 Welcome to the November 6th history bites lunchtime lecture hosted by the Amherst history society. And the saying is that journalism is the first draft of history and I think we've been getting enough of the first draft in the last week to last us a while. But we are happy today to hear about a journalist who wrote 100 years ago. Mr Ray Stannard Baker was a writer who lived in Amherst from 1910 until his death in 1946. He was known as America's number one newspaper man. He was friends with Ida Tarbell. He was known first of all as a luck raking journalist who run who want who was one of the first writers to address America's racial problems. And in fact I am now reading following the color line American Negro citizenship in the progressive era written in 1908. And I find it fascinating as he travels around the South and North talking with black people and white people about the racial situation. Enough of that plug though. While Baker was living in Amherst he wrote a multi volume biography of Woodrow Wilson that won the Pulitzer Prize. But he gained the most notoriety most renowned as the author of books by his alter ego David Grayson who celebrated the pleasures of country living and of every person's basic humanity. Mr Baker is buried in Wildwood Cemetery and incidentally his brother Hugh Potter Baker was president of Massachusetts State College which later became UMass from 1933 to 1947. So here to present to us on about Mr Baker is Nick Grabe who was the editor of the Amherst Bulletin for 19 years and then stepped down to become a writer about Amherst for the Bulletin and for the Daily Hampshire Gazette for another 13 years. In his retirement he was elected to the Charter Commission which proposed a new form of government for Amherst. I expect not everyone thanks you for that. He created a blog called A Better Amherst that was read by 5000 people and helped win voter approval for the new 13 member town council in 2018. Another piece of Amherst history we may have you back to talk about that. But today we're going to hear about Ray Standard Baker and David Grayson. Take it away Nick. Thank you George and thanks to all who have gathered here virtually today. Can everyone hear me. Okay. I was a journalist in Amherst for 32 years and then an elected official for a year and a half. And during that time I experienced a high level of stress. I dealt with that stress by cultivating a personal lifestyle that emphasized simplicity and self sufficiency. So it was only natural for me to be drawn to a journalist who lived in Amherst 100 years ago and also had a sojourn in public affairs but saw himself primarily as a farmer during the 36 years he lived here. His name was Ray Standard Baker and he was 40 years old when he moved to Amherst in 1910. He brought with him a reputation as a hard hitting journalist who wrote about labor struggles, the conduct of corporations and the exploitation of African Americans. But when Baker moved to Amherst he also brought with him a secret identity that was completely different and it became the most puzzling mystery in the American publishing world. I call him Amherst's greatest journalist. Eventually Baker's secret identity was revealed and by the 1920s his writing was popular all around the world. Much more well known than the poems of Emily Dickinson by the way. He lived in Amherst until his death in 1946 serving as a trustee of the Jones Library where he wrote a biography of Woodrow Wilson that won the Pulitzer Prize. Although fewer people know Baker's name now I think he still has something to teach us in this post-Trump world. Baker's secret identity was a winsome and articulate farmer philosopher who went by the name David Grayson. Books published under this pen name sold 2 million copies and were translated into French, Czech, Norwegian and even Braille. In 1926 a magazine advertisement for his books called Grayson America's Most Popular Philosopher. In a survey at Wellesley College in 1927 students named him one of their six favorite authors. Ray Standard Baker lived briefly on Amity Street and then for the remainder of his life at 118 Sunset Avenue now a fraternity house near the Gillan Farm. When it was revealed in 1916 that Baker had written the David Grayson books many people were amazed. The secret had been kept for 10 years. The muck raking magazine articles that Baker wrote under his real name seemed far removed from the pastoral musings that had become so popular. There are many curious aspects to Baker's David Grayson persona but let's back up a bit and look at his life before he became accidentally a best-selling author. Baker spent most of his childhood in a frontier settlement in Wisconsin where he got to know lumbermen, rogues and members of native tribes. He graduated from Michigan State and dabbled in real estate and studied the law before becoming a newspaper reporter in Chicago where he was often short of money and met poor and homeless residents in soup kitchens and on the streets. He wrote of the experience, my attitude was that of the frontier where I had grown up, bums, tramps. Why didn't they go out and hustle? Why didn't they quit Chicago? But his attitude shifted after he tried to help a young man find a job. Baker then worked for a monthly magazine called McClure's