Review of Nancy Beck Young's Wright Patman: Liberalism, Populism, and the American Dream

 

Review of Nancy Beck Young's Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism and the American Dream

Note: This book is now extremely rare and goes on Amazon for around $900. A good Samaritan put it up on LibGen where it's free to read.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=505F144B4900D9AA76A44C1DEB301858

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Reading the Acknowledgements section of Nancy Beck Young's biography of Wright Patman, I felt a knot form in my stomach. As Young lists through the people and institutions that gave her financial and archival support for this work, she lists also the intellectual support, particularly in the areas of editing and criticism, from the professional historians: Kathryn Lang, Keith Gregory, Teddy Diggs, Freddie Goff, Bonny McLaughlin, Rich Hendel, Bruce Schulman, Jeff Broadwater, and so on and so forth - the professional Southern History Contextualizers. I understand full well that most intellectual works dealing with recorded history, especially ones such as these, are collaborative efforts, but even so I felt a sense of looming dread at what the Professionals were going to do with the legacy of Wright Patman. To those for whom this dread seems a bit confusing - there is a tendency among professional historians, particularly when dealing with the South, to treat certain types of figures with a Yankee-ish condescension, to conscript them into their own causes when it is expedient, and to relegate them to obsolescence, or apologize for their lack of good sense, when those figures become inconvenient.

Wright Patman was a Texarkana native who served as Texas Congressman, as a Democrat, from 1929-1976. That's 47 years of service, in which time he also served as Chairman of the Small Business Committee from 1949-1953 and Chairman of the Currency and Banking Committee from 1963-1975. Patman was raised in the thick of Texas agrarian populism, and lived and died as a warrior for that general social cause, which is known today as Producerism. To briefly summarize what that means, producerism means supporting those that produce against those that distribute, i.e. farmers against middlemen and bankers, it means supporting places deprived of capital versus those places swimming in capital, i.e. rural areas versus urban areas, and it means supporting little enterprise (even banks!) against bigger ones, i.e. big versus small. In short, Producerism means trying to reverse the flow of what Market Forces invariably want to do when left to their own devices: commodify, liquidate, rationalize, consolidate. It seeks to create a society in which the number of people living as self-sufficient master craftsmen and proprietors is the greatest, in which the personal autonomy of the worker and small-holder is secured against the forces of bigness. To onlooking critics then, Wright Patman's political decisions may sometimes have seemed at odds with his populist bona fides but it would only appear that way to someone who didn't understand economics and the American peoples' interests as perfectly as he did. This issue becomes more and more a point of contention as the biography proceeds into the future, where, it is claimed, personal autonomy in economies dominated by big business is a non-issue.

Nancy Young lays out her retelling of Patman's life in accordance with his great political battles in Washington, listed sequentially thus: (1) his come-up from Texarkana and his leading advocacy on the issue of the Bonus Army and Depression-era Monetary Reform, (2) his fight against the Chain Stores and his advocacy for Small Business Interests in the Defense Planning of WWII, (3) the fight against the Banks and Tight-Money Policy under Eisenhower, (4) his appointment to Chairman of the Currency and Banking Committee and his confrontation with the Tax-Exempt Foundations, and lastly (5) Patman in the Era of Nixon Politics. We start from the beginning.

Patman came up out of Texas Democratic politics in somewhat anomalous fashion. Although he remained committed to segregation politics - he was, first and foremost, a representative of his constituency's interests - his first real fight in politics was against the Ku Klux Klan. The reason for his opposition to the KKK was that he believed a secret reactionary core of political power, somewhat akin to Freemasonry or, for a more relevant example, the Elk's Club. As a true Jeffersonian Democrat, Patman abhorred the idea of secret political power, especially that which was generally opposed to development. His fights earned him enemies with the KKK but they earned him the respect of his district of Texarkana and the friendship of influential Texas democrat Sam Rayburn, who would be a lifelong ally of his. Patman beat Eugene Black in the 1928 race for his Texarkana district for Congressman and in his victory he conscripted some of the old Populist people I mentioned in the review of Goodwyn's Democratic Promise. Jim "Cyclone" Davis was one such Texas democrat and old veteran of the Farmer's Alliance - the farmer's cooperative union that launched the Populist movement of the 1890s based on the critique of the country's money system - who helped Patman steady his wings for this race and helped him get enmeshed in the networks that had still been maintained from the crest of the Populist wave. His opponent, Eugene Black, had made the mistake of down-talking farmer's concerns and, in doing so, essentially gave over the race to him.

