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49
NEWTON D. BAKER AND THE DEMOCRATIC MALAISE,
1920-1937
DOUGLAS CRAIG
Abstract: ‘Whatever became of Newton Baker?’ was a common refrain
among Democrats during the 1920s and 1930s. As one of Woodrow
Wilson’s most trusted lieutenants between 1916 and 1921, Baker seemed
assured of future political prominence. That promise was never fulfilled,
and Baker lost much of his political relevance to either his own party or to
the electorate at large. This article asks why that was so, and explores its
consequences. Other biographers of Baker and historians of the Democratic
party have emphasized Baker’s supposedly increasing conservatism, his
contentment with private life and a lucrative law practice, and his refusal to
subscribe to the growing ethno-cultural tensions that divided the party after
World War as explanations of his political decline. I argue instead that
Baker’s eclipse was caused by his attempts to straddle a widening
ideological divide between liberal and conservative Democrats over
internationalism and federal activism. The story of Baker’s political decline
is thus part of a much bigger story of the Democrats’ failure to reconcile
their ideological heritage of localism, States’ rights and progressivism with
the New Deal.
As Democrats surveyed the wreckage after their comprehensive defeat in
the elections of November 1920, they could console themselves that they
had at least two leaders destined for future party leadership: Newton Diehl
Baker and William Gibbs McAdoo. Through their activities in Woodrow
Wilson’s cabinet, these two men were considered to be Wilson's most
brilliant proteges. McAdoo partially fulfilled these expectations, first as de
facto leader of the Democrats’ liberal wing during the 1920s, then as a kingmaker at Chicago in 1932, and finally as a United States Senator from
California; Baker, on the other hand, remained distant from party affairs
during the 1920s and most of the 1930s despite his high standing and wide
political experience.
Why did Baker fade from the political scene after 1921? C.H. Cramer,
Baker's only biographer, concentrated on his legal career and his tenure as
Secretary of War without fully exploring this question.1 He concluded that
Baker was above all a philosopher, more interested in the great moral issues
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of his time than with the mundane world of everyday politics.2 Apart from
Cramer's work, historians have relegated Baker to the role of supporting
actor -- first to Tom Johnson, then to Woodrow Wilson, then as FDR's most
prominent rival for the 1932 nomination, and finally as one of the majority
of former progressive leaders who opposed the New Deal.3
Baker's virtual absence from Democratic party historiography is at least
partly due to the ethno-cultural analyses that have dominated histories of the
interwar party since 1945.4 Historians of the 1920s Democratic party have
generally argued that the party reacted to its electoral losses by descending
into destructive cultural conflict as its fragile alliance of farmers, urbanites
and Southerners fell apart.5 Baker was largely uninterested in these
conflicts. He showed little interest in the Ku Klux Klan in 1924, or the
anti-Catholic sentiment aroused by Al Smith's increasing prominence within
the party. While uneasy with the concept of national prohibition, he
remained a mild wet and disassociated himself from the fanaticism of both
extremes of that debate. For those historians concerned with the
ethno-cultural conflicts of the party, therefore, the quiet ex-Secretary
provides little interest.
Elsewhere I have argued that behind the more spectacular cultural conflicts
within the Democratic party during the 1920s lay a profound ideological
turmoil which contributed to its failure to unite around a coherent set of
policies on issues such as prohibition, water power, industry regulation and
labor law.6 The party was torn apart by a fierce struggle between
conservatives and liberals for control of the party’s economic and social
agendas, and those disputes ran both parallel to and across the party’s lines
of cultural cleavage. Those who opposed prohibition, for example, were less
identified with Wilson and progressivism, and instead tried to direct the
national party away from its recent populist and progressive past. These
conservative elements formed a loose coalition of Northeastern and some
Southern leaders who won control of the party’s organization after 1920.
Arrayed against this group were a loose group of former Wilsonians and
self-described liberals led first by William McAdoo and then by Franklin D.
Roosevelt.7
Baker avoided close identification with either side of this ideological divide.
During the 1920s he was a fervent Wilsonian in international matters, but
increasingly agreed with Democratic conservatives on domestic policy; he
was a favoured candidate of conservative, business-orientated Democrats in
1932, yet disapproved of Al Smith's pro-business 1928 Houston platform;
he found the New Deal profoundly disturbing, but could not bring himself
to join the American Liberty League. He consequently dwelt in an
ideological no man's land; he was suspected by McAdoo's and then FDR's
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
51
liberals of being too conservative, while at the same time he was kept at
arm's length by conservatives because of his attachment to the Wilsonian
heritage of internationalism and low tariffs. Baker's fate after 1921 was to
be a perennial square peg in a round hole.
Yet an ideological approach sheds much more light on Baker than do
ethno-cultural interpretations because Baker himself approached his party's
affairs from an ideological rather than a cultural stance. Remaining largely
unmoved by issues arising from Catholicism, urbanism and prohibition, he
was nonetheless deeply concerned with the party's policy directions in
foreign and domestic matters. Reviewing the period between 1920 and 1937
through Baker's eyes provides clues not only to his enigmatic personality,
but also to the nature of the Democratic party's divisions during those years.
