Paul Douglas

From Philosopedia

Paul H. Douglas (Senator) (26 Marach 1892 - 24 September 1976)

An economist and politician, Douglas served as a Democratic U. S. Senator from Illinois from 1949 to 1967.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he was the son of a mother who died when he was four and a father who was abusive to his new wife, who left and, unable to obtain a divorce, took Douglas and his older brother to Newport, Maine.

Douglas, who graduated from Bowdoin with a Phi Beta Kappa Society key in 1913, earned his Ph. D. in economics at Columbia University. He married Dorothy Wolff, who also earned her Ph. D. at Columbia. He then taught at Harvard, the Univerity of Illinois, Oregon's Reed College, and the University of Washington. In 1920 he taught economics at the University in Chicago, meeting social reformer Jane Addams. Because of rules about nepotism, Mrs. Douglas could not teach at the University of Chicago, left to teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and in 1930 the two divorced with her taking their four children and his returning to Chicago. In 1931 Douglas married Emily Taft Douglas (1899 - 1994), who became a U. S. Representative from Illinois. They had one daughter, Jean.

When the United States became involved in the Korean War in 1950, Douglas applauded America's military efforts on behalf of South Korea's right of self-determination against the communist invaders from the north.

During Douglas's three-term career - which spanned the presidential administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson - he was a forceful champion of civil rights, social welfare programs, public housing, extension of Social Security (including Medicare), federal aid to education, concern for the environment, and legislation beneficial to labor unions. Known as an uncompromising idealist, Douglas was often described as one who marched to his own drumbeat.

Many of his fellow senators characterized Douglas as "the conscience of the U.S. Senate." Senator Douglas frequently noted that "a liberal need not be a wastrel." Some of his views on the standards he set for himself and expected of others are contained in his 1951 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, which were later published as a book, Ethics in Government.

Senator Douglas was especially proud of his work on tax reform and Medicare, his efforts against federal subsidies, and his campaign to save the Indiana dunes. He is remembered too for his work in the area of civil rights in the late fifties - in fact, his efforts during those years provided much of the language for the landmark 1964 civil rights legislation.

A pacifist and Quaker, he surprised many in 1935 by saying, when Benito Mussolini announced Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, that "isolationism was impossible and pacifism self-defeating against dictators." The Spanish Civil War and the sellout of Czechoslovakia at Munich fortified Douglas's belief that the Neutrality Acts only benefited aggressor nations and that the U.S. and other democracies must resist totalitarian aggression, with military force if necessary.

Douglas attended the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, where - according to Warren Y. Gore, a student who later became a professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul campus - Douglas participated and was a friendly participant at coffee hour.

(John Keohane, in Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography, has written an extensive biography and listed where further information can be located.)

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