Background
Arthur Bernard Langlie was born in Lanesboro, Minnesota, the son of Bjarne Alfred Langlie, a grocer, and Carrie Dahl, both Norwegian immigrants.
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Arthur Bernard Langlie was born in Lanesboro, Minnesota, the son of Bjarne Alfred Langlie, a grocer, and Carrie Dahl, both Norwegian immigrants.
Langlie attended public schools in Bremerton, Washington. In high school he was active in athletics, drama, and debate. In 1919 he was admitted to the University of Washington. He excelled in both baseball and tennis, serving as captain of the university's teams in both sports. (He was captain of the baseball team when it toured Japan in 1925. ) He received his B. A. in 1923 and his LL. B. in 1926.
While studying, Langlie supported himself by employment at family store, farms, service stations, logging camps, and lumber mills. In 1926, Langlie was admitted to the Washington State bar and joined the Seattle firm of Shank, Balt, and Rode, of which he was a member until 1935.
During the Great Depression, Langlie was one of the organizers of the New Order of Cincinnatus, which advocated applying good business-management principles to the government of Seattle. He was one of three members of the New Order elected to the city council in 1935. In 1936 he was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor but won that office in 1938 and 1940.
In the summer of 1940, Langlie became the Republican candidate for governor of Washington. In November he was elected, narrowly defeating former Democratic senator Clarence C. Dill. Dill's supporters contested the result, but the legislature in a joint session voted 97-45 to confirm Langlie's election. Langlie's gubernatorial agenda included an expansion of state services to be financed by vigorous application of business methods to state government, the improvement of social programs, and the introduction of the merit system to the state civil service. Langlie was active among Republican governors. At a conference on Mackinac Island in 1943, he joined seventeen other governors in proposing substantial revision of the Republican platform. With Governor Earl Warren of California, he drew up a new policy statement on organized labor. He was active in his support of Thomas E. Dewey's presidential aspirations at the 1944 Republican National Convention. In the elections of that year he was defeated in his bid for reelection by former senator Monrad C. Wallgren.
Early in 1945, Langlie began a year of active duty in the navy, in which he held a reserve lieutenant's commission. He served in both the Atlantic and Hawaii. At the end of his year of active duty he joined the Seattle law firm of Langlie, Todd, and Nickel. In 1948, Langlie was again the Republican nominee for the governorship. Despite a strong Democratic trend nationally, he defeated Wallgren by very nearly the same margin by which he had lost in 1944. At the same time, the Washington electorate approved the Citizens' Security Act, which increased old-age pensions and medical care for pensioners and welfare recipients. Langlie found himself in the difficult position of asking the legislature for new taxes to cover costs that he found excessive; the tax increases were voted down.
In 1950 he supported a campaign to reduce the state's welfare expenditures, which he felt to be as extravagant as the British health program. Although he favored establishment of the Washington State Toll Bridge Authority, he strongly opposed a plan for a Columbia Valley regional scheme modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority. He was philosophically opposed to public ownership of utilities, his principal objection to the plan being the tremendous influence that it would confer on a three-man federal commission over the economy of the whole Northwest; his opposition played an important role in defeating it. He also fought public construction of the Hell's Canyon Dam on the Snake River, the major tributary of the Columbia. (It was finally built by the Idaho Power Company in 1968. )
Langlie was reelected in November 1952, becoming the state's first three-term governor. He had been a strong supporter of Dwight D. Eisenhower in that year and in 1954 was the American delegate to the International Labor Organization conference in Geneva. He was the keynote speaker at the 1956 Republican National Convention, which nominated Eisenhower for his second term. That year, he was also elected chairman of the Conference of State Governors. When Langlie's term as governor was drawing to a close in 1956, he was persuaded by the White House to run for the Senate against the veteran Democratic incumbent, Warren G. Magnuson. Langlie was defeated.
Although he had been a popular governor, he had been involved during his third term in several controversies. He had incurred the wrath of conservationists when he supported lumber companies with designs on Olympic National Park, and his effort to unseat Magnuson was criticized as a "smear campaign. " In 1957, Norton Simon, whose Hunt Foods and Industries had recently acquired the McCall Corporation, invited Langlie to be president of the firm, principally known for publishing McCall's Magazine. Langlie moved to New York City, where he was chief executive officer of McCall until 1961, when he suffered a heart attack. After he left the presidency, he continued as chairman of the board of directors, but failing health caused his retirement from the firm in 1965. He and his wife returned to Seattle, where he died.
Langlie was to date the only mayor of Seattle to be elected Governor of Washington. During his term as a mayor he fulfilled a campaign promise to rationalize the city's finances and to rehabilitate Seattle's streetcar system. Langlie's legacy as governor included the Washington State Ferries system inaugurated under his administration, additional road and bridge projects, and some of the first environmental measures adopted in the state of Washington.
On September 15, 1928, Langlie married Evelyn P. Baker. They had two children.
