Wright Patman

Based on Wikipedia: Wright Patman

In the summer of 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. When police searched them, they found something curious: crisp hundred-dollar bills. The question of where that money came from would eventually destroy a presidency. And the first person in Congress to seriously investigate that money trail was a seventy-nine-year-old Texan congressman named Wright Patman, who had spent nearly half a century waging war against concentrated financial power.

The Nixon White House moved heaven and earth to stop him. They succeeded, at least temporarily. But the questions Patman raised refused to die.

A Small-Town Lawyer Takes on Big Money

John William Wright Patman was born on August 6, 1893, in the small town of Hughes Springs in Cass County, Texas. This was deep East Texas, a region of pine forests and cotton fields, far from the corridors of power in Washington or Wall Street. His parents, John and Emma Patman, raised him in a world where local businesses served local communities, where the banker knew your name and your family, and where the idea of a faceless corporate giant crushing small competitors seemed almost unimaginable.

After graduating from Hughes Springs High School in 1912, Patman headed to Cumberland University Law School in Lebanon, Tennessee. He earned his law degree in 1916 and returned home to practice law. His legal career was barely underway when America entered World War One in 1917.

Patman enlisted as a private in the United States Army. He didn't stay a private for long. By war's end, he had earned a commission as a first lieutenant and served as a machine gun officer in the Texas Army National Guard's 144th Infantry Regiment, part of the 36th Division. This experience with ordinary soldiers from ordinary backgrounds would shape his political career. He never forgot the men who served alongside him.

The Path to Congress

After the war, Patman entered politics with remarkable speed. In 1920, at just twenty-seven years old, he won election to the Texas House of Representatives. He served two terms before taking on the role of district attorney for the fifth judicial district of Texas in 1924. This prosecutorial experience gave him a taste for investigating wrongdoing and holding the powerful accountable.

In 1928, Patman won election to the United States House of Representatives from Texas's First Congressional District. He would hold that seat for the next forty-seven years, serving twenty-four consecutive terms until his death in 1976. To put that in perspective: when Patman first arrived in Washington, Herbert Hoover was about to become president. When he died, Gerald Ford occupied the Oval Office. He served under ten different presidents.

By the end of his career, Patman held the title of Dean of the House, an honorific given to the longest-serving member. But titles never interested him as much as action.

The Bonus Army and the Fall of Andrew Mellon

The Great Depression tested America like nothing since the Civil War. By 1932, unemployment had reached twenty-five percent. Breadlines stretched around city blocks. Banks failed by the thousands. And in this atmosphere of desperation, Wright Patman took on two fights that would define his early congressional career.

The first involved World War One veterans. Congress had promised them a bonus for their service, but payment wasn't scheduled until 1945. With the economy in collapse, thousands of veterans wanted their money now. In 1932, Patman introduced a bill mandating immediate payment of this bonus.

His bill attracted something unprecedented: the Bonus Army. Tens of thousands of veterans descended on Washington, setting up camps and demanding action. The sight of American soldiers, men who had fought for their country, now living in shanties and begging for what they'd been promised, became one of the defining images of the Depression. President Hoover eventually sent the Army to disperse them violently, a decision that helped doom his reelection campaign.

The second fight targeted Andrew Mellon.

Mellon was one of the richest men in America, a banking and industrial titan who had served as Treasury Secretary since 1921. He represented everything Patman despised about concentrated financial power. In January 1932, Patman launched an impeachment effort against Mellon, accusing him of conflicts of interest and violations of law.

Mellon resigned the following month.

Now, Mellon's defenders would point out that President Hoover appointed him ambassador to Britain, suggesting the resignation was a graceful exit rather than a forced departure. But Patman had demonstrated something important: even the most powerful men in America could be challenged. He was thirty-eight years old and had been in Congress for barely three years.

The War Against Chain Stores

To understand Wright Patman's most lasting legislative achievement, you need to understand what was happening to American retail in the 1930s.

Chain stores were revolutionizing how Americans shopped. Companies like the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, known as A&P, could buy goods in enormous quantities, negotiate lower prices from manufacturers, and undersell local competitors. By 1930, chain stores accounted for about twenty percent of all retail sales. Independent retailers, the mom-and-pop stores that had served American communities for generations, were being driven out of business.

This wasn't just an economic issue. It was an existential question about what kind of economy Americans wanted to live in. Would Main Street survive, or would it be replaced by standardized corporate outlets controlled by distant shareholders?

Patman threw himself into this fight with characteristic passion. He aligned with independent retailers who were organizing a nationwide movement to restrict chain stores through taxation and regulation. The result was the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, co-sponsored by Patman in the House and Senator Joseph Taylor Robinson of Arkansas in the Senate.

The law's premise was straightforward: manufacturers shouldn't be allowed to give preferential pricing to large buyers that would put smaller competitors at a disadvantage. If a manufacturer sold widgets to A&P at one price and to the corner store at a higher price, that price discrimination was now illegal unless it could be justified by actual cost differences.

Critics called it price-fixing. Supporters called it the salvation of small business. Like most things in economics, the truth was complicated. The law remains on the books today, though its enforcement has waxed and waned dramatically over the decades.

Banking's Most Persistent Critic

From 1963 to 1975, Patman chaired the House Banking and Currency Committee. This gave him the power to investigate, subpoena, and interrogate the most powerful financial institutions in America. He used that power relentlessly.

The Federal Reserve became a particular obsession. The Fed, as it's commonly known, is America's central bank, responsible for setting interest rates, regulating banks, and managing the money supply. It operates with considerable independence from elected officials, a design choice that supporters say protects monetary policy from short-term political pressures and critics say removes crucial economic decisions from democratic accountability.