II
Newton Baker was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1871. His father
had been a Confederate, and practised medicine. Newton was sent North to
Johns Hopkins in 1889, where he shared a boarding-house with Woodrow
Wilson. In 1893 he left Baltimore for Washington and Lee University,
where he completed a law degree in the company of John W. Davis. After
returning to Martinsburg to begin legal practice, Baker soon went to
Washington as private secretary to Grover Cleveland's Postmaster-General
William Wilson.8 Returning to Martinsburg after McKinley's inauguration,
Baker moved to Cleveland in 1899 in search of further opportunities as a
lawyer.
Baker quickly established himself in Cleveland’s legal and political circles.
In 1903 he joined Tom Johnson's mayoral ticket as City Solicitor, a post he
held until 1911. Together, Johnson and Baker propelled their city to the
forefront of municipal Progressive reform, and in 1911 Baker was elected
mayor by the largest margin in Cleveland's history.9 Mayor Baker displayed
a willingness to use the powers of municipal government to further social
welfare: public operation of utilities as a yardstick for prices and services to
consumers, a municipal light plant that sold power at three cents a
kilowatt-hour, and a City Department of Parks that caught fish from Lake
Erie. He even organized municipal dances and ice cream stalls to reduce the
price of entertainment.10
As a committed Democrat and an active progressive, Baker threw his
support behind Woodrow Wilson's campaign for the Democratic
nomination and then the Presidency in 1912. Wilson offered him the
Secretaryship of the Interior, but Baker declined in order to run for a second
term as Mayor of Cleveland. That term completed, Baker joined Wilson’s
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cabinet in February 1916, replacing Lindley Garrison as Secretary of War.
This was an unlikely assignment for Baker, who had long been interested in
organised pacifism. War, he thought, should be avoided at any cost short of
national ideals and honour. By April 1917 he agreed with Wilson that war
had become a sad necessity, and set out to create the largest war machine
that the United States had yet known.11
As Secretary of War, Baker undertook the enormous task of drafting,
housing, training and shipping the expeditionary force to France. Although
subject to much partisan criticism, he proved to be a successful co-ordinator
of the war effort.12 His years as Secretary also revealed a gentle spirit
behind the administration of total war; he released all conscientious
objectors by Thanksgiving of 1920 and refused to allow capital punishment
of any offenders against military discipline.13 Baker remained in the cabinet
until the very end of Wilson's administration. When he did leave
Washington, he took with him a passionate adherence to internationalism
and a determination to fight for American membership of the League of
Nations.14 Once again ensconced in Cleveland, Baker founded the law firm
of Baker, Hostetler and Sidlo and was soon recognised as equal in legal
ability to Charles Evans Hughes and John W. Davis. Yet in the political
arena Baker's role was far less prominent. The reasons for his premature
political eclipse lay both within and beyond his control.
Baker encouraged his own withdrawal from Democratic leadership after
1921 through his single-minded advocacy of the League of Nations. He had
been delighted by James Cox's insistence on the League as the primary issue
of his presidential campaign in 1920, and even Cox’s landslide defeat did
not dampen Baker's ardour for the cause.15 He thus moved in the opposite
direction to most other Democratic leaders, to whom the League became a
poisonous issue after 1920.16 As the 1924 convention neared, Baker's
favoured candidate was James Cox, whom he hoped would again run his
campaign on the League.17 While other Democrats went to Madison Square
Garden determined to squabble over the Klan, prohibition and Catholicism,
Baker had only one purpose in mind: the platform must include an
unequivocal pledge to take America into the League.18 Despite his best
efforts, the platform’s innocuous call for a referendum after "ample time for
full consideration" was adopted at the expense of Baker's plank calling for
immediate entry.19 Disgusted, Baker at first took little interest in the
nomination struggle. When, after 103 ballots, the weary delegates finally
decided upon his old friend John W. Davis, however, he was pleasantly
surprised.20
Davis' massive defeat in 1924 did not shake Baker's preoccupation with the
League, and this was an important cause of his relegation to political
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53
obscurity after 1920.21 His ambivalence on other issues also contributed to
his political exile. He consistently refused to define his position on labor
relations, water power and States' rights in ways that conformed to the
wider debate on these issues within the Democratic party. He seemed to
approach labor policy and water power from a liberal point of view, but his
conclusions placed him on the conservative side of the debate. Conversely,
on matters such as the Child Labor Amendment and prohibition, he began
with precepts shared by conservatives but arrived at conclusions that placed
him in the liberals' camp.
