PAUL DOUGLAS - SOCIAL INDIVIDUALIST
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
New Leader Pertrait: PAUL DOUGLAS - SOCIAL INDIVIDUALIST By WILLIAM E. BOHN THIS ©HAY AMD INDIA,*. BEAKED tlUACER is something special. That was clear from the •tart. I aabjBd htm: "Look. You...
...Paul is a realistic liberal, an independent liberal, an individualistic liberal...
...Well, you know, I had just been licked in the primaries for the Democratic nomination as Senator...
...He also headed up a sub-committee which hammered out the school health bill, which passed the Senate without dissent...
...When recently he went off on his own tack, a trade union leader is said to have remarked: "Paul must have been thinking again...
...Her experience, her good judgment and her great charm are of immeasurable assistance to the Senator...
...This man had introduced an amendment to the Eliender Housing Bill, providing that funds would be denied to any state unless it pledged that all the dwellings constructed under the terms of the act would be rented or sold without any restrictions as to race, religion or nationality...
...He wanted the Senate to defeat the entire housing bill...
...The budget issue is simply one of arithmetic and logic," Having the advantage of statistical training, this particular Senator went beyond eloquence...
...Within a few months Douglas made 1,100 speeches in 400 towns, traveling 40,000 miles in a sound-equipped jeep stationwagon through all of Illinois' 102 counties...
...We must, in fact, be thrifty if we are to be really humane...
...You had bean President of the American Economics Association...
...From then on, Douglas was never out of politics...
...He showed precisely where and how hundreds of millions could be lopped off without harm...
...All this dramatic activity would be impossible had Senator Douglas not received prompt recognition upon his appearance...
...What a sensation she caused when she first appeared in the House as Representative at Large from Illinois...
...A scholar who feels at home among 'the Marines has what it takes to make a rapid success among legislators...
...But he does not automatically go along even with the President or with the most powerful trade union leaders...
...You were^oO years old...
...In the years following, he rendered many such services to other state and federal agencies...
...He said he did not know him very well but he liked him...
...Asked by friends to survey the Insull lay-out, he found himself in the middle of a fight...
...As an economist who has written expertly about dealing with depressions, he believes that this is the time to squeeze the fat out'of the budget and keep taxes down...
...So, the Senator from Illinois explained, this amendment was intended to defeat the bill...
...He solved his problem by going straight to the point...
...Yes, they said, Paul believes in competence...
...The push and pull of campaigning seemed to satisfy some deep inner urge...
...But I got from him the one thing I wanted...
...It took courage to stand up to a proposal of this sort...
...He never takes the soft ajpd obvious way...
...But soon we were on even-terms...
...Where will he land and how much is he likely to accomplish...
...Nothing else touches the spot in quite the same way...
...The man loves students and books...
...There was nonp of the traditional nonsense about the neophyte having to serve his apprenticeship...
...In 1931 Franklin Delano Roosevelt made hfm economic advisor to a similar commission in New York...
...Now they are going down...
...I ASKED FRIENDS of the Senator: What sort qf man is this scholar in politics...
...We just naturally hit it Off...
...In those days we had net gotten used to having good-looking and smartly-dressed women of great competence scattered among the legislators...
...This sharpness and rectitude save the Senator from all of the easy vices .of the do-gooders...
...I told him how we had beaten our heads trying to find the right word for him—practical, independent, individualistic, realistic, etc., etc...
...When I heard this, I recalled the look of disgust which came over his face when I happened to mention Henry Wallace...
...What makes him tick...
...One of his friends put it to me this way: "If you write about him, you cannot ignore Mrs...
...They are brave, comradely, sincere...
...It meant the possibility of being accused of antiNegroism...
...What he meant was that the man is utterly honest, that he works from within out, that when he has made up his mind no power on earth can divert him from what seems the right course...
...Earlier in the day*l had observed him moving about the Senate floor—acting not at all as a novice in that dignified body, but participating with all the confidence of a veteran...
...He doesn't belong to any crowd...
...For example: "To be a liberal, one does not have to be a wastrel...
...A professor all his adult life, he does not act like one, but has the self-confidence and quick impulses of a man of action...
...Industrial arbitration work and the fight against the crooked Insull utilities empire finally lured the teacher from the classroom...
...She is Emily Taft Douglas, the daughter of Lorado Taft, the sculptor...
...We are not helping the slum-dwellers, the undereducated, the sick, by supporting an excessive number of stenographers and clerks...
...So I knew my man was in haste to be off to join the good-looking lady in Chicago...
...After the first days, they never thought of giving me a soft or sissy job...
...But then prices and production were going up...