When Patman first arrived in Washington, he did not get the tap to sit on the committee he most wanted, the Currency and Banking committee, but he did get the tap for the War Claims committee, which would ultimately serve as a springboard for his highest priority anyways: monetary reform. In 1929, but long before the Stock Market Crash which brought in the Great Depression, a group of disgruntled WWI veterans began to coalesce around the issue of the payments they were owed for their wartime service. When they returned from Europe, they received only a $60 severance "bonus", and in 1924, Congress passed a bill providing for an adjusted compensation that would be payable in 1945. This was an insult to the soldiers who felt they had fought a nonsense-war and come back home only to be rewarded with a pittance and a promise of something (maybe) two decades in the future. Patman took charge of this issue and sought to reform the Compensation Act of 1924 for an immediate payment for veterans. Critics of the soldiers demands started to call the early compensation a "bonus payment" and from then on, the name of the "Bonus Army" stuck.

One of Patman's many virtues was his work ethic and, in his advocacy and organization for the legislative package he intended to put through, he put together his own leaflets and mailed them out to veterans via the American Legions and lobbied the National American Legion Convention. When this strategy started falter due to string-pulling from then-Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, he reached out to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the Disabled American Veterans for further support. Andrew Mellon was a Pittsburgh steel-baron and stalwart reactionary; he wouldn't tolerate the idea of a new Bonus Army package which, he rightly suspected, would be the narrow end of the wedge for subsequent attempts at reforming the country's money system. Mellon and Patman would become nemeses around this issue, Mellon representing the banker's orthodox view and Patman the populist heterodox view. Patman would be distracted by a number of other issues after kicking the Bonus Army issue into gear and his efforts, alongside the efforts of the disgruntled veterans and other currency-activists, would not come to fruition until 1936, when Congress passed an Adjusted Compensation Payment Act in 1936, overriding Roosevelt's veto, and affording an immediate payout for veterans. The Bonus Army issue would become a national drama in the meantime. The Bonus Army soldiers marched on Washington D.C. in 1932 and President Hoover called in the Army to disperse the veteran army with lethal force. The affair was seen as a national disgrace and is thought by many to have significantly contributed to Hoover's loss to Roosevelt in the same year.

The march was occurring at the same time as a vote on the bill that Patman had helped to draft. The bill had been significantly watered down since the time that Patman had started to help draft it and then left to go back to Texarkana and work on local issues. He wanted it to provide for an issue of debt-free currency directly from the Treasury, but this was seen as inflationary by new-comers. The bill had been accumulating popularity and attracted both Democrats and Republicans as a vehicle for their own electoral popularity but they did not share Patman's understanding of the country's monetary ills (read: general lack of currency). In this section of the book, Young is more sympathetic to Patman's greenbacker politics and refrains from using critical language, for the most part, when discussing his monetary proposals. One might speculate that this is because it is now acknowledged by even the staunchest free-marketeers that the cause of the Great Depression was a lack of money. That is to say, there is little social or intellectual cost in supposing that Wright Patman may have been right in 1932 to support an injection of money, even if it was debt-free (this is considered bad because it bypasses the democratic and multilateral process of money creation which is made more transparent and stable by the inclusion of the primary dealer banks).

In the meantime, Patman used the Bonus Bill as a platform from which to attack Andrew Mellon. He made a motion to impeach the Secretary of Treasury on the basis of high crimes and misdemeanors, identifying the Secretary as overseeing tax refunds of companies he owned or controlled, owning bank stock while serving as an ex oficio chair of the Federal Reserve, and illegally trading with the Soviet Union in his capacity as board-member of the Aluminum Company of America. Patman had his eye on Mellon and had not forgotten his statement regarding what ought to be done in response to the crash:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

At the same time he advocated market discipline for Americans, this arch-reactionary baron of America's financial machinery was illegally shipping aluminum to the Red Russia. Though the impeachment proceedings were laughed down, Mellon resigned from his position in their wake, whereafter he was reappointed as Ambassador to the United Kingdom. This is an all-too-easily glossed-over segment of American history: the fact that so many dogmatically free-market American industry-captains were, simultaneous to their denunciations of the moral rot of socialism in the US, actively themselves building Communism in the East.

