Dan Moody - Part One

Dan Moody - Part One

By Ken Anderson Friday, 14 November 2008

A chance sighting of a woodpecker caused 16-year-old Dan Moody, who was working with live electricity on top of a 35-foot power pole, to reassess his future. Moody decided that if the bird could make a living with his head, so could he. He climbed down the pole, quit his job and headed to college.

It was indeed fortunate for Texas that Moody saw that woodpecker. As events later unfolded, Moody played a major role in saving Texas not once, but twice, in the 1920s — first, from the Ku Klux Klan and then from the political corruption of Gov. Miriam Ferguson. Moody ended up becoming Texas’ youngest governor.

Daniel J. Moody was born on June 1, 1893, to Daniel James Moody and Nancy Elizabeth Robertson Moody in the then fast-growing railroad town of Taylor. He grew up in Taylor where he graduated from high school. After a year as an electrical lineman, he spent four years at the University of Texas. In 1914, without completing his law degree, he left school, passed the bar exam and formed a law partnership with Harris Melasky, a childhood friend, in Taylor.

Moody developed a good reputation as a lawyer. He began his political career in 1920 by becoming the youngest person ever to serve as Williamson County Attorney. In 1922, Ben Robertson, district attorney for the 26th District which served both Travis and Williamson counties, resigned partly in frustration with his inability to obtain a murder indictment against members of the Ku Klux Klan who had killed a man in downtown Austin. Gov. Pat Neff, a tough law-and-order man who himself was a former district attorney, appointed Moody to the post.

Moody excelled as district attorney. But it was in 1923 that he faced his toughest test when he confronted the raw power of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, at that time a nationwide organization with 3 million members, including numerous political figures, specialized in vigilante violence. Such violence, usually in the form of a “tar party” — kidnapping, beating, tarring and feathering — was directed against blacks, Jews, immigrants, Catholics, bootleggers, gamblers and moral transgressors. There were thousands of such tar parties throughout the nation. The common thread of these assaults was that very few perpetrators were arrested and no one was convicted.

The Klan’s invincibility came to a crashing halt when they held a “tar party” for a young salesman whom they suspected of committing adultery in the small northern Williamson County town of Weir. On Easter Sunday, 1923, eight Klansmen kidnapped the salesman, beat him, chained him to a tree in Taylor and poured tar on him. Moody, with the help of Sheriff Lee Allen and Constable Louis Lowe, launched an investigation that identified three of the Klansmen. After the grand jury indicted the Klansmen for aggravated assault and later a Klan preacher for perjury, the stage was set for four prosecutions. Beginning in September 1923, and ending five months later, Moody obtained four straight convictions — each with a prison sentence — becoming the first prosecutor in the U.S. to succeed against the Klan.

Moody then took on the Klan in the court of public opinion. After the state’s newspapers clamored for Moody to run for state attorney general, he ran and made the Ku Klux Klan the central issue in the campaign. Moody turned public opinion against the Klan and overwhelmingly defeated a Klansman who was his election opponent. From that moment forward, Klan membership in Texas went into a tailspin, and it quickly ceased to be a power in Texas.

Unfortunately, the Klan’s unpopularity also led to the election of Miriam “Ma” Ferguson as governor. Her husband, Jim, had been impeached, removed from office and banned from ever holding office again because of corruption. As attorney general, Moody would have to deal with any corruption in the new Ferguson administration. The fireworks were just about to begin.

Ken Anderson, former Williamson County district attorney and current judge, is the author of eight books dealing with law and history. His current book, “Dan Moody: Crusader for Justice,” is the first complete biography of Gov. Moody.