While Baker shared this conviction, he had initially hesitated when McClure suggested he study the violence perpetrated against non-striking miners. He was loath to provide “ammunition for mere stupid opposition to all labor organizations” or to compromise the labor leaders he had come to know and respect over the years. Furthermore, the coal strike had erupted during his second leave of absence from the magazine as he began long-postponed work on his novel exploring the nation’s grave social and economic plight. Baker had finally moved from New York to East Lansing, a quiet hamlet near the campus of Michigan State College where his father-in-law still taught biology. He calculated that his savings would last at least a year. The change delighted his wife tremendously, drawing their three children close to their grandparents and reuniting her with childhood friends.
Baker would “never . . . forget the feeling of joyful independence” as he settled into his new home and commenced work on his novel. On his study wall, he hung portraits of Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy, and his own father. He tacked favorite quotations to the back of the desk, which, he noted with satisfaction, was “the first desk I ever had that was big enough . . . where I could spread out my elbows and work as long as I wanted to without interruption.”
“I actually thought my future was settled!” Baker recalled of the brief respite. “I did not count sufficiently upon S. S. McClure.” Eager to keep his gifted young reporter, McClure had contacted him in October 1902 as the coal strike was escalating. The magazine, he generously proposed, would pay a weekly stipend throughout the year, while Baker would have to work only six months. The rest of the year he would be free to pursue his own writing, which McClure’s would publish on liberal terms. “So the serpent in my new Eden!” Baker ruefully jested, the proposition too tempting to reject.
Baker had just arrived at the magazine’s New York office when he received word that McClure wanted him in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where the coal strike was coming to an end. McClure himself had traveled to the coal region shortly after his summer vacation in Europe, joining dozens of reporters, writers, and publishers gathered to cover the historic strike. Recognizing that the press was saturated with stories about the terrible coal-field conditions that had precipitated the five-month strike, McClure sought a different aspect of the story. Despite the abysmal conditions, some miners had kept on the job, refusing to support their fellow strikers, even at the risk of violent reprisal. “What sort of men were they?” McClure pondered. The story of “the scabs” was yet untold, and McClure felt that no one was better suited to investigate the matter than Ray Baker.
When they met at the Hotel Sterling at the corner of River and Market Streets, the buoyant McClure presented his idea to Baker. The young writer was less sanguine, explaining his concern that so long as public opinion “was generally hostile to labor unionism,” it must be emphasized that the strikebreakers’ plight was “only one aspect of a highly complex problem.” But the longer he considered the proposal, the more curious he grew about the 17,000 out of roughly 140,000 miners who persisted in working. Baker had always been intrigued by the motivation of the few who went against the many, and in the end, to McClure’s delight, he agreed to stay in the coal region for a month or more to talk with these men and learn why they refused to support the union.
With the same exacting impartiality that marked his investigation of the Pullman strike, Baker sought out people on all sides of the “scab” issue. He talked with the miners in the kitchens of their homes and descended with them down the shafts into the mines, taking note of the “low wages, company houses, company stores, poor schools, wretched living conditions” in the collieries. He sat in on union meetings where “the scabs” were bitterly denounced and interviewed John Mitchell, whom he found “singularly steady-headed” in the wake of the turbulent strike. In hotel suites thick with cigar smoke, he discussed the conflict with fellow writers and radical leaders, including Henry D. Lloyd and Clarence Darrow. Armed with a range of opinions, he spent weeks with scores of non-striking miners, talking with them and their families, eliciting their perspectives of the realities that led to their decision to continue working even under such treacherous conditions.