Following the Hoover's defeat and Roosevelt's victory, whereby Mellon stepped down and Henry Morgenthau stepped up to the Treasury position, Patman started building coalitions. He gained the support of various money-populists throughout the country: James Curley the Irish Boston mayor, who threatened to rip up the plumbing in front of the banks' downtown offices if they didn't help to circulate credit in the city, Jacob Coxey the veteran populist who led a mass march on D.C. in 1894 to protest the currency shortage, and Father Coughlin the anti-bank radio-priest of Detroit. In 1934, Patman published his Bankerteering, Bonuseering, and Melloneering as an attempt to explain the way the money-system worked and its myriad abuses. The refined version of Patman's Bonus Army bill, with all his new populist friends who had sprung up out of the Depression's discontent, made it to Congress in May of 1935 and even passed a vote in the Senate, but was vetoed by President Roosevelt. In early May, Roosevelt confided to his right-hand man Morgenthau, regarding the bill: "It is going to be vetoed. That is number one. It is going to be vetoed as strongly as I can veto it. And number three, I hope with all my heart that the veto will be sustained." Morgenthau would shortly afterwards comment in a correspondence: "The president's gone right out on the end of the limb on this bonus... And I'm going with him... And as far as I can find, I'm the only member of the Cabinet that gives a God damn what he's doing." The two were dead-set against the Bonus Bill which would provide for the injection of debt-free currency into the economy as a payout to the veterans. Kentucky Democrat Vinson organized a redrafting of the bill such that the provisions which were seen by many as 'radical' and 'inflationary' were taken out and it would simply be a payment to the veterans from the government's budget as it was. The now-bowdlerized Bonus Bill passed through a second time with enough votes to beat the veto. Strangely, Patman's takeaway from this episode was optimistic, both in his perspective on Roosevelt and on the co-authors of the bill who defanged it post-veto. It was part of Patman's unflappably optimistic character to see every political episode, whether victory, minor victory or defeat, as a learning opportunity for the American people in their struggle against the banks. He would even turn down further collaboration with Father Coughlin due to the latter's denunciation of Roosevelt as a 'liar' and 'betrayer'. Coughlin was right, but despite Roosevelt's betrayal of Patman's bill, Patman remained a loyal support of the President and the New Deal. Perhaps he thought he could one day influence the President to a greater understanding of the issue one day or, perhaps more realistically, he knew that his only chance for pushing through producerist reform was within the broad New Deal coalition under Roosevelt's aegis. Patman, despite the betrayal, remained a New Dealer and supporter of Roosevelt, and would even ape Rooseveltian political language later on, giving speeches warning about the imminent danger of a Fascist takeover in America. Young concludes this section by noting that his struggles in the 1930s, which included the Bonus Bill but also a subsequent piece of legislation aiming to increase governmental control over the Federal Reserve System, gained him a reputation as a fighter and a hard-worker, but also as a loner who was incapable of passing his own legislation and accuses him of being unable to make compromises with others.

The next segment of Patman's career is concerned with his defense and advocacy of small business, particularly against the rise of chain stores and in the national defense planning budgets. This was, much like the previous one, a difficult time in his story; it gave him legitimacy in the New Deal coalition as a dogged warrior for the interests of the small against the big, but it also further alienated him as the passion and aggression of his writings, orations, and maneuvers discomforted neutral observers ("Dude stop fighting the banks, you're scaring the hoes...") and irritated those whose interests he threatened.

During this period (roughly the second half of the 1930s until the end of the Second World War), Patman's legislative activities included lobbying on behalf of Texas banks' rights to the deposits and credit-markets of Texas business, fighting the approach of the Chain Store system which he correctly anticipated would ruin the social fabric of rural and suburban America, and securing Defense Funds for the development of industry and small business in Texas. One of his victories in this period, while it did not stem the tide of the Chain Store, was the Robinson-Patman Act, which prevented price discrimination among retailers. This was meant to give small retailers a chance against larger ones which were vertically integrated into a corporate structure of importing, warehousing, refining, etc. These vertically integrated corporate structures could deal to themselves on a preferential basis and thus create private markets-within-markets, which local retailers had no access to. The Robinson-Patman Act was an attempt to get the retail market to behave in the way that economic theory tells us it does: with a normal market price for every good.

