Lewis McCarthy Downs (25 November 1901–21 September 1956), judge of the State Corporation Commission, was born at Crewe, in Nottoway County, and was the son of Charles Emmett Downs and Jacquemine Fentress Downs. He began school in Roanoke and completed high school in Richmond, where the family had moved in 1910 when his father went to work in the office of the state auditor of public accounts. As a young man, Downs worked as a clerk in the Richmond court of chancery and in the city treasurer's office, briefly attended Richmond College (later the University of Richmond), and spent a year and a half at Virginia Military Institute. He joined the credit-reporting Bradstreet Company (later Dun and Bradstreet) in 1924 and managed its offices in Raleigh and Wilmington, North Carolina, in Charleston, West Virginia, and in Dayton, Ohio. Downs married Ann Belle Warthen in Richmond on 2 February 1924. They had three sons and one daughter.
L. McCarthy Downs, as he was professionally known, joined the state auditor's staff in Richmond in 1929. He rapidly worked his way up the ladder until the governor appointed him to succeed Thomas Coleman Andrews as auditor of public accounts on 1 May 1933. The General Assembly subsequently elected him to two consecutive four-year terms. The office audited the accounts of all the state agencies and local governments. During Downs's tenure it instituted modern bookkeeping procedures and designed uniform accounting systems for clerks of county courts and other local agencies. Increased staffing at the auditor's office during the 1930s helped assure that the state's reputation for honest and efficient money management continued. That reputation was of primary importance to the state's Democratic Party leadership under Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), who relied on honest, able, and politically unambitious men such as Downs to prevent public scandals and hold down public spending. Because the General Assembly elected the auditor, Downs remained in office during the administration of Governor James Hubert Price, who replaced many other Byrd loyalists, and led the opposition to some of Price's administrative reforms. For several years Downs was a vice president of the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers, and Treasurers of the United States.
Downs was a man of considerable political importance behind the scenes. From 1933 to 1944 he was a member ex officio of the State Compensation Board (before 1934 the State Fee Commission), which set salaries for and monitored the work of many local officials. The board was one of the key instruments by which Byrd and his primary lieutenant, Everett Randolph Combs, the board chair, maintained control over the party apparatus and enforced loyalty at the local level. At Downs's recommendation, in 1942 Virginia ended the practice, dating from the early years of the colonial period, of compensating sheriffs and some local officeholders with portions of the fees that they collected rather than with a set salary. His auditing had exposed instances of abuse and malfeasance in the fee system, and his reform was no doubt intended to reduce impropriety and implemented so as not to lessen the political influence of the compensation board.
Late in 1944 the governor appointed Downs to a vacant seat on the State Corporation Commission, a three-member panel that issued charters to corporations; regulated corporate behavior under state laws; regulated rates charged by public carriers, public utilities, and insurance companies; and oversaw banks that operated under state, rather than federal, charters. Downs took office on 16 December 1944. As a non-lawyer, he was a rarity on the commission, which acted in many respects as a court. In spite of his lack of formal legal training, he took an active hand in adjudicating contentious rulings. Of the eighteen binding opinions written during his tenure, Downs wrote eight, all of which displayed familiarity with relevant legal precedents and which defended the state's taxing powers, guarded the commission's authority to set the standards under which businesses operated in Virginia, and sided with corporations in disputes with consumers. The commissioners annually rotated the chairmanship, which Downs held in 1946 and again in 1949.
Downs resigned effective 18 April 1949 to become president of the Continental Life Insurance Company, of Washington, D.C. After Southland Life Insurance purchased Continental Life the following year, he served for four years as its vice president. In October 1950 the governor named Downs to succeed Combs as chair of the State Compensation Board, a part-time political office that he held while working for the insurance companies. Downs retired from state service in June 1955 to be general manager of Benjamin T. Crump Company, a Richmond manufacturer of automobile seat covers and hassocks. He became president of the company the following March. Lewis McCarthy Downs had a heart attack at his Richmond home on 21 September 1956 and died in an ambulance en route to a hospital. He was buried in the city's Hollywood Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in Robert C. Glass and Carter Glass Jr., Virginia Democracy (1937), 3:182–185, with variant marriage year of 1923 (portrait on 183); feature articles in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 Jan. 1942, and Richmond News Leader, 13 June 1955; Marriage Register, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; publications include Downs, "State Auditing," Commonwealth 4 (May 1937): 7–8, and "The State Corporation Commission," Virginia Law Review 35 (1949): 516–530; BVS Death Certificate, with birth date, Richmond City; obituaries in Richmond News Leader, 22 Sept. 1956 and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 Sept. 1956 (portraits), and Washington Post and Times Herald, 23 Sept. 1956; editorial tributes in Richmond News Leader, 25 Sept. 1956 and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 25 Sept. 1956.