The Klansman

Campaigning in San Francisco, Vice Presidential Candidate Harry Truman amiably endorsed the entire California Democratic ticket. A reporter cut in sharply: did that include Hal Styles (candidate for Congressman from Hollywood, exposed last month as a onetime Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan)? Harry Truman said blandly he was for anybody who was for Franklin Roosevelt.

On the three folksy, saccharine radio programs he conducts over Hollywood's KFWB, Hal Styles promptly made the most of this topflight support. He plastered Hollywood with 60 billboards proclaiming, "Senator Truman says: 'I'm for Styles.' "

Hal Styles came to California in 1932. For twelve years he read poetry, platitudes and "notes from my magic scrapbook of life" over the radio, became a favorite of Los Angeles housewives. Last May he took his kitchen popularity into politics, trounced union-hating John M. Costello in the Democratic primary. Hollywood's liberal Democrats cheered. P.A.C. boasted nationally that this was their work. But these happy pink faces turned lobster red when Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner dug up the fact that Styles had been a Klansman in Queens County, N.Y. in the mid '20s.

The Hollywood Democratic Committee, which had sparked Styles's primary campaign, promptly disowned their candidate. So did the rabidly pro-Democratic Los Angeles Daily News. Los Angeles' P.A.C. still stood by him. Styles tried to explain, somewhat lamely, that he had joined the Klan to expose it in the old New York Graphic. But this excuse fell through when it turned out he had never been on the Graphic's payroll. Then he took another tack. He pictured himself as a changed man, compared himself to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (whose onetime Klan connections almost kept him off the bench in 1937). Styles even wangled an endorsement from an editorial writer on the leading Negro newspaper.

But dopesters were sure that Hal Styles' goose was cooked--despite the support of Truman and P.A.C.--and that the district would now go Republican.

Meanwhile Hal Styles went on explaining & explaining. His best: "My life is an open book, with a few pages stuck together."

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