To his credit, Wright Patman also broadcasted a radio show criticizing the prospect of American entry into the War in Europe. Although, when Pearl Harbor did happen, and America did enter, he supported the enterprise like a good New Dealer. This flip to supporting the war gives insight on Patman's character and priorities: he was first-and-foremost a representative of his constituency's interests, meaning the interests of the working people of Texarkana, and if sticking his neck out for the Germans meant losing clout within the New Deal coalition, then he would not do it. Patman's objection to American overseas-adventurism was, in the first place, based on the populist understanding that America's foreign policy establishment and its economic royalty were one in the same. It was not based, as can be speculated in other cases, on Teutonophile tendencies. Thus, when the War began on the Commander-in-Chief's say-so, the pragmatic choice was obvious, if painful. Patman thought that the war and its mobilization of national resources could represent an opportunity for development in rural areas. He fought to create a Smaller War Plants Corporation (SWPC), which was meant to allocate credit to small industrial enterprises in underdeveloped areas. And then when it was created, he had to fight to get it to do its job because it had been staffed with banker's trying to scuttle its mission. The SWPC's role was to allocate credit to fledgling industrial enterprise that it wouldn't otherwise get in normal credit conditions; this would help both small business (for obvious reasons) and the state in its wartime effort (for the reason that it could build more nimble, more robust supply chains for things that could be supplied by small-scale producers). The losers in this case would have been the banks because the SWPC-allocated credit would wreck the bargaining power in the loan-capital markets. The thirst for capital would be slaked and banks would no longer have industry over a barrel.

In addition to his work for the SWPC, which was only semi-successful due to the power struggle that ensued over credit allocation, he successfully lobbied for the direct allocation of capital from the federal government to a small steel concern in Texarkana called Lone Star Steel. The infusion and following contracts were small but big enough to get the thing up and running. Patman's lobbying on behalf of Lone Star Steel were not accompanied by pro-labor or pro-farmer provisions; instead, it was simply a mission to get the capital to develop the Texarkana and raise the general level of demand for labor and inputs, thus lifting all tides. Evidently this was confusing for Nancy Young, who commented on Patman's lobbying efforts to the effect that this was somehow complicating or even contradictory to his record and integrity as a populist or even as a liberal. She commented that Patman's program was somewhat confused, but really it's probably closer to the truth that Young is herself confused. Patman did not hate private enterprise, he simply loved fruitful, working people and hated whatever he saw to be an agent of exploitation or deprivation over their heads. Lobbying for investment and contracts for a steel mill with no unionized labor was in no way contradictory to Patman's philosophy as a populist because to him it was obvious that economic development was a net positive for the region, and would tilt the labor market in the region in favor of labor - which it did, as Young's record of complaining Northeast Texan businessmen can attest to.

We come to some of my complaints with Nancy Young. In terms of her retelling of Wright Patman's career I have no complaints, though this might be simply because there's no other Patman biography with which to compare it, as far as I know. In terms of her commentary on Patman's ideology, she is often chiseling at him with backhanded compliments, apologies for his ignorance on racial questions, and a mixture of condescension and motherly, loving pity for his anachronistic Producerist stance. For one example, she says that Patman's record as a liberal is flawed because his perfectly economically progressive (her words) record is marred by his relatively racially reactionary record. She says on more than one occasion that his complacency with the mores of his place and time did not allow him to see how his economic views were contradicted by his racial views, but then stops without further explanation. It does not appear to enter into her consideration that maybe Wright Patman was a self-possessed intelligent person who did not agree with the politics of integration and civil rights. That would be impossible because someone as principled and intelligent as Wright Patman could not possibly in his good mind be of that opinion. Rather than keeping him as a pure Populist, Nancy Young claims him as a Liberal but then chides him as a reactionary imperfect one.

For another example, to return to the previous topic, she notes the case of the Lone Star Steel Mill. It should be easily comprehensible to anyone with a full understanding of Patman's economic perspective as to why he would lobby for the federal government's capital to be invested in developing the local Texarkana economy, and yet Young sees some mystifying contradiction here between Patman's supposed hatred of big business and his lobbying for petty steel bosses. But there is quite obviously no contradiction whatsoever. Patman is for the Texarkana farmer against the Texarkana bank, for the Texarkana steel mill against the Texarkana bank, but for the Texarkana bank against the Texas bank, and even for the Texas bank against the New York City bank. Get it? A consistent application of principles along multiple axes: the worker/boss axis, the producer/distributor axis, the local/national axis, and the small/big axis, supporting the former of these pairings in every case. Always against the big New York City banks, no matter what.

