DOUGLAS OF ILLINOIS

...He has been in Washington off and on since 1942, except for a year as associate editor of the Dayton Daily News...

...To all but the most liberal members of the Senate, his own brilliant rise to national prominence had put Hum-phrey in an exposed position—one more difficult to move around in than that enjoyed by Douglas...

...Scott Lucas, had endorsed a multi-million dollar Illinois project in the bill, Douglas replied that while he could safely trust Lucas to look after Illinois interests better than he himself could, the Constitution, nevertheless, required him to be a Senator of the United States as well as a representative of Illinois...

...But Douglas made colleagues tear up their labels within a few weeks after he came to the Senate...

...Harry Byrd of Virginia—all got into the act...

...The effort failed, by six votes, with Senator Majority Leader Lucas absent on campaign errands in Illinois...

...When the bill came to the floor, he was physically exhausted but didn't show it...

...Kerr got laughs from some of his Southern Democratic supporters, who like a little corn to go with the heavier stuff in interminable debate...

...among Douglas', freshmen Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Herbert Lehman of New York, and William Benton of Connecticut...

...One hundred and fifteen Democrats took Douglas' stand on the measure...

...If he were, first of all, one of the country's foremost economists, he brought to the floor only the root principles and none of the catchwords of the social scientist...

...Fair Dealer Paul Douglas was silent for two days as he worked over the figures...

...Douglas, Kerr, Johnson, and Long had been on the floor and on their feet throughout the long debate...

...With deficit spending a major issue for 1950 the heavy Truman budget fell in the lap of Congress last January amidst howls for "economy" and cries of outrage...

...The Senate end of the proceedings began quietly enough...

...Where have you put Humphrey...

...Freshman Sen...

...He took his entire staff off everything else, drove his aides and himself day and night...

...At least in embryo, four distinct elements in Douglas' role as a Senator were visible to his colleagues from his first debate...

...He had been out in front with the rebels in the fight for the civil rights plank...

...Republican Policy Leader Robert A. Taft, House Republican Majority Leader Martin, and professional economy advocate Sen...

...The almost unbroken string of such issues in recent weeks —the natural gas bill, the basing point bill, and the rivers and harbors appropriations—has tried his strong physical constitution more severely than at any time since his war service...

...II In the first days of the 81st Congress, the junior Senator from Minnesota moved cautiously...

...Douglas had so vividly laid bare the consumer vs...

...President," said Kerr of Oklahoma, in his free-swinging counterattack against Douglas over the natural gas bill, "the junior Senator from Oklahoma is frank to acknowledge that he never attended college long enough to receive any degrees...

...monopoly issue that the national committee wanted to get President Truman off the hook...

...on Douglas' own face...

...As a matter of fact, when one comes to comparing the Douglas manner to that of other Senate liberals and ex-academicians, he appre-ciates the unique role being played by the junior Senator from Illinois...

...One of the most significant touchstones of Douglas' success as an independent first termer is the respect and admiration accorded him by Russell across a gulf of principle and politics...

...If the issue is in doubt, and his side of the debate is getting active leadership, he will speak but give way to his seniors...

...He lectures the boys with a vengeance and, again unlike Douglas, with an egocentric attention to "my bill" and "my speech" that is hard for some of his colleagues to absorb...

...I can't figure Douglas out," one White House adviser told me...

...Before 1942 he was a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois...

...An independent liberal whom the White House "can't figure out" had rescued the Fair Deal from a politically vulnerable spot by splitting the ranks of his party and saving it from the stigma of supporting the measure en masse...

...That was not what Douglas had set out to do, however...

...Both reactions are completely wide of the mark...

...Unlike Humphrey, Morse, and Lehman, Douglas has never been led off to the woodshed for a spanking by his elders, though he has given them the opportunity many times...

...But Senate colleagues could figure Humphrey out, on those long tallies on which they sought to predict the division of the Senate, in the course of every important debate...

