Newton D. Baker's Measure

Newton D. Baker's Measure

Creel, George Edward, 1876-1953

WWP16963

No date

George Creel writes, in this reprinted article, of Newton D. Baker’s motives in not seeking the presidential nomination.

Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Staunton, Virginia

English

Reprinted from Collier’s Weekly,by the Author.

_____________________________
HARD-BOILED politicians of the “Oh, yeah” school may have an idea that Newton D. Baker’s refusal to be considered as a Presidential candidate is nothing more than premeditated coyness, but evidence in support of his sincerity is already piled high and keeps piling.

It is an open secret, for instance, that he could have had the Ohio delegation for the taking, yet he vetoed the suggestion firmly and finally, and when various Southern leaders offered to put their states behind his candidacy, the answer was a flat rejection. It is equally a fact that certain Democratic powers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and North Carolina promised a winning fight for delegations if he would only permit the use of his name, and again Mr. Baker rejected the proposals. In much the same manner he has sat down on the seething enthusiasm of theAmerican Legion , a body virtually a unit in whole-hearted regard for their war-time boss.

Even without these proofs of disinclination, there is still ample reason to credit Mr. Baker with absolute honesty when he insists that he is not seeking the Democratic nomination and does not want it. Out of a life that now measures sixty years, he has spent a score in public service, and the record shows that there was never an office he did not try to escape. At no point has he ever spared effort to remain a highly private citizen, surrendering only when faced by what seemed an imperative call to public duty.

The Joys of Private Life

A variety of causes are back of this unique attitude. First of all, he holds to an old-fashioned belief that the office should seek the man. In the second place, he has a real and very active distaste for public life. His idea of a happy existence is to practice law by day and have the evenings free for his family, his books and his friends. No man was ever more in love with peaceful, ordered hours, or so free from the itch for acclaim. The limelight, instead of creating the usual grateful glow, induces a painful rash. Back in 1926, even as today, there was a movement to put him forward as a presidential candidate, and the following excerpt is from a letter that he wrote to Ralph Hayes, his former secretary:

“I have held public office often and long, and I cannot remember ever having even a momentary thrill of pleasure out of the glory and honor end of it, while I can remember long periods of anxious concern and distress, on Mrs. Baker’s part chiefly, which no amount of kudos could compensate for. The President is the loneliest and most defenseless prisoner in the world, and I doubt very much whether any President from Washington down to Coolidge ever spent as many happy hours in four years as I now habitually spend in each month that I practice law and grub potatoes. Nor do I imagine that my children would either be made happier or their paths in life made easier by my leaving them as a heritage the record of my having been President. On the contrary, sensible young people though they are, they might get puffed up, and puffed-up people are unpleasant and unhappy.”

Handicaps to Politics

Along with the feeling expressed in this letter, Newton Baker also has a curiously set conviction that he is unfitted for political life. He has no mane to fling back in moments of high oratory, his voice refuses to make the welkin ring and, while the friendliest soul in the world, a loathing of charlatanism makes it impossible for him to clap shoulders with the fulsomeness demanded by political custom.

Greatest handicap of all, he stands only a little over five feet, and even at sixty retains the slim boyishness that used to make doorkeepers question him suspiciously when he tried to get into auditoriums where he was billed to deliver the principal address. As a youngster this lack of stature bit into him, and the passing years brought small relief. He grew into manhood at a time when beef dominated America’s public life, no man who could be weighed on anything less than a hay scale daring to stand for office, and the conviction of his own inadequacy took enduring shape.

His father, a book-loving country doctor, encouraged this view, for doubtless due to four years in the Confederate Army, fighting under “Jeb” Stuart, he himself had an aversion to politics. Making his little son an inseparable companion, he took him with him on his rounds, and while Dr. Baker paid his calls, Newton dug deep into some classic that the two talked over as the old horse jogged along rural roads. When, therefore, he left Martinsburg, West Virginia, to practice law in Cleveland, his own taste for private life was reinforced by the pleasing thought that a political career was only for portly, wattled men.

Where he made his mistake was in coming under the eye of Tom Johnson. That dynamic Saul of Tarsus, converted from a career of mere moneymaking by Henry George, had been elected mayor in 1901, and was in full cry for three-cent car fare, municipal lighting, home rule, tax reform and other ideas designed to end the reign of Special Privilege. Johnson’s need was for idealistic youths that he could fire with his own enthusiasm, and before young Baker could protest he found himself neck-deep in the public service.

