Ray
Stannard Baker was born in Michigan in 1870. He joined McClure's
Magazine, where he worked with Lincoln
Steffens and Ira Tarbell in the kind
of investigative journalism that became known as muckraking.
Baker himself was involved in exposing railroad and financial corruption.
In 1906 Baker joined with Lincoln Steffens,
Ida Tarbell, William Allen White, John S.
Phillips, and Finley Peter Dunne to form the American
Magazine. It soon established itself as one of America's leading
investigative magazines. However, its opponents accused the magazine
of muckraking journalism.
In 1908 Baker produced a series of five articles on the plight of
the African Americans. In this pioneering work in the study of race
relations in the United States, Baker dealt with issues such
as political leadership, Jim Crow laws,
lynching and poverty. These articles
were eventually turned into the book, Following
the Color Line (1908).
Other books written by Baker include Woodrow
Wilson and World Settlement (1922), Adventures
in Understanding (1925) and Adventures
in Solitude (1931). Ray Stannard
Baker died in 1946.
Lincoln Steffens and Roy Stannard Baker
The New York World (December, 1905)
(1)
Ray
Stannard Baker,
Hull House, Outlook Magazine (26th
March, 1898)
The
Nineteenth Ward is fertile soil for growing a ward boss. Its population
consists of Italians, Polish and Russian Jews, Irish of the poorest
class, and the offscourings of a dozen other nationalities. They live
huddled together in ill-smelling houses, and few of the older people,
many of whom are day laborers, have any understanding of American
institutions, or even of the English language. They are capable of
being herded and driven by any one who is strong enough to wield the
rod.
Johnny Powers has been the undisputed political boss for many years.
Powers has been more than ordinarily successful as a ward boss. He
is cool-headed, cunning, and wholly unscrupulous, and yet he possesses
the effective gift known, for lack of a better name, as "good-fellowship"
or good-heartedness". Among his constituents he appears in his
kingly aspects of unlimited power and benevolence. He impresses them
with the primitive generosity which has turkeys to give away by thousands
at Christmas time, which elevates a faithful follower to a position
on the city pay-roll in a single day, or discharges him with equal
ease. He
is the feudal lord who governs his retainers with open-handed liberality
or crushes them to poverty as it suits his nearest purpose.
The
streets and alleys of the ward were notoriously filthy, and the contractors
habitually neglected them, not failing, however, to draw their regular
payments from the city treasury. At last it fell to the women of Hull
House to take the initiative. Miss Addams herself applied for the
position of garbage inspector, and, to the astonishment of Johnny
Powers and his retainers, received the appointment. Within two months
the Nineteenth Ward was one of the cleanest in the city.
(2)
Ray
Stannard Baker,
What is a Lynching?, McClure's
Magazine (February, 1905)
Well,
on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an absurd,
ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to twenty
- a pronounced feature of every mob - with a wide fringe of more respectable
citizens, their hands in
their pockets and no convictions in their souls, looking on curiously,
helplessly. They gathered hooting around the jail, cowardly, at first,
as all mobs are, but growing bolder as darkness came on and no move
was made to check them. The murder of Collis was not a horrible, soul-rending
crime like that at Statesboro, Georgia; these men in the mob were
not personal friends of the murdered man; it was a mob from the back
rooms of the swarming saloons of Springfield; and it included also
the sort of idle boys "who hang around cigar stores," as
one observer told me. The newspaper reports are fond of describing
lynching mobs as "made up of the foremost citizens of the town."
In no cases that I know of, either South or North, has a mob been
made up of what may be called the best citizens; but the best citizens
have often stood afar off "decrying the mob" - as a Springfield
man told me piously - and letting it go on. A mob
is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the
government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.
And no
official in direct authority in Springfield that evening, apparently,
had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came out and
made a weak speech in which he said he "didn't want to hurt anybody."
They threw stones at him and broke his windows. The chief of police
sent eighteen men to the jail but did not go near himself. All
of these policemen undoubtedly sympathized with the mob in its efforts
to get at the slayer of their brother officer; at least, they did
nothing effective to prevent the lynching. An appeal was made to the
Mayor to order out the engine companies that water might be turned
on the mob. He said he didn't like to; the hose might be cut! The
local militia company
was called to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated, vacillated,
doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had
no ammunition except Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired into
a mob, would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir that
night from the safe and comfortable precincts of their armory.
