The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 88, July 1984 - April, 1985 Page: 220

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Franklin D. Roosevelt's court enlargement scheme in 1937 and Gar-
ner's use of his considerable parliamentary skills against it, but, as the
author notes, Dallas Congressman Hatton W. Sumners-on his own
initiative-blocked it in the House Judiciary Committee and that
alone sufficed to kill it.
The author could have profitably used a host of theses, dissertations,
and published works, such as James Smallwood's study of Texas public
opinion and the court fight of 1937 (M.A., East Texas State University,
1969), Gene Atkinson's work on Governor James V. Allred (Ph.D.,
Texas Christian University, 1979), and Alfred Steinberg's biography,
Sam Rayburn (New York, 1975). Even more serious deficiencies are
the lack of balance and lack of analysis. "Hot oil," for instance, oil
produced in excess of the allowable set by the Texas Railroad Com-
mission, was a far more important issue in Texas and New Deal poli-
tics in the 1930s than the Jeffersonian Democrats, a right-wing splinter
group, but the latter get over ten times the attention. Patenaude at-
tributes the decline of the New Deal in Texas to a vague "rebellious
attitude" (p. 1 oo) among voters and a polarization of Texas politics,
ignoring the encroachment of corporate interest groups on the politics
of the state.
Part of the problem of balance is that this is actually an extended
essay in which several topics that the author has researched over the
years are spliced together. Within those topics, Patenaude displays a
deft touch in describing and explaining Garner's contrasting role in
the early and late phases of the New Deal, in analyzing Allred as a
cautious New Dealer who knew just how to cope with Harry L. Hop-
kins and others, and in revealing the personal relations between
Garner, Allred, and Rayburn. There is little that is new here, at least
not to those who have read Patenaude's several published articles and
his dissertation, but it is handy nonetheless to have his Texas-New
Deal summary in one volume.
The University of Texas at Arlington GEORGE NORRIS GREEN
The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. By Vaughn Davis Bornet.
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983. Pp. xvi+415. Fore-
word, preface, notes, bibliographical essay, index. $25.00oo, cloth;
$14.95, paper.)
Vaughn D. Bornet's analysis of the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson
is the eleventh volume published in a University of Kansas series that
is designed to produce synthetic works, drawing upon the secondary

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