Nancy Beck Young

Nancy K. Young

In a study of Lou Henry Hoover's White House years from 1929-1933, the author draws on Lou Hoover's personal papers to show that she was a transitional figure between nineteenth- and twentieth-century views on womanhood.

Activist First Lady

Lou Henry Hoover

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.

Populism, Liberalism, & the American Dream

Wright Patman

Over time the presidential election of 1964 has come to be seen as a generational shift, a defining moment in which Americans deliberated between two distinctly different visions for the future. In its juxtaposition of these divergent visions, Two Suns of the Southwest is the first full account of this critical election and its legacy for US politics. The 1964 election, in Nancy Beck Young’s telling, was a contest between two men of the Southwest, each with a very different idea of what the Southwest was and what America should be. Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, came to represent a nostalgic, idealized past, a preservation of traditional order, while Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic incumbent from Texas, looked boldly and hopefully toward an expansive, liberal future of increased opportunity. Thus, as we see in Two Suns of the Southwest, the election was also a showdown between liberalism and conservatism, an election whose outcome would echo throughout the rest of the century. Young explores how demographics, namely the rise of the Sunbelt, factored into the framing and reception of these competing ideas. Her work situates Johnson’s Sunbelt liberalism as universalist, designed to create space for all Americans; Goldwater’s Sunbelt conservatism was far more restrictive, at least with regard to what the federal government should do. In this respect the election became a debate about individual rights versus legislated equality as priorities of the federal government. Young explores all the cultural and political elements and events that figured in this narrative, allowing Johnson to unite disaffected Republicans with independents and Democrats in a winning coalition. On a final note Young connects the 1964 election to the current state of our democracy, explaining the irony whereby the winning candidate’s vision has grown stale while the losing candidate’s has become much more central to American politics.

Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle between Liberalism and Conservatism

Two Suns of the Southwest

A study of Congress at the crossroads between the New Deal and the postwar era, showing that the wartime political dynamic established the dominant patterns for national politics through the remainder of the century. Reveals that moderates, not conservatives, determined the outcomes in key policy debates and examines how compromises were reached.

Congress and the Politics of World War II

Why We Fight

Documentary History of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidency: The Eisenhower administration and the Brown v. Board of Education decision, 1954-1955

Documentary History of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidency

William D. Pederson

Byron W. Daynes

Examines the reactions of particular groups within Congress (including those of individual congressmen) to the changing role of the federal government during the New Deal era. Also examines facets of the New Deal era from a contemporary perspective.

Nancy Beck Young

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