Lewis Williams Douglas was an American diplomat, congressman, businessman, and academic. At the time, it was acknowledged that Douglas was America's most influential diplomat, its strongest link with Great Britain, and one of the most significant architects of the regeneration of Western European stability as a bulwark against Soviet Communism.
Background
Douglas was born on July 2, 1894 in Bisbee, Arizona, the son of James Stuart Douglas and Josephine Leah Williams. As president of the United Verde Extension Mining Company, James Douglas, a Canadian immigrant, built a copper empire and accumulated enormous wealth.
Education
Douglas, educated initially in private schools in New York and New Jersey, graduated from Montclair Academy, New Jersey, and from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1916 with a degree in history and economics. Douglas pursued graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in geology and metallurgy.
Career
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Douglas was commissioned as a second lieutenant and fought with distinction with the Ninety-first Division in the Meuse-Argonne and Flanders campaigns. Following the war, Douglas taught history and economics at Hatchley Preparatory School in New York State and at Amherst College; he also taught law briefly at Harvard.
In Arizona Douglas was elected to the state legislature in 1923. In 1926, he captured an at-large Arizona seat in the United States House of Representatives. Douglas's endorsement of Roosevelt was short-lived. Initially, Roosevelt's campaign commitment to fiscal austerity attracted Douglas, and Roosevelt, impressed by Douglas's reputation for integrity and courage, appointed him the nation's first budget director in February 1933. But Roosevelt's subsequent move away from balanced budgets to a program favoring massive federal expenditure, deficit spending, and large-scale public works projects to relieve unemployment alienated Douglas. Finally, when Roosevelt proved unwilling to take the lead in stabilizing world markets, Douglas resigned in August 1934.
For the remainder of the 1930's, Douglas continued to be one of the New Deal's most vociferous critics, attacking Keynesian economics, applauding the Supreme Court's invalidation of the National Industrial Recovery Act, and supporting the presidential candidacies of Republicans Alfred M. Landon and Wendell L. Willkie.
In the meantime, Douglas had become vice-president of the chemical firm of American Cyanamid Company. Then, in 1937, he became the first American principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University in Montreal. Three years later he accepted the presidency of Mutual Life Insurance Company in New York City. Douglas's return to the United States coincided with the outbreak of World War II. As a committed internationalist and Anglophile, he labored to push the nation toward war preparedness and support of the Allies. To Douglas, Anglo-American amity was the key to postwar peace and stability, and just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was chairman of the national policy board of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Although Douglas had not supported Roosevelt in the 1940 election, the president valued his capabilities, his strident anti-isolationism, and his strong support for a postwar world based on the principles of free trade and global cooperation. Accordingly, in February 1942, Roosevelt appointed Douglas deputy administrator of the War Shipping Administration (WSA). Under his direction, the WSA established a scientifically managed and balanced pool of merchant ships for American war and civilian cargoes, for aid to the Allies, and for European civil relief and rehabilitation programs, thereby contributing significantly not only to the defeat of the Axis powers but also to the stabilization and recovery of the liberated nations. Douglas left the WSA in March 1944; the WSA disbanded in 1946.
In 1945, Douglas served three months as a special economic adviser to the deputy military governorin Germany, General Lucius Clay. He resigned when it appeared that leaders in Washington favored a punitive peace for Germany, a policy Douglas feared would launch Europe into economic and social anarchy.
In 1950 Douglas resigned his ambassadorship. The loss of an eye in a fishing mishap precipitated his resignation, but he had been ill for several years. While banking became his main business, he provided counsel to the Eisenhower administration, continued to express his nineteenth-century Jeffersonian and conservative ideals, and served as director for a number of Wall Street corporations. Always attached to England, Douglas was president of the Winston Churchill Foundation at the time of his death in Tucson, which occurred on March 7, 1974.
Douglas was a rugged individualist who put principle before party. His principles were emphatically conservative, and although he won office as a Democrat, he was not supportive of that party's embracement of an emerging twentieth-century American liberalism emphasizing increased government responsibility and a sensitivity to the growing urban working classes. Instead, Douglas relentlessly resisted federal public works projects, government welfare programs, and the organization of labor. This position expressed his determination to defend individual and states rights and his concern that the consequences of big government would be unbalanced budgets, inflation, and the sapping of individual initiatives.
In other areas, Douglas advocated immigration restriction and despite his personal abhorrence of Prohibition, did not resist it publicly. While Douglas strongly espoused his party's commitment to lower tariffs and reciprocal agreements, his domestic philosophy was identifiably that of both Herbert Hoover and the Republican party. Nevertheless, Doublas supported Democrats Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1928 and 1932, respectively.
Connections
Douglas married Margaret ("Peggy") Zinsser on June 19, 1921; they had three children.