As Secretary of War Baker had supported organised labor. He had insisted
on union wages for workers constructing army camps, had refused to let war
contracts to sweatshop employers, and had devised mediation processes for
strikes.22 But in 1922 he dismayed his progressive admirers by coming out
in favour of the open shop. Baker was by then President of the Cleveland
Chamber of Commerce, and his espousal of such a pro-business cause
seemed a betrayal of his earlier principles. Baker defended the right of
employees not to join a union, arguing that compulsory unionism would
institutionalise industrial conflict. Even so, he maintained his earlier
conviction that unions were not only necessary to ensure industrial justice
but also that discrimination against organized workers was wrong.23
Water power presented another contest between liberals and conservatives
over the acceptable limits of state intervention. The post war debate centred
around the future of the Muscle Shoals project in Alabama, which Baker
had authorized as Secretary of War. When Henry Ford offered in 1924 to
lease the dam from the government, Baker at first seemed to support him in
the face of a progressive outcry. Private operation of the project, he told
Senator Carter Glass of Virginia in March 1924, was preferable to
government generation and transmission of electric power. ‘I… am still
old-fashioned enough to believe that the government should not undertake
to do anything that can be better or even as well done privately.’24 Two
months later he seemed to qualify this position. Water power projects, he
wrote a railroad union leader, should not be alienated from public control
for the hundred years that Ford stipulated. Instead ‘this great property’
should be ‘preserved for the common good.’25 This begged the issue as it
had evolved during the decade. By arguing that Muscle Shoals should be
‘preserved,’ Baker evaded the question whether it should be developed, and
by whom. Conservatives such as Calvin Coolidge maintained that private
utilities should generate and transmit power; liberals like Nebraska's
Senator George Norris advocated public generation and transmission, while
others supported Al Smith's formula of public generation and private
transmission. Baker's declaration in favour of ‘preservation’ pleased no one.
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Baker's attempts to steer a moderate course over water power were again
brought into question in 1931, when he represented the Appalachian Power
Company in a Constitutional challenge to the Federal Water Power Act of
1920. The Act, Baker argued, could not apply to power sites on
non-navigable streams that lay wholly within State boundaries.26 The Act
was widely considered to be a progressive triumph in the struggle for public
control of hydro-electric power generation, and Baker's challenge to it was
unpopular among reformers. He again tried to steer a middle course; he did
not question the Act's application to navigable and interstate streams, and
his support of public control -- as opposed to public development -- of
Muscle Shoals was in no way weakened.27 But his legalistic definitions and
distinctions did not convince water power reformers, who by this time had
rallied behind FDR's call for federal control, ownership and operation of
water power sites. Baker's stand was also too ambiguous to satisfy
conservatives, who wished for a federal retreat to mere regulation of private
power generation and transmission.
On child labor, in contrast, Baker began with essentially conservative
assumptions but arrived at conclusions that sat more easily with liberal
Democrats. The proposed Child Labor Amendment represented the last
remnant of the Progressive agenda to be debated during the 1920s.28
Liberals supported it as a necessary extension of Federal power to ensure
the protection of children beyond the patchy safeguards of State laws.
Conservatives like John Raskob, a prominent DuPont and General Motors
executive and later to be Al Smith’s Chairman of the Democratic National
Committee, opposed it as a dangerous extension of Federal power. Baker
supported the Amendment, but in the process made clear his attachment to
the conservatives' catch cry of States' rights.29
Baker was prepared to forego his instinctive concern for States' rights
because the protection of children had become a matter of national
concern.30 In this, child labor was different to liquor control, which did
properly belong to the individual states. The nation as a whole depended
upon the health of its children, and some states had not adequately protected
them. Overall, Baker concluded, he was persuaded that ‘child labor is a
more natural and necessary national concern than agricultural seeds or fish
culture or the control of the navigation of the tenuous tributaries of the
Black Warrior River.’31 Although this conclusion placed Baker on the
liberal side of the controversy, his reasoning was hardly indicative of an
open-ended commitment to Federal intervention.
Baker took a similarly moderate approach to prohibition during the 1920s.
He agreed with the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment
(AAPA) that the Federal Constitution was no place for essentially local and
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
55
police legislation, but he did not feel inclined to join it. 32 ‘I do not believe
in the Eighteenth Amendment,’ he wrote to his friend Frank Baker in 1928,
‘did not believe in it when it was passed, and would be glad to see it
changed, but so long as it is there I am in favor of living up to its spirit and
its letter, both in my own behavior and in the legal and administrative policy
of the country.’33 He could not get excited about a ‘right to drink.’34
In an unposted letter to John Raskob, one of the founders of AAPA, in July
1928, Baker discussed his views on prohibition in some detail. He had never
been a prohibitionist, and would much prefer Americans to achieve
temperance through ‘self-discipline and education’ than through
prohibition. To that extent, he agreed with the AAPA.35 Yet Baker had seen
at first hand the lawlessness created by prohibition, and argued that the wets
themselves bore some responsibility for it. ‘The patronage of respectable
people,’ he lectured Raskob, ‘has clothed the bootlegging industry with a
certain respectability and its profits have made it highly attractive.’ Because
the AAPA had not devised definite solutions to the problem of removing
national prohibition without recreating the ‘old evils of commercialised
liquor traffic,’ he concluded, ’I have regarded its activities without
interest.’36 Baker had once again taken the middle path, but he seemed too
wet for the dries and too dry for the wets.