A sort of dry rot, a moral
paralysis, seems to strike the administrators of law in a town like
Springfield. What can be expected of officers who are not accustomed
to enforce the law, or of a people not accustomed to obey it - or
who make reservations and exceptions when they do enforce it or obey
it?
When the sheriff made
his speech to the mob, urging them to let the law take its course
they jeered him. The law! When, in the past, had the law taken its
proper course in dark County? Someone shouted, referring to Dixon:
"He'll only get fined
for shooting in the city limits."
"He'll get ten days
in jail and suspended sentence."
Then there were voices:
"Let's go hang Mower
and Miller" - the two judges.
This threat, indeed, was
frequently repeated both on the night of the lynching and on the day
following.
So the mob came finally,
and cracked the door of the jail with a railroad rail. This jail is
said to be the strongest in Ohio, and having seen it, I can well believe
that the report is true. But steel bars have never yet kept out a
mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed
up by the consciousness of being right.
They murdered the Negro
in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they dragged him to the principal
business street and hung him to a telegraph-pole, afterward riddling
his lifeless body with revolver shots.
That was the end of that.
Mob justice administered. And there the Negro hung until daylight
the next morning - an unspeakably grisly, dangling horror, advertising
the shame of the town. His head was shockingly crooked to one side,
his ragged clothing, cut for souvenirs, exposed in places his bare
body: he dripped blood. And, with the crowds of men both here and
at the morgue where the body was publicly exhibited, came young boys
in knickerbockers, and little girls and women by scores, horrified
but curious. They came even with baby carriages! Men made jokes: "A
dead nigger is a good nigger." And the purblind, dollars-and-cents
man, most despicable of all, was congratulating the public:
'"It'll save the
county a lot of money!"
Significant lessons, these,
for the young!
But the mob wasn't through
with its work. Easy people imagine that, having hanged a Negro, the
mob goes quietly about its business; but that is never the way of
the mob. Once released, the spirit of anarchy spreads
and spreads, not subsiding until it has accomplished its full measure
of evil.
(3) Ray Stannard Baker, American
Magazine, Following the Color Line (1908)
One of the points in which
I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is,
the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad
trains.
I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the
door of each car, I found the sign: "White people will seat from
front of car toward the back and colored people from toward front".
Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind.
As the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between
the white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities.
This very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships
in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just
where it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships,
because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source
of friction and bitterness.
The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor
- all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take
a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have
also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.
"We pay first-class fare," said one of the leading Negroes
in Atlanta, "exactly as the white man does, but we don't get
first-class service. I say it isn't fair."
Charles T. Hopkins, a leader in the Civic League and one of the prominent
lawyers of the city, told me that he believed the Negroes should be
given their definite seats in every car; he said that he personally
made it a practice to stand up rather than to take any one of the
four back seats, which he considered as belonging to the Negroes.
(4)
Ray Stannard Baker, American
Magazine, Following the Color Line (1908)
A few years ago no hotel or
restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now several hotels, restaurants,
and especially confectionary stores, will not serve Negroes, even
the best of them. The discrimination is not made openly, but a Negro
who goes to such places is informed that there are no accommodations,
or he is overlooked and otherwise slighted, so that he does not come
again. A strong prejudice exists against renting flats and houses
in many white neighbourhoods to coloured people. The Negro in Boston,
as in other cities, is building up "quarters," which he
occupies to the increasing exclusion of other classes of people.
(5)
Ray Stannard Baker, American
Magazine, Following the Color Line (1908)
In the sixteen years from
1984 to 1900 the number of persons lynched in the United States was
2,516. Of these 2,080 were in the Southern states and 436 in the North;
1,678 were Negroes and 801 were white men; 2,465 were men and 51 were
women. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia - the black belt
states - are thus seen to have the worst records.
Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later
to the question of rape. Ask any high-class citizen - the very highest
- if he believes in lynching, and he will tell you roundly, "No".
Ask him about lynching for rape, and in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred he will instantly weaken.
Lynching, he says, is absolutely necessary to keep down this crime.
You ask him why the law cannot be depended upon, and he replies: "It
is too great an ordeal for the self-respecting white woman to go into
court and accuse the Negro ravisher and withstand a public cross-examination.
It is intolerable. No woman will do it. And, besides, the courts are
uncertain. Lynching is the only remedy."
If the white man sets an example of non-obedience
to law, of non-enforcement of law, and an example of non-obedience
to law, of non-enforcement of law, and of unequal justice, what can
be expected of the Negro? A criminal father is a poor preacher of
homilies to a wayward son. The Negro sees a man, white or black, commit
murder and go free, over and over again in all these lynching counties.
Why should he fear to murder?
(6)
Ray Stannard Baker, American
Magazine, Following the Color Line (1908)
Nothing has been more remarkable
in the recent history of the Negro than Washington's rise to influence
as a leader, and the spread of his ideals of education and progress.
It is noteworthy that he was born in the South, a slave, that he knew
intimately the common struggling life of the people and the attitude
of the white race toward them. The central idea of his doctrine is
work. He teaches that if the Negro wins by real worth a strong economic
position in the country, other rights and privileges will come to
him naturally. He should get his rights, not by gift of the white
man, but by earning them himself.
Whenever I found a prosperous Negro enterprise, a thriving business
place, a good home, there I was almost sure to find Booker T. Washington's
picture over the fireplace or a little framed motto expressing his
gospel of work and service. Many highly educated Negroes, especially,
in the North, dislike him and oppose him, but he has brought new hope
and given new courage to the masses of his race. He has given them
a working plan of life. And is there a higher test of usefulness?
Measured by any standard, white or black, Washington must be regarded
today as one of the great men of this country: and in the future he
will be so honored.
(7)
Ray Stannard Baker, American
Magazine, Following the Color Line (1908)
Dr. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts
of a family that had no history that had no history of Southern slavery.
He has a large intermixture of white blood. Broadly educated at Harvard
and in the universities of Germany, he is today one of the most able
sociologists of this country.
His economic studies of the Negro made for the United States Government
and for the Atlanta University conference (which he organised) are
works of sound scholarship and furnish the student with the best single
source of accurate information regarding the Negro at present obtainable
in this country. And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner
life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The
Souls of Black Folk.
Dr. Du Bois has the temperament of the scholar and idealist - critical,
sensitive, humorous, impatient, often covering its deep feeling with
sarcasm and cynicism. "What shall the Negro do about discrimination?"
his answer was the exact reverse of Washington's: it was the voice
of Massachusetts: "Do not submit! agitate, object, fight."
(8)
Ray Stannard Baker, comments on Theodore
Roosevelt (1910)
In the beginning I thought,
and still think, he did great good in giving support and encouragement
to this movement. But I did not believe then, and have never believed
since, that these ills can be settled by partisan political methods.
They are moral and economic questions. Latterly I believe Roosevelt
did a dis-service to the country in seizing upon a movement that ought
to have been built up slowly and solidly from the bottom with much
solid thought and experimentation, and hitching it to the cart of
his own political ambitions. He thus short-circuited a fine and vigorous
current of aroused public opinion into a futile partisan movement.
(9)
Ray Stannard Baker, Lawrence Textile Strike,
American Magazine (May, 1912)
It is not short of amazing,
the power of a great idea to weld men together. There was in it a
peculiar, intense, vital spirit if you will, that I have never felt
before in any strike. At first everyone predicted that it would be
impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from
the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively
few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted
with little violence.
(10)
Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography
(1931)
Ray Stannard Baker came to
Chicago, and with my references for a start and my idea for a title,
wrote a stirring article, Capital and Labour Get Together.
While I had been reporting political corruption, Ray Stannard Baker
had been describing the corruption of labor unions by contractors
in the building business, and Miss Ida M. Tarbell had been writing
the history of the Standard Oil Company.
Available from Amazon Books
