He was the son of Taylor's mayor, justice of the peace, and school board chairman, Daniel James Moody, who was one of the town's first settlers in 1876.In 1923, Moody obtained an assault conviction against four members of the Ku Klux Klan for beating and tarring a white traveling salesman.[5] The activist Jane Y. McCallum, whom Moody would later appoint as his Secretary of State, hosted the campaign headquarters in her own home.A request from President Roosevelt made Moody help to prosecute income tax evasion schemes in Louisiana as a special assistant to the US Attorney General.Moody came in third in the 1942 Democratic primary for the seat, his only political defeat,[1] behind former Governors W. Lee O'Daniel and James V. Allred.[10][11] The Williamson County Courthouse had the courtroom in which Moody tried his famous case against the Klan completely restored to its 1920s appearance and reopened in 2007.