As the Democratic national convention of 1928 approached, Baker was in
an ambivalent mood. Although he had steadfastly resisted pleas to enter the
race for the nomination, and had described Al Smith as ‘an executor [sic] I
greatly admire,’ he was privately troubled by the prospect of Smith's
candidacy. The New Yorker seemed too concerned with prohibition and too
ignorant of foreign affairs.37 Baker objected strenuously to the platform's
abandonment of traditional Democratic tariff policy and its silence on the
League. Once again his attempts to secure a foreign affairs plank that
properly reflected Wilsonianism were defeated. ‘The Houston Convention
was a great disappointment to me,’ he wrote Frank Baker, ‘McKinley could
have run on our tariff plank and [Henry Cabot] Lodge on our plank on
international relations.’38 The ’me-too’ strategy pursued by Smith and
Raskob in 1928 struck him as particularly futile; after the election he wrote
to James Cox that ‘[p]rotected industries are never going to look to us for
protection, and why should they? The Republicans are experts in that sort of
thing and we would be half-hearted amateurs.’39 Smith's campaign also
worried him; he seemed to be ‘more happy than warrior.’40
III
Newton Baker’s political re-emergence in 1930 was prompted by an
unexpected person, and it concerned an unexpected issue: Herbert Hoover
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named him to the Wickersham Committee to report on the future of
prohibition. Baker's presence on the Wickersham Committee only added to
its indecisive recommendations. The Committee's eleven members were as
divided as were ordinary Americans over the future of prohibition. Baker
and another member came out for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment
and the return of liquor control to the states; five others concluded that it
should be retained, but that the Volstead Act should be amended so as to
allow for the sale of beer and wine; three members argued that the status
quo should be maintained, and another member advocated a national
referendum on the future of the Amendment.41 What robbed the
Commissioners' findings of credibility was the statement of ‘conclusions
and recommendations’ signed by Baker and nine of his colleagues.
Contradicting their individual reports, the joint statement recommended the
continuation of the Eighteenth Amendment in its original form, and even an
increase in Federal appropriations to enforce it.42 Not surprisingly, the
Wickersham Report met with derision from all sources except President
Hoover, who welcomed its joint conclusions and ignored its individual
reports.
While engaged in the futile work of the Wickersham Committee, Baker's
political interest was more forcibly awakened by the deepening Depression.
Although aware of the profound social and political consequences of the
economic collapse after 1929, his attempts to steer a middle course over its
remedy were as unsuccessful as they had been over prohibition. As early as
July 1930 he had declared himself to be ‘heartily ashamed of the ineptitude
of our present industrial arrangement.’43 A month later, he wrote of his
despair at the sight of mass unemployment, and concluded that ‘the problem
is a challenge to our best thinking and we just dare not fail to solve it.’44
Despite recognizing the gravity of the problem Baker was unable to provide
constructive solutions to it. He admitted to Ralph Hayes, his former
secretary, that he had no ‘patent medicine remedy’ for the nation's economic
distress. Responsibility for future social and economic justice lay not with
the government but with the ‘employer class,’ but it had spectacularly failed
the challenge.45 Baker could not provide a constructive program for
achieving his vague desire to restructure the economic and social system to
distribute more fairly the benefits of prosperity and the burdens of
depression. When he was confronted with Hoover's recovery program,
Baker responded in ways that reflected a deeply conservative attitude to the
role of government. He declined Hoover's offer of the Chairmanship of the
Reconstruction Finance Commission (RFC), ostensibly because of his lack
of economic expertise, but really because he disapproved of its philosophy.
He did not believe the government should lend public funds at low interest
rates to private industry.46
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57
The Hoover administration's rudimentary system of Federal relief through
state agencies also troubled Baker. Although he conceded that, as a ‘last
resort,’ the Federal government should assist local authorities to prevent
‘actual destitution,’ he was worried that massive Federal relief would
destroy the ‘whole volunteer machinery which has been built up in the
country.’ Private relief had performed essential ‘character building and
social service,’ and its demise threatened the whole concept of local
responsibility that had made America great.47 He had approached the issue
of relief from a conceptual position consistent with liberalism, but had come
to essentially conservative conclusions. The sympathy for extensive reform
that he expressed in theory did not carry through into practice. When the
Bonus Army marched on Washington in the summer of 1932, Baker
recognised its distress but praised its forcible dispersal.48
Baker's meandering search for a middle way between liberalism and
conservatism made him attractive to some as a compromise candidate for
the 1932 presidential nomination. He was, however, a genuinely reluctant
candidate despite the urgings of leading newspapers, columnists and Ralph
Hayes, who had become his chief political advocate.49 Baker discouraged
Hayes' efforts, partly because a heart attack in 1928 had left him aware of
his frailty.50 Even at the end of 1931 Baker told his old cabinet colleague
Josephus Daniels that ‘[n]othing would induce me to become a candidate.’51
He did, however, agree to Hayes' entreaties in three important areas. He
attempted to improve his relations with labor by declaring that ‘I have
always been a trade unionist and believe that the cause of labor is best
advanced by men joining that organized body... If I were entitled to
membership in a labor union, I would join it...’ His earlier quarrel with
unions, he explained, had been caused by their tendency to ‘go too far’ in
their demands for higher wages and improved conditions.52
Baker's second step aroused more public interest. On January 26 1932 he
announced that, although full American membership of the League was
‘inevitable,’ he did not favour a platform plank to this effect in 1932.53 This
about-face made public his growing scepticism about the chances for
American membership of the League. Finally, on April 17 1932, Baker took
another step towards the Presidency by announcing that he would not
campaign for the nomination but would accept if it were offered to him.
Baker's hesitant candidacy offended some prominent liberals. Felix
Frankfurter of Harvard Law School and Oswald Garrison Villard, Editor of
The Nation, both thought that his attempts to find a middle ground between
liberalism and conservatism were nothing more than reaction in disguise.