Nancy Young's attempt to shove him awkwardly into her own basket, which would grant her (and Liberalism) both the power to take credit for his great successes and chastise him for his transgressions, rather than letting him slip flush into the Populist-shaped slot, shows that something here is at work underneath the hood. Liberalism is working quietly but diligently to fold the Populist legacy under the aegis of the New Deal and then, when it's newly situated, deal with it once and for all. This is how history gets erased in Open Societies: by using word tricks and the pitying downward-facing love of the executioner.

This review is mostly going to skip over the Eisenhower Era of Patman's career because, to be frank, it's not as exciting as the other parts, but for a quick recap: Patman used his position on the Currency and Banking committee to criticize the Federal Reserve and the concerned banks for collectively keeping interest rates too high, unsuccessfully proposed legislation that would support local banks against State and National banks, and further polarized the Democratic party around him. Some people grew to such a state of irritation with his constant meddling that they would vote 'No' as soon as they heard the name 'Patman', Democrats included.

The next section, which deals with Patman's fights against the Tax-Exempt Foundations opens with perhaps the only substantive criticism of Patman's Populism as something 'anachronistic'. It is cogent so I'll just post it in full:

"The events of the 1960s helped reshape the concept of liberalism in thought, in social exchange, and in practical political application. The result in the United States was a mixture of New Deal economic liberalism, postwar anticommunism, and the newest component of the American liberal tradition: a consciousness of race and gender discrimination. Wright Patman's career provides an interesting lens for examining the internal stresses at work in this decade. Although he occasionally recognized the civil rights demands of minorities and women, he never re-created the parameters of his economic liberalism and his populism to account for these constituencies. His vociferous rhetoric of protest made Patman a foil for the other important ideological development of the decade: the reemergence of conservatism as a political and social force. Social conservatives, however, co-opted Patman's emphasis on the primacy of local control. Whereas Patman had stressed the need for local economic control in order to ensure expanded opportunities for the disadvantaged, conservatives used arguments for local control to fend off nationally mandated civil rights reforms. These dual pressures - an expansive liberalism on one side and a developing conservatism on the other - made Patman appear even more anachronistic to his contemporaries and to media observers"

In case that isn't entirely clear, let me translate: the 1960s were a decade in which the Rockefeller-Banker-CIA spooks were trying to subject the population to their program of internal social engineering, which required that the federal government be able to stick its fingers into the workings of state politics (for non-Americans, 'State' here means the sub-state like 'Michigan' or 'Louisiana'). Wright Patman's political program also sought for the federal government to stick its fingers into state politics but for entirely different purposes. Patman found himself at odds with his traditionally-minded working-class constituency, who were now starting to seek protection from the social engineering program in the arms of the States' Rights conservatives. Thus he was placed by default in an awkward position, where his historically bread-and-butter people were (figuratively speaking) afraid to reach out for his powerful, tender, Populist mitts and risk getting their arms bitten by the venomous snake of federally-encroaching social engineering. It is ironic then that, after so succinctly grasping the nasty contradictory situation into which Patman was placed by circumstance, and after assembling some great information in this section, that Nancy Young cannot quite piece together why the 1960s were the decade in which Patman decided to wheel his guns toward the Foundations.

To give some context for this period, Patman was finally given the position of Chairman of the Currency and Banking Committee in 1963, which was his great ambition when he entered into politics. He had been serving on this crucial committee for some time already. In fact he authored a report on the country's monetary and financial situation under the Eisenhower administration which was so well-researched that it gained him the admiration and lifelong friendship of John K. Galbraith. But now he was to sit at the top of the pyramid of this committee and finally have the kind of power, or so he believed, to push for serious monetary reform.

