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Adlai Stevenson III
United States Senator from Illinois
In office November 17, 1970 – January 2, 1981
Preceded by	Ralph Tyler Smith
Succeeded by	Alan J. Dixon
Personal details
Born	Adlai Ewing Stevenson III (1930-10-10) October 10, 1930 (age 81) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Alma mater	Harvard University
Religion	Unitarian
Military service
Service/branch	United States Marine Corps
Rank	Captain

Adlai Ewing Stevenson III (born October 10, 1930) is an American politician of the Democratic Party. He represented the state of Illinois in the United States Senate from 1970 until 1981.

Education, military service, and early career[link]

Adlai Stevenson III was born in Chicago. He attended the Milton Academy in Massachusetts, Harrow School in England, and Harvard College.

He received a law degree in 1957 from Harvard Law School.

Stevenson was commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1952, served in Korea and was discharged from active duty in 1954. He continued to serve in the Marine Reserves and was discharged in 1961 as a captain.

In 1957, Stevenson went to work as a clerk for a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and worked there until 1958 when he joined the law firm of Brown and Platt.

Illinois political career[link]

In 1964, Stevenson was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives as an at-large representative due to reapportionment problems, serving from 1965 to 1967.^[1][2] He then served as Illinois Treasurer (1967–1970).^[3]

United States Senate[link]

After U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) died in office in 1969 and Ralph Tyler Smith was appointed to the seat, Stevenson defeated Smith in a 1970 special election by a 58% to 42% margin to fill Dirksen's unexpired term. Stevenson introduced legislation requiring an end to all foreign aid to South Vietnam by June 30, 1975.^[4] He authored the International Banking Act, the Stevenson Wydler-Technology Innovation Act and its companion, the Bayh Dole Act, to foster cooperative research, organize national laboratories for technology utilization and commercialization, permit private sector interests in government funded research. He was the first Chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee charged with implementing a code of ethics he helped draft. Stevenson was also chairman of a Special Senate Committee which reorganized the Senate and served on the Democratic Policy Committee. Inter alia, he also conducted the first in depth Congressional study of terrorism as Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Collection and Production of Intelligence, leading to introduction of the Comprehensive Counter Terrorism Act of 1971 with warnings of "spectacular acts of disruption and destruction" and an amendment which proposed a reduction of assistance for Israel by $200 million until such time as the President could certify that the settlements polices of the newly elected Likud Government of Israel were consistent with U.S. policy. His amendment received 7 votes - making his point, that given a choice between supporting the U.S. and the "Israeli Lobby", Congress would support the latter.

Stevenson was re-elected to the seat in 1974, and in 1980 declined to stand for re-election, thus serving in the U.S. Senate from 1970 to 1981.

Stevenson was encouraged to run for President in 1976 by Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, declined and was one of the finalists for Vice-President at the Democratic Convention that year. Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota was nominated for vice president.^[5]

Post-Senate political career[link]

Stevenson ran for Governor of Illinois in 1982 and 1986, losing both elections to James R. Thompson. In 1982 the initial vote count showed Stevenson winning; however, the final official count showed him losing by 1/7 of one percent. Stevenson promptly petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court for a recount and presented evidence of widespread election irregularities, including evidence of a failed punch card system for tabulation of votes (later to become infamous in the presidential election of 2000). Three days before the gubernatorial inauguration, the Court, by a one vote margin, denied the recount, asserting that the Illinois recount statute was unconstitutional.

However, the Illinois Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit, and did so in a curious way. Instead of following the normal standard that decides a motion to dismiss, the court did not assume, for purposes of the motion, that the facts stated in the complaint were true. Instead, the court went "behind the pleadings" to look at the conduct of the original partial recount and then dismissed the case because it said that Adlai Stevenson had no reasonable cause to complain about the conduct of the counting and recounting activities. A grand jury later determined that Adlai Stevenson had unwittingly benefited from some 100,000 illegal ballots that had been cast in Chicago in the 1982 gubernatorial election. "U.S. to probe primary vote fraud," Chicago Tribune, March 11, 1987. The Illinois legislature later changed election contest procedures based on the court's ruling.