Elected city solicitor in 1903, he was forced to accept re-election in 1905 and 1907, and in 1909 was the only victorious candidate on his ticket. The press of official duties was heavy enough, for much of the incessant litigation against the reform program went as high as the Supreme Court, but there were also the tent meetings that figured as a feature of Tom Johnson’s tireless campaigns.

That rebellious iron molder, Peter Witt, had no peer when it came to “skinning a skunk,” and the mayor was unmatched in answering questions, but on “Newt” fell the task of putting issues before the audiences, for his was the gift of simple, telling phrase, driving straight to the point with never a wasted word nor an angry one. Disliking personalities, and concerned entirely with ideas, he could handle the most controversial subject with an effect of fairness and open-mindedness that proved singularly disarming.

In the opinion of competent judges, Newton Baker is the most forceful, persuasive and convincing speaker in American public life. Even in those early Cleveland years he had no need for notes, due to the orderly processes of his trained mind, and practice has developed this facility to the point of genius. No matter how important the address, he speaks without a line of writing before him, yet when he has finished, after half an hour or an hour, what he has said could be printed as literature without the change of a word. Added to amazing fluency and a rare choice of words there is the deeper appeal of sincerity, for he never talks except when he has something to say, and says nothing that he does not believe with all his soul.

No Rest for the Competent

At the end of his fourth term in 1911, the unhappy city solicitor counted confidently on a return to private life, but to his dismay the Democrats drafted him as their mayoralty candidate, and surprise was added to dismay when the people elected him by the greatest majority in the city’s history. He was re-elected in 1913, and could easily have had a third term, but helpful circumstances enabled him to give the petitioners a flat and heartfelt refusal. The three-cent fare was in effect, a municipal lighting plant in successful operation, likewise a new charter based on Home Rule principles, and the city’s right to rich lake-front lands had been vindicated. The reforms for which he had enlisted were accomplished, and he claimed the privilege of returning to his abandoned law practice, his family, his books and the somewhat important business of making a living.

Before he had finished furnishing his office, however, there came a telegram from President Wilson asking the ex-mayor to take the post left vacant by the resignation of Secretary of War Garrison. It was by no means a shot in the dark, as many supposed, for back of the request was a friendship of years. As a student at Johns Hopkins, Mr. Baker sat at the feet of Professor Wilson, and as a delegate to the Baltimore convention of 1912 he waged a successful fight to release Ohio from the unit rule, carrying its delegation’s votes to Woodrow Wilson.

Moreover, it was not the first offer of a Cabinet post, for back in 1913 Mr. Wilson had asked his former pupil to take a place in the official family as Secretary of the Interior. Mr. Baker, thankfully enough, had been able to refuse on the ground that he could not possibly leave his Cleveland fight, but now he had no such excuse, and the President pressed acceptance as a matter of public duty.

From his home town, where people knew him, came a chorus of praise, Republicans joining with Democrats in declaring that the President had made a splendid choice, but all of it was a whisper compared to the roar of disapproval that went up from the rest of the country. Baker ’s pacifist views were unearthed and paraded and, by way of helping the hue and cry along, the Washington correspondents looked him over and decided that he was both unfit and a misfit. At no point did he meet their conception of a forceful executive, for he never raised his voice, carefully abstained from pounding the desk and—crime of crimes—at some point in the first interview mentioned his garden and confessed to a love of flowers.

There is now a definite disposition to do Mr. Baker some measure of justice, largely inspired by generous and authoritative voices, for not only have General Pershing and General Dawes paid him splendid tributes, but General James G. Harbord, another staunch Republican, is on record with this statement: “My considered judgment is that Newton D. Baker was the greatest Secretary of War in war that our history has yet produced.” Not once, however, during his Washington years was there a word of praise to lighten the load he bore, a storm of abuse and ridicule beating down upon him from the first.

He took office at the very moment of Villa’s murderous raid, and the manner in which he handled that trying situation would have been illuminating had there been any honest interest in the real character of the man. Border security, not war, was his object, and in spite of chauvinism at home and Mexico’s ugly attitude, he drove straight to his goal. This done, he turned to the task at hand and made the swift yet searching survey that is always Newton Baker’s approach to every problem.

“I never saw such a man for going to the heart of things,” a lawyer said to me while in Cleveland. “I was associated with Baker in a case for the Federal Reserve, one that vitally concerned its functions and powers, and what do you think he did? Read every damned decision of the Supreme Court in banking cases from the time of the court’s creation.”

