As a state, Alabama has had a complicated political history even though for a long time it was a one-party state, as the party became split between conservative and liberal factions in the mid-20th century, with the state having one of the most powerful liberal wings in the South until 1964. One figure who straddled both the New Deal and conservative lines of Alabama politics was Sam Hobbs (1887-1952). A lawyer by profession, in 1921, Governor Thomas Kilby appointed him a judge, a post for which he would be reelected. As a judge, Hobbs found the KKK’s vigilante justice objectionable and served as campaign manager for Benjamin Meek Miller, who successfully ran for governor on an anti-Klan platform in 1930. He was an early supporter of FDR and he thanked him for his support by appointing him to Alabama’s National Recovery Administration Committee. The prestige he gained from this role enabled him to make a run for higher office.
In 1934, Hobbs challenged Congressman Lamar Jeffers, who had been serving since 1921, for renomination. Jeffers was a man who was known for his white supremacist views and for his sometimes incendiary rhetoric surrounding race as well as declining to condemn lynchings (Spann). He succeeded in defeating him and this was tantamount to being elected as Alabama was a one-party state at the time. Although many Alabamians at the time were staunchly pro-New Deal, Hobbs, despite having been considered a New Deal supporter, was a bit less enthusiastic about it than some of his colleagues. Indeed, save for Birmingham’s George Huddleston, he was the least supportive of Alabama Democrats of the New Deal at the time. For instance, he voted with Huddleston to strike the controversial “death sentence” clause from the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, a key issue for President Roosevelt. Hobbs also opposed the Bituminous Coal Act in 1935 and minimum wage legislation in 1938. He was supportive of agricultural legislation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Social Security, and extending the National Industrial Recovery Act. Hobbs was also quite helpful in bringing federal funds to his district to construct the Edmund Pettus Bridge, managed the impeachment of Judge Halsted L. Ritter, and was successful in encouraging Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to use marble in the construction of federal buildings. However, Hobbs became most known for his expertise in law enforcement issues and his close ties with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
In 1939, Hobbs sponsored a measure that if enacted would have provided for the setup of detention facilities for criminal aliens who were ordered deported, but their countries would not take them back. To win approval and to prevent the measure from potentially being ruled unconstitutional, the bill stipulated that inmates would not be forced to work and that it would only be among aliens that were criminals in other ways. Critics dubbed the measure the “concentration camp bill” and although the House passed this measure overwhelmingly, it was not voted on in the Senate.
As part of his support for law enforcement, Hobbs sponsored legislation to apply the 1934 anti-racketeering law to unions, thus prohibiting robbery and extortion in interstate commerce. This was pushed due to numerous racketeering incidents regarding unions and most notably one in which members of the Teamsters union coerced truck drivers travelling from New Jersey to New York, through beatings and threats of beatings, to pay them wages for work whether they did the work or not. The Supreme Court had ruled that these actions did not constitute a violation of the anti-racketeering statute. After passage in 1943 didn’t result in Senate enactment, the Hobbs Act would ultimately be signed into law in 1946. Hobbs was repeatedly supportive of legislation to limit the power of labor unions, and he was also predictably opposed to civil rights legislation. In 1943, he attempted to strike from the anti-poll tax bill the prohibition on poll taxes for primaries (The Call). Although strongly disliked by left-wing and civil rights groups, Hobbs was far from all right-wing in his views. After all, he had supported a good amount of the New Deal, was an internationalist, supported rent control, and in 1943 he objected to Martin Dies’s (D-Tex.) proposal to deny funds for the payment of three government officials his Un-American Activities Committee had found to be subversive.
Although Hobbs supported the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 he was largely opposed to the Republican agenda of the 80th Congress and in 1948, Hobbs backed the candidacy of State’s Rights Democrat Strom Thurmond for president. Although he was arguably a better alternative to some Southern politicians of his day, he was nonetheless a firm supporter of the Jim Crow system as were all Alabama elected officials at the time, and he was willing to go up against his party’s nominee over it. Hobbs agreed with the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action 60% of the time from 1947 to 1950, far from indicative of a solid conservative record, as was his -0.176 from DW-Nominate. By 1950, he was in poor health and his doctors warned him that running for another term was tantamount to suicide (The World-News). He thus opted not to run for reelection, but nonetheless died on May 31, 1952.
References
ADA Voting Records. Americans for Democratic Action.
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Alien Internment is Voted by House. (1939, May 6). The New York Times.
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Former Rep. Hobbs Dies In Alabama. (1952, June 2). The World-News, 2.
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https://www.newspapers.com/image/914365402/
Hobbs, Samuel Francis. Voteview.
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https://voteview.com/person/4471/samuel-francis-hobbs
Neeley, G.R. (2017, November 15). Samuel Francis Hobbs. Encyclopedia of Alabama.
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https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/samuel-francis-hobbs/
Spann, K. (2017, November 17). Lamar Jeffers. Encyclopedia of Alabama.
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https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/lamar-jeffers/
Words Fly as House Passes Anti-Poll Tax Bill; Gird for Senate. The Call, 36.
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Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 