In the 1986 campaign for Governor, in a fluke, two followers of Lyndon LaRouche won the Democratic Party primary nominations for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State. Stevenson objected to their platform and refused to appear on the same ticket. Instead, he organized the Solidarity Party to provide an alternate slate for Governor, Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State, which was duly endorsed by the regular Democratic organization. Persuading Democrats to vote a regular Democratic ticket and then cross over to also vote for the Solidarity candidates for Governor, Lt. Governor and Secretary of State was doomed to fail; however, Stevenson and the candidate for Lieutenant Governor position, Mike Howlett, won 40% of the vote.

Post-political career[link]

Since leaving the Senate, Stevenson has been active in business and cultural relations with east Asia. He is chairman of SC&M Investment Management Corporation, and co-chairman of HuaMei Capital Company (the first Chinese-American investment bank).

He has also held many positions with non-profit organizations in this area. He has served as chairman of the Japan-America Society of Chicago, the Midwest U.S.-Japan Association, and the Midwest U.S.-China Association, and as President of the U.S. Committee of the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC). He is also co-chairman of the PECC's Financial Market Development Project, a member of the U.S.-Korea Wisemen Council, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Korea Economic Institute.

Stevenson has been honored by the government of Japan with the Order of the Sacred Treasure, and is an Honorary Professor of Renmin University in China.

He is Chairman of the international Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy housed at the family home near Libertyville, Illinois. The Center brings practitioners from the real world of politics together with scholars and experts from many parts of the world to address systemic challenges to democratic systems of government. Stevenson is auth of The Black Book which records American history and his politics as his family knew it over five generations, starting with his great great grandfather Jesse Fell who was Abraham Lincoln's patron. Stevenson contrasts the values which created america with those which now undermine it. He recall lessons from a rich American past. The Black Book is available at www.adlai3.com.

Political family history[link]

Stevenson's great-grandfather Adlai E. Stevenson I was vice president of the United States (1893–1897). His grandfather Lewis G. Stevenson was Illinois secretary of state (1914–1917). His father, Adlai Stevenson, was governor of Illinois, Ambassador to the United Nations, and two time Democratic presidential nominee. Actor McLean Stevenson was his second cousin once removed.

Adlai Stevenson IV, Stevenson III's son, became a television reporter in Chicago in the 1980s. It is reported that when asked if he liked his name, he said he intended to become "Adlai the Last".^[6] However, in the summer of 1994, Adlai Ewing Stevenson V was born.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Baker, Jean H. (1996). The Stevensons: A Biography of An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-03874-2. 

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Adlai Stevenson III at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Political Science: Analysis of the 1986 election "debacle" in Illinois

v t e United States Senators from Illinois Class 2 Thomas McLean Baker Robinson McRoberts Semple S. Douglas Browning Richardson Yates Logan Davis Cullom Lewis McCormick Deneen Lewis Slattery Brooks P. Douglas Percy Simon Durbin Class 3 Edwards McLean Kane Ewing Young Breese Shields Trumbull Oglesby Logan Farwell Palmer Mason Hopkins Lorimer Sherman McKinley Glenn Dieterich Lucas Dirksen Smith Stevenson III Dixon Moseley Braun Fitzgerald Obama Burris Kirk

Adlai Stevenson may refer to:

• Adlai Stevenson I (1835–1914), U.S. Vice President (1893–1897) and Congressman (1879–1881)
• Adlai Stevenson II (1900–1965), Governor of Illinois (1949–1953), U.S. presidential candidate (1952 and 1956), U.N. Ambassador (1961–1965), grandson of Adlai Stevenson I
• Adlai Stevenson III (born 1930), U.S. Senator (1970–1981), Illinois State Representative (1965–1967), candidate for Illinois governor (1982 and 1986), son of Adlai Stevenson II
• Adlai Stevenson IV (born 1956), journalist, son of Adlai Stevenson III

See also[link]

• Stevenson family

This disambiguation page lists articles about people with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Paul Douglas
United States Senator from Illinois
In office January 3, 1949 – January 3, 1967
Preceded by	Charles W. Brooks
Succeeded by	Charles H. Percy
Personal details
Born	Paul Howard Douglas (1892-03-26)March 26, 1892 Salem, Massachusetts
Died	September 24, 1976(1976-09-24) (aged 84) Washington, D.C.
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Dorothy Wolff Douglas, divorced Emily Taft Douglas, deceased
Alma mater	Bowdoin College Columbia University Harvard University
Profession	Economist
Religion	Quaker
Military service
Service/branch	United States Marine Corps
Rank	Lieutenant Colonel
Battles/wars	World War II
Awards	Bronze Star Purple Heart (2)

Paul Howard Douglas (March 26, 1892 – September 24, 1976) was an American politician and economist. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a U.S. Senator from Illinois for eighteen years, from 1949 to 1967. During his Senate career, he was a prominent member of the Liberal coalition.^[1]

Born in Massachusetts and raised in Maine, Douglas graduated from Bowdoin College and Columbia University. He served as a professor of economics at several schools, most notably the University of Chicago, and earned a reputation as a reformer while a member of the Chicago City Council (1939–1942). During World War II, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and becoming known as a war hero.

