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A term in the Army (on this side) and an unspectacular non-corporation law practice in Birmingham brought Hugo Black up to 1926, when Alabama's late great Oscar Wilder Underwood declined to stand for reelection to the Senate. John H. Bankhead of a proud Alabama family announced for the job. So did Colonel L. B. Musgrove, potent coal operator and angel of the Anti-Saloon League. So did three others, including unprepossessing: Hugo Black. But Hugo Black campaigned the hardest and bitterest. He drove his battered Model T into every cranny of Alabama. He often spent the night at a farmer's house, left next morning after convincing the family and neighbors he was one of them. Most important, he wrested support from Alabama's Ku Klux Klan from Colonel Musgrove, though the Colonel claimed the promise of Klan favor from its national headquarters. Poor-white KKK backing meant election in Alabama in 1926, embarrassing as it might prove to Nominee Black in 1937*
'"The Senate made Hugo Black" runs a saying in Washington. Senators in 1927 sized him up as nothing much: an insignificant-looking son of a crossroads storekeeper and farmer, a poor young lawyer elected by the KKK to take a seat alongside J. Thomas ("Tom-Tom") Heflin. Charles Michelson of the New York World mourned the passing of Southern statesmen like Underwood and Mississippi's John Sharp Williams.
But once in the Senate something happened to Hugo Black. Venerable old George William Norris burned into him the virtues of public power development. Crusty old Thomas J. Walsh, scourge of Teapot Dome, taught him the science of conducting Senate investigations, and became in return Hugo Black's idol. As a disciple of Walsh, Hugo Black set himself up as prime inquisitor of the Senate. Hiding a quick, brittle mind behind a naive countenance and an Alabama accent, trapping witnesses in their own chicanery, Hugo Black pried into steamship and airmail scandals, brought on the Merchant Marine Act after he had proved that the Republican Administration paid as much as $125,000 to a steamship line for transporting a pound of mail. Inquisitor Black seized some 5,000,000 telegrams from Western Union files during his famed investigation of lobbyists in 1935, thereby winning a reputation as a ruthless prosecutor which was of no service to him as a candidate for Judge.
Is Black Red? Significant it is, however, that almost no one has pinned the label "Radical" on Hugo Black. He was not even listed in Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling's ludicrous The Red Network, although Mrs. Roosevelt and Senators Borah and Nye were. Whoever called a Southern Senator radical if he rode into office swathed in the sheets of Klanism and later led filibusters against the Anti-Lynching Bill, as he was planning to do again last week until that controversial measure was withdrawn under compromise? Thus defying classification, Hugo Black stacks up as a curious mixture of prejudiced heredity and openminded environment. A voracious reader, he knows Karl Marx's Das Kapital, prefers Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, plunks for regulated, competitive capitalism. With Borah he opposed NRA because he thought it fostered monopoly. Otherwise he has almost un-deviatingly followed Roosevelt without, however, winning a reputation as a Roosevelt stooge.