Literary Journeyman
AMERICAN CHRONICLE—Ray Stannard Baker—Scrlbners ($3.50).
One day in 1897 a young Chicago newspaperman named Ray Stannard Baker bought a small notebook and began to jot down notes about everything that caught his interest: people, conversations, landscapes, speculations. After a few years he bought larger notebooks. In almost 50 years, he has filled 70 of them with a total of about two million words.
It was one of the most profitable investments a writer ever made. When journalism left Baker ill and exhausted, he turned to his notebooks and, drawing on their recorded memories of his life on farms in Wisconsin and Michigan, wrote his beloved Adventures in Contentment books under the name of David Grayson. The nine volumes of these fictional essays have sold two million copies. During the 21 years he has spent as Woodrow Wilson's official biographer, his notebooks have re mained a guarded treasure. They have given him the substance of American Chronicle, one of the simplest, truest and most revealing books about the press in U.S. literature.
With Coxey's Army. In 1893 Baker was a 23-year-old reporter on the Chicago Record, writing about the breadlines and soup kitchens of that depression year. No sentimentalist, he was impatient with the men in the breadlines: why didn't they get out of Chicago and work at anything? He was 24 before he learned that depressions were nationwide. On March 15, 1894, the Record sent him to Massillon, Ohio to report on a strange, round-shouldered, oily-faced man with a straw-colored mustache named Jacob S. Coxey, a prosperous horse-breeder and quarry owner who was planning a march on Washington.
At 11 a.m. on Easter Sunday, March 25, the army set off. The "Commonweal of Christ Brass Band," riding in a red, yellow and black wagon, blared a march. In the army's van rode and strode numerous odd characters including a cowboy, an astrologer, a Negro minstrel who claimed to be the loudest singer in the world, and a man who called himself the Great Unknown. Some 300 or 400 tough-looking tramps carried banners proclaiming: Peace on earth, good will to men, but death to interest on bonds.
The army reached Pittsburgh on April 3, turned south to Uniontown, rested two days before climbing the mountains, and suddenly ceased to be funny. Recruits joined the ranks. Townsfolk appeared with food at every stop. Baker walked with the men, getting their stories. He found that many were honest farmers and workmen, and realized that "there could haye been no such demonstration in a civilized country unless there was profound and deep-seated distress, disorganization, unrest, unhappiness behind it." He was still on hand when police broke up the march in Washington and kept Coxey from reading his petition on the Capitol steps.