Furthermore, his good friend Lyndon B. Johnson became vice-president in the Kennedy administration and then, rather infamously, became POTUS after his untimely death. As this section of the book reveals, Johnson and Patman, both being two Texas democrats were on good terms with each other and even had very similar sympathies. This friendship with Johnson allowed Patman to push and poke around in areas which he otherwise might not have been allowed to, so irritating was it to the powers that be. On the other hand, Johnson's worldview was so different to Patman's, that their friendship was not nearly as politically expedient as Patman expected it to be. Patman thought in terms of popular power vs. bank power, he thought in terms of fighting for principle and building the power to fight for principle. Johnson thought in terms of what the greatest short-term good he could accomplish with the political capital that was currently available. Patman was a principled warrior and Johnson, on the other hand, while still a peoples' democrat like Patman, was a pragmatist and a spender, rather than accumulator, of political power. This fundamental difference between them did not sour their friendship, but it did place pressures on Johnson as POTUS that made him a friend to Patman in an increasingly personal sense, to the detriment of political friendship. One might say that it is a tragic irony that Johnson's politics, which we might call Demand-Side Socialism (welfare payments, education spending, healthcare spending, etc.), would ultimately dwarf and erase Patman's politics, which we might call Supply-Side Socialism (monetary reform, credit allocation and stimulus to production, excision of economic rents, etc.) -- politically speaking, it is much much easier to put legislation through that taxes business, but lets them be, and then does something with that revenue, than it is to try and reverse the sway of market forces by excising rents, diffusing ownership, etc. -- , while Patman's personal friendship and tutelage were so helpful in building Johnson's career. Of course, to the professional historians like Young, the victory of Demand-Side Socialism (or 'Leftism') over Supply-Side Socialism (or 'Populism', 'Producerism', etc.), is not indicative of political battles won and lost so much as it is of the smoothly neutral unfolding of the Liberal process known as 'History', and Patman's stubborn refusal to lay down his banners indicates a quaint country-stubbornness rather than a heroic integrity. That being said, as lifelong friends, Patman and Johnson always kept on good terms and exchanged letters often. Patman had a wonderful personal quality of being able to sustain differences with others while keeping the friendship in full life.

From the beginning of the 1960s, and from his positions on the Small Business Committee and Ways and Means Committee, Patman launched an attack on the Tax-Exempt Foundations, which he saw as inimical to the American way of life, a way for a circle of oligarchical families to put themselves above the law and pave the way for the consolidation of industrial and financial control within the domain of these foundations. The thing that first aroused Patman's ire was John D. Rockefeller III's statement to the Ways and Means Committee to the effect that "since I am not required to pay any income tax, I will do so anyways at a rate between 5 and 10 percent." This statement galled Patman, although it apparently hardly galled anyone else, as it indicated that J.D. Rockefeller III thought that his tax payments were a matter of noblesse oblige and a ceremonial formality, rather than the legal duty of any citizen of the United States. Of course, Rockefeller was justified in thinking so, but Patman's point had merit in that he wished to make the United States a genuinely democratic country, not one in which the authority of the State is merely a layer separating the populace from the oligarchy. Patman's objection to the Tax-Exempt Foundations was categorical, which confused his peers who evidently could not find the moral problem with creating a caste of wealthy large-holders above the law.

Patman's inquiries, launched from the Small Business committee, charged with moral fervor, started to approach the Third Rail of politics, after which point his tack was forced to change. Young is oddly silent in this, perhaps the most significant passage of the entire work, which we quote directly below:

"Pleased that his inquiries had caused trouble for some of what he believed were the more egregious foundation offenders, Patman kept his eye on the main goal - a legislative reform package. Yet during the Johnson presidency, Patman had great difficulty getting his foundation message out to the public. After Johnson left office, reports surfaced that the president had pressured his Texas ally to tone down his foundation rhetoric. In early hearings, Patman publicized that connections among certain foundations, the IRS, and the CIA. On August 31, 1964, Patman told the few individuals assembled at the subcommittee hearing that the J.M. Kaplan Fund distributed money to CIA operatives throughout the world. Although the upper echelons of the foundation community and government officials already knew of the relationship, Patman made his disclosure because neither the IRS nor the CIA would answer his questions about foundations. "I feel I have been trifled with," he complained to the press. Patman and Olsher unearthed a scheme in which the CIA and the IRS used foundations to fund overseas exercises that usually involved student organizations. The problem with the arrangement ensued because the IRS broke the laws pertaining to tax exemption when it cleared foundations for partisan activity, an endeavor that legally mandated the revocation of tax exemption. When the hearing adjourned, reporters greeted the assemblage, but no further mention of the CIA connection occurred for three years. Patman's disclosure led to several meetings with CIA and IRS officials, who cautioned silence on the matter."

