DON TOM OF ALABAM'

BY RAY T. TUCKER

THE boy's pasty, pudgy face turned livid. He let fall the armful of wood which he had been collecting for the supper fire, holding tight to a slender stick five feet long. It shone in the sunlight of the clearing with the purple gleam of an Excalibur, while he waddled toward the kitchen door as swiftly as his thin legs would move his tumbler-shaped body. The sight of his sister sprawled on the floor, with old Aunt Rose standing over her in a threatening posture, left no doubt of the cause of the cries that had startled him.

In less time than it now takes him to tell it, he struck the Negro cook over the head with his five-foot weapon. She danced a beeline across the floor and fell. Frightened at the old mammy's deathly stillness, the brave boy walked over to the shapeless black heap, shook it and explained that he "hadn't meant to kill her."

Thus did Senator Heflin of Alabama first exhibit the chivalric impulses that now inspire him to deeds of high emprize in the United States Senate Chamber. In the light of this childhood display of gallantry and self-discipline, it is not so difficult to understand the man. In fact, a sympathetic insight into the influences which shaped his early days seems to reveal that Providence ordained there should be at least one James Thomas Heflin, if only as a milestone to measure the progress which public men and manners have made during his lifetime. Motionless has he sat astride his charger and smithered lance after lance upon life itself as it coursed by. As the Don Quixote of American politics and the sole survivor of a long line of picturesque and Elizabethan figures who once lent zest and color to the most drab capital in the world, Don Tom is a subject of historical as well as topical interest. He represents an era which, though it might well be forgotten, the romanticist as well as the realist is loath to forget. He spans and speaks for several generations of the Old South.

Don Tom was born into a family of eight sons and one daughter, in an isolated Alabama hamlet of fifty people. It stood in the midst of a country of canebrakes, cotton plantations, swamps and agricultural land. Life and the means of enriching it seem to have been fairly primitive. Planters, preachers and politicians of the post-Civil War era were his father's cronies, often spending the night at the eleven-room, one-story Heflin home. The Senator recalls that he frequently sat far into the morning before the fireplace while his elders discussed the politics and problems of those bitter Reconstruction days, and from them he undoubtedly derived many lasting prejudices.

Republican Reconstructionists, the great financial interests, the alien influences of the Yankee North, both political and religious-these were the forces held blameworthy for the South's wretched condition. Carpet baggers, capitalists and Republicans-for-revenue-only were denounced in language as vehement as it was picturesque, and these were the ogres which tumbled through the boy's dreams. The elders mourned-and their listener does to this day-the passing of the golden age of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, when the South's star of empire lighted the land from the coast to the Mississippi River.

Such beacons as remained to brighten the days of the dying generation were the Methodist church, the Masonic hall and the Democratic party. The "greatest speech" Heflin ever heard was delivered by the late Senator John T. Morgan at a Masonic rally in an oak grove overhanging the Methodist church. The boy's world was as circumscribed as his father's. Diversion he obtained by clandestine attendance at Negro revivals, which developed in him an extraordinary art of mimicry and storytelling. His imitative instinct was given more orderly direction at the Friday afternoon declamation hour at school, and it may have been prophetic, in view of his matured style of oratory, that his favorite selection was "Give me liberty, or give me death!"

It was from these barbecues, these speaking contests and these harangues on the hearth that he became imbued with the feeling that he "would rather be a United States Senator than hold any other office". Now that boyish hopes have come true, those inspiring scenes of fifty years ago still dominate his horizon. His

unique garb of striped trousers, one-button frock coat, stiff-bosomed shirt, cream-colored, double-breasted waistcoat and flat black bow tie, is that of the old-fashioned Southern statesman, he explains "though the one-button idea is my own invention”— and therefore he wears it. If his politics still smack of the fireplace, the barbecue and the camp meeting, it is largely because the child was father of the Senator.

When he arrived in Washington to enter the House in 1904, he moved in a congenial atmosphere. Though he is now the only "character" in Congress, blooming and booming all alone, both House and Senate then had their shares of riotous and attractive figures. There were Ollie James, who was to become Heflin's roistering companion by night and by day, and such human, historic celebrities as the "two Uncle Joes"-Fordney and Cannon. Their escapades and adventures in and out of Congress are legend; they were lusty makers of ballads and history, men who mingled liquor, horse races, drollery and racy moments at the table with more serious duties. Those who grieve at Heflin's present sourness on life can hardly believe that he is the only relic remaining from that generous, tolerant age of fun and fermentation.

