March 8, 1977
Page 6737
A TRIBUTE TO PAUL DOUGLAS
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Bowdoin Alumnus pays tribute in its current edition to a distinguished member of the Bowdoin class of 1913, Paul Douglas. While his political constituency was in Illinois, Douglas had deep Maine roots. These are examined in a sensitive article by G. Calvin Mackenzie of the George Washington University, who is also a Bowdoin alumnus. To share with my colleagues some insights into the character and development of a "gallant warrior" and a man of giant accomplishments in the U.S. Senate, I ask unanimous consent that the article by Mr. Mackenzie be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
PAUL DOUGLAS: GALLANT WARRIOR
(By G. Calvin Mackenzie)
It was a seasonably cool afternoon in November of 1966 and a small crowd had gathered at National Airport in Washington, D.C. The textile workers were there, and the communications workers. There were some black women and a small group holding a banner reading, "National Council of Senior Citizens." The patriarch of Alaskan politics, Ernest Gruening, was there and so too was Hubert Humphrey. It was a spirited crowd. but its spirit was edged in sadness. They had come to welcome Paul Douglas back to Washington after his final, unsuccessful, campaign for the Senate.
They waited as his plane approached and then he appeared at the door, a figure familiar to most of them. With his unruly thatch of white hair, the magnificent falcon nose, and a mode of dress reflecting the absentmindedness one expected of professors, Paul Douglas was easy to recognize in a crowd. As he came closer, a cheer rose and grew louder, and the group broke into a chorus of For He's A Jolly Good Fellow. "Nothing in my whole life," the senator said, "has touched me so much." Yet for many of those present there lingered a sense of incongruity, of the inadequacy of this show of appreciation. "How do you express what is inside you by hitting your hands together?" wrote Richard Strout of the Christian Science Monitor. "What do you sing to a gallant warrior?"What, indeed?
There is, first of all, the temptation to say that Paul Douglas was a man of profound contrasts. The child of the Maine woods who developed the deepest affection for the city of Chicago. The sensible, gentle Quaker who enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of fifty. The erudite professor who derived so much pleasure from singing Home on the Range with the ward heelers on election night. The indefatigable fighter for the great causes of his generation who thought that the reform of Chicago's garbage dumps was perhaps his greatest political achievement and who delighted in the prospect that the city might name a landfill in his honor.
But the temptation to focus on the superficial contrasts of Paul Douglas's life must be resisted. For beneath these apparent paradoxes there lay steely fibers of profound conviction. The thread that tied so much of his life's work together was the compelling force of his own essential humanism, his sustained desire to assert the dignity and worth of man while trying to improve the quality of his living conditions. This devotion to the human side of social and economic progress informed his scholarship, it shaped his career, and it gave him the remarkable energy to persist in the face of what often appeared to be insuperable opposition. In his commitment to the goal of honest and humane government, and in his belief in reason and compassion as the only appropriate means to that end, Paul Douglas was a model of consistency.
The forests and the little villages of Maine provided the backdrop for Paul Douglas's boyhood. His childhood differed little from what it would have been had his birth come a century earlier, for Maine in the 1890s was still very much a frontier state. The tiny towns of Newport and Onawa and Greenville were little settlements, closer in amenities and values to the eighteenth century than the twentieth. Schooling was haphazard, hard physical labor was a way of life, family bereavements were commonplace. The Douglas family fell apart early in young Paul's life.
His father, an itinerant salesman, was often absent and, when present, often drunk. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis when he was only four and he was cared for thereafter by a stepmother, whom he came to love deeply, and by an assortment of uncles and stepfathers.
His childhood in the backwaters of Maine was marked by prolonged periods of isolation, and this had two lasting effects on his life. Lacking an artificial environment, he was forced to find stimulation and spiritual sustenance in the natural one. He spent long hours exploring the woodlands that surrounded his home. He became a keen observer of the plant and animal life he found there, remarking at nature's regularities and speculating about its mysteries. He grew to love the cycle of the seasons and he could little abide his own impatience for the sap runs of spring and the harvests of autumn. He never lost this tender appreciation for the earth in its natural state. And as his life passed through the horrors of war and the frequent brutality of industrial development, he continued to cherish those parts and places of the world that men had not yet made ugly.