“What men I met during those fiery weeks!” he recalled. “What stories they told me: what dramas of human suffering, human loyalty, and human fear.” McClure was thrilled with Baker’s letters from the field. “Don’t, my dear boy, be afraid of space,” he urged; “we can give this thing all the space it requires, all the articles it requires. I am glad you have struck such a rich mine.” A week later, McClure wrote again. The New York Sun had devoted two columns that day to a sermon delivered in Brooklyn on the subject of “the feuds in the coal-fields, the bitterness between union and non-union men, the uncompromising hatred” opening “wounds that only death can heal.” Baker’s subject had “become the most important question of the day,” McClure reassured him. “I am going down to go over the material with you yourself,” he added. “You have done magnificently!”
Baker completed his piece, which McClure titled “The Right to Work,” just in time for inclusion in the landmark issue. At Baker’s insistence, an editor’s note preceded the piece to clarify the magazine’s support for labor unions. Although the magazine would continue to advocate for the nation’s workingmen, the editor explained, the public “is beginning to distinguish between unionism and the sins of unionists, as it is between organized capital and the sins of capitalists.” By illuminating the individual lives of the strikebreakers, Baker also stressed in his opening, he intended neither to challenge “the rights of labor to organize” nor to question “the sincerity of the labor leader.” Instead, he simply wanted to offer a detailed “series of case histories” exploring why these men “continued to work in spite of so much abuse and even real danger.”
The story of John Colson dramatically illustrated the divisive impact of the strike within mining families. An engineer from the small town of Gilberton, Pennsylvania, Colson enjoyed “the best position at the colliery.” Although not a member of the union, he initially went out with the strikers. But with no prospect of a settlement after several months, he took a job at a distant colliery while his wife remained at home with the children. The moment spies determined that Colson had gone back to work, his wife was targeted for retaliation: stores would not serve her; former friends repudiated her in the streets; neighbors pelted her with rocks. When she tried to move, no teamster would help her. A mob finally tracked down Colson himself, beating him so badly that he was mistakenly listed among those murdered during the strike. After talking with Colson and his wife, Baker went to visit Colson’s elderly parents in Mahonay City, four miles away. Mrs. Colson spoke with pride of her sons, all miners, all union members who had faithfully maintained the strike. She discussed her eldest son, John, reluctantly. “He might better be dead,” she declared, “for he’s brought disgrace on the name. He deserved all he got. He wasn’t raised a scab.” Never again would the family acknowledge him. “The strike,” Baker wrote, “had wholly crushed all family feeling.”
Baker’s reporting illustrated how, all too often, lifelong friendships, like familial bonds, became casualties of the conflict. A strong believer in unions, one miner, Hugh Johnson, nonetheless considered this strike, the second in two years, a bad idea. Although he voted against it, he remained out with the strikers until he could no longer afford to pay his family’s living expenses. As soon as he returned to work, troubles began: his daughter was fired from her job as a teacher, his son harassed at school, and his wife prevented from buying food and supplies at the local stores. One night, a mob chased and threatened to kill him. “All these things,” Baker observed, “were done by his neighbors and friends, among whom he had lived an honorable life for years.”
As the strike dragged on, the level of violence escalated. One telling example involved James Winstone, a respected community leader. Winstone, too, had argued against the strike but stayed out to support his fellow
workers. Informed that he did not qualify for assistance from the union relief fund because he owned property, Winstone finally returned to work. In late September, only a few days before the strike was settled, he was clubbed to death by three longtime neighbors. Such stories, Baker insisted, constituted “only a few among scores, even hundreds, of similar tragedies of the great coal strike.”
Baker returned to East Lansing after completing the article “on fire with the wealth of new material, new characters and, above all, new understandings of the human elements” involved in the labor struggle. He happily anticipated sitting at his desk to work on his novel “gloriously all winter long.” As January turned to February, however, he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Clippings arrived from all over the country praising his article. “Everything has borne out the truthfulness and value of the article you wrote,” McClure congratulated him. His case histories had dramatized a vital aspect of the conflict—the price paid by non-striking miners—better than anything else written. McClure sought to entice him with the prospect of an entire series on labor.
