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T he Austin-Boston alliance was established during the later years of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and in the aftermath of FDR’s thwarted efforts to pack the Supreme Court in 1937 and the failure of his 1938 “purge” of conservative congressional Democrats. The loss of FDR’s enormous congressional majorities and the rise of the inter-regional Conservative Coalition of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats jeopardized the gains of Roosevelt’s New Deal. FDR and the liberal Democrats needed their own unique inter-regional alliance, and it was the Austin-Boston connection of Sam Rayburn, John McCormack, and their successors and protégés who would preserve the New Deal’s major policy gains in public welfare (Social Security and workman ’s compensation); labor-management issues (the National Labor Relations Board); public scrutiny of the stock market in the Securities and Exchanges Act; and the regulation of energy for public use in the Public Utilities Holding Act. It was this remarkable coalition that lasted for a full fifty years in the most contentious century in world and American history. The Austin-Boston connection would keep the fractious Democratic Party united throughout the 1940s and 1950s in the era of World War II; the dawn of the atomic age; the postwar international conflicts with the Soviet Union; the corrosive years of McCarthyism; and the ultimate triumph over legalized segregation. The alliance remained in place in the 1960s and 1970s through the national traumas of the assassinations of Pres. John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.; the escalation and eventual end of the bloody Vietnam War; the investigation and resignation of Pres. Richard Nixon; and the internecine Democratic squabbles between Pres. Jimmy Carter and Speaker Tip O’Neill. In the 1980s, its last decade, the Austin-Boston connection of Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright successfully thwarted Pres. Ronald Reagan’s multiple efforts to dismantle the public welfare programs that had been so instrumental CHAPTER 9 CONCLUSION THE IMPACT OF THE AUSTIN-BOSTON ALLIANCE ON HOUSE POLITICS ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ ★★★ 252 C H A P T E R 9 in providing Americans with the safety nets that would enable the nation to never again face the despair of the Great Depression. First and foremost, the Austin-Boston alliance stabilized the inherently fragile New Deal coalition, divided as it was among disparate interests and regional rivalries. The Austin-Boston alliance helped cope with the deepening rifts in the New Deal coalition, when the party’s deep ideological and regional divisions suggested the value of selecting ideologically moderate legislative leaders who could reach out to the northern and southern factions. Indeed, in developing his classic hypothesis that legislative parties select ideological “middleman” as leaders, political scientist David B. Truman argued that this was primarily due to “the depth and persistence of the [regional and ideological] cleavages in both parties.” Austin-Boston leaders would chart a moderate policy course that avoided legislative proposals that would threaten intraparty unity, especially those involving civil rights. From the perspective of northern members and their allies , this strategic reality established a de facto “southern veto” over liberal legislation. To be sure, the “middleman’s” course and the southern veto came at a price. Far more moderate than would satisfy the most ardent New Dealers or, later, the most progressive “new politics” liberals, the Austin-Boston leadership seemed to some to be unnecessarily deferential to southern interests, though the southerners also often balked at intraparty compromise and sided instead with Republicans in the famed “conservative coalition .” While it is true that Austin-Boston leaders like Rayburn and McCormack were uniquely situated to protect the core policies of the New Deal and to bridge intraparty divides, it is also true that they did so, in part, by delaying, deflecting, and studiously ignoring policies that would undermine intraparty unity. In some respects this moderation protected key elements of the New Deal from outright southern revolt; in others it merely perpetuated a racist status quo as Austin-Boston House leaders tolerated, worked closely with, and advanced the careers of some of the House’s most ardent segregationists and forgave their dissent from national party stances. Eventually , the Austin-Boston leaders’ strategy of delay and avoidance of race questions turned to a cross-regional balancing role when the 1948 Dixiecrat Revolt and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision made it impossible to ignore race and civil rights politics any longer. Several efforts at...

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