The cafés and oyster houses which lined Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House had not yet given ground to the prim offices of white-ribboned reformers. At the basement bar in the Senate a statesman or near-statesman could still obtain Olympian inspiration before mounting the dizzily winding stairs to deliver a Ciceronian or Bacchanalian oration. Among this group in the House, Heflin soon became the good fellow and jester. His Negro dialect stories and rollicking spirit commended him to the graybeards, whose tales were growing stale.

No closing session was complete without an hour's foolery and clowning, in which the Member from Alabama played a leading part. His habit of hyperbole and rodomontade, though developed in him to a pathological degree, was not unique, and it nettled nobody, for it was overcast with Brobdignagian humor. In assailing the Republican tariff, for example, he was not content to charge that it increased the cost of living; his intensely partisan spirit did not stop this side of the grave.

"Not satisfied with taxing the swaddling clothes of the infant,"

he would thunder, "you Republicans levy a duty upon the winding sheet of the corpse. Not even when we are dead can we escape, for you raise the cost of the coffin our cold bones lie in and the tombstone that stands guard over our dust."

Nor was his anti-Negro attitude, with his demand for "Jim Crow" cars in the District of Columbia, more extreme than other Southerners' until he demonstrated that he was ready to shoot as well as speak for racial segregation. For twenty-four hours the Capital was plunged into a turmoil approaching that of inauguration night by this comparatively insignificant member from below the Mason and Dixon line.

His mad March night began quietly enough. While riding on a trolley car to a Methodist church, where he was to deliver a prohibition address, he grew infuriated at a Negro who was drinking liquor in the presence of a white woman. Soon Congressman and Negro were rolling on the pavement. When they were dragged apart, Heflin reëntered the trolley car and the colored man turned toward the curb. The latter, according to Heflin's witnesses, continued his abusive language, and his hand shot toward his pocket. He may have been reaching for a flask or a gun, but Heflin had no doubt about it-he never entertains doubts-and blazed away twice through the car window. One bullet struck the negro in the neck, and the other, as bullets will, ricochetted and penetrated the leg of an ex-jockey.

Booked at the police station on two charges of assault with a dangerous weapon, Heflin's defense and justification, it would appear, was dementia democratica. To questions regarding his nationality and occupation he gave but one answer: "I am a Democrat." He said that he had done "only what any gentleman would do". He insisted that he had been receiving threatening letters and therefore had obtained permission to tote a pistol. Meanwhile, the Capital paid appropriate tribute to its two-shot Congressman.

The police station soon filled with excited members of Congress. Telephone bells rang, messengers scurried through the streets on a search for bail, the newsboys sang the story of the extras and the most thrilling event since Admiral Dewey's homecoming was heralded with the opening, banging and shutting of gossip-laden

windows. It was, without a doubt, a great night for Heflin and headlines.

The concentration of his Congressional champions in the precinct house may have touched Don Tom, but it was not productive of bail. All twenty members were eager to aid, but some possessed more zeal than property, others owned up to certain embarrassing encumbrances, and the rest had assigned their belongings to their wives. It began to look like the hoosegow for the honorable gentleman from the Fifth Alabama District, but after a four hours' wait there appeared an ex-saloon keeper with sufficient unencumbered and wifeless collateral. Thus ended an evening in which a holy tilt against Demon Rum had been transformed through the best and most chivalric of intentions into a scuffling and shooting scrape, with Heflin emulating his Spanish prototype by landing in the donjon keep.

This incident seems to have exerted a mollifying effect, but not for long. During the Taft Administration he was a vanguard and rearguard speaker against the "big interests" as he saw them reflected in century-old Republican policies. The issues of those days were heaven-sent for a young member who owned a pair of leather lungs and acrobatic arms.

But he was not alone in these tirades, and a good part of public and press agreed with his ideas, so that although he cannot be said ever to have enjoyed a golden age as a statesman, these years may accurately be described as his gold-plate period. He was ever ready to shed a tear or an oration over the evil ways into which the party of Abraham Lincoln had fallen.

"The sons of Eli," he Jeremiahed, "carried the Ark of the Covenant, but the Spirit of the Covenant had fled, and the spirit of Lincoln no longer abides in the ark or strong box you Republicans carry above your cohorts at campaign time."

The election of Woodrow Wilson was "balm of Gilead" to him. He strode through Congressional corridors as triumphantly as the Sons of Israel swept through the streets of the Holy City upon their return from the land of bondage. Likewise, Heflin was returning from a political wilderness in which the tree of patronage had withered under the neglect of a Philistine President, and the flower of his oratory had oft been crushed by a