Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism, & the American Dream

by Nancy Beck Young

An assessment of Texas Congressman Wright Patman's public life. Based on research, it analyzes one of the 20th century's most colourful and controversial legislators, showing how Patman combined populism with liberalism to fashion his own vision of how best to preserve the American Dream.

Genres: Politics

472 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Nancy Beck Young is a historian of twentieth-century American politics. Her research questions how ideology has shaped public policy and political institutions. Much of her work involves study of Congress, the presidency, electoral politics, and first ladies. Dr. Young is also interested in Texas political history, especially Texans in Washington. She joined the faculty of the University of Houston in 2007 after teaching for ten years at McKendree College in Illinois. She has held fellowships at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Along with colleague Leandra Zarnow, she was awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a 2017 Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers entitled Gender, the State, and the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference.

Reviews

[Christopher Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very excited ... in a way that few people are, I realize ... to read a biography of one of the iconic anti-monopoly figures in US history. This was sorta like that. I guess it would be like loving basketball and reading a biography of Michael Jordan to find that the author was more interested in his golf, baseball, and gambling focuses.

Part of the problem is that this book appears to be written for a reader that has a greater fluency with monetary policy, the way the Federal Reserve works, and other banking issues. Because despite the vast amount of time spent dissecting the ways Patman focused on the conduct of the Fed and fights over the interest rate, there is very little to help the reader actually understand what that meant.

I don't know nearly as much about Patman as the author, but the author seems to believe Wright's unwavering focus on restoring local power by ensuring strong local businesses was somehow at odds with using the power of the federal government to achieve that. I don't think there has to be a conflict there... in fact as business grew increasingly powerful, the federal government was likely the only entity that could restore a needed balance. But it didn't, in part because of flaws in Patman that I think the author covers well - his strategy and style were more conducive to raising and publicizing concerns that enacting fixes to problems.

I'm very glad to have read this book and I learned a lot... it is interesting to read a history of so many decades from the eyes of one particular person. I'm just disappointed it wasn't the book I hoped it would be. I am far more interested in Patman's efforts to ensure competitive markets than his fed feud - but then I think Patman probably would tell me that his Fed focus was more important than I realize.

I should also say that this book was very hard to find. Thank you academic libraries!

[Mark Greenbaum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Patman was one of the longest-serving congressmembers in the American history (47 years) but known more as the acerbic critic of the Federal Reserve system, eastern-based U.S. banks, and the leaving behind of rural America by the industrial economy. Interested in learning about mavericks who have challenged the modern Congress and whose prescient views on Democrats abandoning populism have been borne out, Patman is one of the most important, and this is the only biography of him. The author suggests that Patman was largely unsuccessful because he was more adept at giving voice to problems and villains than building solutions. Probably this gives Patman short shrift, as the very shedding of light on the corporate colossuses he provided for nearly half a century was better than nearly all of his colleagues then (and now!) can be bothered to muster. Inside baseball, but it's fascinating and disheartening to read about the utter and complete domination by the House Banking Committee by financial interests. Not much has changed, illustrating that Patman was onto something. Interestingly, Patman was sacked from his chairmanship by the Watergate class of 1974 (who viewed him as too old and in disregarding his service and populist intuition far different from his contemporary autocratic chairmen, threw the baby with the bathwater) but with the the combined support of my corporate-friendly Democrats who themselves heralded the change in the Democratic Party beginning then in the mid-1970s. I came here in part because of Matt Stoller's admiration and discussion of Patman. Given the rarity of his perspective in Congress in the last century and the far-sightedness of Patman's views, Patman seems important to emulate. But unfortunately he gets weak treatment here.

I can't help but compare this biography to a favorite, John Jacobs's masterful treatment of Phil Burton. Burton was a later contemporary of Patman and like Patman was an iconoclast whose entire life was dedicated to tearing down unfair institutions. But Burton achieved more successes than Patman because he was political operational and able to forge coalitions among his disparate colleagues while Patman more shouted at the moon. This study itself can't compete with Jacobs because the author lacks the storytelling ability and textual understanding of Congress that she can translate to laymen. The book is chronologically disorganized and dives far too deep into difficult financial minutia without any explanation. It is mostly a hard slog. There is no doubt that the material of Patman's life and career are rich, and could be mined far better in more able hands. While anyone mine that material of a forgotten congressmen elected in 1928? Sadly not.

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good biography of a figure who modern political scholars often forget, but way too into the weeds on monetary policy. Above all, Wright Patman was a southern populist, but not the kind who employed it as a front for conservative policies. He was an authentic crusader for the dispossessed and forgotten, albeit with a large blind spot when it came to race, like many of his Southern colleagues. Patman’s long career brought him into fights with figures from Andrew Mellon all the way through Richard Nixon. As Young notes, Patman’s energy was often focused more on fighting and less on building. Nonetheless, he had some major legislative accomplishments on veterans’ bonuses, antitrust legislation, housing, and bank regulation. He also was a leader for small businesses during the 1940s and 1950s. As time went on, Patman increasingly began to butt heads with the Federal Reserve, which was sometimes misguided. This is where Young’s biography becomes a bit too dense and dry—she lost my interest for a while despite my fascination with Patman’s politics.

Additionally, Patman was a forceful voice for his downtrodden East Texas district. Young argues that Patman’s career can be defined by his devotion to producerism. She claims that while this truly represented forgotten Middle America it also proved anachronistic in a modern economy. I disagree with her to some extent on the latter claim; producerism wasn’t taken seriously enough by by modern liberals, which she does seem to concede in the end. Nonetheless, I agree that American politics squeezed out uniquely rural voices like his to the extent that there aren’t members of Congress like Patman anymore. So too it did with the vociferous Texan, who was thrown out of the Banking Committee chairmanship in the post-Watergate Democratic caucus upheaval. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t always a team player. Perhaps it was just the rise of younger voices. But as Matt Stoller suggests in “Goliath”, it was probably a representation of the Democratic Party’s more corporate turn. An updated Patmanian populist liberalism with a better understanding of racial justice, could be useful for Democrats seeking to better represent forgotten Americans of all backgrounds. Young’s biography was very well researched but a little too elaborative on the specifics of monetary policy.