woodrow Wilson who taught him political science at Johns Hopkins used to say that his Secretary of War had a mind like chain lightning. Mr. Baker prefers to call his mind "a draft horse that does not rear but follows its own little road back & forth." Coupled to that mind is a smooth tongue from which flows some of the most authentic oratory of the day. Mr. Baker speaks without notes; his speech is crisp, rapid, fluent; he can bring audiences to their feet or reduce them to tears. If he is nominated by the Democrats at Chicago, the next campaign will not lack literate eloquence from at least one side of the field.
*Of these only five—Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Taft, Harding—were elected as citizens of Ohio. Grant is credited to Illinois, Harrison to Indiana.
*Virginia disputes this title. She has mothered eight U.S. Presidents, five of whom—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Tyler—were elected as her citizens.
*In 1844 Martin Van Buren got a majority on the first ballot but lost to James K. Polk on the ninth.