...The ultra-respectable Senator Bricker did not devise this amendment to help the Negroes...
...HOW THIS FIGHTING QUAKER got into politics is a long story...
...At noon and again at quitting time, he would be waiting for the workers as they swarmed out of some other place of employment...
...But then they went on to use other descriptive terms...
...Douglas was immediately given unusually good committee assignments— on the committees on Banking and Currency, on Labor and Public Welfare, and on the Joint Committee on the Economic .Report...
...How did you ever happen to join the Marines...
...He is opposed to it...
...This was Be natter Paul Douglas of Illinois speaking...
...The reactionary and isolationist Brooks embodied all his pet dislikes...
...Douglas's independence stood out, also, in his discussion of the budget...
...You were a collage riiof——i You had written a shelflul of hooks...
...My time was short...
...At first they took me up as a freak...
...But the speech Senator Douglas made against the Bricker amendment—and in favor of pushing through the original bill despite the provision for local decisions on segregation—is a perfect example of the stout hard-headedness of the junior Senator from Illinois...
...I am not a Socialist...
...Douglas...
...I was right up there with the combat units...
...I relayed to them a phrase which I had picked up from James Loeb, the Secretary of ADA...
...Often hje would be up af six in the morning making a speech at a factory gate...
...His analysis of it given over the Columbia Broadcasting System and mosje fully on the Senate floor was devastating...
...Communist Negroes in Chicago, in fact, leveled this charge...
...He had related that Walter Reuther had said on one occasion: "Paul is a man you have to convince...
...It had been impressed on me that he is head-over-heels a family man...
...They base their judgments on real things — strip life down to the essentials...
...Had he been a member of the tOth Congress, he might have favored higher, rather than lower, taxes...
...In 1030 Gifford Pinchot called on him to set up Pennsylvania's Unemployment Commission...
...From 1939 to 1942, he was alderman from Chicago's famous 5th Ward, fighting the shenanigans of the Kelly machine, which he bucked also in the unsuccessful effort to win the Senatorial nomination in 1942...
...In this connection Senator Douglas has coined some of his most succulent sayings...
...He had been delayed at a session of the Labor Committee...
...I am one of those queer people who is an individualist—not a Socialist— but who wants some social action to defend the individual...
...I went out to the lake and swam two miles in a heavy sea...
...I brought up the fact that Governor Chester Bowles glorifies the "competent" liberal...
...You cannot imagine him making a sloppy speech about the virtues of the common man...
...That was just to prove my fitness to myself...
...I suppose it really gees back to the boy's birth in Salem, Massachusetts, to his boyhood on the term in Maine, to his education at Bowdoin College, back to whatever it was in his New England ancestry and education that put the uprightness and outrightness into his s/stem...
...The acceptance of his amendment would have amounted to a death sentence to any adequate Federal housing legislation...
...But carrying his insight into economics to the factory gate seems to him to be getting down closer to realities...
...TWICE Iff HIS tlfOftT CAHEER as a Senator the man from Illinois has faced up to situations which would have been trying to** less courageous public servant...
...He was kind, even gentle, to the good-looking man from Ohio...
...He is 10(r per cent with President Truman and the labor unions against the Taft-Hartley Law...
...At the end of a long, tough week, I had a final word with Senator Douglas in his office...
...He can never stand anything half-baked...
...I'll tell you what I am," he flung out...
...With the amendment, they would get nothing...
...He is friendly in manner, direct in speetn and has a saving sense of humor . . . But surely it is permissible to point out that the Senator from Ohio has made no secret of his attitude toward this bill...
...I hate the Communists...
...He grinned boyishly...
...How did I get on with those famous roughnecks...
...It meant opposing a law against segregation...
...His opponent on the first occasion was Ohio's ingratiating and personable junior Senator, John Bricker...
...That's how I happened to get it in the arm at Okinawa...
...I never hit it off so well with any bunch <of men I ever lived and worked with...
...Is he left, right or center...
...He doesn't believe that the Government should go into the business of clearing the slums...
...He has spent his life with them...
...So I said to myself, "Welt, old fellow, if you can't serve your country in the Senate, maybe you cap put in some service with these hardboiled soldiers of the see.' Naturally I had some doubts about their wanting me...
...What is he driving at...
...Without the amendment the Negroes stood to get 270,000 dwelling units...
...The economist's transparent honesty served as a shield against any embarrassment as he dealt with a knotty political problem...
...And— Quaker though he is—he just naturally can't stay out of a good fight...
...Do you know what I did...
...The Marines love a nut...
...Last yeer's light against Curley Brooks gave him special satisfaction...
Vol. 32 • August 1949 • No. 32
