Champion of The Elderly

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Pepper won re-election in 1944 but, mainly because of his liberal views, speaking invitations in Florida dropped off as civic clubs and local Chambers of Commerce blackballed him. Business leaders were building a campaign war chest to beat him in 1950. He played right into the hands of his foes. Traveling abroad in 1945, Pepper met Joseph Stalin and naively described the Soviet dictator as "a man Americans can trust."

The following year, Pepper accepted an invitation to attend a left-wing political rally in New York's Madison Square Garden. Waiting backstage with Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace and others, Pepper was asked to pose for a group photo. As he did so, Paul Robeson, the opera singer who was widely considered a Communist, took a position beside him. The resulting photo of Pepper looking chummy with a black Soviet sympathizer was to prove a political disaster for him back home.

Pepper also incurred the potent wrath of Harry Truman by joining a dump-Truman movement at the 1948 Democratic convention. Pepper felt that Truman had abandoned Roosevelt's domestic programs. Pepper and others tried to persuade World War II Hero Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Democrat. They got word that Ike would not seek the nomination, but would accept it. Thus Pepper led a Florida delegation pledged largely to Ike, gaining headlines that made Truman furious. Ike left Pepper out in the cold by sending him a telegram withdrawing his name from consideration.

Truman did not forget. Shortly after upsetting Republican Thomas Dewey in the election, he summoned George Smathers, then a Florida Congressman, to the White House. Pepper had helped Smathers get elected. "I want you to do me a favor," Smathers recalls Truman's saying. "I want you to beat that son-of-a-bitch Claude Pepper."

That 1950 senatorial election was one of the dirtiest on record. The Robeson-Pepper photo was circulated widely. So too was a book called The Red Record of Senator Claude Pepper, which distorted his attitude toward the Soviet Union. He was stuck with the label Red Pepper.

But the campaign is chiefly remembered for remarks attributed to Smathers—and later denied by him—in TIME. Quoting Northern newspapers, the magazine said Smathers used fancy language to convey sinister meanings to benighted rural listeners: "Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extravert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr.Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy."

Pepper was defeated by 67,000 votes. "On election night people came up to our house in cars, shouting obscenities, cheering the fact that I had been defeated," