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.

Youth's Companion & McClure's. Grown seasoned and successful as a reporter, Baker still yearned to write fiction. He wrote to the Youth's Companion to ask their requirements. The Companion, he was informed, wanted stories of irreproachable moral tone, with well-devised plots, which would not revive sectional bitterness between North and South, or between rich and poor. Baker began to write such stories, fast. Once, staying at home while his wife and baby went to Michigan, he sat in the half-darkened dining room on hot summer mornings, went nowhere, saw no one, did not answer the doorbell, and finished a five-part serial for the Companion in a week. He got $250 for it.

Encouraged, Baker wrote asking McClure's if they would be interested in a series on the Secret Service. Brilliant, ailing, dynamic S. S. McClure invited him to come to New York, sent him a pass on the New York Central. When he got there McClure had gone to Europe, but the editors took him to lunch, talked about books and articles, and let him savor "the most stimulating, yes, intoxicating, editorial atmosphere then existent in America--or anywhere else." There, with such young associates as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, William Allen White, Lincoln Steffens, O. Henry, Jack London and Ida Tarbell, he became one of the "muckrakers" who made McClure's the most sensationally successful magazine of its time and a potent influence in U.S. history.

Action Portraits. American Chronicle is written without pretense or boasting. It contains no sensational anecdotes or personal disclosures. It is filled with authentic, undramatized accounts of a sensitive, scrupulous literary journeyman's life and with brilliant sketches of public men in action. Three of these sketches--of General Tasker Bliss and Commissioner Henry White at the Versailles Peace Conference, and of Marconi receiving the first transatlantic wireless message in Newfoundland --are models of their kind, written with the sense of history that makes both the characters and the moment live. The full-length portrait of Woodrow Wilson, whom Baker served at Versailles as the Peace Commission's press director, is masterly.

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