Frankfurter was particularly cutting: Baker's economic views might have
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been devised ‘by any member of the seminar in economics in Baker's
student days in the early '90's at Johns Hopkins.’ Although Baker had not
been corrupted by his big corporate legal clients in the 1920s, he had
strayed far from his earlier progressivism. ‘The war,’ Frankfurter believed,
‘left him impatient with liberals, [and] he thinks that they are not
“practical”… I'm afraid Baker's liberalism has largely evaporated.’54
Baker's supposed drift towards reaction did not manifest itself in a close
alliance with the Democratic conservative coalition between 1929 and 1933.
He maintained instead an independent position, keeping on good terms with
the Raskob wing while reserving his right to criticize aspects of its platform.
He seemed uncomfortable with the ostentatious wealth of the coalition's
leading members, and suspicious of their motives. Although he was a
wealthy man, there was little of the plutocrat in Newton Baker.
‘Unfortunately for me,’ he wrote the merchandising magnate Edward A.
Filene in 1932:
I am so made that I like to pay taxes and I am never sure
that I can make as good use of any money I have as the
Government will make for me… I pay my income taxes
with a solid satisfaction, feeling quite sure that the benefits
of living in a free country, even though I sometimes wish
it were freer, are so inestimably valuable that my share in
the price is never a burden.55
In particular, he objected to the conservative coalition's ‘booze before
bread’ strategy that was designed to encourage the repeal of prohibition and
to distract the party from economic radicalism. Baker, on the other hand,
insisted that the party should not shrink from the challenges presented by
the Depression. In this he again seemed to espouse the theory of Raskob's
and Smith's liberal opponents. ‘The Democratic Party,’ he wrote to
Professor William Dodd of the University of Chicago in March 1931, ‘must
recognize that it is more important to get men jobs than drinks, and must
face what is to me the burning question of the hour, and that is whether the
capitalistic system as we have been developing and operating it is not
frankly broken down…’56
After the Chicago Convention nominated FDR, Baker seemed genuinely
relieved that he had not been chosen.57 He was less pleased with FDR's
nomination. He considered that the real ‘tragedy’ was that the party had
passed over Smith, and had instead approved a shabby deal between
McAdoo, Hearst and FDR.58 Hearst and Baker had long been political
enemies because of their diametrically opposed views on American foreign
policy, and Baker feared that FDR had sold the party's soul to the ruthless
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59
publisher.59 Nevertheless, he much preferred the ‘touch of the boy scout’ in
FDR to the ‘touch of Mr Micawber’ in Herbert Hoover.60
IV
Newton Baker tried hard to like the New Deal. He lauded the Hundred
Days, and gave the new President his full support during 1933.61 Privately,
however, Baker confessed that the New Deal left him ‘instinctively cold.’
He had devoted his life, he told Edward Filene in May 1934, to the
advocacy of freedom and to the defence of individual liberties. The National
Recovery Administration (NRA), Agricultural Adjustment Act and other
measures all involved surrenders of individual economic freedom. The
American people were being treated as if they were ‘atoms.’ In these views,
as Otis Graham noted in 1967, Baker was typical of the majority of former
Progressive leaders who opposed the New Deal.62 Baker's experiences
during World War I also came back to haunt him; he still shuddered at the
memory of the virulent propaganda of the war effort, and the New Deal's
‘fervently propagandist’ nature brought back unpleasant memories.63
Baker moved closer to the conservative coalition as his doubts about the
New Deal grew. Like Raskob and Smith, he feared the recovery program's
centralising tendencies. He conceded in theory that it was necessary that
‘Federal power should grow into adequacy to meet Federal problems,’ but
believed that no transfer of power from the States to Washington should
occur ‘without an obvious and demonstrated necessity.’64 The NRA struck
him as especially intrusive into the prerogatives of local and individual selfgovernment. It seemed to be the first step towards the establishment of
permanent control by the Federal government over American industry.65
Massive Federal relief programs also worried Baker. He considered that
their most disturbing feature was that people would take them for granted.
