Background
Doughton was born on November 7, 1863, in Laurel Springs, North Carolina, the son of Rebecca Jones Doughton and J. H. Doughton, a Confederate Army captain who named his son for the rebel general. Doughton was raised on a farm.
Doughton was born on November 7, 1863, in Laurel Springs, North Carolina, the son of Rebecca Jones Doughton and J. H. Doughton, a Confederate Army captain who named his son for the rebel general. Doughton was raised on a farm.
Doughton was educated at the Laurel Springs Academy, a secondary school his father helped establish.
A prosperous farmer, land speculator, banker, and store-owner, Doughton served on the state agriculture board before he was elected to the North Carolina senate in 1908. His brother Rufus, six years his senior, also figured prominently in North Carolina politics and served as chairman of the Legislative Finance Committee in the 1930's. Unlike most southerners in his time, Doughton came from a Piedmont district in which Republicans competed fiercely with Democrats, and it was necessary for him to wrest a state senate seat (in 1908) and then a U. S. House of Representatives seat (in 1910) from incumbent Republicans.
Doughton proved to be shrewd as both an electoral politician and a legislative tactician. By making himself nearly indispensable to his constituency and to the Democratic leadership in Washington, he enjoyed a congressional career that lasted forty-two years. Doughton had been a back-bencher in the House for nearly two decades before he gained prominence during the Great Depression by spearheading the 1932 sales-tax rebellion. This marked one of the few times that Doughton found himself out of step with the Democratic leadership, but he had correctly read the antitax mood of his constituency. He also feared that additional federal taxes would duplicate state taxes and deny the states their needed tax sources.
In 1932, after a series of senior Democrats had retired or been defeated, the sixty-nine-year-old Doughton began his long tenure as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Although his New York Times obituary called him a New Dealer, his cooperation with the Roosevelt administration on most legislative matters was more apparent than substantial. Most of the time he skillfully navigated between congressional conservatives and New Deal liberals to achieve compromises grudgingly satisfactory to both. He cultivated a reputation as the New Deal's man on taxes and, according to Frances Perkins, uncharacteristically persuaded Roosevelt to let him sponsor the administration's social security bill. But, within the confines of his committee, he adroitly modified those New Deal revenue proposals that took a bigger bite from wealth than he thought socially justifiable. As conservative forces in the House grew stronger in the late 1930's and in the early 1940's, Doughton increasingly aligned himself with the anti New Dealers without, however, alienating the administration.
During World War II he enthusiastically supported business and administration proposals for broad-based withholding taxes on the grounds that they both contributed needed revenues and drained inflationary dollars from pay checks. At the same time he sought to encourage investors with selected rebates and loopholes, despite administration opposition; such loopholes finally led Roosevelt to veto the 1944 tax bill on the grounds that it provided relief "not for the needy but for the greedy. " But Doughton lined up with the lawmakers who overrode the veto, the first of a revenue bill in United States fiscal history. Although deficit spending squared with the emerging New Economics of John Maynard Keynes's liberal American disciples, the conservative Doughton believed that such investororiented fiscal policies made good business and political sense.
Doughton had reached the zenith of his power in his seventies and eighties. By the time he finally retired from the House in 1953, it was estimated that $380 billion had been raised during his twenty-year tenure as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. During those years he had participated in a fiscal revolution that required financing New Deal relief programs, Social Security, United States mobilization in World War II and the Korean War, the reconversion of the mid-1940's, and the foreign aid programs of the early Cold War years.
Doughton died on October 2, 1954, in Laurel Springs, North Carolina.
Doughton was chairman of the congressional committee that originates revenue bills in an era in which some liberals sought to require investors to pay a more equitable share of federal taxation, while some conservatives sought to pass the mounting costs of government to consumers. Although he consistently resisted proposals for the sales tax, that action did not place him in the liberal camp; he did not object to adoption of the regressive levy on the state level. He also worked strenuously against such taxes on investors as the undistributed corporate earnings tax, which he modified out of existence between 1936 and 1939, when the Treasury anticipated national mobilization of industry for war and shifted to reassuring investor incentives, a policy Doughton warmly endorsed.
Doughton claimed that a "simple, orthodox, democratic view of taxes" governed his fiscal philosophy. He eschewed budget deficits and espoused pay-as-you-go financing, especially when that financing involved revenue for social programs. Like other congressmen who endeavored to stimulate postwar business investment, Doughton endorsed tax cuts that continued the wartime fiscal practice of enlarging the federal debt. "We have given business the green light, " he boasted.
Doughton was known in Washington as a plugger rather than a brilliant man. A tall (six-foot-two), lean man of considerable persistence and energy, he was called "Muley Bob" by the press because of his alleged stubbornness in legislative pursuits. The name actually belied a flexibility that enabled him to maneuver onto the winning side of most issues. Reporters enjoyed his homespun speech, one of his oft-repeated maxims reminded listeners that "the science of levying and collecting taxes is the science of getting the most feathers with the least squawking of the geese. "
At an unknown date Doughton married Mrs. Boyd Greer Doughton; following her death, he married Lillie Strickler Hix in 1898. They had four children.