Claude Pepper
Claude Denson Pepper was an American politician of the Democratic Party. He represented Florida in the United States Senate from 1936 to 1951, and the Miami area in the United States House of Representatives from 1963 until his death in 1989. He was considered a spokesman for left-liberalism and the elderly.
Born in Chambers County, Alabama, Pepper established a legal practice in Perry, Florida, after graduating from Harvard Law School. After serving a single term in the Florida House of Representatives, Pepper won a 1936 special election to succeed Senator Duncan U. Fletcher. Pepper became one of the most prominent liberals in Congress, supporting legislation such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. After World War II, Pepper's conciliatory views towards the Soviet Union and opposition to President Harry Truman's 1948 re-nomination engendered opposition within the party. Pepper lost the 1950 Senate Democratic primary to Congressman George Smathers, and returned to private legal practice the following year.
In 1962, Pepper won election to a newly created district in the United States House of Representatives. He emerged as a staunch anti-Communist, and strongly criticized Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Pepper served as chairman of the House Committee on Aging, and pursued reforms to Social Security and Medicare. From 1983 to 1989, he served as chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee. He died in office in 1989, and was honored with a state funeral. In 2000, the United States Postal Service issued a 33¢ Distinguished Americans series postage stamp honoring Pepper.
Early life
Claude Denson Pepper was born on September 8, 1900, in Chambers County, Alabama, the son of farmers Lena Corine Talbot and Joseph Wheeler Pepper. Pepper was the fourth child born to his parents; the first three died in infancy. Pepper was an only child until he was ten years old; his younger siblings were Joseph, Sara and Frank. He attended school in Dudleyville and Camp Hill, and graduated from Camp Hill High School in 1917. He then operated a hat cleaning and repair business, taught school in Dothan and worked in an Ensley steel mill before beginning studies at the University of Alabama.While in college he joined the Army for World War I and served in the Student Army Training Corps. The war ended before he saw active service, and after the SATC was disbanded, Pepper joined the ROTC. While lifting ammunition crates during a training event, Pepper suffered a double hernia, which required surgery to correct. After graduating from the University of Alabama with his A.B. degree in 1921, Pepper was able to use his veterans' and disability benefits to attend Harvard Law School, and he received his LL.B. in 1924.
Career
Pepper taught law at the University of Arkansas and then moved to Perry, Florida, where he opened a law practice. Pepper was a member of the Florida Democratic Party's executive committee from 1928 to 1929.He was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1928 and served from 1929 to 1931. During his term, Pepper served as chairman of the House's Committee on Constitutional Amendments. In response to the Great Depression, Governor Doyle E. Carlton proposed austerity measures including layoffs of state employees and large tax cuts. Pepper was among those who opposed Carlton's program, and popular support was with Carlton, so Pepper was among many legislators who lost when they ran for renomination in 1930.
After being defeated for renomination, Pepper moved his law practice to Tallahassee, the state capital. In 1931, he met Mildred Webster outside the governor's office. They began dating, and they married in St. Petersburg on December 29, 1936. They remained married until her death in 1979, and had no children.
Florida government
Pepper served on the Florida Board of Public Welfare from 1931 to 1932, and was a member of the Florida Board of Bar Examiners in 1933.U.S. Senate
In 1934, Pepper ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, challenging incumbent Park Trammell. Pepper lost to Trammell in the primary runoff 51%–49%. But Pepper was unopposed in the 1936 special election following the death of Senator Duncan U. Fletcher, and succeeded William Luther Hill, who had been appointed pending the special election. In the Senate, Pepper became a leading New Dealer and close ally of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was unusually articulate and intellectual, and, collaborating with labor unions, he was often the leader of the liberal-left forces in the Senate. His reelection in a heavily fought primary in 1938 solidified his reputation as the most prominent liberal in Congress. His campaign based on a wages-hours bill, which soon became the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. He sponsored the Lend-Lease Act.In 1937, he joined other Southern senators to filibuster an anti-lynching bill, but broke with them to support anti-poll tax legislation in the 1940s, and the popular account of the Senate Citadel said that Pepper had broken totally with the Southern Caucus. Pepper still supported some aspects of Southern white supremacy such as the all white Primary because he "thought that a Senator from the South had to do that".
In 1943, a confidential analysis by Isaiah Berlin of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the British Foreign Office described Pepper as:
A loud-voiced and fiery New Deal politician. Before Pearl Harbor, he was a most ardent interventionist. He is equally Russophile and apt to be critical of British Imperial policy. He is an out and out internationalist and champion of labour and negro rights and thus a passionate supporter of the Administration's more internationalist policies. He is occasionally used by the President for the purpose of sending up trial balloons in matters of foreign policy. With all these qualities, he is, in his methods, a thoroughly opportunist politician.Because of the power of the Conservative Coalition, he usually lost on domestic policy. He was, however, more successful in promoting an international foreign policy based on friendship with the Soviet Union. In 1946, Pepper appeared frequently in the national press and began to eye the 1948 presidential race. He considered running with his close friend and fellow liberal, former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, with whom he was active in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
Pepper was re-elected in 1944.