...But Morse's experience as a law professor and dean of the Oregon Law School sticks out all over him...

...Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota affords another interesting contrast to Douglas...

...But, according to reports still considered trustworthy, the White House was soothed with a Kerr amendment allowing FPC to come back to Congress later if (a) gas prices rose too high without regulation or (b) price fixing and mono-poly by the big oil companies Hi suited...

...But there were few positive suggestions for change...

...But for all liberals in the special political framework of 1950, Douglas' position has a different significance...

...And though poles apart on many more questions than the Federal regulation of natural gas in interstate commerce, Douglas and Long each respect and admire the other for what he is...

...Now, Mr...

...But their smiles were no more malicious than the one W. McNEIL LOWRY is chief Washington correspondent of the Cox newspapers—the Dayton Daily News, the Atlanta Journal, the Miami Daily News, and the Springfield (O...

...He is the best hope of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party for high office, though, contrary to the conclusion of his admirers, it is questionable whether he will even want to run for the Senate again in 1954...

...It would be better if the bill did not go to his desk for signature...

...In doing so, the had alienated many powerful in terests in the Southwest, some ol-which had a good deal of money to contribute to the Democratic chesfc The question of regulating oil and gas producers selling gas in interstate commerce gave these...

...Douglas seems to be making an excellent Senator on everything but economics," said another, smiling over the conscious paradox...

...He has concerned, he said, about unbalancing the Federal budget in times of prosperity, and he would like to cut the bill by 40% and at least put off the public works until a potentially deflationary period...

...Jesse Wolcott of Michigan) to go unanimously on record against the principle of an anually balanced budget...

...Douglas has even had grudging praise on occasion from the pathologically anti-Fair Deal Chicago Tribune...

...only Byrd had any figures, and those were lump sums...

...This kind of by-play—which The New Yorker calls "Wind on Capitol Hill" and Douglas calls "tipping one's foil with a rose"—has long since been discounted by hardened veterans in the Senate galleries...

...When his party's policy had been dislodged through a series of accidents behind the scenes, he pushed it almost into place again, leaving only a visible crack, and one the opposition is in no shape to open up...

...His brief Senatorial career throws strong light upon both the potentialities and the handicaps facing a truly independent liberal...

...his fluty voice casually and informally belying a mind that is like a steel trap, concealing in plain style and good humor the most exhaustive education ever brought to Congress...

...Secondly, he established in terms of a specific Federal expenditure the assumption of fiscal policy which he developed last November as chairman of one of the Congressional Subcommittees on the Economic Report...

...He showed himself, thirdly, one of the most skillful and appealing debaters in the Senate, sparking to their feet but at the same time disarming men of altogether contrasting political and personal backgrounds...

...Of these, the Truman budget and the Kerr-Thomas natural gas bill afford the best examples...

...two days later, when the measure went back to the House for concurrence, it took Sam Rayburn's bare knuckles to get it through by two votes...

...Within the next two years a majority of the FPC agreed and began to prepare a test case...

...Then he was ready...

...III From the time of his maiden appearance on the Senate floor to the present, Douglas has sustained the impression he first made...

...A few questions were raised, however, about the traditional Truman policy on regulating interstate utilities, particularly where the means of transmission could make for monopoly...

...Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon is devoted to the principles of liberalism, understands them, and supports them with his votes no matter what either his constituents or his Republican colleagues think about it...

...He cautioned the Westerners about levying too heavily upon the tax revenues of the prosperous Middle West and East while claiming special privileges from the position of a national Democratic Party, but the Western Democrats thus prodded to their feet came up smiling...

...Late in the afternoon of the 29th, the Senate had passed the Kerr-Thomas amendment to the Natural Gas Act by a margin of six votes...

...His part in the debate ran along in separate, if connected, sallies, rather than in a flowing expository discourse...

...Eisenhower for the Democratic nomination for President—a move Douglas now agrees was "probably unrealistic" and would like to forget...