that is credited with starting the tradition of muck raking journalism. While Ida Tarbell was writing exposés in McClure's about John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Lincoln Steffens was exposing corruptions in municipal government, Baker was investigating the United States Steel Corporation. In 1894, Baker walked from Ohio to Washington D.C. with a group of jobless men known as Cox's Army during an economic depression. He covered the bloody Pullman railcar strike that year and the presidential campaign of 1896. Baker interviewed socialist presidential candidate U.D. Gene Debs, meatpacking tycoon G. Ogden Armour and inventor Thomas Edison. He was there with Marconi during the first transatlantic radio transmission. President Theodore Roosevelt praised Baker saying, You have impressed me with your earnest desire to be fair, with your freedom from hysteria and with your anxiety to tell the truth rather than write something that will be sensational. Roosevelt was less impressed when Baker started writing about political reform and race relations. Baker documented the exploitation of African Americans in Georgia who were often arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to work on for-profit chain gags. He became the first prominent white journalist to examine the racial divide in America. And George has already showed you the book following the color line. He was influenced by Souls of the Black Folk written five years earlier by W.E.B. Du Bois, another writer with ties to Massachusetts. Du Bois helped Baker arrange interviews with African Americans and collect photos and statistics and urged him to investigate what he called convict leasing in the South. Baker reported that the demand for cheap prison labor explains in some degree the very large number of criminals, especially Negroes in Georgia. Baker documented the injustices that African Americans were subjected to and their efforts to become educated, build businesses and careers and raise families. But Du Bois believed that Baker exaggerated African American crime and gave too little attention to voting rights. Bruce Watson of Leverett, who wrote a book on the bread and roses strike by immigrant workers at a textile mill in Lawrence Mass in 1912, tells me that Baker did some of the best reporting on this labor struggle. Baker wrote, It was the first strike I ever saw which sang, I shall not soon forget the curious lift, the strange sudden fire of the mingled nationalities at the strike meetings when they broke into the universal language of song. And not only at the meetings did they sing but in the soup houses and in the streets. Baker's invention of David Grayson happened almost by accident. In 1906, four years before he moved to Amherst, Baker was the associate editor of the American magazine. One day, the editors were sitting around and panicking over what would fill the next issue, a scene I can relate to from my 19 years as editor of the Amherst bulletin. A desperate cry went out to writers for whatever they could contribute. Baker had been writing his private thoughts and experiences in notebooks for many years, never planning to publish them, and he answered the call. He transformed these sketches into personal essays and invented the pseudonym David Grayson, because it seemed like a homely name that suited the subject matter. He didn't use his real name because he didn't want to confuse readers of his hard hitting articles. The first David Grayson essay was called The Burden of the Valley of Vision. To his surprise, the fictional David Grayson became a celebrity and Baker admitted later that he was just a little jealous of his alter ego. I certainly felt that the articles I was writing under my own name were of far greater importance than the David Grayson sketches, he wrote much later. I felt like I was reforming the world. Some of David Grayson essays were collected in a book called Adventures in Contentment in 1907. The later David Grayson books included titles like Adventures in Friendship, Adventures in Solitude, and Adventures in Understanding. There were eight in all. David Grayson portrayed himself as a well-raided red man who has left the city to live on a farm. He likes to walk around visiting people and meeting strangers, preaching a gospel of kindness, hospitality, and trustworthiness. He patiently observes the ways of his rural neighbors with amused detachment and shows deep respect for the humblest of citizens. Someone wrote, a fence was for David Grayson not so much a barrier as a rustic podium with an earnest advocate on either side. The homespun stories that made up the David Grayson books were a mixture of essay, philosophy, and quiet humor. They frequently quoted the Bible, Shakespeare, and Marcus Aurelius. The stories had a straightforward colloquial style and resonated deeply with people going through the challenges of industrialization and urbanization in the early part of the 20th century. One reviewer wrote, Those who read Grayson with sympathy and enlightenment are strangely conscious that here is a loyal, familiar, and well-approved friend. Here is a man who has thought our thoughts for us and who has given the soul of those thoughts their appropriate body in words. Baker himself wrote that the David Grayson