Baker found himself making scant headway on his novel, unable “to write fiction when the world seemed literally on fire with critical, possibly revolutionary, movements in which [he] was deeply interested.” Putting the fiction aside, he returned to New York, where “a powerful new interest, a common purpose” was energizing the McClure’s office. The enthusiasm generated by the magazine’s critical and popular success was palpable. “I doubt whether any other magazine published in America ever achieved such sudden and overwhelming recognition,” Baker proudly remarked. “We had put our fingers upon the sorest spots in American life.”
The staff members at McClure’s had always worked closely, even while pursuing diverse interests. Now that their respective investigations into the problems of modern industrial society substantially overlapped, they eagerly read one another’s works, often suggesting further lines of inquiry. Tarbell’s disclosures of John D. Rockefeller’s illegal activities resonated with Steffens’s endeavor to trace political corruption to the captains of industry. Tarbell looked to Steffens for an understanding of the invisible web that linked businessmen to politicians, politicians to judges. Indeed, the intensity of these reciprocally informing projects and the sense of camaraderie in a momentous cause affected Baker profoundly. “I have wondered,” he later wrote, “if there could have been a more interesting editorial office than ours, one with more of the ozone of great ideas, touch-and-go experimentation, magic success.” This rare formula, he noted, owed as much to rigorous and honest feedback as to affectionate support. “We were friends indeed, but we were also uncompromising critics of one another.” Forty years later, Baker still considered John Phillips “the most creative editor” he had worked with in his entire life. “He could tell wherein an article failed and why,” he recalled; “he could usually make fertile suggestions for improving it; he was willing to give the writer all the precious time he needed for rewriting his story.”
The office itself, now situated just east of the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street, reflected the collaborative ardor of McClure’s staff. The walls in the hallway were a mosaic of original artwork designed for pages of the magazine. Mementoes from individual articles decorated each writer’s office. They even had special names for one another: McClure was “the Chief,” Steffens was “Stef,” and Ida M. Tarbell was affectionately dubbed “I-dare-m.” In her office, she proudly displayed a framed note from Finley Peter Dunne: “Idarem—She’s a lady but she has the punch.” No one, Baker said of Tarbell, lived “so warmly in the hearts of her friends.” Never had he known “a finer human spirit,” “so generous, so modest, so full of kindness, so able, so gallant—and yet with such good sense and humor.”
The exhilarating atmosphere in the office persuaded Baker to accept the Chief’s suggestion and embark upon a series of labor articles. “Why bother with fictional characters and plots,” he told himself, “when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true: and characters so powerful, so fresh, so new, that they stepped into the narratives under their own power?”
THE PRESIDENT’S REQUEST FOR BAKER’S help in uncovering possible corruption in Arizona reached the reporter in Chicago, where he was researching the first of five lengthy articles on various aspects of the labor problem. As the celebrated series unfolded, Roosevelt would frequently reach out to Baker for advice and counsel on labor issues. In the summer of 1903, as Roosevelt labored to assess the contentious Salt River situation, he recalled a more obscure series on the Southwest Baker had written for the literary Century magazine the previous year. Like Roosevelt, Baker recognized the transformative potential of irrigation. Using language close to Roosevelt’s heart, Baker described riding through miles of desert with “no sign of living creatures,” only to discover a green stretch of well-watered acreage “with rows of rustling cottonwoods, the roofs of home, and the sound of cattle in the meadows. A wire fence was the dividing line: on this side lay the fruitless desert; on the other green alfalfa, full of blossoms and bees, brimming over the fences.” The sight, Baker proclaimed, “was something to stir a man’s heart.” “My dear Mr. Baker,” Roosevelt wrote on June 25, explaining his dilemma and soliciting Baker’s guidance. “As you know, I am especially concerned over the irrigation project. At times I hear rumors of crookedness in connection with the Government irrigation work, especially in Arizona. I have been utterly unable hitherto to get any definite statement in reference thereto. It has occurred to me that you may be able privately to tell me something about this.”