A pacifist with all the strength of his being, this pacifism had in it no note of non-resistance. As he told the newspaper men on taking office, “I am so much for peace that I am willing to fight for it.” With Europe in flames, and an increasing disregard of the rights of neutrals by belligerents, his logical mind recognized the necessity for measures of sane preparedness, and by early April he handed President Wilson a memorandum that not only outlined a broad policy but set it down in painstaking detail. Its three fundamentals were concerned with the adequate training, adequate officering and speedy mobilization of the Army, improvement in Navy equipment and personnel and an organization of the industrial, commercial, financial and social resources of the nation.

Out of the last suggestion came the formation of the Council of National Defense, but the big idea of the memorandum, unhappily, went unheeded. What Mr. Baker had the vision to urge was government control of necessary industrial plants in event of war, the owners receiving only a continuance of normal dividends—a plan that would have made profiteering impossible.

Tom Johnson, writing before his death, testified that “Newton Baker, while the youngest of our Cabinet, was the head and chief adviser.” The forcefulness and farsightedness that won this tribute were put to work at once in Washington, but hidden under the same air of calmness and mildness. Cutting red tape with unsparing hand, and putting the best man in every key position, he tightened the ramshackle War Department into a compact, smooth-running machine, yet all so quietly that few realized the sweeping nature of the changes.

Short Cuts to Efficiency

The full test of his courage, however, came when Congress adjourned on March 4, 1917, without passing either the Deficiency bill or the Army Appropriation bill. As a matter of fact, the billions needed for preparation were not authorized until June 15, and even then the money did not become available until July 1. For a full month before the declaration of war, and for two months after the declaration, the War Department was entirely without funds.

To meet an unprecedented situation Mr. Baker took unprecedented action. Men who had furnished supplies for the mobilization of the National Guard on the Mexican border were saved from bankruptcy by bold and utterly illegal expedients, and the Quartermaster General was ordered to go ahead with his purchases as though the money was in hand. As early as April, contracts were let for thirteen training camps for officers, and in May he authorized the commencement of work on the thirty-two cantonments, an $800,000,000 undertaking.

“But, Mr. Secretary,” protested department heads, all green about the gills, “there’s a penalty of fine and imprisonment for—”

“I assume full responsibility,” he said, and turned away to order the expenditure of more millions.

A Militant “Pacifist”

The amazing feature of it all was not so much the courage of the man as his persuasiveness, for the hard-headed industrialists who accepted his contracts were entirely without assurance, other than his word, that their bills would ever be honored. Honored they were, however, for when the unperturbed Secretary faced a somewhat indignant Congress, representatives and senators were made to see that his “usurpations” had saved months of precious time.

At very point the “pacifist” gave America’s military effort a drive that recognized no obstacle, and all without once lifting his voice, pounding a desk or abating one jot of his incredible placidity. It was his mind that conceived the Selective Service Act, holding to it without recession in the face of joint attack by those who wanted the volunteer system, and those who advocated downright conscription. It was Baker who selected Pershing, and Baker who swept aside the contention that we should content ourselves with merely sending men across the water to serve in the French and British armies. The order that he laid down for General Pershing ’s direction was that “the forces of the United States must at all times be considered a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.”

Marshal Joffre, like the Germans, never counted on an American army of any size, while ex-President Roosevelt bitterly attacked the Department of War for not “straining every energy” to send over 500,000 men in 1918, “or any part of 500,000 men which we could ship.” What quiet Mr. Baker did was to ship 2,000,000 men to France in 1918, four times the Roosevelt estimate. Quite an achievement for one who, to quote his own whimsical confession to President Wilson, had never even played with lead soldiers as a boy.

The Maximum of Efficiency

The Secretary of War was about the only high Washington official who did not go in for golf or throwing a medicine ball before breakfast, but by general agreement he was rated as representing the maximum of human efficiency. His day began at eight o’clock in the morning and ended at midnight, and his Sundays were usually given to the study of the progress charts handed to him every week-end. Vast as was the mighty war machine under his control, there were no details that he did not watch.

