Black Scandal

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. .. ."

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.

Last week, dispatches from London indicated that Justice Hugo Black would get back to the U. S. next week. In Washington the President suddenly ceased to be indecisive about the trip to the West Coast which he has been considering for the past month, announced that he would leave this week (see p. 9). Thus, when Hugo Black gets back from Europe and when the Supreme Court convenes on Oct. 4, Franklin Delano Roosevelt will be far, far away.

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