The isolation of his childhood had a second permanent impact on Paul Douglas's life. It made him a bookworm. His formal elementary and high school education was, at best, barely adequate. But it did help to raise the horizons of his own world by introducing him to the world of literature. At first he worked his way through the classics that one found in the undernourished village libraries of his youth. He devoured Washington Irving and the New England patriarchs: Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes. When Douglas was a teenager, his stepmother and uncles opened a small resort at Moosehead Lake. There his world was opened to the popular literature of the time and especially to the current newspapers and journals left behind by the transients of summer. For the first time he became aware of national politics. The causes and controversies of the first decade of the twentieth century came to life for him. He sought, in his own untutored way, to decipher the meaning of American occupation of the Philippines. He relished the vigor of Ida Tarbell's muckraking attacks on Standard Oil. And he found for himself a new pantheon of heroes. While most of his contemporaries idolized Teddy Roosevelt, Paul Douglas's imagination fixed on William Jennings Bryan and "Fighting Bob" LaFollette. From these early literary excursions, there sprung twin passions: one for the life of the mind, the other for the life of the nation.
After graduating from Newport High School, Douglas was able to round up enough money to enroll at Bowdoin College in the fall of 1909. He crammed a great deal of learning, and no small amount of fun, into his Bowdoin years. Intellectually, this was a period of significant development for Paul Douglas. Like many before and since (the present author included), he found himself unprepared for the rigors of his freshman year and he struggled with his studies. In subsequent years, however, he righted himself academically and by graduation time he stood near the top of his class. While at Bowdoin he formed a fast friendship with Professor Warren Catlin, a friendship that would last for more than sixty years. Catlin helped to introduce him to the "dismal science"of economics, which he found not at all dismal but, instead, rather stimulating and adventurous.
Toward the end of his life, Paul Douglas looked back on his Bowdoin years and several things protruded in his memory. The "most thrilling experience"of his college years was football. He was the starting center for the Bowdoin teams of 1911 and 1912, and while little fame was involved (he recalled drubbings on successive Saturdays by Harvard, Dartmouth, and Brown), he delighted in the sense of accomplishment derived from encountering and enduring physical pain in pursuit of collective goals.
Two of his Bowdoin courses also remained fresh in his memory. One was a course in Darwinism. Darwin's views are no longer the radical novelty they once were, but sixty years ago they were a source of high intellectual adventure. Douglas latched onto Darwin's ideas for their inherent vigor; but he also found in them confirmation and explanation for much of what he had personally observed during his youthful sojourns in the woods. He also had warm memories of the excitement provided by President Hyde's course in philosophy and ethics. Douglas was initially attracted to Hyde because the college president was an avowed Democrat at a time when the majority of his colleagues, avowedly, were not. From Hyde's lectures Douglas developed an interest in Kant and the Epicureans that delighted him as a college senior and later came to color much of his work in economics.
Paul Douglas's Bowdoin years were a time of intellectual growth, to be sure, but they were also a time for profound self-exploration. Bowdoin didn't make Paul Douglas into what he was to become. But the Bowdoin experience helped him to recognize within himself the potential for great achievement and great contributions. He left in 1913 with a Phi Beta Kappa key, with a scholarship for graduate study, and with the first kindlings of a fire in his belly: While at Bowdoin, he later said, "I began to be a social reformer."
Following graduate work at Columbia and Harvard, Douglas began to work full time as an academic economist. He held teaching positions of short duration at several colleges and then in 1920 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago. There he established a reputation for inspirational teaching and creative, prolific scholarship. His esteem among his colleagues began to move toward the heights it would reach in later years when his profession would accord him its highest honor: election to the presidency of the American Economics Association.
But Paul Douglas was no cloistered academic. By 1930 his writings had begun to attract the attention of leaders in business and government. With growing frequency he was asked to arbitrate labor disputes and to undertake comprehensive economic analyses for government agencies. Slowly there developed a new dimension to Paul Douglas's life. The distinguished professor was becoming an increasingly active public citizen. He was drawn into developing controversies over labor legislation and business regulation and social security, not as a detached scholarly observer, but as a participant, as a decision maker. And he liked it.
Douglas found in public affairs an opportunity to express, sometimes even to satisfy, his basic humanism. It was these contacts with the human side of social and economic problems that gradually moved him toward a career in public service. They also became the primary source of inspiration for his public actions. "Many of my congressional bills," he later wrote, "originated from these contacts with actual life. . . . The chief stimulus from which I learned was the turbulent flow of my experiences."
In 1939 Douglas sought and won a seat on the Chicago City Council. He was a lonely voice on the council, often finding himself on the short end of 49 to 1 votes. But he rather enjoyed struggling with municipal issues and, after some initial standoffishness, the ward politicians who made up the bulk of the council's membership came to value and appreciate his fairmindedness and his commitment to the people he represented.