Although it had been necessary for the Federal government to intervene to
help relieve the burdens of unemployment, he told the New York Times at
the end of 1934, he foresaw that ‘[w]e are coming more and more to regard
the State as a legitimate and responsible carrier of all individual, group and
class burdens.'’66
Despite the similarity between Baker's criticisms of the New Deal and those
of the Liberty League, he again declined to turn his theoretical objections
into political practice. He had not been consulted about the formation of the
League in August 1934, and nor did he join it.67 Baker remained distant
from the League because of the same sense of alienation from post-war
politics that he had shown since 1920. The League struck him as too
one-sided in its attacks on the administration. In the same way that he felt
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uneasy about the New Dealers' assumption that they could regulate citizens’
affairs, Baker felt uncomfortable with the League's view that it was
especially qualified to protect the ancien regime. He disliked the New Deal,
but at the same time could not forget the injustices of the Republican ‘old
deal.’68 Baker again found himself in a political quandary as he pondered
his options in 1936. Unable to desert the party that had already left him, he
refused to speak at anti-administration rallies, and even cast his vote for
FDR.69 ‘I find myself a very old-fashioned Democrat,’ he wrote Josephus
Daniels, ‘perhaps too old-fashioned to be in touch with the necessities of
this very modern situation... so I have taken my sad thoughts off into a
corner and withdrawn from political activities entirely.'’70
Late in life Baker tempered his criticisms of the New Deal with a note of
resignation. The ‘class war’ that Roosevelt had initiated still dismayed him,
and he feared that American society would be permanently divided into
‘special and selfish interest’ groups clamouring for special privileges from
Washington. ‘As a consequence our Government for the last three years,’ he
wrote in 1936, ‘has been the mere tossing of tubs to each whale as it grows
bold enough to stick its head out of the water.'’71 The sit-down strikes of
1937 reminded him of the Bonus Army in 1932, and provided further
evidence of ‘a very noticeable breakdown in the respect for law in this
country.’ Yet Baker's essential fair-mindedness prevented him from
blaming the New Deal entirely for this decline; Americans had never been a
very law-abiding people. The country's frontier past and its recent
experience with prohibition showed lawless tendencies that long predated
the New Deal. ‘So far as the world is concerned,’ he wrote to Josephus
Daniels a year before his death, ‘I suppose it gets as good institutions and
good government as it deserves, and when we look at what the world now is
and what it faces, the only conclusion we can make is that it does not
deserve any better.’72
Newton Baker died on Christmas Day 1937, still in the midst of a troubled
intellectual journey. Disaffected during the 1920s, and bewildered during
the 1930s, he had seen his philosophical assumptions challenged by new
ideas of government responsibility and social organization. Neither the old
nor the New Deal seemed adequate to deal with the challenges of the
post-war world. Relegated to political obscurity after 1920, he could only
reflect on the political system that became as irrelevant to him as he was to
it. ‘My situation,’ he wrote Walter Lippmann in 1936, ‘is that I find it
difficult to be a Democrat and impossible to be a Republican.'’73
V
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61
Newton Baker's experiences after 1920 point to an ideological malaise
within his party as a whole. He became irrelevant because he was unwilling
to identify himself with either of the party's antagonistic ideological groups.
He drifted between theoretical liberalism and practical conservatism, as
uncomfortable with the utopian schemes of liberals as he was with the
complacency of conservatives. Baker was a liberal in local affairs and a
conservative about the proper scope of the national government. This
ambivalence ensured that his role within the party would remain peripheral
after 1920. The national party became increasingly polarized between those
who thought the party should be the vehicle for an expanding and assertive
Federal government and those who wished to arrest or even dismantle the
Progressive legacy left by Woodrow Wilson. Ideological battle lines were
drawn ever tighter, and men like Baker teetered on a rapidly narrowing
middle ground.
Baker's greatest political liability after 1920 was also his greatest personal
attribute. He was, in Frank Kent's phrase, ‘a conservative with an open
mind.’74 On economic policy, he was too conservative for liberals, yet too
liberal for conservatives; on prohibition he was a wet who shrank from the
AAPA's denunciation of the prohibitionists' bold experiment in social
reform. He could justify assertive Federal government during the military
emergency of 1917-1918, but not during the civil emergency of 1933-1937,
and he opposed the New Deal but could not join the Liberty League.
Ironically enough, as Otis Graham has argued, Baker was ultimately too
much of a progressive to stomach the New Deal.75 In another political
context, perhaps, this refusal to cement his philosophical independence into
dogma might have won him a prominent role within the party as a mediator
of divergent opinion, but in the Democratic party of the 1920s and 1930s it
reduced him to the impotence of a spectator. Yet the greatest loser was not
Baker but the Democratic Party. By denying Baker prominence, and by
dismissing his temperate search for a middle way, it robbed itself of the
tolerant spirit which it needed so badly to regain its ideological coherence. It
also added a prominent voice to those former progressives who, despite
their pioneering reformism before and during World War I, found
themselves on the wrong side of the New Deal.
ENDNOTES
1
C. H. Cramer, Newton D. Baker: A Biography, World Publishing, Cleveland, 1961.
1bid., pp. 274-275.
3
See, for example, Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917,
Harper and Brothers, New York, 1954 and Elliot A. Rosen, ‘Baker on the Fifth Ballot? The
Democratic Alternative: 1932,’ Ohio History, Autumn 1966, pp. 226-246. Daniel R. Beaver,
Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1966,
2
62
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
is limited to Baker’s period as Secretary of War. For Progressive attitudes to the New Deal
see Otis L. Graham Jr, An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal,
Oxford University Press, New York, 1967.
4
See David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition,
1918-1932, W.W. Norton, New York, 1967, Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old
Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,
1979, and Charles W. Eagles, “Urban-Rural Conflict in the 1920s: A Historiographical
Reassessment,” Historian, 49, November 1986, 26-48.
5
See Burner, Politics of Provincialism, p.3, Peter L. Petersen, “Stopping Al Smith: The 1928
Democratic Primary in South Dakota,” South Dakota History 34, February 1974, 439-54.
6
Douglas B. Craig, After Wilson: The Struggle for the Democratic Party, 1920-1934,
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1992, pp.1-14.
