Nancy Beck Young's is the first book-length assessment of 
Texas Congressman Wright Patman's public life. Based on 
exhaustive research, this crisp congressional biography 
analyzes one of the twentieth century's most colorful and 
controversial legislators. Elected to the House of 
Representatives in 1928 and serving until his death in 1976, 
Patman combined populism with liberalism to fashion his own 
vision of how best to preserve the American Dream.


Patman often operated on the margins of Washington politics, 
but through the force of his personality and his 
effectiveness as a speaker, he was able to coerce his 
colleagues to address his reform agenda. His abilities as a 
campaigner and his dependability as a Democratic vote in 
Congress on all questions except civil rights made him an 
important though sometimes unwelcome ally for the Democratic 
presidents under whom he served.


From his earliest days in Congress Patman sought payment of 
a "bonus" for World War I veterans, to fulfill a debt to the 
men who fought for their country as well as to provide a 
depression relief and reform program that would expand the 
nation's currency. His assault on chain stores stemmed from 
his concern that they were destructive of mom-and-pop 
ventures as well as traditional American values and 
communities. During and after World War II he lobbied for 
programs beneficial to the small businesses he believed were 
victims of a federal policy that encouraged large 
multinational corporations.


In the 1960s and 1970s he added a new dimension to his 
attack on elite privileges, maintaining that most large 
foundations existed not for charitable purposes but as tax 
dodges for the wealthy families that established them. His 
perennial crusade against the Federal Reserve and against 
high interest rates intensified as interest rates and 
inflation grew. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of his 
partisanship came with his aborted attempt to investigate 
Richard Nixon's activities in the Watergate affair prior to 
the 1972 election.


The last major fight of his career was his futile effort to 
retain his chairmanship of the Banking and Currency 
Committee in 1975. His defeat was a testimonial to the 
changes liberalism underwent during his career in Washington, 
D.C. A new generation of reformers no longer cared about the 
economic populism that drove much of his agenda for forty-
seven years.


This book is essential reading for anyone interested in 
twentieth-century politics and policy development.


"This masterful biography . . . does full justice to Patman's 
extraordinary career.   . . . Congressional biography does not get 
any better than this."—Lewis L. Gould


"For half a century, Wright Patman prowled Capitol Hill, 
transforming the congress as an institution and crusading for a 
vanishing political and economic order. Nancy Beck Young's 
penetrating and impeccably researched biography chronicles 
Patman's storied career, simultaneously explicating the 
institutional history of the House of Representatives and 
elucidating the odyssey of American liberalism."—Bruce J. 
Schulman


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A Dallas area native, NANCY BECK YOUNG is an assistant 
professor of history at McKendree College in Lebanon, Illinois. 
She specializes in twentieth-century American political history 
and the history of American women. Coauthor of Texas, Her 
Texas: The Life and Times of Frances Goff, she is currently 
working on a new book, Forgotten Feminist: Lou Henry Hoover 
as First Lady, under contract to the University Press of 
Kansas.


Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements 
Center for Southwest Studies.