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Published by EH.NET (June 2003) 
 
Roger Biles, _Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois_.  
DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. vii + 259 pp.  
$35.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-87580-304-0. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Alice O'Connor, Department of History,  
University of California, Santa Barbara. <[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
For anyone who wants to understand the odyssey of twentieth-century  
U.S. liberalism, Paul H. Douglas (1892-1976) is an essential figure.  
Having spent his early career engaged in late progressive-era/early  
New Deal academic and policy circles, the economist-turned-politician  
was in the vanguard of reform in the U.S. Senate as post World War II  
liberalism first struggled for its identity and then reached its  
Great Society heights, only to see glimmers of backlash in his 1966  
electoral defeat. As told by Roger Biles (Professor of History, East  
Carolina University) in this first full-scale biography, Douglas'  
story is less one of liberalism's "rise and fall" than of ongoing  
struggle, considerable frustration, and partial achievement. Above  
all, it is a story of one man's persistence in the face of  
opposition, a persistence fueled by an enduring faith in the  
possibilities of using activist governance, regulation, and economic  
knowledge in the name of a more just, equitable society. 
 
Biles develops this theme in a straightforward narrative that spans  
Douglas' lifetime but pays most attention to his Senate career.  
Nevertheless, there is much to learn about the roots of his postwar  
liberalism in his earlier life and career. Raised on the edge of  
poverty in rural Maine, Douglas worked his way through Bowdoin  
College and from there went on to Columbia University, eventually  
earning his Ph.D. in economics in 1921. In what would become a  
lifelong pattern of joining research with social action, Douglas  
cultivated his growing interest in labor economics in the heady  
atmosphere of New York's pre-World War I labor activism as well as in  
classrooms with the likes of Charles Beard, John Dewey, Henry R.  
Seager, and, on the theoretical end, John Bates Clark. He went on to  
spend most of his academic career in the interwar University of  
Chicago economics department. While there, he published extensively,  
establishing himself as a leading labor economist and policy  
intellectual with articles and books that included _Wages and the  
Family_ (1925), _Real Wages in the United States_ (1930), _Standards  
of Unemployment Insurance_ (1933), and _The Theory of Wages_ (1934).  
He also became prominent in Chicago's progressive intellectual and  
reform circles in the 1920s and 30s, and, running as a reform  
Democrat, won election to the notoriously machine-dominated city  
council in 1939. Meanwhile, having earlier aligned himself with third  
party and socialist politics in national elections, he had come to  
endorse the New Deal during FDR's second term. Equally important in  
his growing identification with the Democratic Party mainstream,  
Douglas was increasingly convinced of the need for American  
intervention to aid the Allies against Nazi expansionism, and eager  
to defend FDR against isolationist attacks. 
 
It was not until after World War II, during which the 50-year-old  
Douglas cajoled his way into active service in the U.S. Marine Corps,  
that he emerged as a force in national politics. As a three-term  
senator from Illinois beginning in 1948, he established himself as a  
standard-bearer for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,  
advocating far-reaching civil rights, anti-poverty, consumer rights,  
and tax reform legislation well before their time. If not immediately  
successful in his reform vision, Biles argues, Douglas played a key  
role in chipping away the formidable sources of opposition and in  
thus setting the stage for successes to come. This comes through  
especially in Biles' detailed discussion of the fights over the  
relatively weak Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, and of  
concomitant efforts to thwart the ever-present filibuster threat.  
Refusing to cave in to pressure from then-Senate majority leader  
Lyndon B. Johnson, Douglas continued to push for more aggressive  
legislation and federal enforcement rather than appease Southern  
Democrats with watered-down measures. Portrayed at the time as  
obstinate and quixotic, Douglas staked out a position that would  
eventually be incorporated in later legislation -- a sign, according  
to Biles, not of political zealotry or naivete, but of a principled,  
ultimately effective stance against reactionary forces. 
 
