Paul Howard Douglas (March 26, 1892 – September 24, 1976) was an American politician and Georgist economist. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a U.S. senator from Illinois for eighteen years, from 1949 to 1967. During his Senate career, he was a prominent member of the liberal coalition.Biles (2002)
Born in Massachusetts and raised in Maine, Douglas graduated from Bowdoin College and Columbia University. He served as a professor of economics at several schools, most notably the University of Chicago, and earned a reputation as a reformer while a member of the Chicago City Council (1939–1942). During World War II he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and becoming known as a war hero.
He first married Dorothy Wolff in 1915. They had four children. He divorced her in 1930 and a year later married Emily Taft, daughter of sculptor Lorado Taft; Emily later served one term as U.S. representative from Illinois's at-large congressional district.
Early years Douglas was born on March 26, 1892, in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Annie (Smith) and James Howard Douglas. When he was four, his mother died of natural causes and his father remarried. His father was an abusive husband and his stepmother, unable to obtain a divorce, left her husband and took Douglas and his older brother to Onawa, Maine, in Piscataquis County, where her brother and uncle had built a resort in the woods. He graduated from Newport High School in 1909, the precursor to Nokomis Regional High School.
Academia and family life
In 1913, Douglas graduated from Bowdoin College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was a Charles Carroll Everett Scholar. He then moved on to Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1915 and a PhD in economics in 1921.
In 1915, he married Dorothy Wolff, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College who also earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
From 1915 to 1920, the Douglases moved six times. He studied at Harvard University; taught at the University of Illinois and at Oregon's Reed College; served as a mediator of labor disputes for the Emergency Fleet Corporation of Pennsylvania; and taught at the University of Washington. When working for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, he read John Woolman's journals. When teaching in Seattle, he joined the Religious Society of Friends.
In 1919, Douglas took a job teaching economics at the University of Chicago. Although Douglas enjoyed his job, his wife was unable to obtain a job at the university due to anti-nepotism rules. When she obtained a job at Smith College, in Massachusetts, she persuaded her husband to move the family there. He would then start teaching at Amherst College. In 1930 the couple divorced; Dorothy Wolff Douglas began a romantic relationship with Katharine DuPre Lumpkin. Dorothy took custody of their four children, and Douglas returned to Chicago. The following year, Douglas met and married Emily Taft Douglas, daughter of sculptor Lorado Taft and a distant cousin of former president William Howard Taft. Emily was a political activist, former actress, and subsequent one-term congresswoman at-large from Illinois (1945–47).
Douglas was listed as a supporter of banking reforms suggested by University of Chicago economists in 1933 that were later referred to as the "Chicago plan". In 1939, he coauthored with five other notable economists a draft proposal titled A Program for Monetary Reform. The Chicago plan and A Program for Monetary Reform generated much interest and discussion among lawmakers, but the suggested reforms did not result in any new legislation.
Douglas is probably best known to economics students as the co-author of the 1928 article with Charles Cobb that first laid out the Cobb-Douglas production function.
Government service and city politics
As the 1920s drew to a close, Douglas got more involved in politics. He served as an economic advisor to Republican governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania and Democratic governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. Along with Chicago lawyer Harold L. Ickes, he launched a campaign against public utility tycoon Samuel Insull's stock market manipulations. Working with the state legislature, he helped draft laws regulating utilities and establishing old-age pensions and unemployment insurance. By the early 1930s he was vice chairman of the League for Independent Political Action, a member of the Farmer-Labor Party's national committee, and treasurer of the American Commonwealth Political Federation.
A registered Independent, Douglas felt that the Democratic Party was too corrupt and the Republican Party was too reactionary; he expressed these views in a 1932 book, The Coming of a New Party, in which he supported the creation of a party similar to the British Labour Party. In that year he supported Socialist candidate Norman Thomas for President of the United States.
After Roosevelt's victory in the election, Douglas, at the recommendation of his friend Harold Ickes, was appointed to serve on the Consumers' Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration. In 1935, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the Administration was unconstitutional, and it was abolished.
In that year Douglas made his first foray into electoral politics, campaigning for the endorsement of the local Republican Party for mayor of Chicago. He was unsuccessful, however. After this, Douglas attempted to run for mayor atop the ticket of a newly created third party. However, his efforts to collect the necessary 56,000 petition signatures for his party to appear on the ballot were unsuccessful. Although the Republican Party had not endorsed him for mayor, Douglas supported their 5th ward city council nominee. However, a strong Socialist candidate in that ward split the reform vote, and Democratic Party nominee James Cusack was elected.