He was married to Emily Taft Douglas, a U.S. Representative from Illinois's At-large district (1945–1947).

Early years[link]

Douglas was born on March 26, 1892 in the small town of Salem, Massachusetts. When he was four, his mother died of natural causes and his father remarried. His father was an abusive husband and his stepmother, unable to obtain a divorce, left her husband and took Douglas and his older brother to Onawa, Maine in Piscataquis County, where her brother and uncle had built a resort in the woods.

Academia and family life[link]

Douglas graduated from Bowdoin College with a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1913. He then moved on to Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1915 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1921. In 1915, he married Dorothy Wolff, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College who also earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

From 1915 to 1920, the Douglases moved six times. Paul studied at Harvard University; taught at the University of Illinois and at Oregon's Reed College, served as a mediator of labor disputes for the Emergency Fleet Corporation of Pennsylvania and taught at University of Washington. When working for the Emergency Fleet Corporation he read John Woolman's journals. When teaching in Seattle, he joined the Religious Society of Friends.

In 1919, Douglas took a job teaching economics at the University of Chicago. Although Douglas enjoyed his job, his wife was unable to obtain a job at the university due to anti-nepotism rules. When she obtained a job at Smith College, in Massachusetts, she persuaded her husband to move the family there. He would then start teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Douglas soon decided that the marriage situation was untenable^{[citation needed]} and, in 1930, the couple divorced, with Dorothy taking custody of their four children and Douglas returning to Chicago. The following year, Douglas met and married Emily Taft Douglas, daughter of sculptor Lorado Taft and distant cousin of former President William Howard Taft. Emily was a political activist, former actress, and subsequent one-term congresswoman at-large from Illinois (1945–47).

Douglas was listed as a supporter of banking reforms suggested by University of Chicago economists in 1933 that were later referred to as the "Chicago plan".^[2] In 1939, he coauthored with five other notable economists a draft proposal titled A Program for Monetary Reform. The Chicago plan and A Program for Monetary Reform generated much interest and discussion among lawmakers, but the suggested reforms did not result in any new legislation.

Douglas is probably best-known to economics students as the co-author of the 1928 article with Charles Cobb that first laid out the Cobb-Douglas production function.

Government service and city politics[link]

As the 1920s drew to a close, Douglas got more involved in politics. He served as an economic advisor to Republican Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania and Democratic Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. Along with Chicago lawyer Harold L. Ickes, he launched a campaign against public utility tycoon Samuel Insull's stock market manipulations.^{[citation needed]} Working with the state legislature, he helped draft laws regulating utilities and establishing old-age pensions and unemployment insurance. By the early 1930s, he was vice chairman of the League for Independent Political Action, a member of the Farmer-Labor Party's national committee, and treasurer of the American Commonwealth Political Federation.

A registered Independent, Douglas felt that the Democratic Party was too corrupt and the Republican Party was too reactionary, views that he expressed in a 1932 book, The Coming of a New Party, in which he called for the creation of a party similar to the British Labour Party.^{[citation needed]} That year, he voted for Socialist candidate Norman Thomas for President of the United States.

After Roosevelt's victory in the election, Douglas, at the recommendation of his friend Harold Ickes, was appointed to serve on the Consumers' Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration. In 1935, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the Administration was unconstitutional and it was abolished.

That year, Douglas made his first foray into electoral politics, campaigning for the endorsement of the local Republican Party for mayor of Chicago. Although the party endorsed someone else, Douglas continued to work with them to get their candidate elected to the city council from the 5th Ward. A strong Socialist candidate split the reform vote, however, and Democrat James Cusack, a member of the Cook County political machine, was elected.

Four years later, in 1939, Cusack came up for re-election, and Douglas joined a group of reform-minded Independents in attempting to select a suitable challenger. The group decided that Douglas was the best candidate for the position and he was summarily drafted. During the election, Mayor Ed Kelly, a leader of the machine who was in a tough fight for re-election, attempted to shore up his reputation by lending his support to Douglas' campaign. With Kelly's help, and his own dogged campaigning, Douglas managed a narrow victory over Cusack in a runoff election.

