Background
Eugene Donald Millikin was born on February 12, 1891, in Hamilton, Ohio. He was the son of Samuel Hunter Millikin, a dentist, and Mary Schelly.
Eugene Donald Millikin was born on February 12, 1891, in Hamilton, Ohio. He was the son of Samuel Hunter Millikin, a dentist, and Mary Schelly.
Millikin moved to Colorado at nineteen, partly for reasons of health, and enrolled at the University of Colorado. He took his law degree in 1913.
As a young lawyer, Millikin became active in Republican politics; he managed the successful gubernatorial campaign of George A. Carlson and served as Carlson's executive secretary from 1915 to 1917. He joined the Colorado National Guard after the United States entered World War I. Sent to officers' training school and commissioned, he saw action in France, attended staff college at Langres, served in the army of occupation, and was mustered out as a lieutenant colonel. Back in Denver in 1919, he plunged into business and law as a partner of Karl C. Schuyler. He was president of the Kinney-Coastal Oil Company, served as attorney for other oil firms, and became an authority on irrigation, mining, and oil matters. One Schuyler-Millikin client was Harry M. Blackmer, whose links with the Continental Trading Company came to light in the Teapot Dome investigations. Millikin managed Schuyler's winning 1932 campaign and acted as his unpaid assistant until Schuyler's sudden death in 1933. The death of Alva B. Adams left a Senate vacancy to which Governor Ralph Carr, a college friend, appointed Millikin on December 20, 1941. The choice surprised even Millikin, and none of the newspapers had pictures of him in their files. Elected to the balance of the term in 1942 with 57 percent of the vote, Millikin was reelected in 1944 and 1950. Although Governor Carr had called Millikin a "progressive Republican, " his Senate career proved the contrary.
One of the upper chamber's noted conservatives, he worked closely with Robert A. Taft and Arthur H. Vandenberg, the three constituting the triumvirate that dominated Republican Senate affairs from the mid-1940's on. Millikin headed the Republican Conference and, in the Republican-controlled Eightieth and Eighty-third Congresses, the Finance Committee. He voted for the United Nations Charter, the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and military assistance, yet he criticized administration efforts "to diaper every squalling problem all over the face of the earth" and voted against the Bretton Woods agreements, the Rio hemispheric defense pact, and the British loan. His hostility to the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), public housing, the full-employment bill, and aid to education and his support for the Taft-Hartley Act illustrated his conservatism in domestic affairs. On the Interior Committee, Millikin strongly espoused Colorado's interest in irrigation. He was also a member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, but he left his deepest impress on national policy in the area of taxation. A devout protectionist, he disliked the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. Yet, persuaded that the world situation made a precipitate change unwise, he helped fashion an accord with the administration in 1947: President Harry S. Truman accepted the principle of "peril points" and the "escape clause"; Congress did not dismantle the trade program and included these protectionist devices in its one-year renewal of the law in 1948. Millikin shepherded one-year extensions of the program through in 1953 and 1954; President Dwight D. Eisenhower won a three-year renewal in 1955. Millikin thus swallowed the principle of liberalized trade but sweetened it with protectionist condiments. "I do not war with history, " he said in another context. "I cooperate with the inevitable. " Millikin's zeal for tax cuts was always tempered by his concern for balanced budgets. In his final term, Millikin's health deteriorated. For years he suffered from painful arthritis; by 1955 it had immobilized even his head and neck and confined him to a wheelchair. In July 1956, he announced that he would not seek reelection. He died in Denver.
Though Millikin first came to national attention by piloting the Mexican Water Treaty through the Senate, he was soon marked as an isolationist.
Millikin's power flowed not from seniority but from his talent as a conciliator. Democrats also held him in high regard. Observers were awed by the rapport between Millikin and Ed Johnson, his Democratic colleague from Colorado. Millikin contributed sparingly to debate, but when he did speak, colleagues listened. His bald dome, "the Senate's finest head of skin, " sheathed an acute intellect. It was a year and a half before his maiden speech, which eloquently and tersely damned an effort to cut off the salaries of three alleged "Reds" in the executive branch: the effort smelled, he said, "of ancient tombs in which liberty has been buried. " He later jousted zestfully with liberal senators Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas on tax issues. Douglas called him the Senate's "wiliest debater" and likened him to a crocodile waiting to pounce on unwary orators. His dour mien belied his reputation as a raconteur. Taft regretted how few of Millikin's ribald tales he could take home to his wife.
On January 30, 1935, Millikin married his partner's widow, Delia Alsena Schuyler.