The Making of a Maverick

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In Maine a half-century ago, the Memorial Day Parade that formed under the late-blooming apple blossoms was always a Republican parade. The veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic were getting along in years and every so often one of them would step out of ranks with a jug and come back a little red in the cheeks. A down-Easter who was to travel a long way from home remembered later how it was when he was a small boy.

"There were a few kids in our town who were known to be members of Democratic families. We were always allowed to march too, but they put us at the end of the line, so as not to contaminate the rest of them. Gradually we realized that we were always put at the end of the line and we got sort of sore about it."

The little boy was Paul Howard Douglas, who grew up to be a college professor, a famous economist, and a combat veteran himself. But he never got over being sort of sore at injustice, wherever he found it. He was from the beginning a rebel, a reformer, a crusader for the boys at the end of the line. The people of Chicago made him an alderman; in 1948 the voters of Illinois sent him to the U.S. Senate.

As the 81st Congress came back to its work last week, he slouched through the halls of the Capitol, a rumpled, craggy mountain of a man, smoking incessantly, dropping the ashes often as not on his shabby blue suit--the most promising, most controversial freshman the Senate had seen in years.

A Forgotten Breed. The Truman Administration was still not sure whether Freshman Douglas was to be its foremost prophet or its subtlest enemy. He had fought for most of its program with a scholarly mastery of facts and a cool, articulate logic that had hopeful Democrats proclaiming him the Fair Deal's answer to Republican Robert Taft. But he had fought Fair Deal waste and extravagance as hard as any Republican.

He was no man to fit easily into any pigeonhole; if there was one, it had long gone unused. On the basis of the record so far, Douglas seemed to be the nearest visible approach to an almost forgotten breed of American maverick--the old freewheeling Republican independent like Idaho's William E. Borah or Nebraska's doughty Liberal, George W. Norris.

When he first stood in the empty quiet of his new Senate office a year ago, Douglas confided to his secretary: "All I want is to be a damn good Senator." Since then he has modified that ambition somewhat. "All I want is to be half as good a Senator as old George Norris." At 57, he was off to a good start.

His father was a traveling salesman; his mother died when he was only four. Brought up by stepparents on a Maine farm near Newport, he gathered maple sap, milked cows. Milking was valuable training for a handshaking politician, Douglas says: "The hand movement is about the same."

He worked his way through Bowdoin College, played center, more doggedly than skillfully, on the football team, and graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa key. An old classmate, Atomic Energy Commissioner Sumner Pike, remembers him as a tall, gangling rebel even then: "I was rather to the right of William Howard Taft, who was then President, and he was rather to the left of Eugene V. Debs, who was tried for something about once every four years. Douglas was a radical campus leader in almost everything. If he could find a minority, he would go with it."

Tidy Concept. The campus radical became a radical young instructor in economics; he went from two years of study at Columbia and another at Harvard to teaching jobs at the University of Illinois, Reed College in Portland, Ore., the University of Washington, finally at 28 moved on to the University of Chicago. "Paul's head was working all the time," a friend of those days remembers, "and so was his conscience."

By then the undergraduate's vague, radical dreams had hardened into a tidy--too tidy--concept of a perfect economic order. It was a sort of classroom socialism that Douglas developed: an equitable system of distribution, a wage scale tied to living costs, government moving in on business when it grew too large. He became a brilliant teacher, and a popular one.

Age of Innocence. Those were the bright, innocent days when it seemed that the U.S. could never again be anything but rich and secure, and prosperity seemed like an ever-rising escalator, leading straight to heaven. Douglas was too conscientious a rebel to go along. He began spreading his developing socialistic gospel before civic groups, before voters' organizations, before any who would listen. He wrote his convictions into a long series of weighty tomes with such titles as The Theory of Wages, The Problem of Unemployment, Wages and the Family.

The U.S. was beginning to hear about Paul Douglas. Along with an unknown "caseless" Chicago lawyer named Harold Ickes, he launched the first protest campaign against the shabby stock manipulations of Utilitycoon Samuel Insull. Governor Franklin Roosevelt borrowed Douglas to work on New York State unemployment problems; so did Pennsylvania's Governor Gifford Pinchot. Douglas drafted old-age pension and unemployment-insurance laws for Illinois, worked out the state utilities regulation act. He was a chairman of the board of arbiters for the newspaper industry, made such even-handed rulings that only two of his 40 decisions were ever challenged. He appeared before congressional committees on social security, relief and labor legislation.

Douglas might well have gone on to become one of the visionary young dreamers of the New Deal brain trust. But he was no more willing to accept the neatly contrived panaceas of the early New Deal than the heady optimism of the '20s. He still had some thinking to do. And in a book calling for a new socialistic party he had already declared himself a maverick with a sentence that none of his political enemies has ever let him forget: "There is indeed no logical place in American life for the Democratic Party."