A reformer on a council full of machine politicians and grafters, Douglas usually found himself in the minority. His attempts to reform the public education system and lower public transportation fares were met with derision and he typically ended up on the losing end of 49-1 votes. "I have three degrees", Douglas once said after a particularly close-fought rout. "I have been associated with intelligent and intellectual people for many years. Some of these aldermen haven't gone through the fifth grade. But they're the smartest bunch of bastards I ever saw grouped together."^{[citation needed]}

In 1942, Douglas officially joined the Democratic Party and ran for its nomination for the United States Senate. He had the support of a cadre of left-wing activists, but the machine supported the state's at-large Congressman Raymond S. McKeough for the nomination. On the day of the primary, Douglas carried 99 of the state's 102 counties, but McKeough's strong support in Cook County allowed him to win a slim majority. He would go on to lose in the general election to incumbent Republican Senator C. Wayland Brooks.

Military service[link]

As alderman, Douglas had worked with Chicago Daily News publisher Frank Knox in fighting corruption in Chicago. Knox, who had been Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1936, had become Secretary of the Navy, thus responsible for both the navy and the Marine Corps.

Shortly after losing the primary, Douglas resigned from the Chicago City Council and, with the aid of Knox enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a private at the age of 50. As a member of the 57th Street Meeting of the Quakers, Douglas recognized that joining the Marines was contrary to the traditional testimony of that group against war and offered to resign his membership; the meeting refused to release him.^[3] Promoted to corporal, then to sergeant, Douglas was kept stateside, writing training manuals, and giving inspirational speeches to troops. He was told he was "too old to go overseas 'as an enlisted man'".^{[citation needed]} With the aid of Knox, and of Knox assistant Adlai Stevenson, Douglas was commissioned as an officer, and was subsequently sent to the Pacific theater of operations with the 1st Marine Division.

On the second day of the Battle of Peleliu, Captain Douglas finally saw action when his unit waded into the fray. He earned a Bronze Star for carrying ammunition to the front lines under enemy fire and earned his first Purple Heart when he was grazed by shrapnel while carrying flamethrower ammunition to the front lines.^[4] In that six week battle, while investigating some random fire shootings, Douglas was shot at as he uncovered a two-foot-wide cave. He then killed the Japanese soldier inside at which point he wondered whether his enemy might be an economics professor from the University of Tokyo.^[5]

A few months later, during the Battle of Okinawa, Douglas earned his second Purple Heart. A volunteer rifleman in an infantry platoon, he was helping to carry wounded from 3rd Battalion 5th Marines along the Naha-Shuri line when a burst of machine gun fire tore through his left arm, severing the main nerve and leaving it permanently disabled.^[4]

After a thirteen-month stay in the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, Douglas was given an honorable discharge as a Lieutenant Colonel with full disability pay.

Campaign for the Senate[link]

While Douglas had been serving in the Marines, his wife, Emily, had been nominated to run against isolationist Republican Congressman Stephen A. Day, who had succeeded Raymond McKeough. Although she had defeated Day in the 1944 election, a Republican upsurge had unseated her in 1946, the same year that Douglas left the Marines.

Deciding to enter politics once again, Douglas let it be generally known that he wished to seek the office of Governor of Illinois in 1948. Cook County machine boss Jacob Arvey, however, had a different plan. At the time, several scandals had broken out over the machine's activities, and Arvey decided that Douglas, a scholar and war hero with a reputation for incorruptibility, would be the perfect nominee to run against Senator Brooks. Since Brooks was hugely popular in the state and had a large campaign warchest, Arvey decided that there was no danger of Douglas winning.^{[citation needed]}. The top 2/3 of the Illinois Democratic slate for the 1948 election then became Paul Douglas for senator and Adlai Stevenson for governor.

At the outset of the campaign, Douglas' chances looked slim. As a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention, he had tried to draft General Dwight D. Eisenhower for President, calling President Harry S. Truman "incompetent."^{[citation needed]}

Douglas, however, proved to be a tenacious campaigner. He stumped across the state in a Jeep station wagon for the Marshall Plan, civil rights, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, more public housing, and more social security programs. During six months of non-stop campaigning, he traveled more than 40,000 miles (64,000 km) around the state and delivered more than 1,100 speeches. When Senator Brooks refused to debate him, Douglas debated an empty chair, switching from seat to seat as he provided both his own answers and Brooks'.

