Ray Stannard Baker to Cary T. Grayson
Title
Ray Stannard Baker to Cary T. Grayson
Creator
Baker, Ray Stannard, 1870-1946
Identifier
WWP15999
Date
1919 October 18
Description
Ray Stannard Baker writes to Cary T. Grayson about President Wilson’s health and public image and his attempts at writing articles to accurately represent Woodrow Wilson.
Source
Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Staunton, Virginia
Language
English
Text
My dear Admiral
Through these strenuous and anxious days I have been on the point of writing you many times. But I knew that you would be overwhelmed with work and worry--for your task has been one of unparalleled responsibility. I tell you I felt for you these days! And I had full confidence, too, that you’d come through with your flag up!
I wish the President could know, too, how my heart has gone out to him these days. The way he has been hounded and misrepresented makes one’s blood boil. I’ve written a series of articles--which I wish I could have done sooner—about his real task and how he met it in Paris, and they will begin next week in a very large syndicate of newspapers, both here and in Canada and Europe. They are even being cabled to La Prensa, in South America. I’m making them as strong as a loyal friend can do and perhaps putting in some details that the President might shrink from using himself. But the trouble is that the President is constitutionally unable to dramatize his own great work. He never sees himself as a great figure (you remember how Roosevelt was always seeing himself standing up, side by side with Washington and Lincoln--and if anything a little taller than either!) and therefore cannot tell about it. He can make people think: he can win them to high aspirations better than any man of his time, but he has no faculty at all of making people see events in which he has had a part or the men who have been factors for or against him. And so I am going to tell in these articles, as nearly as I can, how the President met the great crises of the Conference., And I am going to keep at it until there is a better understanding of what happened over there.
I wish I had been able to do this before but after I got back here the bottom seemed to drop right out of me physically. I never realized until after it was over, the strain under which I had worked at Paris (work of a kind wholly unfamiliar to me) and though I planned and indeed placed a series of syndicate articles and some papers for the Atlantic Monthly (which the editor was rash enough to announce!) I was not able to do them. I did however make quite a number of speeches, wrote some short articles supporting the Treaty and the League, and also an explanation of the Shantung Settlement which you may have seen in the Times.
I am all right again now and am going ahead, and one of these days when the worst of your task is over I am going to drop in on you at Washington.
With very best regards,
Sincerely yours,
Ray Stannard Baker
Through these strenuous and anxious days I have been on the point of writing you many times. But I knew that you would be overwhelmed with work and worry--for your task has been one of unparalleled responsibility. I tell you I felt for you these days! And I had full confidence, too, that you’d come through with your flag up!
I wish the President could know, too, how my heart has gone out to him these days. The way he has been hounded and misrepresented makes one’s blood boil. I’ve written a series of articles--which I wish I could have done sooner—about his real task and how he met it in Paris, and they will begin next week in a very large syndicate of newspapers, both here and in Canada and Europe. They are even being cabled to La Prensa, in South America. I’m making them as strong as a loyal friend can do and perhaps putting in some details that the President might shrink from using himself. But the trouble is that the President is constitutionally unable to dramatize his own great work. He never sees himself as a great figure (you remember how Roosevelt was always seeing himself standing up, side by side with Washington and Lincoln--and if anything a little taller than either!) and therefore cannot tell about it. He can make people think: he can win them to high aspirations better than any man of his time, but he has no faculty at all of making people see events in which he has had a part or the men who have been factors for or against him. And so I am going to tell in these articles, as nearly as I can, how the President met the great crises of the Conference., And I am going to keep at it until there is a better understanding of what happened over there.
I wish I had been able to do this before but after I got back here the bottom seemed to drop right out of me physically. I never realized until after it was over, the strain under which I had worked at Paris (work of a kind wholly unfamiliar to me) and though I planned and indeed placed a series of syndicate articles and some papers for the Atlantic Monthly (which the editor was rash enough to announce!) I was not able to do them. I did however make quite a number of speeches, wrote some short articles supporting the Treaty and the League, and also an explanation of the Shantung Settlement which you may have seen in the Times.
I am all right again now and am going ahead, and one of these days when the worst of your task is over I am going to drop in on you at Washington.
With very best regards,
Sincerely yours,
Ray Stannard Baker
Original Format
Letter
To
Grayson, Cary T. (Cary Travers), 1878-1938
Files
Collection
Citation
Baker, Ray Stannard, 1870-1946, “Ray Stannard Baker to Cary T. Grayson,” 1919 October 18, WWP15999, Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum, Staunton, Virginia.