Glenn H. Taylor: Singing Cowboy Senator, Bull Connor Arrest, Tin Toupee

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Glenn H. Taylor was born in 1904 in a Portland, Oregon, boarding house, the 12th of 13 children of a retired Texas Ranger turned preacher, and left school after the eighth grade. From 1919 he toured with his brother's stock theater company as an actor and country western singer, and the Depression turned him toward progressive economics, including the writings of Stuart Chase and King Camp Gillette. Between losing Idaho Senate races in 1940 and 1942 he worked as a sheet metal worker and painter's assistant in California. He drew crowds in small towns by singing cowboy songs, then delivered political speeches, and in 1944 he won the Senate seat.

He rode his horse Nugget up the Capitol steps, sang a rewritten Home on the Range to find housing, and by one measure ranks as the second most liberal senator in history. He opposed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, proposed a world republic, pushed onto the floor to disrupt a 1946 filibuster against job discrimination protections, and tried to block Theodore Bilbo's swearing in. On May 1, 1948, in Birmingham, Alabama, he used the entrance designated for Black attendees at a Southern Negro Youth Congress meeting and was arrested under Commissioner Eugene Bull Connor, then ran for vice president with Henry Wallace on the Progressive ticket, which won 2.4 percent.

• On election night 1946 he allegedly broke the jaw of 66 year old Idaho Republican Ray McCaig in a Boise hotel lobby brawl.
• In 1947 he said he almost hoped the Roswell flying saucers were real, since aliens might force humanity to unite.
• Sentenced in Birmingham to 180 days of hard labor, he avoided it when Idaho's governor refused extradition.
• After losing the 1956 primary to Frank Church, he demanded that Church take a lie detector test.
• He patented his tin pie plate toupee in 1958, and Taylor Topper Inc. became the major U.S. hairpiece maker by 1960.