...On one abstruse measure, the basing point bill, they have worked as a team...

...He talked like a politician, in the best sense of the word, and not at all like an academic...

...Among the Kerr forces was freshman Russell Long of Louisiana...

...V Three days before the bill came to a vote, reporters knew that the Democratic National Committee had entered the fight behind the scenes, not in Kerr's behalf but in Douglas...

...Speaker Sam Rayburn, Kerr, Thomas, and other Southwt Democrats had stuck with the ministration in 1948 over ther elc trie power issue...

...In his fight on the Kerr-Thomas natural gas bill, Douglas, acting alone, performed the functions of an independent liberal in the classic manner...

...He slept late, ate a leisurely breakfast, and walked in the woods with his wife and daughter...

...Paul Douglas had led the opposition...

...Not the least miraculous of Douglas' achievements in Congress was his success last November in getting a Congressional committee (which included Republican Rep...

...freshmen Sen...

...He was just trying to be a flood Senator...

...First, he shrewdly congratulated the President for the cuts he had made...

...It looked to him like (a) a $200,000,000 to $300,000,000 annual bonanza to the big oil companies and (b) a reversal of the traditional Democratic policy toward regulation of interstate commerce and producer price fixing...

...The Senator from Louisiana will never excel the greatness of the very able and learned Senator from Illinois, I assure him," replied Long...

...So far as I am aware, this was the first time Douglas' doctorate degree and professorial past were ever used against him in the Senate, where the "plain man" or "know nothing" role is as popular as anywhere else...

...Right or wrong, he made his calculations with scrupulous devotion both to our foreign programs and to such Fair Deal objectives as housing, health, and education...

...Deficit spending in times of depression, he argued, should be followed in times of prosperity by a balanced budget and a surplus—not as ends in themselves but to avoid expansion of credit and hence even more inflation...

...And there might be others behind him knocking at the door for entrance...

...He has broken all precedents in the memory of Senate veterans for a freshman...

...Except for a brief tangle over the parliamentary rules during debate on the natural gas bill, he has suffered none of the freshman's mishaps...

...Douglas emerged from the ruckus over the rivers and harbors pork barrel with the reputation, and the enormously difficult position, of an independent liberal...

...In 1947 the Supreme Court, on a pipeline case, left the interpretation, however, that the FPC could not really regulate pipeline gas prices without going back to the producers and gatherers that originated the gas...

...Richard Russell of Georgia, replied that if all his friends in the North felt about these problems as did the junior Senator from Illinois, he, Russell, would not have a great deal of difficulty in going along...

...Here, catense, brilliant, and staccato, was a new voice, the voice of an ideolo-gical liberal, child of the depression and the dust bowl, apostle of the New Deal and the millenium, scourge to reaction...

...Even without the amands the PPC could, of course, re-to Congress any time it wanted It looked as if the bill would sail through easily when Scott Lucas laid it down at a Democratic Policy Committee meeting with an Administration go-ahead, But Paul Douglas had lit on this innocent-seeming measure...

...Horror of political horrors, he was as willing to cut the Illinois projects as any other...

...A bill to do that sailed through the House in 1949, with the vocal objections of only six members of the Interstate Commerce Committee...

...News...

...has been a question rarely asked...

...In 1948 he won the Sigma Delta Chi award for outstanding Wash' ington correspondence...

...He had been with Humphrey in the strategy of Americans for Democratic Action to draft Gen...

...That motive has conditioned his activities ever since...

...Such a bill would change nothing, would just "eliminate confusion" from the 1938 act, they claimed...

...The biggest story in the 81st Congress, however, is Paul Douglas of Illinois, the huge, shaggy man of 58, his left arm withered by Japanese mortar fire and held stiffly before him...

...What compelled Douglas to his abortive task was the conviction that he must actively oppose on the floor any bill he was against on principle, provided his seniors were not going to make the fight he felt needed to be made...

