John William Patman

Background

John William Patman was born on August 6, 1893 in Hughes Springs, Cass County, Texas, United States. He was the son of Emma Spurlin and John Newton Patman, a poor tenant farmer, part-time blacksmith, and devout fundamentalist Baptist.

Education

A good student, John William Patman graduated from high school in Hughes Springs, Texas, in 1912. He then worked and saved his money in order to attend law school at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tenn. He received a Bachelor of Law in 1916 and had a brief law practice in Hughes Springs before joining the United States Army in 1917.

Career

John William Patman settled in Linden, Texas, and in 1920 he won a seat in the Texas House, where he made the acquaintance of Sam Ealy Johnson and his tall young son, Lyndon Baines Johnson. He admired the elder Johnson as an honest legislator who worked hard for his agrarian constituents. Likewise, Johnson admired Patman as a man who "always votes for the people. " In the Texas House, Patman assailed the Ku Klux Klan as "un-American" and sponsored a resolution to condemn it. The resolution was tabled by a vote of sixty-nine to fifty-four. Although the Klan opposed Patman's reelection, he won in 1922 and waged a campaign in the next session against agricultural corporations. At the request of the governor, Patman accepted appointment as district attorney for Texarkana, a town notorious for graft, gambling, and prostitution.

John William Patman won election in his own right in 1924 while carrying a pistol to protect himself against threats by gangsters. In 1928, Patman ran for the United States House of Representatives, vowing to fight for farmers and against big corporate influences in the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Trade Commission, which remained political targets for the rest of his life. He accused the incumbent, Eugene Black, of voting for the Railroad Act of 1920 to benefit the principal holders of railroad securities, Wall Street bankers. Also, Patman asserted, fourteen years in the House was enough for any man. "Give a Young Man a Chance, " was his slogan. The young man won by 3, 000 votes and would serve forty-seven years in the House of Representatives.

Patman's district then included eleven counties with a population of about a quarter of a million. It was so poor that in 1935 it was estimated that less than two-thirds of 1 percent of the population had ever filed an income tax return. Beginning his tenure in the special session of 1929, Patman vowed that he would not "regard the House as a morgue where new members must lie on a marble slab for several sessions" awaiting the right to speak. A few months into his career he introduced a bill to give war veterans an immediate cash payment of the paid-up life insurance promised them in 1924. As the veterans' bonus would cost the government the astronomical sum of $2 billion, Patman proposed issuing new currency to pay for it, a proposition that revealed him as an inflationist. The veterans' bonus bill failed then and again in 1932, when it provoked a massive veterans' march on Washington and a riot that President Hoover put down with military force. In 1935, Congress finally passed the veterans' bonus over President Roosevelt's veto. Known as a "funny money man, " Patman ignored House Speaker John Nance Garner's orders to desist in seeking a bonus payment. He paid the penalty for it by being denied a seat on the House Banking and Currency Committee for eight years, which, he calculated, delayed his ascendancy to its chair by sixteen years.

Patman depicted the monopoly of capital as the country's greatest sin and the farmer its principal victim. Monopolies in banking, he insisted, bred additional monopolies in manufacturing, distribution, and even retailing, which went to the heart of woes endured by small-town merchants such as his constituents. A defender of "independent business, " he endeared himself to fellow Democrats by attacking Republicans for "making the rich richer and the poor poorer. " Patman assailed Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon in 1932, demanding his impeachment on the grounds that his banking, shipping, aluminum, and oil interests directly benefited from decisions he made in the name of fiscal policy. He accused Mellon of having illegally acquired more property than anybody was entitled to possess. When President Herbert Hoover ended the impeachment process by appointing Mellon to be ambassador to Great Britain, Patman called it a "presidential pardon. "

During the Great Depression, Patman crusaded against chain stores at a time when several southern states enacted laws taxing chains by the store; the more stores it had in a state, the larger the tax paid by a retail corporation. But the Supreme Court struck down a Florida law that endeavored to foster "equality of opportunity" by taxing big chains, and Patman made himself the House's champion of small business by proposing a national "fair trade" law to protect independent grocers and wholesalers. This resulted in the Patman-Robinson Act. However, when Patman proposed other "fair trade" laws, he aroused consumer interest groups who pointed out that Patman advocated limiting the number of competitors while opposing price competition. He proposed, in effect, a retailers' cartel.