Despite Douglas's pleasure in serving on the council, the experience was short lived. The onset of World War II thrust upon him the great moral and intellectual dilemma of his life. And he resolved it finally by resigning from the council and enlisting in the United States Marine Corps.
That act seems almost ludicrous at first glance. Paul Douglas was fifty years old. His eyesight was not up to military standards. And years earlier he had pledged his devotion to the peaceful ideals of the Society of Friends. What was it that brought on the determination of such a man to go to war?
The answer is not simple. Douglas's first acquaintance with the Quaker faith came when he was in his mid-twenties. He was attracted by the simplicity of it, and by the transcendent optimism of its central tenets.
He wrote of his first brush with the Quaker philosophy: "For months this vision of what an individual could accomplish if guided by a true and informed inner light obsessed me. From a negative repugnance to physical force and violence as instruments of coercion, I felt a mission to try to practice the principle of redemptive love. I failed more than I succeeded, but felt my feet were on the right path and that I was trying to move in the light."
But the harsh reality of Axis aggression led Paul Douglas to set aside his profound distaste for physical force. He loved peace, but he loved freedom more. He cherished the notion of living in a world in which the power of active love could overcome oppression, but he recognized that he didn't live in such a world. And he recognized further that unless the terror of the fascist states was aggressively resisted, all hope would be dashed of ever creating such a world. So Paul Douglas became a private in the Marine Corps and went off to war.
The Marines were reluctant to fill his wish and send him into combat. But, in the face of his head-on determination, there was little the corps could do to keep him away from the front lines. Promoted to major and assigned as an adjutant, he took off the insignia of his rank and worked the front lines as a stretcher bearer. The younger Marines (and they were all younger Marines) never quite accustomed themselves to the vision of the whitehaired eccentric they called "Pop" moving along the assault line, offering aid in the crush of battle. At Okinawa a bullet pierced Paul Douglas's arm and left it virtually destroyed. In later years he often referred to his left arm as an exceedingly fine paperweight, but he never publicly expressed the slightest regret at losing the use of his arm in the service of his country. Indeed he later recalled how, at the time of the wound, he felt overcome by a euphoric, almost shameless, sense of patriotism. "A deep wave of exultation swept through me," he wrote, "that at my age I had shed blood in defense of my country."
After evacuation back to the States, Douglas spent a prolonged period of recuperation in Washington where his wife was serving a term in the House of Representatives. When his therapy was completed he returned to the University of Chicago and to the pursuits that had filled his life before the war. He was soon drawn back into public life, however; and in 1948 he sought, and resoundingly won, a seat in the United States Senate. At an age when most men begin to think of retirement, Paul Douglas was just entering the most productive period of his life
Douglas's eighteen years in the Senate were a time of difficult and vigorous legislative activity. The political agenda was filled with old business like medicare and civil rights, and with new business like the space race and the Cold War. Douglas was actively involved in all of these matters, but throughout his career there were a few key issues on which his passion and his energy focused most intensively. These included civil rights, housing reform, the preservation of legitimate competition in industry, and the reduction of wasteful government expenditures. Make no mistake about it: Paul Douglas was a liberal. But there was nothing doctrinaire about his liberalism. He supported the right of labor unions to organize and bargain collectively, but he would have been the last to argue that labor unions were always in the right and management in the wrong. He believed that the national government ought to use the full range of its powers to actively assist those of its citizens who lacked the means to sustain themselves. But he did not believe that all problems could be solved simply by throwing money at them. "To be a liberal," he once said, "one does not have to be a wastrel." And while he was widely identified with liberal causes throughout his career, it was his fierce independence rather than his liberalism that became the hallmark of his reputation.
As he had years earlier in the Chicago City Council, Senator Douglas often found himself on the losing side in Senate debates. He was cursed (or is it blessed?) with a vision that extended beyond that of many of his peers. His opponents frequently accused him of being too far ahead of his time, though perhaps the real problem was that they were too far behind theirs. In his efforts to achieve a full measure of human dignity for all Americans, to protect the rights of buyers as well as sellers, and to help rescue the cities and preserve the land, Paul Douglas was often at logger heads with the conservative barony of elders that controlled the Senate for most of his tenure there: He frequently lost the battles that he waged, not because he fought them poorly, but simply because the odds were too long. But some gracious Providence allowed Paul Douglas to live a long life and in his waning years he repeatedly experienced the joy of seeing his legislative seedlings come to fruit: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicaid and Medicare, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, The Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968, and the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
A great many things distinguished Paul Douglas's service in the Senate. But he will perhaps be remembered as much for the manner in which he served as for his ample accomplishments. Two characteristics stand out. One was his incredible persistence. He was never unnerved by the failure to win legislative battles. His wit was maintained and his temper controlled even in the hours of his most excruciating defeats. He was never less than open and fair in his dealings with his colleagues. He was forever guided by the belief that tomorrow is another day and that an admirable and honorable performance today would help to ensure a successful performance tomorrow. And he never ceased to believe that fighting the battle, even losing the battle, might ultimately help to win the war.