...Here Rayburn and Kerr stepped in...

...If the issue is in great doubt, or hopeless, however, and his elders are sitting back, he will move to the forefront...

...Both, however, illuminate the current White House attitude toward liberal Democrats, who must be 100% for Truman or be suspect, whereas great White House exertions are made to bring an erring conservative or fence-straddler into the fold...

...But the Douglas-Long exchange was real...

...But a large number of Democrats had been alarmed...

...And if it ever in fact needed to be put, there was Humphrey with the answer— smack on the line, abundantly plain, and provocative...

...Humphrey's strident but altogether effective speech from the platform on that occasion sealed the party's stand and embittered its Dixie branch...

...He is conscientiously on the floor for every roll call vote, whether he is going with or against the Democratic majority, but he does not feel called upon to speak on every question...

...Congress should make it clear, they argued, that it had always intended to exempt the independent producers from regulation...

...Robert Kerr of Oklahoma and Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Democrats all, had marshaled the proponents...

...He was looking, he said, for a non-existent harbor in Maine, one of hundreds 0f projects in the annual omnibus rivers and harbors appropriations bill of pork-barrel notoriety...

...The junior Senator from Oklahoma has never been mentally seduced by the fine-spun theories of men who advocated that the basic industries of a great nation should be socialized...

...It is the about unanimously accepted in the cloakrooms and the galleries the this past president of the American Economic Association and Univer sity of Chicago professor did not come to the Senate to lecture the boys or flaunt his erudition...

...He proceeded to attack, singlerhanded-ly and utterly without success, a $740,000,000 program on which no less than 85 project-hungry Senators had testified favorably...

...He had carried his state by more than 400,000 votes on the Fair Deal slate, and with this solid cushion of popular strength beneath him he need pull no punches...

...One of the minor miracles of the 1948 election is that it brought to the Senate and the Democratic Party the most promising liberal and the most promising conservative of the past generation...

...It is an understatement to say that the Senate was laying for the 37-year old Minnesota Democrat when he rose to be sworn in with Douglas in January, 194f, When the South attempted to rewrite the so-called compromise civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention, it was Humphrey who led the spectacular battle in defeating not only the move, but also m rewriting it in the other, more liberal direction...

...When he cleared his throat and delivered his first major speed mphrey's colleagues were im-ptessed but no more relaxed...

...Reminded that his senior colleague and majority leader, Sen...

...Southwestern Democrats a chance to mollify the interests and seem-ingly still carry out the intent of Congress...

...IV Congress in 1938 had passed the Natural Gas Act, giving to the Federal Power Commission the clear right to regulate pipeline companies but not such a clear right to regulate the large producers selling to pipelines...

...They are not likely to forget the day the ex-Marine and ex-professor, a smile oa his face, walked onto the floor with an atlas propped against his stiffened arm and a magnifying glass in his good hand...

...Here, said the eterans, right here in the hallowed Senate chamber, was what Roosevelt had raised up for them...

...He advised the Southern Democrats, in their fear that the Truman civil rights program was merely an opening wedge to more chaotic social changes, that in a democracy many problems must confidently be left to generations unborn...

...Then Douglas broke down the budget category by category, reexamined the calculations on revenues, and came up with a $3,000,000,000 reduction, including the highly unpopular recommendation for cutting Federal employe vacation time from five and one-half weeks to four...

...The junior Senator from Louisiana," Douglas said at one point to Huey Long's son, "in my judgment is going to be one of the greatest Senators this country has had in a long time...

...There were many old-timers returning to the Senate in January of 49 who had the same label ready to stick on Paul Douglas...

...The Southern Democratic leader, Sen...

...He poured into the record masses of figures on every phase of the question, furnished material to his colleagues wherever he got even a spark of support, and, with Kerr, monopolized the debate for a week...

...Finally, in his unprecedented attack on the big money bill, Douglas showed the independent attitude toward commitments of the Truman Administration he has demonstrated ever since...