Champion of The Elderly

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But Pepper yearned to return to politics. He made a brash bid in 1934 to unseat U.S. Senator Park Trammell in the Democratic primary. F.D.R. was in the White House, and Pepper's campaign slogan was wordy but effective: "The Welfare of the Common Man Is the Cornerstone of the New Deal." Virtually unknown, he nevertheless forced a run-off and lost by a mere 4,050 votes. When both of the state's Senators died within weeks of each other in 1936, Pepper filed for one of the vacancies. His earlier showing scared off challengers, and at 36, he was lee ted to the Senate unopposed. Says Pepper, a Baptist: "I realized then that providence can handle my affairs much better than I can."

Roosevelt sought the freshman Senator's support for his power-grabbing and ultimately unsuccessful plan to pack the Supreme Court with additional Justices. Pepper had reservations, but, far from timid, he said he would go along if F.D.R. would help him win election to his first full six-year term in 1938. "I will, and that's a commitment," promised the President, who kept his word.

Pepper, in turn, became one of F.D.R.'s stalwart supporters on Capitol Hill. When resistance to New Deal economic programs grew in the Senate, the Florida newcomer rose to scold his elders: "We haven't gone too far, we haven't gone far enough. This is not the Promised Land. Are we going to commit the same folly that the children of Israel did?" His colleagues rose in an ovation. Newspaper Columnist Drew Pearson called the speech "one of the greatest of its kind ever heard in the Senate chamber."

Pepper easily won re-election in 1938 after defeating a former Florida Governor in the primary by more than 100,000 votes. But his liberalism was antagonizing businessmen in the state, who vowed to turn him out of office. Pepper had been instrumental in passing the nation's first minimum wage law, which guaranteed workers 25¢ an hour. "Business never forgave me," he says. It was the last major piece of New Deal legislation.

His views on foreign affairs also undermined his Florida support. He and his wife Mildred visited Berlin after his 1938 reelection, and the Senator was alarmed by what he recalls with wry understatement as "the mutterings of war." Pepper joined the push for a military draft and came up with an innovation of his own. He was convinced that the only way the U.S. could stay out of the war in Europe was to help the Allies win it. Since they were awaiting warplanes on order from the U.S., Pepper reasoned, why not send them aircraft out of the U.S. Air Force, replacing these planes later as the orders came off production lines? This idea, rejected at first in the Senate, became the Lend-Lease program, which provided Britain, in particular, with crucial ships, warplanes and other war materiel.

For his efforts, Pepper was hanged in effigy at the Capitol in August 1940, by women who opposed his "warmongering." He still has the coconut head and stuffed denims that the women had fashioned to look like him.