stories helped make people understand and enjoy their lives a little more deeply and fully by presenting the beauty of neighborliness, the richness of the quiet life, and the charm of common things. I'm going to read a few passages from Adventures in Contentment now. One morning, I wakened with a strange new joy in my soul. It came to me at that moment with an indescribable poignancy, the thought of walking barefoot in cool, fresh, plow froze as I had once done as a boy. I make this confession in answer to the inner and truthful demand of the soul that we are not, after all, the slaves of things, whether corn or banknotes or spindles, that we are not used but the users, that life is more than profit and loss. So I went back to my work thinking how many fine people there are in the world if you scratch them deep enough. There is nothing strange about great men. They're like us only deeper, higher, broader. They think as we do but with more intensity. They suffer as we do more keenly. They love as we do more tenderly. Thousands of people all over the world wrote to David Grayson to express how much his books meant to them. 4,700 of these letters are preserved in the Special Collections Department of the Jones Library, and I have spent many happy hours reading them. In one, George Baldwin of Springfield wrote, To bring quietness to the heart in these days of storm, hopefulness in the heart of discouragement, sane practical wisdom into the fog of madness, and to do these with the sunniest, sweetest, most delicate humor, why what could a man want more? The letters to David Grayson show how many people yearn for someone to express a faith in our common humanity. A woman named Ethel Bradley wrote, Yours was a new gospel of life to us, urging beauty, simplicity, and the commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest things that come nearest happiness. One correspondent wrote, Permit me a humble clerk to express my appreciation and thankfulness and tell you what an inspiration such writing is. Dan O'Brien wrote from Shanghai, where he was stationed on an American ship, writing, You have made me forget for a time that I was in a place where dreamers are not wanted. G. W. Elderkin of Pasadena wanted to know if the writer of the David Grayson books was a regular churchgoer. He was not. Elderkin wrote, He comes nearer to being a real Christian than anyone I know. The president of the Mormon Church bought 400 copies of the first David Grayson book and gave them to all the members of the Tabernacle Choir. Someone wrote this to Grayson after reading his country tales. There came to me in a crowded subway. A vision of clear skies and broad green acres. A sense of the joy of possessing a bit of Mother Earth. A feeling of kinship with a soul that had cut loose and sought, nature's healing. A man who had become disfigured as a soldier in World War One. Wrote of the first David Grayson book. It is my greatest friend. I owe everything to this book, for it gave me a peace of mind when the bitterness of despair was still in my heart. I'm going to read a few other sentences from this book. Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought or emotion or sentiment. As well try to eat beauty, for happiness must be tricked. She loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifice. This morning I went to church. I usually have some excuse for not going. But this morning, I had them out one by one and they were all together so shabby I decided not to use them. But he also wrote, Now I say that if a man has to be scared into religion, his religion ain't much good. In old neighborhoods, and especially farm neighborhoods, people come to know one another, not close knowledge or money knowledge, but that sort of knowledge which reaches down into the hidden springs of human character. Many readers asked for Grayson's address or his photo or invited him to visit. I should be much obliged if you would send me Mr. Grayson's address, one man wrote the publisher. I have had much pleasure from his adventures and wish to make an anonymous remittance on his account in the form of choice rose bushes. An Arizona man wrote, Anytime you come out this way, please drop off the trail and stop at my camp. Many of the letters came from nostalgic elderly people, students, men who risked missed rural life, and also women with romantic fantasies. Many were addressed to David or dear friend. Dorothy Verral of Illinois wrote, I wish if you are ever in Chicago that you would let me talk with you. David Grayson clubs sprang up, and their members were known as Graysonians. One club in Florida wrote, A true Graysonian will stop and retrace his steps to help an unknown brother find a loose bolt, lost bolt, and then drive out of his way to take this unknown brother home. He will give a hearty handshake when introduced to a stranger, a smile into the face of the sorrowing one with a smile of sympathy and understanding. But not everyone liked the David Grayson books. The misanthropic H. L. Menken wrote, Mr. Grayson's sentimentality often descends to the maudlin. I fail to respond to his enthusiasm for yokels, a heartful forgetfulness that the country is dull, dirty, and uncomfortable, and that countrymen are stupid and rascally. The publishers of the David