Baker swiftly responded, promising to share all the information gleaned concerning the Salt River project. He had, in fact, returned to Arizona earlier that spring, contemplating another irrigation article. Moreover, he had been present at the meetings when Charles Walcott of the U.S. Geological Survey delivered his decision in favor of the Water Users Association in Salt River, and had spent time on an alfalfa ranch in order to “get at the exact sentiment of the people.” Though he had witnessed no overt corruption, Baker had little doubt that something was wrong; promoters of the Water Users Association, “backed by the government officials,” relied on “overbearing” methods that were “suspicious in the extreme.” He assured the president that he would gladly call at the White House when he returned to Washington the following week.
“I suppose that the Government officials you speak of must be in the Geological Survey,” Roosevelt replied, adding that “in public life as in private life a man of the very highest repute will occasionally go wrong.” Still, he recognized that accusations and rumors are readily fabricated, and in such cases “it is most desirable that their falsity be shown.” Some criticism of Walcott was undoubtedly political—fueled by Republicans upset with projects recommended in Democratic states, as well as senators and congressmen in the Rocky Mountain region furious over the choice of Arizona (still a territory without representation in Congress). Regardless of the origins, Roosevelt insisted that if Walcott “or any other Government official has gone wrong in Arizona I am more anxious than any other man can be to get at it.” He requested that Baker do him the favor of stopping first to see Gifford Pinchot at the Forestry Division and then joining him for lunch at Oyster Bay. “If there is any kind of ground for believing in fraud of any sort by Government officials,” he concluded, “I want to consult with you as to the best way of setting men to work so as to be sure of our getting the proof.”
Baker was thrilled by the prospect of working closely with the president either to uncover corruption or to dispel malicious career-destroying rumors. “I was so eager to help,” he recalled, “that I got together a large package of notes and memoranda—also maps and pictures—and a veritable article of several thousand words on which I spent several days of hard work, setting forth in detail the exact situation in the Salt River Valley as I had seen it.” He took another day to compile a memorandum on the coal fields, just in case Roosevelt ventured to d
iscuss labor issues as well. “I was determined to be fully prepared,” he explained, “to give the President of the United States several hours of sound enlightenment and instruction!”
Baker’s study of the situation in Arizona convinced him that the government’s choice of the Salt River Valley was perfectly justified. “If ever men worked miracles,” he wrote, it was in Salt River. Sustained by private capital, neighbors had cooperated for decades to dig ditches and build canals in order to divert water. From inhospitable desert, they had wrested three cities replete with electric lights, fine hotels, schools, and churches—all shaded by mature trees and bordered by thriving and productive “orchards of oranges, almonds, olives, and figs.” After seven years of insufficient rainfall and reckless deforestation, however, the “implacable desert” was closing in again: homes were reluctantly abandoned as orchards died, fields withered, and land values plummeted. Without the infusion of vast government capital to build a great reservoir, this once-thriving valley would perish. Baker carefully considered how two related factors complicated the situation: vast tracts of land were already under private ownership, and unscrupulous developers might lure more people into the valley than the water project could supply.
On the morning of July 15, Baker boarded a train at Long Island City. En route to Oyster Bay, where the president was spending the summer, he ran into an old Chicago acquaintance, Herman Kohlsaat, publisher of the Record-Herald. Treasury Secretary Leslie Mortimer Shaw and Charles J. Bonaparte, a noted attorney who was investigating postal fraud for the Justice Department, also joined them aboard the train. Upon arrival, the four men crowded into a horse-driven public carriage for the three-mile journey to Sagamore Hill.
“The President lives very simply,” Baker informed his father. “I thought as I drove over from the station what some modern German or English worthy might say on entering the president’s grounds & seeing no guards or military anywhere about.” A maid ushered the guests into the library to wait for the president. “Robust, hearty, wholesome, like a gust of wind,” he soon burst in, wearing knee-length breeches and an old coat.
The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism Page 52