ABSTRACT
Baker’s moralism was a legacy from a long line of public servants. Captain Remember Baker, his great-great-grandfather, had served with a cousin, General Ethan Allen, during the Revolutionary War. His father Joseph Stannard Baker was a Civil War major captured by the Confederates. Major Baker married Alice Potter, and the two raised their family on “the essential truths of Christianity” and a Presbyterian certainty that “in the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread” (American Chronicle, 2 and 57). Ray Stannard Baker was born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised in St. Croix, Wisconsin. After graduating Michigan Agricultural College, Baker reported on social unrest for Victor Lawson’s liberally minded Chicago News-Record. Baker’s sympathetic coverage of a worker’s march on Washington in 1893 and the Pullman strike in Chicago a year later, deepened his social activism. The widely publicized efforts of British reformer William Stead to clean up Chicago’s vice, intensi ed Baker’s sense of mission, an attitude encouraged by Jessie Irene Beal, the daughter of his botany professor, whom he married in 1896. The couple would have four children.