Time to Change. Independent Douglas was-dogmatic about another party too: his proposed alliance of farmers, workers and consumers should have no truck with the Communists. In 1935, he and his wife went abroad, stood in the Palazzo Venezia the day Mussolini sent Italy into the Ethiopian war. Douglas, who had become a Quaker in 1920, turned away from pacifism then & there. He heard and approved Franklin Roosevelt's warnings against dictators. And he discovered that Roosevelt had cribbed a lot of the Socialists' ideas. He decided there was indeed a logical place in American life for the Democrats.

About that time a group of university friends asked him to run for city alderman from the town & gown Fifth Ward. To Douglas' stunned surprise, Boss Ed Kelly himself offered the amateur the regular Democratic nomination.

Douglas made it clear that he intended to run with no strings attached. That was all right with Ed. "We need an anchor man on the council," he explained, "someone who can inject some thought into it." What he really needed was someone who could win the labor, Negro and university-votes of the Fifth Ward, and pile up a big majority for Kelly for mayor as well.

Douglas and the machine rode in together and old Ed lived up to his bargain. Says Douglas: "Ed Kelly gave me his word and he kept it. I was a free agent."

49 to 1. His fellow aldermen weren't so understanding of the "professor." From the start, Douglas was a gadfly, a windmill-tilter, a nagging conscience and a sponsor of lost causes. He banged away at the corrupt school system, at excessive transit fares, at the enormous city budget. He published an audit of his city salary showing that he netted only $16.72 for the year after paying the expenses of office. The boys resented the implication that only a grafter could make ends meet.

Douglas never got very far. The boys laughed at him or ignored him--and voted him down. "At first," says Douglas, "it was usually 49 to 1. I was the one. Then John Boyle--he's state's attorney now--came over and it was 48 to 2."

But Douglas kept at it. One day he turned up with a basketful of plastic edibles to make a compelling demonstration of just how little a relief family was getting. While he was addressing his colleagues, they stole the exhibit, sawed the pork chops in half, used the basket as a portable men's room. They bedeviled his witnesses, dug up old ordinances to confound him. Douglas confessed to friends: "I have three degrees. I have been associated with intelligent and intellectual people for many years. Some of these aldermen haven't gone through the fifth grade. But they're the smartest bunch of bastards I ever saw grouped together."

On Chicago's rough & tumble council--the kind of place where, as Hegel said, ideas take on hands and feet--Douglas the reformer rid himself of a lot of liberal shibboleths and learned to take on the enemy. He had one more lesson to learn. He entered the Democratic primary for U.S. Senator, and tried to buck the Kelly-Nash machine. He did so well downstate that he actually held a slim majority going into Chicago's Cook County. There the machine votes rolled out and crushed him.

"Some of Them Words." That was in wartime 1942. The next day Alderman Douglas, the man who had been rejected by the Army for poor eyesight in World War I, enlisted as a 50-year-old private in the Marines. He had pulled enough wires with Navy Secretary Frank Knox to get a whole satchelful of waivers. He set off for boot camp at Parris Island.

Before he left, he dropped by the council to say goodbye to the boys. Most of them had come to have a grudging respect for the professor--when he had stumped for the regular ticket in 1940, they used to shout "Give us some of them words, Paul." But there were a few hecklers left. Old Ed Kelly, who was so fascinated by Douglas' oratory that he left standing orders to be notified whenever Douglas took the floor, promptly shut the hecklers up. Said Ed: "Any man who is willing to go and fight for his country at Paul Douglas' age can talk as long as he wants to."

The next day Private Douglas was in a boot platoon. He refused to accept a commission until he found he was too old for overseas service without one. Then he pinned on a set of captain's bars and joined the I Marine Amphibious Corps at Noumea.

The Old Buzzard. It was a desk job and Douglas stood it as long as he could. But he kept pestering the brass for a chance to get into the fighting. His chance came when the ist Division charged ashore at Peleliu. On the second savage day, the adjutant of the 5th Marines was wounded; back to the ships went the message: "If that old white-haired buzzard wants to get in some fighting, let him come ashore." Douglas stayed with the 5th through some of the bloodiest days of the Pacific campaign, won a Bronze Star for carrying ammunition to the front lines under fire and was nicked by a piece of shrapnel for his first Purple Heart.

He won another as a volunteer rifleman in an infantry platoon, assaulting the Naha-Shuri line on Okinawa. The platoon was advancing into heavy machine-gun fire and sniper fire when one burst stitched down his left arm from elbow to wrist and severed the main nerve. One month later he was admitted to the naval hospital at Bethesda, Md. for a 13-month stay.

In 1946, Lieut. Colonel Paul Douglas was retired from active duty with a crippled arm that he will never fully use again and only the fondest recollections of the marines: "They don't hold it against you too much if you have made your living in intellectual pursuits. The Marine Corps loves eccentrics and I guess they thought I was something of a nut. So they gave me my chance."