Grayson essays and books responded to all the letters, but did not reveal the writer's true identity. They said that the Grayson stories are partly fiction and partly fact, and that the writer lives on a small New England farm, and as a letter writer, he is quite hopeless. But the longer that David Grayson's identity remained a mystery, the more rumors spread and pressure built for a disclosure. You are doing readers a flagrant injustice unless you tell them who David Grayson is, wrote Dorothy Seward of Nebraska. We can't wait another year to find out. Some of us will explode. W. H. G. Temple of Seattle wrote simply to Grayson, Are you real or imaginary? There were at least six David Grayson imposters, one of whom convinced a woman to marry him by telling her that he was the famous author. It was an early form of identity theft. In Denver, detectives and newspaper men cornered a man who was giving lectures claiming to be David Grayson and read him a telegram from the real publishers disavowing his claim. Other people, including a main writer named David Gray and an Atlanta attorney actually named David Grayson, announced publicly that they were not the writers of the wholesome stories. Other writers who were suspected of writing the David Grayson stories issued statements saying that they weren't. One of the David Grayson books was called Hempfield and many people thought it was written by a Hempstead New York writer named Walter Dyer who tearfully maintained that it was not. Charles Collins of Greensburg, Pennsylvania wrote to the publishers suggesting they offer a prize to anyone who reveals Grayson's true identity. By 1913, the secret was leaking out. A story in the New York Post speculated that the writer of the David Grayson stories was actually Baker, the famous journalist. Geneva Smith of Frankfurt, Michigan wrote to Grayson's publisher that she had heard rumors that Baker had written the stories. Please tell me the truth about the matter, she wrote. We can't quite believe it. We think he must be a man of greater age and he must have lived that very life on a farm. The publishers wrote her back with an early non-denial denial. The author of the David Grayson articles has never given us permission to reveal his identity. Of course, you hear all sorts of rumors. An English professor at the University of Kansas named Edwin Hopkins asked his students to analyze and compare the works of Grayson and Baker to see if there was any evidence of similarity. He wrote to the publishers that the students concluded that they were in fact the same man and wanted to know if his students were correct. Finally, in 1916, six years after he moved to Amherst, Baker revealed that he was in fact the writer of the David Grayson essays and books. He started responding personally to each letter he received. But to his surprise, many people refused to believe that Baker and Grayson were the same person. Book News Monthly wrote, There was an apparent discrepancy between the character of David Grayson, the idler by Woodland Brooks, the poet of the open road, the philosopher of that deepest contentment in life which may be had by the lowest or the highest, and that of Ray Standard Baker, the skilled journalist, the investigator thick in the hurly burly of life. One of Baker's daughters wrote that fans of David Grayson would knock on the door of their house on Sunset Avenue to see if it was really true. Some were upset to find that Baker, unlike Grayson, lived in a town instead of in the country and had a wife and family. One of them said, David Grayson has no right to have a daughter. Another says that David Grayson was the real writer and Baker was the imposter. Baker wrote in his notebook, Scarcely a day passes when I do not receive letters or visits asking for autographs, inquiring about first editions, demanding information or simply praising. It is a weariness. Yet somehow it assures me somehow. My work has not been wholly lost. People there are who enjoy it. And once in a blue moon, I make an understanding friend. When Baker moved to Amherst in 1910, it was actually his fourth attempt to get out of New York City and reclaim the rural life of his boyhood. In Amherst, he was able to live out the David Grayson persona that previously had existed only in his mind. As a journalist, Baker had met Woodrow Wilson before he became president in 1912, and they became close. Baker became Wilson's official biographer. When World War I broke out, Wilson asked Baker to go to Western Europe as an unofficial envoy and report back to him. And in 1919, Baker was the head of the American Press Bureau at the Versailles Peace Conference, and he wrote a book about it. Baker was a trustee of John's Library from 1929 until his death in 1946, and the Office of the Curator of Special Collections has some of Baker's furniture to this day. In all, the library has 300 books and 9,000 manuscript items in the Baker collection. As George mentioned, Baker's brother Hugh was the president of Mass Agricultural College, which became the University of Massachusetts in the 1930s and 40s. At Hugh Mass, there is both a Baker Hall and a Grayson Hall. Baker is buried in Wildwood Cemetery, but he made clear that he did not want a tombstone. After titles such as Adventures in