In London last week, Associate Justice Hugo La Fayette Black of the U. S. Supreme Court spent some of the last days of his European holiday shopping for tweeds, browsing about bookstores for a copy of Crete's Aristotle, dining at Simpson's and going to the theatre. To reporters who hounded him for a statement, he calmly announced that he would have none to make "at least until I return to the United States." Meanwhile, in the U. S. the story published last week by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that Hugo Black had once been and still is a member of the nearly defunct Ku Klux Klan (TIME, Sept. 20), ceased to be a minor newspaper coup and became the prize political scandal of the year.
If Justice Black had nothing to say about the story, he was almost the only important political personage in the U. S. who did not. Major pronouncement and the one that set the tune for most of the rest came naturally from the White House.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt has an important piece of news to give out, he likes to have as many Washington correspondents as possible at press conference. Last week, the biggest press conference since the President announced his plan for enlarging the Supreme Court was on hand when he started out by saying that he knew exactly what the newspapermen wanted to ask and was prepared to answer for quotation. Without more ado, the President read a prepared statement:
"I know only what I have read in the newspapers. . . . Mr. Justice Black is in Europe, where undoubtedly he cannot get the full text of these articles. Until such time as he returns, there is no further comment to be made."
When a reporter asked the President to elaborate the last line, he reread the whole statement. Asked whether he had known of Justice Black's reputed Klan connections before nominating him to the Senate the President answered: he had not.
Before Franklin Roosevelt chose Hugo Black as the man best fitted to fill the one vacancy on the Supreme Court the Department of Justice went carefully over a list of some 60 possible appointees. That not one of the President's advisers had uncovered a bit of information that was common gossip or had passed it on to the President, seemed to be the shocking significance of the President's statement. It was on this point that the President's ablest critics blamed the President. One- time NRAdministrator Hugh Johnson, who currently flays the New Deal as energetically as he once served it, wrote:
"What difference does it make if Hugo Black is a uniformed Kluxer? ... It was plain from his record that he is a born witch-burner—narrow, prejudiced and class-conscious. ... To suggest that the President did not know these traits is to belittle not only Mr. Roosevelt's splendid intelligence, but also his fine inbred instincts. ... A candidate even for district judge is investigated for weeks by G-men. But Black's appointment to the Supreme Court was not even referred to the Department of Justice. The President may not have known the general Washington belief . . . but he very well knew that, with or without a hobgoblin disguise, Mr. Black is a bigot.
"In all that knowledge that appointment was a gesture of derision toward the pretensions of that court to the highest dignity and respect. .. ."