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William Lewis Douglas

 

William Douglas (August 22, 1845 – September 17, 1924) was a U.S. political figure. He served as governor of Massachusetts from 1905 until 1906.

He was the son of William Douglas and Mary C. (Vaughan) Douglas; he married, September 6, 1868, to N. Augusta Terry.

There was little in the first thirty years of William L. Douglas' life to suggest he was destined to be an industrialist and Governor of Massachusetts. He was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts the son of a sailor, who died when Douglas was five. Mr. Douglas attended school intermittently and from the age of seven worked for his uncle, a shoemaker. Douglas learned this trade, working as a journeyman shoemaker until the Civil War. He enlisted in the Massachusetts 58th regiment and was wounded at the battle of Cold Harbor. He was discharged in 1865.

Douglas pursued his fortune making and selling shoes in Colorado, but he returned to Massachusetts in 1868. In 1876, he began the W.L. Douglas Shoe Company, which boomed becoming a major employer in Brockton, Massachusetts. The factory was able to manufacture 20,000 pairs of shoes per day, which supplied W.L. Douglas Shoe Stores in seventy-eight cities.

Douglas entered politics serving as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives 1884-5 and in the Massachusetts Senate in 1887. He was elected Mayor of Brockton in 1890. Running as a Democrat in 1904, Douglas defeated incumbent Governor John Lewis Bates.

In his first week as Governor, Douglas faced a firestorm of protest from residents of Cape Cod enraged by the Commonwealth's intention to establish a leper colony in the small town of Brewster, Massachusetts. So many protesters traveled from Cape Cod that the railroads had to add an extra train. Douglas ended the plan, sold the Brewster property, and found a new location on the Cape, at Penikese Island, which was the former site of The Anderson School of Natural History, which Louis Agassiz directed in the 1870s. Though protest was voiced, Douglas refused to schedule public meetings on the topic, and the Commonwealth staffed its first treatment program for leprosy under Douglas' administration.

Governor Douglas also created the Douglas Commission to determine how education could be reformed to better prepare Massachusetts' work force. The commission recommended increased industrial education opportunities, which paved the way for industrial education programs in Massachusetts' public schools. Douglas was stymied by a Republican majority in the legislature, and returned to his business and private philanthropy.

Summary:

born in Bisbee, Cochise County, Ariz., July 2, 1894;
attended the public schools and Montclair (N.J.) Academy;
graduated from Amherst (Mass.) College in 1916;
attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1916;
commissioned as a second lieutenant on August 15, 1917, and assigned to the Three Hundred and Forty-seventh Regiment, Field Artillery;
promoted to first lieutenant and served overseas as assistant, G-3 staff, Ninety-first Division, until discharged on February 18, 1919;
instructor of history at Amherst College in 1920;
engaged in mining and general business;
member of the Arizona State house of representatives 1923-1925;
elected as a Democrat to the Seventieth Congress;
reelected to the three succeeding Congresses and served from March 4, 1927, until his resignation March 4, 1933, before the commencement of the Seventy-third Congress;
appointed Director of the Budget by President Franklin D. Roosevelt;
took the oath of office on March 7, 1933, and served until August 31, 1934, when he resigned;
vice president and member of the board of a chemical company 1934-1938;
principal and vice chancellor of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, from January 1938 to December 1939;
president of an insurance company from 1940-1947, and chairman of the board on leave of absence, 1947-1959;
deputy administrator of the War Shipping Administration from May 1942 to March 1944;
United States Ambassador to Great Britain 1947-1950; director, General Motors Corporation, 1944-1965;
chairman and director, Southern Arizona Bank & Trust Company, 1949-1966;
appointed by the President to head Government Study of Foreign Economic Problems, 1953;
member, President’s Task Force on American Indians, 1966-1967; died in Tucson, Ariz., March 7, 1974;
cremated.