Hard-bitten Enoch Crowder, Judge Advocate General, gruffly admitted that the Secretary knew as much about army law as he did himself. General March, Chief of Staff, bore testimony to Mr. Baker’s amazing grasp of military matters, and captains of industry barging into his office rather contemptuously invariably came out with slack jaws and goggling eyes. No less personages than Henry P. Davison and John D. Ryan confessed that some of their best ideas fell to pieces under Mr. Baker’s critical analysis, Mr. Ryan ruefully admitting after one such interview, “That’s the worst licking I ever had.”

His principal asset, of course, was a mind that had the drive and precision of a high-geared machine. Out in Cleveland they love to tell a story about Newton Baker that dates back to the time when the city took over the private street-car companies under a lease. The contract was necessarily complicated, and eminent attorneys each took a whack at it, only to bog down before they had gone far. At last Tom Johnson, squirming impatiently in his chair, turned to the quiet, unassuming city solicitor and said, “Oh, hell, Newt, go on and tell ’em how to do it.” And Newt did, brushing aside everything that had been attempted, dictating from start to finish without a pause, and turning out a document that was never altered in any particular.

Washington was given a taste of this quality in that black month of January, 1918, when the Secretary of War went before the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, demanding the right to answer the wholesale charges of failure that bade fair to break down America’s morale. For a full day he occupied the stand, and without a note, without once referring to a chart or tabulation, he recited the War Department’s record from the first, never halting for a fact or figure although he dealt in billions of dollars and millions of men. It was not only an intellectual feat that stirred even bitter partisans to admiration, but his proof of tremendous achievement was crushing in its conclusiveness. What critics claimed had been left undone was shown to have been done months before, far beyond expectation.

Another one of Newton Baker’s assets, never more conspicuously displayed than during the war years, is an utter absence of vanity. It is the job he thinks about, not what people think about him, and as a result of this absolute unconcern he wastes neither time nor energy in replying to the malignancies that make public life so much a mud bath. In the first Washington days, before those around him had come to a very genuine admiration of Baker’s rare ability, many of the War Department’s dollar-a-year men joined in the daily business of sneering and jeering at their chief, a patent disloyalty that angered his friends no little.

“Kick ’em out,” we urged, citing notorious instances of ugly backbiting, but our answer was a stare of amaze.

“What for?” he asked. “They’re doing their jobs, aren’t they? And I can’t possibly conceive that being forced to like me is any part of their duty.”

Passing the Buck to Baker

As a matter of truth, he always seemed to feel that it was a stroke of luck when attack centered on him rather than on any of his subordinates, actually rejoicing in the role of scapegoat and regarding it as a privilege to be the buffer between public irritation and department heads burdened by heavy duties.

At the time when he was being assailed on every hand for keeping Leonard Wood at home, associates insisted that he let people know that General Wood was in the United States because General Pershing did not want him in France.

“Certainly not,” replied the Secretary. “At all costs the commander in the field must be guarded against the hurt of controversy.”

There was also the regrettable occasion when Franklin Lane, unwittingly enough, entered into a price-fixing arrangement with the coal operators. Mr. Wilson, coming to examine the figures, felt that they were far too high, and made up his mind to set the agreement aside, whereupon Secretary Baker, called in for consultation, pointed out the tumult that would ensue if theChief Executive rebuked and overruled a member of his Cabinet.

“Let me do it,” he urged. “As chairman of the Council of National Defense, such action is within my power.” And do it he did, accepting weeks of vicious railing without a murmur. As a matter of truth, his habit of bearing derision, falsehood and abuse without seeming to turn a hair led to a somewhat general belief that he did not feel attack. I had that idea myself until an evening when he let his mask fall.

“Not mind it?” he said. “Why, if I took out my heart you’d find it covered with heelprints.”

It is a very definite philosophy of life, together with an absolute lack of personal vanity, that makes for his well-nigh incredible serenity of temper. No man has deeper convictions or feels more strongly, but never has he allowed himself the luxury of storming or raging.

“Calling a man a liar,” he argues, “proves nothing, and only adds to the difficulties of agreement. There is also the downright poison that comes from irritations and angers. My self-control,” he laughed, “is what does away with the need of golf.”

Both in Cleveland and in Washington, the hour of successful achievement generally found him in the background, pushing forward his associates and beaming happily when he heard the cheers that greeted them.

