“The year 1936,” Alexander Heard has noted in his landmark study of campaign financing, The Costs of Democracy, “was a turning point in the history of political party fund-raising. The policies and methods of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term produced political alignments more along economic-class lines than any since the McKinley-Bryan era.”

He had been able to bring to the Roosevelt re-election campaign a resource which no other Texan could offer: Herman Brown’s money. And he had used that resource as a base. Because he could provide that money to the Roosevelt campaign in Texas, he was given a commanding role in that campaign. Because he played that role, he was given input into the

Pa Watson guarded only the front door to the Oval Office. There was a “back door,” too. This was the door to the small, cluttered office—on the opposite side of the Oval Office from Watson’s—that was shared by LeHand and Tully. Visitors Roosevelt wanted to see without the knowledge of the press—“off-the-record” guests, in the parlance of the White

During his eleven years as a Congressman, therefore, no national bill introduced by Lyndon Johnson that would have affected the people of the United States became a law of the United States.

For half a century and more, America’s farmers had been asking for tariff reform, for railroad and bank regulation, for government loans, for silver remonetization—for help in fighting forces too big for them to fight—and for half a century, their government had turned to them a very deaf ear. Now, starving, they asked again—often in words that ech

For all through that summer and fall of 1920, as Sam Johnson’s cotton was dying, so was the cotton market. Wall Street speculation was part of the cause, as was an unforeseen worldwide deflation in the price of manufactured goods; moreover, while cotton prices had been driven up immediately after the war by heavy demand from Europe, in 1920, Europe

Rayburn did not, moreover, understand—perhaps because he was a man who could not be bought, and this reputation, and the fear in which he was held, kept anyone from explaining his position to him—how important he was to the wildcatters, how the protection he had extended to them in the past, and the protection they were hoping he would continue to

And as the audience filed out after his speech, student volunteers, standing at the door polite and respectful under the eye of his new young friend, passed out more flyers, mimeographed by his new young friend, summarizing the speech’s main points; he had just had his campaign climaxed, Welly Hopkins realized, with a rally planned down to the last

Lyndon Johnson’s appointment had allowed him to bring together, in a single office, the men he had scattered through the federal bureaucracy.