Contentment, Adventures in Friendship, and Adventures in Understanding, when Baker died, he had been compiling notes for a new David Grayson book to be called Adventures in Mysticism. Baker wrote that during his arduous travels as a journalist, his life was pure toil, but writing the private sketches that became the first David Grayson stories gave him release and joy. In Amherst, he was an avid beekeeper and cultivated a fruit orchard and kept hens. His book Under My Elm gives a detailed account about the economics of growing onions. Here's what Baker wrote about his dope and his double life. Every man should have two occupations, else he cannot succeed. One by which he earns his bread, one by which he serves a greater purpose. I am a farmer, but I am also a reporter of life. Yet there is evidence that he wishes that readers had paid more attention to his reporting. He wrote later in his life, At the time, I certainly felt that the articles I was writing under my own name were of far greater importance than the David Grayson sketches. To explain why he separated his two personas, he wrote, To confuse the issues with my adventures in such a different field seemed downright folly. So, was Baker a journalist who secretly wanted to be a farmer or a farmer who was masquerading as a journalist? Here I'll quote from an address given by Frank Prentice Rand at the Jones Library on Founders Day in 1961. David Grayson was no myth. He was a real man, and he was perhaps the real man. If anyone was wearing a mask, it was the journalist who rubbed shoulders with the celebrities of the day. Rand concluded his address about David Grayson with this, His prescriptions taken from nature and the great books were not always profound. They may have been intuitive rather than intellectual, But they provided for hungry hearts and minds something in the way of rational uplift. If there is such a thing as salvation on earth, not only among men, but among nations. And if there is such a thing as recovery from this feverish disease of modern life, Certainly, the way and the prescription are to be found in the books of David Grayson. When Baker died, this tribute appeared in the Amherst newspaper. Like the bees he kept, Mr. Baker stored a wholesome sweetness. It is something for Amherst people to cherish that such a man chose to spend the best years of his life among us And to leave with us the rich heritage of his memory. Thank you very much for listening. And we open. I had one question. First off, were David Grayson's writings, how are they first published? Were they first published as essays in a magazine or did they start out as books or what? Yes, they were started out as essays in McClure's magazine. And then subsequently, Baker and a number of other McRakers acquired a magazine called The American Magazine and they appeared there. And then a year later, publishers who saw how popular they were published Adventures in Contentment, which was based on those original essays. Rick Cohen, I see. Hey Nick, great job. Oh, hi Rick. How are you? Any descendants of his that still live in or around Amherst? No, not that I'm aware. He had two daughters, but his descendants have greatly contributed to the collection in the Jones Library of Baker and Grayson materials. What's up? Thank you. I really enjoyed that. Now I want to go want to read Grayson. Is he currently in print anywhere? I think so. Yeah, I think you can buy his books on the internet on Amazon. I ordered through Amherst books, but yes. Okay. Thank you. Nancy Yeti. Hey Nick, always nice to see you. And George, some of us are really happy with the work that Nick did on the on the charter. Nick, I've always been kind of interested in this dual personality and what was going on with Ray Standard Baker and David Grayson. And I was puzzled. I'm in the middle of reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Sons. Wonderful book. I've read it. It was a wonderful book. It's about the great migration of the African Americans from the south into the north. Oh, but from the perspective of several different people. Exactly. And it has a number of references to Ray Standard Baker. Does it? Yeah, which kind of I was like, oh, wait, I know a little bit about him. And now I know more. But clearly he wrote about some of the problems faced by the by the black Americans who were trying to get out and what the conditions were like at the time. So it's really interesting. The book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit about Roosevelt and Tav, devotes several pages to Baker. Other questions. Lee Barstow. Not so much of a question as something I just want to share. Nick, thank you so much. It was wonderful to hear you. And, you know, in particular, and I'm sure, and I know that this was, I'm sure that this was in your mind to just, you know, have some of this hope in these days. He's he's a he's a voice for that we need so badly, it seems to me. And so thank you so much for bringing it to us. Thank you. I think that David Grayson has things that he could teach us in the present day. Absolutely. Other questions. Okay, well, thank you very much, Mr. Grammy. And I'm going to go out and start reading David Grayson now, I suppose. So thank you for giving your talk. It was a pleasure. Thank you all for coming.