First elected in 1928, Patman served 24 consecutive terms in the United States House of Representatives for Texas's 1st congressional district from 1929 to 1976.

He later received a commission as a first lieutenant and machine gun officer in the Texas Army National Guard's 144th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the 36th Division.

[5] In January 1932, Patman spearheaded a movement to impeach Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon,[6] which forced the latter's resignation the following month.

[9] Patman was one of four members of the Texas congressional delegation to originally sign the "Southern Manifesto,"[10] a resolution in protest of the United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

[17] Wright Patman's namesake committee played an important role in the early days of the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down the Nixon Administration.

[18] Despite these efforts to stop Patman, his investigative course ultimately proved to be Nixon's undoing in the sense that the money trail, as reported on in The Washington Post, helped lead to the establishment of the Ervin Senate Select Committee on Watergate in April 1973.

[24] "His funeral in Texarkana was one of the largest, most important occurrences in the town's history," wrote Mark Stanley in a 2004 essay for the East Texas Historical Journal.

[25] Patman is regarded as a liberal and populist who brought federal jobs and works projects to his district, where agriculture previously was the dominant economic sector.

[25] However, the left wing Americans for Democratic Action scored Patman low in its 100-point "liberal quotient" (LQ) scale, at 13 in 1972[26] and 24 in 1973.

[30] In the alternate history novel Settling Accounts: In at the Death by Harry Turtledove, part of the Southern Victory series, Wright Patman was a member of the Freedom Party and served as the Governor of Texas during the Second Great War.