7
For detailed discussion of the conflict between liberal and conservative Democrats during
the 1920s and 1930s see Craig, After Wilson, Eliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt and the
Brains Trust: From Depression to New Deal, Columbia University Press, New York, 1977,
Rosen, “Baker on the Fourth Ballot?” and David E. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition,
University of Chicago Press, 1979.
8
Cramer, Newton D. Baker, pp. l3ff., 26.
9
For Baker’s mayoral career, see Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians: Reform
Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, Princeton University
Press, 1995.
10
Cramer, Newton D. Baker, p. 51.
11
See Beaver, Newton D. Baker, passim. Mobilization imposed unprecedented demands on
the Federal government: in its first 128 years of existence between 1789 and April 1917 it
expended a total of $24 billion for all purposes, but in the nineteen months between April
1917 and November 1918 it spent $25 billion, much of it under Baker’s responsibility: Ibid.,
p.144.
12
See The New York Times, January 12-21, 1918.
13
See Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1945,
p. 476, and Beaver, Newton D. Baker, pp. 232ff.
14
Newton D. Baker to Daniel Willard, September 39 1932. Container 236, Baker Papers,
Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington D.C.
15
Newton D. Baker to Homer S. Cummings, November 12 1921. Box 51, Folder: "1921:
December 3-29," Cummings Papers, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, VA.
16
See Baker to Cox, November 10 1923, Container 76, Baker Papers. See also Baker to Felix
Frankfurter, April 18 1923. Reel 13, Frankfurter Papers, Library of Congress, Washington
D.C.
17
See Baker to James E. Campbell, April 15 1924. Container 50, Baker Papers.
18
See Baker to Hayes, undated. Ibid.
19
Cramer, Newton D. Baker, pp. 218ff.
20
See, for example, Container 84, Folder: "John W. Davis, 1929," Baker Papers, Baker to
Raymond Fosdick, July 15 1924. Container 99, Ibid., and Cox to Eugene K. Moulton,
January 22 1951, Ibid., and Box 8, "Baker, Newton D. - 2", James M. Cox Papers, Wright
State University, Dayton, OH.
21
Baker to Raymond E. Brock, January 15 1925. Container 47, Baker Papers. See Beaver,
Newton D. Baker , pp. 240-242 for Baker’s monomania concerning the League of Nations.
22
Beaver, Newton D. Baker, pp. 66ff., and Cramer, Newton D. Baker, p. l94.
23
Baker to Raymond Fosdick, November 29 1922, Container 99, Baker Papers.
24
Baker to Glass, March 25 1924. Box 1, Carter Glass Papers, University of Virginia
Library, Charlottesville, VA.
25
Baker to Albert C. Coyle, May 7 1924. Container 76, Baker Papers.
26
See Rosen, "Baker on the Fifth Ballot?" p. 237.
27
Baker to Frank H. Baker, July 31 1931. Container 36, Baker Papers.
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
28
63
For an account of the (failed) Child Labor Amendment see David E. Kyvig, Explicit and
Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1995, University Press of Kansas,
Lawrence, 1996, pp. 254-261.
29
Baker to Hayes, December 11 1924, Container 114, Ibid.
30
In March 1916, as he prepared to take up his duties as Secretary of War, Baker wrote to
John H. Clarke that “I have long believed that the problems of democracy have to be worked
out in experiment stations rather than by universal applications, so that I regard Cleveland
and Ohio as a more hopeful place to do things than in any national station whatsoever.”
Quoted in Beaver, Newton D. Baker, p.1.
31
Ibid.
32
Baker agreed with G.K. Chesterton's remark that the Eighteenth Amendment was
analogous to the British Constitution stating that "the Government of England shall be a
Hereditary King, a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and there shall be no dogs on
Wimbledon Common." Quoted in Cramer, Newton D. Baker, p. 228.
33
Baker to Frank H. Baker, July 26 1928, Container 36, Baker Papers.
34
Quoted in Cramer, Newton D. Baker, p. 228. See also Baker to Fred M. Alger, October 3
1932, Container 16, Baker Papers.
35
Baker to Raskob, July 16 1928, Container 59, Folder: "John C. Clarke, 1928", Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
See Baker to Julia A. Alexander, October 23 1927, Container 16, Ibid., and Baker to Ralph
Hayes, March 5 1928, Container 115, Ibid.
38
Baker to Frank H. Baker, July 11 1928, Container 36, Ibid.
39
Baker to Cox, December 10 1928, Box 8, Cox Papers.
40
Quoted in Cramer, Newton, D. Baker, p. 225.
41
"Wickersham Report," Folder 234, Alfred E. Smith Private Papers, New York State
Library, Albany NY.
42
Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition, p. ll3.
43
Baker to Hayes, July 29 1930, Container 115, Baker Papers.
44
Baker to Frank H. Baker, August 23 1930, Container 36, Ibid.
45
Baker to Hayes, July 29 1930. Container 115, Ibid.
46
See Cramer, Newton D. Baker, p. 258.
47
Baker to George Foster Peabody, September 27 1932. Container 186, Baker Papers.
48
See Baker to Frank H. Baker, August 13 1932.Container 36, Ibid.
49
See Baker to Saul Praeger, April 6 1931. Container 582, "Ohio - Pre Convention", Baker
Papers and Baker to John Clarke, December 9 1931, Container 59, Container 115, Ibid.,
“Ralph Hayes 1930,” Ibid., and Rosen, “Baker on the Fifth Ballot?” p. 228.