On Election Day, Douglas won an upset victory, taking 55 percent of the vote and defeating the incumbent by a margin of more than 407,000 votes. Stevenson won the race for governor by a wide margin, but there was no coattails effect from president to senator to governor; President Truman, campaigning for re-election, won the state by a slim 33,600 votes.

United States Senator[link]

Douglas (3rd from left) in the Oval Office (1949)

As a member of the Senate, Douglas soon earned a reputation as an unconventional liberal, concerned as much with fiscal discipline as with passing the Fair Deal. He was a passionate crusader for civil rights (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described him as "the greatest of all the Senators"^{[citation needed]}) and earned fame as an opponent of pork barrel spending. Early in his first term, he grabbed headlines when, magnifying glass and atlas in hand, he strode to the Senate floor and, referring to a pork barrel project for the dredging of a river in Maine, defied anyone to find the river in the atlas. When Maine's Owen Brewster objected, and pointed out the millions of dollars in pork going to Illinois, Douglas offered to cut his state's share by 40%.

Appointed to chair the Joint Economic Committee, Douglas led a series of hard-hitting investigations into fiscal mismanagement in government and appeared on the cover of Time.^{[citation needed]} A profile of him in that issue was entitled "The Making of a Maverick."^[6]

As the 1952 presidential election approached, a groundswell of support arose for a Douglas candidacy for President. The National Editorial Association ranked him the second-most-qualified man, after Truman, to receive the Democratic presidential nomination, and a poll of 46 Democratic insiders revealed him to be a favorite for the nomination if Truman stepped aside.

Douglas, however, refused to be considered as a candidate for President, and instead backed the candidacy of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, a folksy, coonskin cap-wearing populist who had become famous for his televised investigations into organized crime. Douglas stumped across the country for Kefauver and stood next to him at the 1952 Democratic National Convention when Kefauver was defeated by Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. Four years later, in 1956, he remained publicly neutral, feeling that openly opposing Stevenson's drive for the nomination and supporting Kefauver would damage his standing with his state party.^{[citation needed]}

In addition to his battles for equal rights for African Americans and less pork barrel spending, Douglas was also known for his fights for environmental protection, public housing, and truth in lending laws. He opposed real estate redlining, but was forced to allow a 1949 provision in a public housing bill making it possible for suburbs to reject low-income housing. He also authored the Consumer Credit Protection Act, a bill that forced lenders to state the terms of a loan in plain language and restricted the ability of lenders to discriminate on the basis of gender, race, or income. Although the bill was not passed during his term of office, it became law in 1968.

Defeat and retirement[link]

During the 1966 election, Douglas, then 74, ran for a fourth term in office against Republican Charles H. Percy, a wealthy businessman. A confluence of events, including Douglas' age, unhappiness within the Democratic Party^{[citation needed]} over his support for the Vietnam War and open housing laws, as well as sympathy for Percy over the recent, unsolved murder of his daughter, caused Douglas to lose the election in an upset.

After losing his seat in the Senate, Douglas taught at the New School, chaired a commission on housing, and wrote books, including an autobiography, In the Fullness of Time.

In the early 1970s, he suffered a stroke and withdrew from public life. On September 24, 1976, he died at his home. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Jackson Park near the University of Chicago.

Memorial[link]

A memorial marker at the Marine Corps training base at Parris Island reads:

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	World War II portal
	United States Marine Corps portal

• Douglas, A Program for Monetary Reform (1939)

Notes[link]

References[link]

Cobb, Charles W. and Paul H. Douglas. "A Theory of Production." American Economic Review 18: Suppl.(1928). pp 139-156.

External links[link]

• Paul Douglas at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• [www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/phdouglas.html Biographical Essay from University of Chicago]

v t e United States Senators from Illinois Class 2 Thomas McLean Baker Robinson McRoberts Semple S. Douglas Browning Richardson Yates Logan Davis Cullom Lewis McCormick Deneen Lewis Slattery Brooks P. Douglas Percy Simon Durbin Class 3 Edwards McLean Kane Ewing Young Breese Shields Trumbull Oglesby Logan Farwell Palmer Mason Hopkins Lorimer Sherman McKinley Glenn Dieterich Lucas Dirksen Smith Stevenson III Dixon Moseley Braun Fitzgerald Obama Burris Kirk