Joseph S. Miller – The Wicked Wine of Democracy

Official Bio of Joseph S. Miller

Joseph S. Miller is the author of The Wicked Wine of Democracy: A Memoir of a Polical Junkie 1948-1995 and Saving Oregon’s Golden Goose: Political Drama on the O&C Lands.

He is a retired generalist whose career path included U.S. Army Private, journalist, Oregon House of Representatives staffer, part-time major league baseball scout, regional information director of the Office of Price Stabilization, campaign director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and lobbyist who has lived in Washington, D.C., since 1956.

Born at Manhattan Maternity Hospital in New York City on January 1, 1922, Miller felt the Great Depression firsthand when his family went from a comfortable life in a suburb of Mt. Vernon, New York, to a simple apartment in northern Manhattan. The Great Depression ultimately split up his family when his mother disappeared with his younger brother back to her prestigious St. Louis, Missouri, family and left a twelve-year-old Miller with a deteriorating father plagued by alcoholism. Miller, being the only WASP in a sea of Catholics and Jews, initially took his share of beatings from the neighborhood kids but ultimately found street smarts, toughness, and thrift.

At 16, Miller hitchhiked across the U.S. to return to family and the Pacific Northwest that he had fallen in love with at age 14 after his first cross-country trip. Along the way, Miller stopped to work for his godfather, Gutzon Borglum, in Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. Borglum relayed to Miller’s mother that he was a “tramp” and could not understand why he was not more like his own son, Lincoln.

In 1941, after an unsuccessful stint at UCLA, where Miller was a catcher for the freshman baseball team, Miller was mercifully granted admission to the University of Oregon. There Miller participated in a 1942 race for student government president that is one heck of a story with one heck of a cast. Miller walked on the football team to play for Tex Oliver as a halfback and made the traveling squad because he was a white kid who “didn’t mindrooming with a black kid.” On December 7, 1941, Miller was on a train coming back from a 71-3 drubbing by the University of Texas when Miller and the squad became aware of Pearl Harbor.

Miller narrowly earned a degree in journalism and married Rosalie Daggy, daughter of the prestigious Speech and Rhetoric professor, Maynard Lee Daggy, who refused to name Edward R. Murrow as one of his ten best students. In 1943, Miller had a two-year stint in the U.S. Army and served as intelligence analyst until 1945 in the docile theater of the Aleutian Islands.

After the war, Miller traversed Oregon, Washington, and Idaho working for the Lewiston Morning Tribune, Boise Daily Statesman, Oregon Journal, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer and acting as a part-time scout for the Pirate’s organization. In 1948, Miller helped an underdog U.S. House candidate win a congressional seat in Seattle. As Miller put it, he “began to get ideas” and from there, The Wicked Wine of Democracy begins.

Miller could have been found almost every Friday around lunchtime at Kelley’s Irish Times on Capitol Hill, having a bite, drinking a pint, and discussing politics with an ever-changing assortment of political theorists. After 30 odd years of this practice, the folks at the Irish Times named the mildly-decrepit back room, where the weekly gathering is held, the Joseph S. Miller Room, so noted by a small piece of engraved wood. This plaque can be found just north of the cigarette machine and west of the Deer Hunter 4 arcade game.

Joseph S. Miller died at the age of 95 in Bethesda, Maryland on January 4, 2017. This website is mainted by his family, who miss him dearly.

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