Clarence Cleveland Dill

Background

Clarence Cleveland Dill was born on September 21, 1884, in Fredericktown, Ohio. He was the only child of Theodore Marshall Dill, a farmer, and Amanda Kunkel.  As a youth, Dill enjoyed debating and planned to enter politics.  

Education

Dill attended public schools and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1907.

Career

After graduation Dill worked briefly as a newspaper reporter for the Cleveland Press.  Later that year he began teaching high school in Dubuque, Iowa, and wrote for the Dubuque Journal. He moved to Spokane, Washington, in 1908 after working briefly as a reporter in Butte, Montana.  In Spokane, Dill worked as a teacher and during the summers as a police reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review until 1909.  Having pursued the study of law on his own, he was admitted to the Washington bar in 1910 and opened a practice in Spokane.  

From 1911 to 1913, Dill was a deputy prosecuting attorney for Spokane County.  In 1912 he became chairman of the state Democratic convention, and the following year he served briefly as private secretary to Governor Ernest Lister.  

In 1914, Dill was elected to Congress from the Fifth Congressional District as the first Washington State Democrat in Congress in eighteen years.  Dill worked to open Indian lands to settlement and to secure new mail routes for his district.  After winning reelection in 1916, in his second term he voted against the declaration of war on Germany and then chaired a congressional special committee investigating conditions in army camps, which toured the western front in November 1917.  Although he easily won the Democratic renomination in 1918, he lost the election to John Stanley Webster; Dill blamed the defeat on his war-declaration vote.  

Dill returned to Spokane to practice law and campaigned for the United States Senate in 1922.  Drawing support from disaffected farmers and postwar isolationists, he won an upset victory over conservative Republican senator Miles Poindexter.  In the Senate, Dill earned a reputation for advocating federal control of the airwaves, in much the way the government oversaw railroads and telephone and telegraph lines.  The law created the Federal Radio Commission to regulate radio station frequencies, allow equal access for political candidates, and prevent network monopolies through the licensing of stations.  Dill was also the principal sponsor of the Federal Communications Act of 1934, which created the Federal Communications Commission, and also supported federal control of the fledgling aviation industry.  

Dill won reelection in 1928, again as the only Democrat from his state to win a seat in the Congress.  During his second term he sat on the Senate Public Lands Committee, which investigated the Teapot Dome Scandal.  During Prohibition, although he was a dry, he criticized the manner in which federal agents disregarded the civil rights of suspects.  He also introduced the first Railroad Retirement Act.  In 1930 he was among the group of senators who unsuccessfully opposed President Herbert Hoover's nomination of Charles Evans Hughes to be chief justice.  Dill also fought private utilities and railroad mergers.  

He first discussed the need for a high dam for Washington's Columbia River with President Hoover, outlining the necessity for electricity and irrigation in the West.  Hoover balked at the projected cost of the project.  In 1931, Dill approached Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, with the idea.  At the close of their conversation, Roosevelt said, "Well, I don't suppose I'll ever be President; but if I am, I'll build that dam. " After Roosevelt's victory in the 1932 election, however, he decided against construction of the dam as "too big. " Dill went to the White House and argued with the president, who compromised by issuing an executive order to start construction on a low dam for $60 million as opposed to a high dam for $450 million.  Roosevelt and Dill agreed that the project could later be expanded.  Congress authorized construction of the high dam after Dill had left the Senate.  With the dam approved, Dill was accused of purchasing large tracts of land in the Columbia River basin in anticipation of rising land values.  Dill denied the allegations and no charges were brought.  

In a surprise announcement in 1934, Dill said he was tired of public life and chose not to run for a third term.  He planned "never to seek public life again, " even though he enjoyed bipartisan support and many pundits predicted he could have won.  After leaving the Senate, Dill returned to his legal practice and maintained offices in both Washington and Spokane, where he specialized in communications and public power law.  He taught radio law at the Washington College of Law from 1936 to 1938.

In 1940, Dill ran for governor and lost narrowly to Arthur B. Langlie, the former mayor of Seattle.  Two years later he was defeated in a bid to return to Congress.  From 1945 to 1948 he served on the Columbia Basin Commission of the State of Washington.  He served as a special assistant to the United States attorney general in charge of the Bonneville Power Administration condemnation work at four Northwest sites from 1946 to 1953, and in 1955 he accepted a position as legislative consultant to the Senate Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce chaired by fellow Washingtonian Warren Magnuson.  Dill continued to practice law in Spokane until shortly before his death there.

Achievements

• Clarence Dill is best known for being the "father of the Grand Coulee Dam, " of which he was a staunch proponent. He also coauthored the Radio Act of 1927, which he proudly called the "Magna Charta of the radio listeners. "

Works

More photos

• book

  • Hydrotherapy: Simple Treatments for Common Ailments

    (Why go to the medicine cabinet for every ailment? Hydroth...)

  • Where water falls

    (hardcover)

  • How Congress Makes Laws

Connections

In 1927, Dill surprised many people by announcing his engagement to Rosilie Gardiner Jones, an outspoken leader in the woman suffrage movement.  The couple had no children, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1936.  On April 16, 1939, he married Mabel Dickson, a Spokane socialite and teacher who established the home economics department at the local Whitworth College.  They had no children.  

Father:

Theodore Marshall Dill

Mother:

Amanda (Kunkel) Dill

Spouse:

Rosilie Gardiner (Jones) Dill

References

• Clarence C. Dill: The Life of a Western Politician