Patman fell firmly in the critic camp. He viewed the Fed as a creature of Wall Street, serving the interests of big banks rather than ordinary Americans. He questioned its secrecy, challenged its policies, and demanded greater transparency and accountability. Whether you agree with his critique depends largely on your views about central bank independence, but no one could accuse him of being deferential to financial power.

The Watergate Investigation That Almost Was

Which brings us back to those hundred-dollar bills.

When the Watergate burglars were arrested in June 1972, investigators found them carrying cash that could potentially be traced. As chairman of the Banking Committee, Patman had jurisdiction over anything involving money and its movement. He launched an investigation into where the burglars' money had come from, suspecting it might lead directly to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, known by the unfortunate acronym CREEP.

The Nixon White House recognized the danger. If Patman's committee issued subpoenas and followed the money trail, the whole cover-up could unravel before the November election. They mounted an extraordinary pressure campaign to stop him.

One of the key players in this effort was Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan, then the House Minority Leader. Ford helped organize Republican opposition to Patman's investigation. When the committee voted on whether to grant Patman subpoena power, the motion failed. The investigation was effectively dead.

But the questions didn't go away. The Washington Post, led by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, continued following the money. By April 1973, the Senate had established its own Select Committee on Watergate. The cover-up eventually collapsed, Nixon resigned, and Gerald Ford became president.

History has a way of arranging ironic symmetries.

The Complicated Legacy

Wright Patman defies easy categorization. He was a New Deal Democrat who championed small business and challenged concentrated financial power. In economic terms, he represented a populist tradition stretching back to William Jennings Bryan and the agrarian movements of the late nineteenth century, suspicious of Wall Street, supportive of farmers and small merchants, deeply skeptical of any institution that accumulated too much economic power.

But there's another side to his record that cannot be ignored.

Patman signed the Southern Manifesto, a 1956 document signed by Southern congressmen opposing the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which had declared school segregation unconstitutional. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1960. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, which banned poll taxes used to disenfranchise Black voters.

This was the great contradiction of many Southern populists. They championed the little guy against corporate power while simultaneously supporting a system of racial hierarchy that oppressed millions of their fellow citizens. Patman's district in East Texas had a significant Black population, and like most white Southern politicians of his era, he built his career on white votes while systematically opposing efforts to extend full citizenship to Black Americans.

The Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal advocacy group, gave Patman low scores on their rating system, a mere thirteen out of one hundred in 1972 and twenty-four in 1973. Meanwhile, the American Conservative Union gave him a more favorable forty-seven out of one hundred in 1973. These numbers reflect a politician who didn't fit neatly into conventional liberal-conservative categories.

The Fall from Power

In 1975, the Democratic caucus in the House revolted against the seniority system. For decades, committee chairmanships had been awarded almost automatically to the longest-serving member of the majority party on each committee. This gave enormous power to Southern Democrats, who often held safe seats and accumulated decades of seniority while their Northern colleagues faced more competitive elections.

The class of 1974, elected in the wake of Watergate, was young, liberal, and impatient. They voted to remove three elderly committee chairmen, including Patman. He was replaced as Banking Committee chairman by Henry Reuss of Wisconsin, losing by a caucus vote of 152 to 117.

The stated reason was concern about his age and effectiveness. Patman was eighty-one years old and had been in Congress for forty-six years. But the vote also reflected a generational shift in the Democratic Party and a rejection of the Southern conservative Democrats who had long held power through seniority.

Patman continued serving in Congress, but he was no longer a power center. He died of pneumonia on March 7, 1976, in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of eighty-two. He was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery in Texarkana, Texas. According to one account, his funeral was one of the largest and most significant events in the town's history.

Personal Life and Family Legacy

Patman married Merle Connor in 1919, the year after World War One ended. They had four children together before her death in 1967, ending nearly fifty years of marriage. He remarried in 1968 to Pauline Tucker.

His son Bill Patman followed him into politics, though not into his father's seat. Bill served in the House from a different Texas district from 1981 to 1985. The Patman name thus appeared in Congress for nearly sixty years across two generations.

Monuments and Memory

Several places bear Wright Patman's name. Wright Patman Lake and Wright Patman Dam in Northeast Texas serve as perhaps the most visible memorials to his half-century of bringing federal projects to his district. In the Capitol itself, the Wright Patman Congressional Federal Credit Union serves the banking needs of House members and staff, a fitting tribute for a man who spent his career thinking about banking and its relationship to ordinary Americans.

More unusually, Patman appears as a character in alternate history fiction. In Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series, which imagines a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War, Patman appears as a member of something called the Freedom Party who becomes Governor of Texas during a second great war between the United States and Confederacy. In this fictional timeline, he declares Texas's secession from the Confederacy as an independent nation. It's a strange kind of immortality, but testament to Patman's historical significance that novelists find him interesting enough to reimagine.

The Questions He Raised

Wright Patman's career raises questions that remain relevant today. How much economic concentration is too much? Should the government protect small businesses from larger competitors, even if consumers might benefit from lower prices? How accountable should central banks be to elected officials? When does efficiency become a threat to the economic independence that democracy requires?

These aren't questions with easy answers. Reasonable people disagree. But Patman spent forty-seven years insisting that they be asked, that financial power be scrutinized, that the interests of Main Street matter as much as the interests of Wall Street.

He was wrong about civil rights, catastrophically and unforgivably so. But he was asking important questions about economic power at a time when many of his colleagues preferred not to notice who was accumulating it. The tension between these two legacies, the populist champion and the segregationist, reflects broader contradictions in American politics that we still haven't resolved.

When Patman first arrived in Congress, the Great Depression was about to begin. When he died, America was still recovering from Watergate and Vietnam. Across those tumultuous decades, through world wars and social upheavals, through technological revolutions and political realignments, he kept asking the same basic question: who does the economy serve?

It's a question worth asking still.