Shortly after interviewing Speaker of the House John McCormack for his doctoral dissertation in 1968, Garrison Nelson began teaching at the University of Vermont. After his second interview with McCormack in 1977 he gave a presentation at the Kennedy School of Government with potentially major implications. Nelson argued that a so-called "Austin/Boston connection" kept the speaker's position and the House majority slot filled by politicians from Texas and Massachusetts for more than 40 years. That connection, he said, was responsible for the passing of some of America's most significant pieces of legislation — from the New Deal to just about every major piece of civil rights legislation.

Some 40 years later, the subject, which has only received peripheral treatment, finally gets a thorough examination with the July 2009 release of The Austin/Boston Connection: Five Decades of House Democratic Leadership, 1937-1989 (Texas A&M Press) by Anthony Champagne, Douglas B. Harris, James W. Riddlesperger Jr. and Nelson. The book explains in detail this highly fruitful alliance that resulted in every Democratic Speaker from 1940 to 1989 coming from either the north Texas-southern Oklahoma area or from Greater Boston. The partnership between racially moderate southern Democrats and their predominantly city-dwelling northern counterparts successfully bridged the gap between the two wings of the party and balanced the regional interests of the coalition by voting as one.

Nelson, who was especially fascinated by the father-son mentor aspects of the alliance, spent years sifting through historical documents and interviewing key individuals about the Boston side of the alliance and McCormack, who is the subject of his current book project. "Garrison's role was essential," says Riddlesperger. "He's an absolute encyclopedia of Congressional knowledge, and his expertise on the Boston end of the Austin/Boston connection was essential to tell the whole story. Particularly, he is the world's leading authority on John McCormack, who along with Sam Rayburn, created and nurtured the connection."

In between his Harvard presentation and the release of the Austin/Boston book, Nelson spent decades as editor compiling the exhaustive two-volume Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1947-1992 and as co-editor of the four-volume Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1789-1992 (Congressional Quarterly). "I didn't want to be known solely as a compiler of committee assignments," says Nelson. "This was a great opportunity to shed light on a little-known, highly significant piece of history with some great researchers. Tony Champagne is an extraordinary archival researcher who can find the one document you need buried in the archives. Jim Riddlesperger's friendship with ex-Speaker Jim Wright at Texas Christian and Doug Harris's extensive work on Tip O'Neill's "public speakership" created a powerful research team."

Sustaining the alliance

The Austin/Boston alliance was born in the late 1930s in the aftermath of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's failed efforts to recast the Democratic Party and began to take shape when Rayburn of Texas won the House majority leadership post in 1937 and became speaker in 1940. John McCormack of Boston, another Roosevelt loyalist, beat a southerner to become Rayburn's majority leader. The alliance took off during Roosevelt's third term and would survive until the resignation of the Speakership by Jim Wright in 1989 thanks to a succession of personal alliances and mentor-based connections, despite numerous near-election defeats, deaths and divisive policy issues such as civil rights.

Nelson stresses that the alliance was dependent on more than just regional balance. Those elected to leadership positions in the House had to come from districts that would elect moderates, who were capable of working across party lines as middlemen to reach policy compromises. John Rankin of Mississippi, for example, who was a hardcore segregationist representing an all-white constituency interested in maintaining Jim Crow racial policies, wouldn't have worked out. Nor would Phil Burton, the quintessential "San Francisco liberal."

This was often a delicate balance, according to Nelson, who uses the "Southern Manifesto," written in 1956 by legislators opposed to racial integration in public places in response to Brown v. Board of Education, as an example of the coalition relying on its moderate southern members to offset their more conservative southern counterparts. Signed by 19 Senators and 82 members of the House of Representatives, including the entire congressional delegations of the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, the manifesto was narrowly shot down.

Mentors and the grooming of protégés

Nelson's original idea for a book on the Austin/Boston connection had an almost sociological focus on the protégé/mentor relationships that built and sustained the alliance. "It was risky intellectually because it had a lot of stuff in there about father-son absences and psychodynamics. The idea was that these people were seeking out protégés to fill the absences of sons in their lives, but it was kind of specious and needed to be more fact-based, so it changed over time," says Nelson.

Despite the change of focus, the protégé/mentor theme is still a significant focus of the book. The connections are everywhere: Minority Leader Joseph Weldon Bailey's protégés were Sam Rayburn and John Nance Garner; Speaker Garner mentored and offered key assistance to Rayburn and McCormack; and Rayburn's and McCormack's protégés — Carl Albert, Hale Boggs, Tip O'Neill and Jim Wright — advanced the alliance well into the Reagan era.

"The mentor/protégé theme is one that occurred over time," says Riddlesperger. "These men all lived with one another in Washington most of the year and often socialized with one another after hours...They shared a drink and swapped lies while working on political agendas or through the weekly poker game — John McCormack's favorite social activity with his colleagues. Older members of the House would select young members and place them on the leadership ladder in the House, such as when McCormack selected Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill to move up in the leadership."

With a dissertation to complete, Nelson wasn't ready to write the story of the Austin/Boston connection in 1968. Four decades of scholarship later, however, and it would seem incomplete without him. "Garrison was especially important in suggesting the importance of the Austin/Boston in understanding the leadership of the House for much of the 20th Century," says Champagne. "His papers and book project on McCormack had developed his thinking about the Austin/Boston connection, and after he presented those ideas to us we were convinced it was something well worth exploring."