An appearance of seeming to “promote” himself is about the only thing that ever shatters the profound Baker calm. When Frederick Palmer sat down to write America at War, he worried whether the Secretary should be referred to as Mr. Baker, plain Baker or Colonel Baker, and took the matter up with a friend. The friend in turn wrote Baker and received this answer:

“The ‘Mister’ problem is quite too much for me. When a man earns the right to be called ‘Mister,’ and later earns the right to have that appellation dropped, I cannot say. I have but two feelings in the matter. For heaven’s sake, tell Palmer not to call me Colonel, and second, if the dropping of the Mister has any subtle implication that I am among the immortals, please tell him to print the Mister in each instance in larger type.”

The modesty of the man, his capacity for self-effacement, never received better illustration than in his declination to accompany President Wilson to Paris as a member of the Peace Commission. With all his heart he wanted to go, for the task was one that fitted his tastes and his abilities, but as he looked about him and saw the vast drudgery of demobilization, he shook his head. “It seems best,” he said, “to stay here and clean up the job.”

And stay he did, right up to March 4, 1921, working even harder than in the war years, for in addition to the crushing detail, there were the countless investigations meanly designed to tarnish the glory of the great achievement. To sustain the charges of wholesale corruption hurled by partisans, more than fifty separate probes were instituted, and upward of $3,000,000 spent in the employment of extra legal aid for the prosecution and imprisonment of “thieves and plunderers.” Serenely as always, Mr. Baker faced inquisition after inquisition, and what had been confidently planned as his ruin resulted in overwhelming vindication.

America’s war expenditures were at a rate of $1,500,000 an hour, yet after some six years of ceaseless effort to uncover fraud and theft, the outcome was two convictions and two pleas of guilty. A man in Texas stole an old truck valued at $2,400; another accepted a “commission” for approving an order for skid chains; a third pilfered enough government property to warrant a fine of $100, and a fourth was found guilty of falsehood in applying for a passport. Scores of other indictments, given noisy publicity at the time of their return, were dismissed quietly, almost secretly, only James Cameron, director of Investigators and Accounts for the Department of Justice, having the decency to admit that “it was unfortunate so many charges of fraud were given circulation involving reputable men.”

A Semi-Private Citizen

The happiest day of Newton Baker’s life was when he finished his term, turned his back on the last inquisitor and left Washington for a little rented apartment in Cleveland. He was virtually penniless, to be sure, after twenty years in office, and at fifty he faced the prospect of beginning a new professional career, but he had for consolaand that now, at last, he would be able to order his days along the lines of his youthful desire.

As it happens, things have not turned out exactly in accordance with his wish. He has had time for the law, of course, building up a large and profitable practice, but the people of Cleveland, out of their pride and trust in him, make many demands. There was the year that he had to serve as president of the Chamber of Commerce, and while he has since managed to escape such sentences, he is not able, nor is it his wish, to win free from the countless requests for speeches. No public question arises that Newt isn’t asked to give his views, and as a consequence he is on record with respect to every vital issue before the country today.

As early as 1926 he made the prophecy that it was only a question of time when Germany would refuse further reparations payments, and that the world might as well quit worrying and nagging and face the inevitable. As for war debts, he thinks it perfectly plain that as European nations cannot pay in money, and are kept from paying in goods by our tariff barrier, common intelligence indicates some quick and permanent settlement based upon the realities of the situation. The one-year moratorium, in his opinion, was an aggravation rather than an abatement, postponement merely continuing the paralysis of international credit.

Many people imagine that his share in the Wickersham Report, when he came out flatly in favor of the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, was his first declaration on the liquor question. As a matter of fact, he made the following statement in 1928:

“I am not and never have been a prohibitionist. I thought the Eighteenth Amendment wrong at the time it was passed, and still think it wrong. My reasons for this are two. In the first place, I do not believe the Constitution of the United States is the place to legislate. That document ought to declare great principles and donate power to Congress as the legislative branch, leaving the power flexible so that legislation under it could be progressively responsive to an enlightening public opinion.

The Death of Temperance

“In the second place, the studies of a lifetime have convinced me that, while there may be some ethical gains from legislation, the major ethical gains of life are from self-discipline, and I, therefore, have been deeply grieved to see the habit of temperance, which was growing among us in response to our increased intellectual and moral growth, cast to the winds in an attempt to secure by arbitrary prohibition what at best is reluctant and resentful obedience to a law.

“Certainly something must be done to relieve us of the present tragic conditions in which the most self-respecting, educated and cultured part of our community is in open rebellion against a law of the United States, and is lending its countenance by trafficking with bootleggers to the building up of a new class of criminals and to a growing anarchy of disregard for all law.”

