Victory & Defeat

In a hospital room in little Lafayette, Ala. one day last week a fleshy, feverish old man lay still in the grip of lobar pneumonia. Having passed through several days of delirium, he did not know what day it was and he was too tired to ask. That was just as well. It was Election Day, and no one wanted to tell J. Thomas Heflin that at 68 he had again lost his chance to get back into the U. S. Senate.

Last week's election for the Democratic nomination to fill the unexpired Senate term of Hugo LaFayette Black presumably meant a seven-year job because it tacitly carried with it a good chance for the nomination for the full term next year. For such a prime political plum, Tom Heflin, weary of the smaller jobs he had been given since his defeat in 1930, entered the race this autumn against Chairman J. Lister Hill of the House Military Affairs Committee.

Tom Heflin's chief liability was the loud and bigoted clownishness he displayed in both houses of Congress for 27 years. Lister Hill, reported candidate of Governor Bibb Graves's machine, had as his chief liability a zealous New Deal enthusiasm that led him last session to break with his southern colleagues over the wages-&-hours legislation. To voters Tom Heflin roared, "Send me to the Senate and I'll see that they don't pass the anti-lynching bill." But the idea of sending Tom Heflin back to the Senate for any reason whatever, according to nearly complete returns, appealed to only 48,000 Alabamians, as against 88.000 willing to try Lister Hill.

A Representative for 14 years, 44-year-old Lister Hill is the son of Dr. Luther Leonidas Hill, said to be one of the first surgeons to operate successfully on the human heart and a pupil of England's Lord Lister for whom his eldest son was named. When Governor Graves this week appointed him to replace his wife, Senatress Dixie, the New Deal's leaders in Congress scored one victory, one defeat: When Lister Hill joins the New Deal bloc in the Senate chamber, the chairmanship of his Military Affairs Committee--the legislative guardians of TVA--will fall to one of the stanchest foes that TVA has in the House, Kentucky's Democratic Andrew Jackson May.

Not for two days did Tom Heflin learn that the election was over. "When I told him," reported Secretary Roy Parker, "he wasn't bitter at all. He just said 'The Lord takes care of His children and there are other things to be thankful for.' "

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