Tom-Tom Tom

Sick & tired of J. Thomas ("Tom-Tom") Heflin's threats to contest the election which dropped him out of his comfortable U. S. Senate seat in 1930, an Alabama legislator named Coates rose in Montgomery in 1931, declared: "No man in Alabama during the last quarter of a century has received greater gifts within the range of the electorate of this State than has J. Thomas Heflin."

But if Mr. Coates or any other Alabaman thought he could shame torrid Tom Heflin he did not know old Tom. Not only did Tom Heflin contest the election; he fought it all the way back to the U. S. Senate; he buttonholed his ex-colleagues until they granted him extraordinary permission to state his case on the floor of the Senate, which he did for 5 1/2 purple hours-- in vain. In 1934 he swallowed his pride, ran for Congressman from the Fifth Alabama District, the comparatively lowly job he had held for eight and a half terms (1904-21) before he found his way to the Senate. Ungrateful constituents placed Congressional Candidate Heflin no better than third, so he rushed back to Washington and the Federal job dispensers.

In 1935 he got a few weeks' work (at $100 a week) as "special representative" of the Federal Housing Administration. After that he became just a figure to be pointed out as a privileged visitor to the Senate floor, where he spent wistful hours in the background. Men shook their heads and said that old Tom had hit hard times.

Last week came evidence to prove that Tom Heflin's infinite persistence merited not sympathy but admiration. A quick question from the Birmingham News & Age Herald's Russell Kent caught Attorney-General Homer Stille Cummings off guard, forced him to admit that Mr. Heflin had been doing some kind of nebulous work for the Department of Justice since July 1936. Salary: $6,000 a year. The New York Sim's Phelps Adams dug deeper, learned just how much old Tom had to suffer in his supplication for jobs: after six months on the payroll, Tom had to wait more than a month before Mr. Cummings reappointed him, after that had to wait another month before he wangled his name back on the payroll for three more months.

These revelations probably bothered paunchy, white-vested Tom Heflin not at all. He was back in Alabama, working feverishly against the day next year when Mrs. Dixie Bibb Graves's term in the Senate expires, when the electorate may possibly put Tom Heflin on the payroll again for six long years at $10,000 per year.

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