He is still a pacifist, or, rather, more of one than ever, facing the American Legion with this statement of belief: “I am a pacifist in my hope; I am a pacifist in my prayers; I am a pacifist in my belief that God made man for better things than that civilization should always be under the blight of war’s increasingly deadly destruction.” As he proved in Washington, however, in his pacifism there is no room for non-resistance. “Peace,” he says, “will not come merely by wishing for it. We must work for it. We must even be willing to fight for it.” So today, as in 1916, he regards sane preparedness as wise and necessary for the protection of a people’s liberties.

For years a story has been going the rounds that Mr. Baker was rigidly committed to the League of Nations by reason of a deathbed promise made to Woodrow Wilson. It is a tale absolutely without truth. Newspaper headlines to the contrary, ever since the defeat of John Davis in 1924 he has had the conviction that America’s entrance into the League of Nations was no longer in the field of practical political consideration. His statement of January 27th of this year was in no sense designed to remove a stumbling-block in the way of his candidacy, as some said, but an honest correction of misstatements concerning his true position. If, by his own fiat, he could take the United States into the League today, he would not do so, believing that it would be a criminal mistake until there is an informed and convinced majority sentiment back of the action.

As an advocate of world disarmament and world peace, he is, to be sure, in favor of the highest possible degree of international concert. Aside from these two tremendous idealisms, he holds that the economic reconstruction of the world can only be brought about by international cooperation. A way must be found to tear down the high tariff barriers, first erected by the United States and since put up by all other nations, either in imitation or retaliation. He views the world as interlocked and interdependent, and to him the idea of isolation is as ancient, absurd and outworn as flintlock rifles and the Pony Express.

Standing Up for Public Rights

As president of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, he braved the outcry of both capital and labor by a courageous insistence that the public had a paramount interest in industrial disputes, and that it was high time for the embattled forces to recognize this public interest. What he stood for was some fair form of collective bargaining that would “create an industrial relationship in which the primary right of organization on both sides will be recognized, and an atmosphere of cooperation in the public interest substituted for class war in disregard of the public interest.” Samuel Gompers debated the issue with him furiously, yet when the great labor leader buried his wife, it was Newton Baker whom he asked to say the last words.

Mr. Baker believes in public ownership of natural resources, and is particularly insistent with respect to water power. The manner of its utilization, whether by the public authority or lease to a private company, does not appeal to him as the vital matter. What he wants first of all is a clean-cut establishment of the principle, and then the application of the principle can be considered safely.

Coming to the present lamentable depression, Mr. Baker has spoken often and to the point. As he sees it, America tried to spend herself rich, and realized too late that it couldn’t be done. The cure, in his opinion, lies in getting down to brass tacks, and recognition that we must cut with regard to our cloth. The nation, the states, the cities and individuals have all got to go in for a balanced budget. Income must be coaxed up, but most important of all, outgo must be pared down. Legislation offers no short cut to prosperity. As firmly as Governor Ritchie he believes in the decentralization of government.

Some prophets may be without honor in their own country, but it’s not that way with Newton Baker. Cleveland esteems him as her First Citizen, holds him in affection as well as admiration, and mournfully regrets his refusal to enter the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination, fully convinced that he’s the best man for the place. The radicals think that maybe Newt is a bit too conservative, and the conservatives feel that maybe Newt is a bit too radical, but all agree that he has truth, strength, steadfastness and administrative genius of the highest order.

“One of the few really first-class minds in the country today,” says Colonel Leonard Ayres, and the lean, hard-boiled statistician actually takes on a faint glow of enthusiasm as he talks of Mr. Baker. “During the war,” he continued, “I used to hand him a sixty-page report of War Department progress every Saturday night, and then I sweated all day Sunday over my own work so as to match him for quick and accurate knowledge on Monday morning. It’s not only that he has a passion for facts. Any fool can have that. Newton Baker also has the intellect to find facts, retain them and relate them. What with his brains, his courage, his perfect balance, his single-minded regard for the public good, he has every quality demanded of the great administrator.”

Those closest to Newton Baker have no doubt of his sincerity when he says that he is not a candidate and does not wish to be considered as a candidate. This regret, however, is not unleavened by hope, for they know that if the nomination does come to him, unsolicited and without stimulation, he will take it. Not the least of his deep convictions is that the people’s service is above private and personal considerations, and at various times in the course of his adult life he has said firmly, if somewhat sadly, that no citizen worthy of the name has the right to evade the call of public duty.