Recalling the earlier statement on the irony of Young's introduction regarding Patman, 1960s conservatism, social issues, and the foundations - here is the irony: she has not put together that Patman was indeed trying to confront those issues that were frightening his constituency. They were afraid of the social engineering programs that came from the federal government and associated channels and thus cleaved themselves to the States' Rights conservatives, but Patman was addressing the problem in the most direct way possible. Instead of the conservatives' tactical retreat from the Spook Leviathan, Patman was jabbing his finger right into the material heart of the issue, the Psyop State's warchest - the wealthy families' foundation-money that was the material base for the social engineering that went on in the post-War Liberal Era. Young can't pursue this angle because, as a professional historian, she is not permitted to get to the bottom of things, but to the discerning reader Patman's anti-Foundation crusade should be taken as a strong point in favor of the argument that not only was he not autistically and exclusively concerned with economic issues, but that he had a full understanding of the situation and was attempting to fight back against it in the most straightforward manner possible: by fucking with the money that was feeding the psyops. If one would rather contend that Patman just stumbled onto this issue coincidentally, at the same time that molested voters were fleeing New Deal liberalism to conservatism, he is welcome to do so. Patman commented to the left-leaning Ramparts magazine in March of 1967: "Disclosure of CIA activities on U.S. campuses threatens to cloud an even more invidious activity by some tax-exempt foundations. Although tax-exempt foundations appear to have been used as spy money conduits for a number of years, they have been used for a much longer time as tax-dodging conduits." The result of Patman's inquiries was a tax reform package that went through successfully, but which also contained such broad legal conditions that many of the foundations were ultimately able to escape from its stipulations, which Patman became completely aware of, saying "The laws of the past are no longer effective." His colleagues, however, only saw reason to celebrate; after all, they had successfully passed a tax reform bill. What was the problem?

Moving onto the last section of this review/summary, we find the Patman in the Era of Nixon Politics episode. Much of this section of the book is dedicated unpleasant topics, such as Patman's personal losses of loved ones, the accelerating effect they had on his aging (he was by now a grizzled old man), the backstabbings he suffered at the hands of junior congressmen on the Currency and Banking committee, more fights with the Federal Reserve on interest rates, and the fight he picked with Richard Nixon after the Watergate thing appeared.

This review is getting too long - in the late 1960s and early '70s Patman was outflanked on the Currency and Banking committee by young liberal democrats from the North who neither understood his gripe with the banks nor cared to learn about it. He had to step down as chairman in 1975 and died one year later. In his last years as chairman, however, he carried on his perennial fight on interest rates. In fact, Patman might well be understood as a structural ceiling on interest rates in mid-century American politics. So doggedly and unconditionally persistent was his fight for lower rates, regardless of the monetary or fiscal situation of the country at any given moment, that Patman acted like a structural barrier to policy, somewhat in the same way that economists often think of wages as sticky on the way downwards. When it came to interest rates, he had only one consideration: how it would affect his constituency, the small-holders and independent producers, who were separated from the unmolestedly low Discount Rate at the Fed by an ocean of middlemanning financial institutions. Whether you think Patman's constituency getting the rates he wanted for them would have been inflationary or not is up for debate, but his loyalty to his people and principles was impregnable.

That Patman and Nixon were, for a time, mortal enemies is just one of the sad facts of history. Lots of guys on our side of things have now learned to see the name 'Nixon' and read 'Betrayed Hero', and I can't disagree - I feel the same way. The facts however, are that Nixon ran a dirty campaign against Wright Patman's friend, democrat Jerry Voorhis, in California. Voorhis and Patman worked on legislation that successfully passed which would force Federal Reserve banks to pay back money to the treasury, money they accrued from the interest on holding bonds, and which they had been keeping in their own accounts as emergency reserves, representing a drain on the currency. Voorhis, like Patman, was a money-populist even if he didn't share the same Texan cultural mores. Patman fingered Nixon for a lover of dirty tricks and a spaniel to the bankers. And who could honestly blame him for that assessment? Nixon did receive campaign funds from Rockefeller people for his race against Voorhis, even if he never felt comfortable with them, and he was practically attached-by-the-hip with David Rockefeller's personal protege Henry Kissinger while in office, so it's hard to fault Patman for making the assessment he did. It wouldn't become clear until years of hindsight yielded sufficient insight to show that Nixon had been the victim of a CIA-DOD plot, his crime being that he was trying to wrest the levers of foreign policy away from oligarchy and restore them to the office of the executive.

Patman, on the other hand, did not see the Nixon presidency in terms of a lower-middle-class Californian trying to run a country with his hands on only roughly a quarter of the political machinery necessary to do so. The Watergate revelation, in conjunction with the Nixon-Voorhis race, suggested to him something else: rule by secrecy, something he abhorred. Patman was not naive, he knew that whatever system-papers and system-media were talking about was probably bunk, but he also saw opportunities for his brand of populist politics in the Nixon scandal. He thought he could turn the narrative into one about democratic control of the country versus secret power. Resultantly, he dove headfirst into the Watergate hearings. The fact that Patman had arrived at a politics so far-removed from the actual material stakes in order to try to build up power is indicative of where he was in his career: he had burned a lot of goodwill with his constant pushing and needed to do something rekindle the romance between himself and the DNC. But he was also an old man, who, along with his politics, had been fairly well left behind. In his stead he left Henry Gonzalez, another Texas democrat and money-populist, who would continue to grill Federal Reserve governors and push for audits. He also left Jim Wright, who would become embroiled in the S&L Scandal, although accounts of his culpability in this differ.