Douglas viewed the Congress as an educational forum of the first order, as a place to clarify issues and enlighten public opinion. Only a man who thought substantive objectives more important than career or self-satisfaction could have waged these battles as long and as arduously as Paul Douglas did. Typically, when the Congress finally approved The Civil Rights Act of 1964, he saw his role in retrospect as that of facilitator, not primogenitor: "The Congressional civil rights group had laid the basis for victory. By keeping the issue before the Congress year after year despite political defeats, we had finally helped to arouse the conscience of the country. We had forced the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party to turn from bitter hostility to studied indifference and finally to ardent advocacy. We had been the whipping boys at every stage of the conflict and had been shunted aside at the conclusion. But we did not care. That was the law of life. The cause had won."
Paul Douglas had a sense of continuity that was uncharacteristic of modern legislators. He was no heady idealist, though he was certainly possessed of heady ideals. He was, in fact, the quintessential realist. In his view, it was the task of the committed legislator to pick up the causes passed on by his predecessors, to make every effort to build support for them in his own legislative lifetime, and then to pass them on to his successors. The lessons of his life had taught him that one man could make a difference, but only insofar as that one man could entice the support of others. No group of people ever disappointed Paul Douglas as much as those fellow liberals who thought politics base, who supported high objectives but would not fight for them.
"How much better," he would say, "are the professional politicians than those who criticize them so caustically from the sidelines but never lift a finger to help the causes in which they say they believe."
The second distinguishing mark of Paul Douglas's public service was his unwavering commitment to the highest standards of personal integrity. What made this commitment all the more remarkable was that it was accompanied by a disarming lack of solemnity. He made a full annual accounting of his personal finances long before that was the convention. Indeed he began to do so in the first year of his service as a Chicago alderman. But he never took his colleagues to task for failing to make a similar accounting. He regularly fought a lonely battle in the Senate against "pork barrel" public works projects which he regarded as little more than raiding parties on the federal treasury. This is not the kind of action that endears a legislator to his peers, but again the senator never questioned the motives of his colleagues even as he attacked the unnecessary appropriations they wanted for their states. In this, as in all he tried to accomplish, he avoided personal attacks and sought to base his arguments on merit. Paul Douglas was a vigorous foe, but a fair one, and ultimately his reputation for integrity served him well and embellished the causes for which he fought so persistently.
Though Douglas demanded of himself the highest standards of integrity and personal morality, he rejected the view of politics as a set of transactions in moral absolutes. Bargaining and compromise are legislative ways of life and he was proficient at both. If the cause were just, he preferred half a loaf to no loaf at all. For him morality was often subjective and uncertain, hard for one man to impose on another. In his view, morality could emerge and survive only when politics was conducted openly, candidly, fairly, and courteously. And he sought always to comport himself in precisely that fashion. As a nation, we have only now begun to demand of our politicians the same standards that Paul Douglas demanded of himself long before it was fashionable.
On the wall in Paul Douglas's Senate office there hung six portraits chosen by him with meticulous care. These were his political heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, John Peter Altgeld, Clarence Darrow, Robert M. LaFollette, and George W. Norris. These were men and women of courage and integrity, of intellectual vigor and unmeasured humanity. It seems clear to us now that the things that characterized their lives were the things that characterized his. Few of us are able in our own lifetimes to measure up to our heroes, but Paul Douglas did. His participation, like theirs, in the great political struggles of his time not only contributed mightily to the political discourse, but elevated it.
Paul Douglas was fond of saying that as a young man he wanted to save the world, in middle age he wanted to save the United States, and as an old man he was satisfied at helping to save the Indiana Dunes. But if his hopes narrowed, his vision never did. He never lost faith in the belief that humankind could make the world a richer place by seeking the truth and heaving to it, by permitting the full flowering of individual abilities and individual dignity, by conducting public affairs with candor and integrity.
For us to note simply that he did all of those things in his own lifetime would perhaps be song enough for Paul Howard Douglas, gallant warrior.