50
R.W. Scott to Ralph Hayes, January 20 1932, Container 116, "Ralph Hayes, 1932
January-February,” Ibid.
51
Quoted in Joseph L. Morrison, Josephus Daniels: The Small-d Democrat, University of
North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1966, p. l62.
52
Baker to Ralph M. Barret, November 23 1931. Container 35, Baker Papers.
53
Baker's statement is quoted in Rosen, "Baker on the Fifth Ballot?” p. 236.
54
Frankfurter to Bruce Bliven, January 9 1932, Reel 14, Frankfurter Papers. See also
Villard, "Newton D. Baker - Just Another Politician,” The Nation, Vol. 134, April 13 1932,
p. 414, and Robert Morse Lovett, "Newton D. Baker: Candidate of Candidates,” New
Republic, Vol. 71, May 18 1932, p. ll.
55
Baker to Filene, February 18 1932, Container 95, Baker Papers. In 1920 Baker told his
friend Joseph Hosteler that his only material ambitions were “for a roof to keep out the rain,
a few more windows to lock at night, and an additional dozen frail porcelain gods and
goddesses which my romping babies may break.” Quoted in Beaver, Newton D. Baker, p.
245.
64
56
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
Baker to Dodd, March 16 1931, Container 86, Baker Papers. See also Baker to Glass, April
6 1931, Box 279, Glass Papers, and Baker to James Cox, May 5 1931, Box 8, "Baker,
Newton D.-2," Cox Papers.
57
See Baker to Davis, July 61932, Series IV, Box 83, John W. Davis Papers, Yale
University, New Haven, CT, and Baker to Josephus Daniels, July 6 1932, Container 84,
Baker Papers.
58
Baker to Howard, July 3 1932, Container 122, Ibid. Baker’s favoured running mate for
Smith was Harry Flood Byrd: Baker to E.C. Folkes, September 19 1931, Box 108, “1931 –
Presidential,” Harry Flood Byrd, Sr Papers, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville,
VA.
59
See Baker to Daniels, July 9 1932, Container 84, Baker Papers. See also Baker to John W.
Davis, July 6 1932, Series IV, Box 83, Davis Papers. Baker’s attitude to FDR before and
during 1932 is revealed in Page Smith, Redeeming the Time: A People’s History of the 1920s
and the New Deal, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1987, p. 326. Baker to Lippmann, November
28 1931, Container 148, Baker Papers, Baker to Raymond Fosdick, July 5 1932, Ibid., Baker
to William E. Dodd, March 16 1931, Container 86, Ibid., Baker to Roy Howard, July 3 1932,
Container 122, Ibid.
60
Baker to Lippmann, July 25 1932, Container 149, Ibid. Baker made twelve speeches in
favour of the Democratic ticket during the 1932 campaign, but these emphasised Hoover’s
shortcomings over Roosevelt’s virtues: see The New York Times, November 1 1932, p. 4.
61
Cramer, Newton D. Baker, p. 259. See also Baker to Filene, May 22 1934, Container 95,
Baker Papers.
62
Graham, An Encore for Reform, p. 67.
63
Baker to Filene, May 22 1934, Container 95, Baker Papers. In this Baker’s reaction stands
as a backhanded endorsement of William E. Leuchtenburg’s famous equation of the New
Deal and the World War I “analogue of war”: William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and
the Analogue of War,” in John Braeman et al., eds., Change and Continuity in TwentiethCentury America, Harper & Row, New York, 1967, pp. 122–123.
64
Baker to Harry M. Ayers, June 8 1935,Container 33, Baker Papers.
65
Baker to Louis J. Alben, November 30 1933, Container 16, Ibid. See also Cramer, Newton
D. Baker, p. l93, and Baker to Filene, May 22 1934, Container 95, Baker Papers.
66
The New York Times, November 22 1934, p. 2. See also Baker to Frank H. Baker, June 23
1933, Baker Papers, The New York Times, November 22 1934, p. 2, Baker to James H.
Durbin, Tuly 3 1936, Container 88, Baker Papers, Baker to Walter Lippmann, January 27
1936, Container 149, Ibid, and Baker to Leonard P. Ayres, November 14 1932, Container 33,
Ibid.
67
Baker to Kelly, November 15 1934, File 61, John J. Raskob Papers, Hagley Museum and
Library, Greenville, DE. See also Baker to Davis, January 18 1935, Container 84, Baker
Papers.
68
See Cramer, Newton D. Baker, pp. 265ff.
69
See Baker to Ralph W. Aigler, July 31 1936, Container 17, Baker Papers.
70
Baker to Daniels, May 2 1936, Reel 40, Josephus Daniels Papers, Library of Congress
Manuscript Division, Washington D.C.
71
Baker to Walter Lippmann, January 27 1936, Container 149, Baker Papers.
72
Baker to Daniels, December 9 1936, Reel 40, Daniels Papers.
73
Baker to Lippmann, January 27 1936, Container 149, Baker Papers.
74
Quoted in Cramer, Newton D. Baker, p. 277.
75
Graham, An Encore for Reform, p.61.