"Eisenhower Boom"
By 1947, momentum was growing for the Draft Eisenhower movement which wanted General Dwight D. Eisenhower, former Chief of Staff of the United States Army, to run for president. On September 10, 1947, Eisenhower disclaimed any association with the movement. In mid-September 1947, US Representative W. Sterling Cole of New York voiced opposition to the nomination of Eisenhower or any other military leader, including George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. In December 1947, an actor impersonating Eisenhower sang "Kiss Me Again" during a political dinner in Washington, DC, whose attendees including President Truman and numerous Republican potential candidates: the song's refrain ran "but it's too soon. Some time next June, ask me, ask me again, ask me, ask me again."On April 3, 1948, Americans for Democratic Action, led by members Adolf A. Berle Jr. and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., declared its decision to support a ticket of Eisenhower and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. On April 5, 1948, Eisenhower stated his position remained unchanged: he would not accept a nomination. In mid-April 1948, American labor unions had entered the debate, as William B. Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, criticized the Congress of Industrial Organizations for supporting the "Eisenhower Boom".
On July 2, 1948, the White House sent George E. Allen, friend and adviser to both Truman and Eisenhower, to the general to persuade him to make yet another denial about his candidacy. On July 3, 1948, Democratic state organizations in Georgia and Virginia openly backed Eisenhower, as did former New York state court judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney. The same day, Progressive presumptive candidate Wallace scorned the Eisenhower boom's southern supporters, saying, "They have reason to believe that Ike is reactionary because of his testimony on the draft and UMT Military_Selective_Service_Act|." On July 4, 1948, rumors abounded, e.g., Eisenhower would accept an "honest draft" or Eisenhower would accept the nomination if made by Truman himself. On July 5, 1948, a New York Times survey completed the previous day revealed that support for Eisenhower as Democratic nominee for president was "increasing among delegates", fueled by an "Anti-Truman Group" led by James Roosevelt of California, Jacob Arvey of Illinois, and William O'Dwyer of New York. US Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi declared his support for Eisenhower. At 10:30 PM that night, Eisenhower issued an internal memo at Columbia for release by the university's PR director that "I will not, at this time, identify myself with any political party, and could not accept nomination for public office or participate in a partisan political contest." Support persisted nonetheless, and on July 6, 1948, a local Philadelphia group seized on Eisenhower's phrases about "political party" and "partisan political contest" and declared their continued support for him. The same day, Truman supporters expressed their satisfaction with the Eisenhower memo and confidence in the nomination. By July 7, 1948, the week before the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the Draft Eisenhower movement drifted onwards, despite flat denials by Eisenhower and despite public declarations of confidence by Truman and Democratic Party national chairman J. Howard McGrath. Nevertheless, 5,000 admirers gathered in front of Eisenhower's Columbia residence to ask him to run.
In 1948, Pepper supported not his friend Henry A. Wallace but Eisenhower. In fact, on July 7, 1948, Pepper went further than any other supporter with an extraordinary proposal:
Senator Claude Pepper of Florida called on the Democratic party today to transform itself temporarily into a national movement, draft Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as a "national" and hence "nonpartisan" Presidential candidate and promise him substantial control of the party's national convention opening in Philadelphia next week.Pepper managed to gain support from ADA. The Draft Ike movement gained support from the CIO, the Liberal Party of New York State, Democratic local leaders made three statements refusing the nomination during July 1948, Pepper and others gave up and provided lukewarm support to Harry S. Truman. His third and last denial, sent by telegram to Pepper, ended the "Eisenhower Boom", and delegates began to reconsider Truman. On the evening of July 9, 1948, Roosevelt conceded at "Eisenhower-for-President headquarters" that the general would not accept a nomination. During the convention and after, concern persisted that the Eisenhower Boom had weakened Truman's hopes in the November 1948 elections.
It would be necessary, Mr. Pepper suggested, for the convention to invite General Eisenhower to write his own platform and to pick the vice presidential nominee.
Moreover, the Senator said, the general should be assured that the Democrats would never make partisan claims on him, and he should be presented not as a "Democratic" candidate but the candidate of a convention "speaking not as Democrats but simply as Americans."
In 1950, Pepper lost his bid for a third full term in 1950 by a margin of over 60,000 votes. Ed Ball, a power in state politics who had broken with Pepper, financed his opponent, U.S. Representative George A. Smathers. A former supporter of Pepper, Smathers repeatedly attacked "Red Pepper" for having far-left sympathies, condemning both his support for universal health care and his alleged support for the Soviet Union. Pepper had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1945 and, after meeting Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, declared he was "a man Americans could trust." Because of his left-of-center sympathies with people like Wallace and actor-activist Paul Robeson and because of his bright red hair, he became widely nicknamed "Red Pepper".
At a speech made on November 11, 1946, before a pro-Soviet group known as Ambijan, which supported the creation of a Soviet Jewish republic in the far east of the USSR, Pepper told his listeners that "Probably nowhere in the world are minorities given more freedom, recognition and respect than in the Soviet Union nowhere in the world is there so little friction, between minority and majority groups, or among minorities." Democracy was "growing" in that country, he added, and he asserted that the Soviets were making such contributions to democracy "that many who decry it might well imitate and emulate rather than despair."
Two years later, on November 21, 1948, speaking to the same group, he again lauded the Soviet Union, calling it a nation which has recognized the dignity of all people, a nation wherein discrimination against anybody on account of race is a crime, and which was in fundamental sympathy with the progress of mankind.