Mr. Baker & Phase No. 1

Most candidates for the Presidency move through three distinct phases before the national conventions meet to nominate. Phase No. 1: a short, vague, extremely modest public letter about general principles. Phase No. 2 : another public letter, longer, more specific, much less I modest about his purposes if nominated I and elected. Phase No. 3: a ringing keynote speech which starts marching-clubs and a hunt for convention delegates. Last week appeared a public letter from Newton Diehl Baker, Wartime Secretary of War, that had all the earmarks of Phase No. 1.

Democrat Baker has been genuinely reluctant to help his friends along with a presidential campaign in his behalf. He has so far refused to sign the necessary papers which would put his name into the Ohio primary. He looked the other way when Martin L. Davey, onetime Congressman, circularized 40,000 Ohio Democrats on the subject of Baker-for-President. But last week he responded to a friendly editorial in Sanford Martin's Winston-Salem (N. C.) Journal-Sentinel, thus:

"I am getting an immense amount of satisfaction out of the kind things said about me . . . because I am singularly able to contrast them with the situation in 1917 and 1918 when almost none was so poor as to do me reverence and I hold that even the wild and lowly flowers of the field* have a right to enjoy a spell of sunshine after they have struggled to lift their heads on cloudy days.

"My greatest joy is that practically all of the comment which suggests a presidential candidacy for me is based upon the need of a revived Liberalism and a refreshed Idealism in the country. To that cause I am deeply committed and for it I want to fight, whether carrying a banner or marching in the ranks. ..."

*William Gibbs McAdoo, Mr. Baker's Cabinet colleague, wrote in his autobiographical Crowded Years: "Baker used to sit at his desk at the War Department with one leg curled up under him. . . . On his desk there was always a fresh pansy. . . ."

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