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Biography of Ray Stannard BakerName: Ray Stannard BakerBirth Date: April, 1870 Death Date: July 12, 1946 Place of Birth: Lansing, Michigan, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: journalist, author Ray Stannard Baker The American author Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946) was a noted muckraking journalist before he became the official biographer of Woodrow Wilson.Ray Stannard Baker was born in Lansing, Mich., on April 17, 1870. An 1889 graduate of Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), he later studied law and literature at the University of Michigan.In 1892 Baker went to work for the Chicago Record, remaining for 6 years as reporter and editor. This introduced him to the misery of Chicago's poor, soup kitchens, charity wards, and thousands of homeless, starving men in the streets. "My attitude was that of the frontier where I had grown up. Bums, tramps! Why didn't they get out and hustle? Why didn't they quit Chicago?" he said. But his attitude began to change after he tried fruitlessly to help a youth find a job. He was haunted for the rest of his life by this "Potato-Car Boy," whom he wanted …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…heart attack in Amherst, Mass., on July 12, 1946. Further Reading Baker's own writings include Native American: The Book of My Youth (1941) and American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (David Grayson) (1945). The best study of Baker is Robert C. Bannister, Jr., Ray Stannard Baker: The Mind and Thought of a Progressive (1966).For background, works sympathetic to Baker are C. C. Regier, Era of the Muckrakers (1932), and Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939; new ed. 1961). Studies critical of him are John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America (1932; 2d ed. 1933), and Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933; rev. ed. 1935). See also Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917 (1954), and David Noble, The Paradox of Progressive Thought (1958).Bannister, Robert C., Ray Stannard Baker: the mind and thought of a progressive, New York: Garland Pub., 1979, 1966. |