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Potatoes & Knee Breeches. It was a far cry from the days when Charlie Dawes worried about whether or not to wear knee breeches to court (he decided not to), or when Boston's bookish Ambassador Alanson Bigelow Houghton singled out as his principal concern the export status of the American potato. As he labored over his problems last week, no one knew better than Lew Douglas how the scope of U.S. diplomacy had changed.
Even its technical workings had been altered unrecognizably since the day when Thomas Jefferson seriously questioned the need for any U.S. envoy in London at all. On the State Department rolls last week were 20,903 employees, from Secretary Marshall to a Chinese translator in Nanking. State's budget was a whopping $303 million. The London Embassy was staffed by over 500. U.S. diplomacy was a big business machine and it took skilled managers to run it—men like ex-Banker James Bruce in Buenos Aires, ex-Businessman William Pawley in Rio, ex-jack-of-all-careers Lew Douglas in London.
Lewis Douglas is one of the most typical products of the managerial revolution. In his adult life he has managed: 1) the U.S. budget, 2) a large industrial concern (American Cyanamid), 3) a university (Montreal's McGill University), 4) a huge insurance company (Mutual Life of New York), and 5) an important arm of a wartime government (Deputy War Shipping Administrator). He is a practical economist rather than a theoretician, he has more than an amateur's interest in history, but is no intellectual. He likes to keep things moving, his desk clean, his thoughts clear. He is not afraid to make a decision, or to state his convictions. He can delegate power. He is no real expert on any one thing, but he knows something about a lot of things, especially what makes capitalism work.
In Washington, World Bank President John J. McCloy, who is also Douglas' brother-in-law, commented: "I've known Lew too long to go into ecstasies over him, but then I don't know who I'd go into ecstasies over. He's no giant, no genius. He's a sound, solid citizen with a good education and a good start in life who has been bounced to the top in our competitive system. He's no smarter than a lot of other people who haven't leveled out yet. I think that's the way Lew would think of himself."
The Professor & Rawhide Jim. Lew Douglas got his start in life in the vast, rolling desert country of Arizona, the descendant of men who had already made history in the West. Grandfather James Douglas, a Canadian, had studied in Edinburgh for the ministry, returned to Quebec to study medicine, and wound up in the copper mines along the Mexican border. Backed by Phelps-Dodge money from the East, he struck it rich with the Copper Queen Mine. He went on to help develop the town of Bisbee, a mine at Morenci, others at Globe and across the Mexican border in Nacozari. He wound up as president of Phelps-Dodge and a legend in the West, a strange, warm, brilliant man, always known as "the professor" to admiring mining toughs.