Young winds down her biography with a tone that is increasingly critical of Patman, and it proceeds along a few different lines. The first line of criticism is that Patman was somewhat racist and that he should have supported more civil rights and ethnic integration to get a better grade as a New Deal liberal. The second line is that his politics of localism and populism were contradictory because, as a New Deal liberal, he should never have advocated for any large business interests in Texas. The third line is that his legacy is largely one of obstinacy and divisiveness; that his failures were proof of his unwillingness to compromise (a bad thing). The fourth is that his politics were anachronistic and somewhat futile. There is an ambience running throughout this biography, a mixture of admiration for his big heart and optimism and condescension for his political struggles. All of this criticism is based on the author's understanding of (or maybe it's better to say "efforts to make") Patman as a New Deal liberal. If the author sought out to, instead of pardoning his legacy in the Liberal Historiography, but understand it on its own terms, then there would be no basis for these criticisms. The obstinate pushing on anachronistic issues, when relieved from the lens of Liberal ideology, becomes what it really is: a refusal to let the sacrifices of older Populists go in vain, a refusal to accept the final result of the banks' victory and their right to decide how capital is allocated. 'Divisiveness' is only a negative in the Liberal historical worldview, in which politics is one big kitchen where each faction can come to throw their own offerings into the stew which, when mixed gently together, becomes "Society". The Populists saw clearly that politics is always a fight, that the compromise of the weak with the powerful is the defeat of the former, and that the 'divisive', i.e. those that refuse to abandon their principles, are just the demonstrably trustworthy. Young would have preferred that Patman compromised on his principles, and then had a more successful political career. But that is only success in that it would have resulted in the passage of more legislation, with no regard for its content. So what exactly is the success there? What is success in general? The aggrandizement of the self in political history? Or the accomplishment of The Thing. For Patman it is obviously the latter. For that, he has earned my unconditional admiration and if he doesn't get full marks from the Historians as a liberal, I humbly give him A+ as Populist Statesman, for five decades of struggle with pinpoint accuracy and acuity against the money power. Going over financial data and writing reports, quibbling over interest rate differentials between the Northeast and the Southwest, and so on and so forth, may seem tedious but it really is just a fight for freedom.

What lessons can we learn from the incorruptible Wright Patman? We can learn both from his successes and his failures. From his successes? His life is one big proof that hard work, high character and optimism can bring success, even with the most controversial, unpalatable program. He showed that freedom is always a fight, that it takes constant vigilance and effort. The kind of political career that Patman had might not be possible any longer but then again maybe it is. After all, Ron Paul's district is geographically very close to Patman's and he had a long career too. But that's neither here nor there. Patman's life is a testament to the efficacy of virtue and struggle: always keeping your eye on the ball, fighting hard, staying optimistic. For us it is no different, we have to fight hard and work hard if we want to be free.

From his failures? Here I will join in with Young and make an accusation of anachronism: his aversion to secrecy. Patman came up in an era when the illusion of a public square still existed, when the Spectacle had not yet completely enveloped the masses, and when censorship and counter-intelligence mechanisms had not diffused down to the finest granularity in the midst of mass society, i.e. on each of our computers, phones, social media accounts, etc.. We don't have the advantage of those conditions and thus we can't adhere to his ideals of honorable struggle out in the open, with everything crystal clear. We have to be more like Nixon and maintain a higher degree of opacity and mediacy in how we act. Patman was a one-man show and rarely had allies around him, even if he had a lot of sympathizers. He was working politically in a time when political power was power. When you could write a report on interest rates and it might have the effect of pushing legislation in favor of small farmers. That is not the situation now. The power to pass legislation is downstream of higher powers. Patman tried to nationalize money in 1936 and got kind of close to winning. Try to nationalize money in 2021. It's a non-starter. The question for us then today is: from what position can we come to agree on ultimate goals and project influence and accumulate power in service of them, without inviting others to target us?