At the height of World War I, in the winter of 1917 1918, one of the Progressive era s most successful muckracking journalists, Ray Stannard Baker (1870 1946), set out on a special mission to Europe on behalf of the Wilson administration. While posing as a foreign correspondent for the New Republic and the New York World, Baker assessed public opinion in Europe about the war and post-war settlement. American officials in the White House and State Department held Baker s wide-ranging, trenchant reports in high regard. After the war, Baker remained in government service as the president s press secretary at the Paris Peace Conference, where the Allied victors dictated the peace terms to the defeated Central Powers.