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If the President had not known that gossip credited Hugo Black with belonging to the Ku Klux Klan before nominating him to the Supreme Court, he could scarcely have failed to learn about it soon afterward. Before the Senate confirmed the nomination, the subject of Hugo Black's connection with the Klan was discussed on the floor. By last week, at least nine Senators who had voted for Hugo Black had hastily announced that they would not have done so if they had been assured that he was a member of the Klan. Senators Walsh and Copeland suggested that Mr. Black resign. Montana's Burton K. Wheeler demanded that the President name an impartial board to investigate the charges.
The Story. Fully aware of the rumors that had escaped the ears of Franklin Roosevelt, the Post Gazette sent its eccentric, middleaged, ace political factfinder, Ray Sprigle, to Alabama to investigate the story as soon as Hugo Black was nominated. For Reporter Sprigle—who affects Western sombreros, carries a silver-ringed cane and likes nothing better than a job of conscientious muckraking—the assignment was a treat. His first dispatches were routine stories which contained principally the information that the Klan had supported Hugo Black in the 1926 election. Original plan was to run the articles before Justice Black could be confirmed, but by the time Reporter Sprigle, aided by an unlimited expense account and private detectives, had got all the data he wanted, the less inquisitive Senate had long since done its job. By the end of last week, Reporter Sprigle's series, among other things, had told in detail how Justice Black had been given a gold card which made him a life member of the Klan and how he addressed a Birmingham Klorero on Sept. 2, 1926, sharing a rostrum with the Klan's Imperial Wizard, onetime Dentist Hiram Wesley Evans. Last week, Dr. Evans, enjoying a new appearance in the limelight, repeated that Klan rolls were secret but Justice Black was not currently a member.
Meantime, while Reporter Sprigle was being mentioned for the Pulitzer Prize, political realists remarked that the completeness of his findings ironically suggested that the association which so shocked the U. S. might have been revealed, precisely because it no longer existed. For disappointment at Hugo Black's failure to pay back his political obligations might have been a motive for Klan bigwigs, from whom alone Reporter Sprigle could apparently have got some of his more damaging information, to make public at the most inopportune moment his relation with it.
The eventual consequences of the" Black scandal would, it appeared, be more painful for Mr. Roosevelt than for his appointee. Sworn in secretly the day he received his commission, Justice Black had been measured for his robes before sailing for Europe. Last week, the Albany, N. Y. firm which specializes in judicial robes announced that Hugo Black's $90 costume of ebony French silk was ready to put on when Hugo Black returns. For the President the Black scandal came most embarrassingly at the time when he was not only proposing to reopen his campaign to put more sympathetic jurists on the Supreme Court, but credited with being about to undertake a political punitive expedition against the Senators who kept him from doing so this summer.