The Empty Chair. While he was at war his wife had gotten into politics. A onetime actress, a daughter of famed Sculptor Lorado Taft,* Emily Taft Douglas had taken the stump against the Republicans' rabidly isolationist Representative-at-large, Stephen A. Day, had concentrated on one issue--internationalism--and beaten him.

But in the Republican upsurge of 1946, Congresswoman Douglas herself was beaten. Douglas made up his mind to go after the governorship, an idea that struck horror into the ranks of the regulars. They had seen enough of Douglas' drawing power even in the 1942 campaign to know that he would be a strong candidate and they desperately needed one. But the thought of state patronage in the hands of a man who didn't appreciate the delicate and desperate needs of party men sent chills up every right-thinking wardheeler's spine. After weeks of haggling indecision, Cook County Boss Jake Arvey reached a compromise: ex-Diplomat Adlai Stevenson, who wanted to run for the Senate, was persuaded to stand for governor; Douglas, who wanted to be governor, was run for Senator.

Douglas' chances looked as hopeless as Harry Truman's; Douglas himself had fought for Eisenhower instead of Truman before Philadelphia, convinced at the time that the President was "inept." But in the spring of 1948, Douglas hitched a loudspeaker to a jeep station wagon and started out across the state. Talking wherever a crowd would gather, beginning at factory gates at 7 a.m., stopping at every gas station and crossroads cafe, winding up again at another factory for the midnight shift, he covered 40,000 miles, made more than 1,100 speeches in six months.

He stumped for new housing, for repeal of the Taft-Hartley law, for more social security, for the Marshall Plan, for civil rights. When Republican Senator C. Wayland ("Curly") Brooks refused to debate the issues with him, in the fashion of the old Lincoln-Douglas debates,* he set up an empty chair and debated with that. The voters liked what they saw: a big, 6 ft. 2 1/2 in., 235-pounder with simplicity and integrity sticking out all over him, a scholar who looked equally at home in the coal fields of Little Egypt and the tenements of South Chicago. "That guy's no politician," said one steelworker. "He doesn't try to con you."

On election day, Stevenson was an easy winner, Harry Truman carried the state by 33,600, and Senator-elect Paul Douglas piled up a majority of 407,000.

The Lonely Way. Among such militant and undeviating Fair Dealers as the Hubert Humphreys, the Matt Neelys and the Claude Peppers, Paul Douglas walks a lonely way. Unlike them he is no predictable doctrinaire. He is a liberal who has learned a healthy skepticism of the liberal cliches, a deeply emotional man who has taught his heart to listen to his head, a crusader who has learned when to fight and when to compromise. Two of the Senators he most respects are Republicans: New Hampshire's able and liberal Charles Tobey, and Ohio's conservative Robert Taft, whom Douglas regards as a Bourbon, but also as a man of honesty and intellect.

It surprised no one to find crusading Paul Douglas leading the attack on the Dixiecrats' filibuster over civil rights. But his choices have often been harder than that, as when John Bricker slyly added an anti-segregation amendment to the housing bill. Torn between two causes he believes in, Douglas characteristically chose the immediate issue of housing and blasted the amendment for what it was: an attempt to kill the bill by rousing the Southerners against it.

Such unconventional liberalism has brought Douglas into conflict with the Administration more than once. He is against Harry Truman's compulsory health-insurance bill because it tries to do too much too soon. (He proposed instead a part-payment insurance plan, to cover only "catastrophic sicknesses.") Opposed as he is to the Taft-Hartley law, he refused to accept the Administration's substitute without some amendments. Says Douglas: "I believe that it is a perversion of liberalism to say that you must be for labor, right or wrong." When the Republicans proposed to cut the budget 5% across the board, Douglas broke with the Fair Dealers again and voted for the cut. Said he: "This is not a matter of liberalism v. conservatism. To be liberal one does not have to be a wastrel."

Before the 1949 session ended, Economizer Douglas had even attacked the most sacred congressional prerogative of all. Brandishing a huge spyglass and lugging an atlas with him, Douglas walked onto the Senate floor, urged his colleagues to re-examine critically the projects they had written into the pork-ridden rivers & harbors bill. The Senators were more genteel about it than the boys in the old Chicago city council; but their votes were about the same.

Douglas is not too discouraged by such setbacks. He has learned, as George Norris learned too late in life, that it is easier by far to be a lone liberal when the conservatives are in power than it is to try to keep an independent mind when all the machinery of power, propaganda and patronage is in the hands of a party that also wears a liberal label. Paul Howard Douglas considers himself "90 percent" a Fair Dealer. But the little boy who began at the end of the line still finds it hard to keep in step.

*A distant cousin of Ohio's Senator Taft.

*Douglas is no kin to Illinois' "Little Giant," or to such contemporary Douglases as Justice William O., Ambassador Lewis, Cinemactors Melvyn, Paul or Kirk..

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