World War II brought political and economic changes to Texas, and Patman adjusted. East Texas hungered for economic development, which mobilization offered. Patman endorsed a campaign to build a steel plant in Longview that would fabricate pipelines for the booming oil industry. When Dallas and New York bankers ignored Patman and other East Texans' petitions for loans to build a pilot plant, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation subsidiary, the Defense Plant Corporation, helped organize the Lone Star Steel Company. Defense industries sprouted all over Texas during the war thanks to $1. 6 billion of government money, far and away the highest figure invested in any southern state. Still, Patman fought big banks, foundations, and the Federal Reserve and enjoyed a reputation as the House's last "populist. " He played a major role in creating the Small Business Administration during World War II, and he was the coauthor of the Employment Act of 1946, which created the Council of Economic Advisers. Patman was the principal author of legislation creating a national system of credit unions for the savings of ordinary workers, and he wrote the bills that gave the president stand-by authority to impose the price controls President Richard Nixon used in 1972. He tried to investigate the Watergate break-in in 1972 to no avail.

In the early 1960's, Patman highlighted abuses by tax-exempt foundations and promoted legislation that corrected them. However, his fight against the Federal Reserve Board and its alleged connections with big banks and their interlocking directors failed to win passage of legislation. He also sought to make credit more available to ordinary citizens through savings and loans associations that duplicated banking functions. In later years the House Banking Committee rebelled against what was said to be his high-handed rule of the committee, and shortly before his death it ousted him as its chairman. John William Patman died on March 7, 1976 at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland.

Achievements

• John William Patman was a distinguished politician. His most noteworthy legislative initiative during the Hoover administration was the Veteran's Bonus (Patman) Bill, which mandated the immediate cash payment of the endowment promised to servicemen of World War I. Patman was also instrumental in the passage of the Federal Credit Union Act of 1934, the Full Employment Act of 1946, the British Loan Act of 1946, the Defense Production Act of 1950, and the Housing Acts of 1946, 1949, 1961, and 1965. Patman was chairman of the Select Committee on Small Businesses (1955 – 1963) and the Joint Economic Committee (1957– 1959, 1961 – 1963, 1965 – 1967, 1969 – 1971, and 1973 – 1975).

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Primer on Money: What Is Money, How Is It Created, and the Role of the Federal Reserve

    ( ..".We have what is known as the Federal Reserve Bank S...)

  • The Federal Reserve System: A study prepared for the use of the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States
  • Our American Government and how it works;: 697 questions and answers (Everyday handbooks, EH 374)

Views

Quotations: "In the United States we have, in effect, two governments . .. We have the duly constituted Government . .. Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution. "

"I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money. I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue. "

Personality

John William Wright Patman was a tall, heavy-set, pink-cheeked man with glasses and curly hair, his smallish facial features gave him a somewhat cherubic look, an impression he reinforced with sincerity in fighting for the underdogs of the marketplace. Yet he had a streak of vanity and thrived on publicity, relishing the adulation of small-town grocers, druggists, and hardware dealers who endorsed his message assailing a conspiracy of big capital in New York City.

Connections

In February 1919 John William Patman married Merle Connor. They had four children. She died in 1967 and he married Pauline Tucker the following year.

Father:

John Newton Patman

Mother:

Susan Emma Spurlin Patman

Spouse:

Merle Connor Patman

Spouse:

Pauline Weaver Patman

Brother:

Benny Henry Patman

Sister :

Kate Patman Watkins

Son:

Charles Matthew Patman

Son:

William Neff Patman

References

• Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism, and the American Dream