Four years later, in 1939, Cusack came up for re-election, and Douglas joined a group of reform-minded Independents that drafted Douglas. During the municipal election cycle, Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly was challenged for re-election and attempted to shore up his reputation by lending his support to Douglas's campaign. With Kelly's help and his own dogged campaigning, Douglas managed a narrow victory over Cusack in a runoff election.
Douglas usually found himself in the minority in the Chicago City Council. His attempts to reform the public education system and lower public transportation fares were met with derision and he typically ended up on the losing end of 49–1 votes. "I have three degrees," Douglas once said after a particularly hard-fought rout. "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."
In 1942, Douglas joined the Democratic Party and ran for its nomination for the United States Senate. He had the support of a cadre of left-wing activists, but the machine supported the state's at-large Congressman Raymond S. McKeough for the nomination. On the day of the primary, Douglas carried 99 of the state's 102 counties, but McKeough's strong support in Cook County allowed him to win a slim majority. McKeough would go on to lose in the general election to incumbent Republican senator C. Wayland Brooks.
Military service
As alderman, Douglas had worked with Chicago Daily News publisher Frank Knox in fighting corruption in Chicago. Knox, who had been Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1936, had become Secretary of the Navy, thus responsible for both the Navy and the Marine Corps.
Shortly after losing the primary, Douglas resigned from the Chicago City Council. With the aid of Knox, Douglas enlisted in the United States Marine Corps on May 15, 1942, at the age of 50, becoming the oldest recruit in the history of Parris Island. Entering service as a private, Douglas was placed in an ordinary platoon and received no waivers aside from his teeth and eyesight.Douglas(1972), p.109 As a member of the 57th Street Meeting of the Quakers, Douglas recognized that joining the Marines was contrary to the traditional testimony of that group against war and offered to resign his membership; the meeting refused to release him.Milton Mayer, The Nature of the Beast. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975, ), p. 312 Initially, Douglas was kept stateside, writing training manuals and giving inspirational speeches to troops, and quickly rose to the rank of staff sergeant. With the aid of Knox and his assistant Adlai Stevenson, Douglas was commissioned as a captain on November 24, 1942. Requesting combat duty, he was subsequently sent to the Pacific theater of operations with the 1st Marine Division.
During the Battle of Peleliu, Douglas initially served as an adjutant in the 1st Marine Division headquarters before being assigned R-1 (personnel officer) of the 5th Marine Regiment. On the second day of the battle, Captain Douglas received permission to head to the front where he found work as a mobile regimental troubleshooter.Douglas(1972), p.119 He earned a Bronze Star for carrying ammunition to the front lines under enemy fire and earned his first Purple Heart when he was grazed by shrapnel while carrying flamethrower ammunition to the front lines.Sledge(1990), p.90 In that six-week battle, while investigating some random fire shootings, Douglas was shot at as he uncovered a two-foot-wide cave. He then killed the Japanese soldier inside at which point he wondered whether his enemy might be an economics professor from the University of Tokyo.Douglas(1972), p.120
Shortly after returning to Pavuvu, Douglas received notice that his wife, Emily Taft Douglas, had won the election for Illinois's at-large congressional district.Douglas(1972), p.121
A few months later, during the Battle of Okinawa, Douglas earned his second Purple Heart. A volunteer rifleman in an infantry platoon, he was helping to carry wounded from 3rd Battalion 5th Marines along the Naha-Shuri line when a burst of machine gun fire tore through his left arm, severing the main nerve and leaving it permanently disabled.
After a thirteen-month stay in the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, Douglas was given an honorable discharge as a lieutenant colonel with full disability pay.
Return to civilian life After Douglas left the service, he returned to teach at the University of Chicago in around 1946.Paul H. Douglas, In the Fulness of Time, 1972, p. 127 In 1947 he was awarded the highest honor in the economics profession when he was elected president of the American Economic Association. However, Douglas soon found himself at odds with the faculty at Chicago; he later stated, "... I was disconcerted to find that the economic and political conservatives had acquired almost complete dominance over my department and taught that market decisions were always right and profit values the supreme ones ... If I stayed, it would be in an unfriendly environment."Douglas, In the Fulness of Time, 1972, pp. 127-128 Unhappy with the situation at the university, Paul turned his attention to Illinois politics.
Senate campaign
While Douglas had been serving in the Marines, his wife, Emily, had been nominated to run against isolationist Republican Congressman Stephen A. Day, who had succeeded McKeough. Although she had defeated Day in the 1944 election, a Republican upsurge had unseated her in 1946, the same year that Douglas left the Marines.