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As McKay expected, he has caught hell. No other member of the President's Cabinet, not even Ezra Benson, has suffered so much personal attack. Sample labels: Dimout Doug, No-Dam Doug and Giveaway McKay. Orators call him a stooge of the power trusts, lumber barons, cattle kings and the other Lucifers of New Deal demonology. McKay shrugs: "I've sold automobiles for 32 years, and I was once a second lieutenant in the Army, so I've been cussed by experts. It doesn't bother me a bit." Sometimes it does: when his honesty is questioned, McKay is apt to reply—firmly—in the next mail. He resented the charge of selling out the West: "How could I sell my own state down the river? Oregon's where I've made every penny I've earned, where everything I own is tied up, where my family has been now for generations."
Hard & Loose. In Oregon, which has nice weather for ducks, McKay is called a "real webfoot." His grandparents, covered-wagon pioneers, settled there more than a century ago. A great-grandmother died on the endless Oregon Trail, and a great-uncle was disemboweled by Indians, who filled his stomach with stones and tossed his body back into his cabin. His grandfather ran a Hudson's Bay Company store, drifted to California looking for gold with three burros ("one for groceries, one for dynamite and one for chewing tobacco") but returned emptyhanded.
As a boy McKay milked the cows at his grandfather's farm on a Columbia River island. His father seldom came home with any money and, one day, never came home at all. His mother found a job as a seamstress, and young Doug McKay went to work. He sold candy in a Portland theater between the acts, until stopped by the child-labor laws. Later he delivered papers, drove a meat wagon, then quit high school to work in a railroad office. But he yearned for a farm of his own; he studied nights and saved enough to get a degree at Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State). But the war came, and the farm went glimmering.
On the last night of 1915's Meuse-Argonne offensive, Lieut. James Douglas McKay, back from patrol, stopped at his outfit's field kitchen just as a German shell landed. Shrapnel ripped open his leg, nicked an ear and tore off part of his right arm and shoulder. He lived mainly because "he refused to die," an Army doctor said, but he left the hospital 13 months later with a gimpy right arm. After the shellburst, he could never again handle a plow.
Ever since, McKay has been careful of his health. On political campaigns, he has learned to sleep sitting up; in Oregon he carried a pillow in his car to sleep on while crossing town between speeches. He likes to quote the old colored mammy: "When I works, I works hard. When I sits, I sits loose. When I worries, I goes to sleep."