If a majority of voters in Alabama’s upcoming election for Senate vote for an accused child molesting, theocratic, twice disgraced and ousted judge Roy Moore he will have a strong rival for the title of worst senator ever from the state in post-Civil War era. The current holder of that dubious title for the moment remains Thomas Heflin, who was Alabama’s senator from 1920 to 1930.
Heflin, nicknamed “Cotton Tom,” began his political career inching his way up the ladder first as the mayor of La Fayette followed by two terms in the state house of representatives. As a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1901 Heflin pushed segregation and Jim Crow into law. He was elected the secretary of state but left midway through his term to run for Congress.
In Washington Heflin was a strange mix of a few progressive views on labor combined with extreme racism and anti-Catholicism. He was a vocal opponent of woman’s suffrage taunting a fellow senator who favored giving women the vote to put on a dress and bonnet, but he was the sponsor of the bill to create Mother’s Day in 1914. The same year he made baseless accusations against another representative for taking payoffs from the Germans.
Riding a streetcar in DC in 1908 with another congressman from South Carolina Heflin saw a black man, Louis Lundy, sitting next to a white woman and drinking whiskey. Heflin threw him off the streetcar onto a crowded platform. What happened next is unclear but the congressman pulled out the pistol he always carried and shot Lundy, grazing him on the neck. Another shot ricocheted and struck a bystander, Thomas McCreary, on the leg. Heflin claimed that Lindy was reaching for a razor when he shot him.
Heflin was arrested on charges of assault with intent to kill.