While similarly persistent in long-gestating truth-in-lending, tax  
reform, area redevelopment and other domestic legislation (including  
measures passed after his Senate tenure) Douglas departed from many  
of his counterparts in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in  
his staunch anti-communism and unyielding support for the Cold War.  
By the mid-to-late 1960s, his continuing support for ever-escalating  
American involvement in Vietnam was beginning to alienate younger,  
New Left, and anti-war voters. Ultimately, however, it was as much  
his Great Society as his Cold War liberalism that proved decisive in  
his bid for a fourth term. He was defeated for reelection by the much  
younger, politically inexperienced Republican Charles Percy in 1966,  
in a campaign that played on the internal fragmentation, and  
especially the deep racial fissures undermining the Democratic  
coalition as the civil rights struggle hit the streets of Chicago. By  
then out of sync with an economics department that had since became a  
bastion of free-market thinking, Douglas made no attempt to return to  
the University of Chicago. He finished his career as something of a  
public intellectual, teaching at the New School for Social Research,  
hosting a television series on public affairs, and chairing the  
volatile Commission on Urban Problems while working on his  
autobiography and other writings. 
 
Illuminating as a chronicle of Douglas' Senate career, this book  
provides an important vantage point for viewing the legislative  
issues and struggles that both shaped and constrained liberalism as a  
reform ideology in the postwar decades. In adhering so closely to the  
legislative record, however, Biles sometimes misses the forest for  
the trees. 
 
Thus, we learn about Douglas' repeated efforts to provide aid to  
"depressed areas," to go after the oil depletion allowance, and to  
protect consumers from monopolistic or misleading corporate  
practices, but little about the broader vision of political economy  
from which he worked. This is pertinent not just in light of Douglas'  
background as an economist, but for what it can tell us about debates  
over such issues as the relative importance of growth and  
redistribution, as well as the appropriate mix of policy  
interventions, within the emerging liberal "Keynesian consensus" of  
the time. Along those lines, it would also be of interest to learn  
whether Douglas attempted to use his position as chair of the Joint  
Economic Committee to inject his own ideas, or to assert a more  
prominent role for Congress in economic policymaking. 
 
Nor do we get much feel for whether and how Douglas was connected to  
the broader currents of racial thought, extra-congressional political  
mobilization, and movement building that galvanized the civil rights  
agenda. That Douglas was an integrationist and egalitarian in his  
thinking seems clear from his own statements and actions. What is  
less clear is why and how civil rights became a defining issue for  
him when it did, especially since there is little in his pre-Senate  
activism to suggest this direction. Here again, the question goes  
beyond Douglas himself to the course of postwar liberalism -- within  
which, as the complacency of many a more "moderate" politician  
indicates, racial equality was hardly a universally shared priority. 
 
Biles also might have done more to explain the sources and nature of  
Douglas' anti-communism, which was coming through even as Douglas was  
visiting the Soviet Union and endorsing Social Party candidate Norman  
Thomas in the 1928 and 1932 presidential elections, and which seems  
if anything to have grown more rigid over time. Whether and how this  
is connected to what later critics considered "overwrought"  
patriotism during the Cold War and "bellicosity" with regard to  
Vietnam (p. 213) is largely unexplored. 
 
More generally, Biles does not do enough to connect Douglas the  
economist and reform intellectual with Douglas the Senator, treating  
the first half of his life and career as more prelude than  
foundational to his political record and offering little analysis of  
his economic ideas. And although extensively researched in archival  
sources, Biles' narrative comes very much from the inside, relying on  
autobiographical and staff analyses for its take on various issues  
without sufficiently leavening them with outside, independent, or  
alternative perspectives. 
 
Still, Biles has provided us with an able and welcome, if not  
definitive, biography of a figure too long neglected in the annals of  
American liberalism. He makes an important contribution to recent  
political history. 
 
 
Alice O'Connor is author of _Poverty Knowledge: Social Science,  
Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History_  
(Princeton, 2001). 
 
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Fax: 513-529-3308). Published by EH.Net (June 2003). All EH.Net  
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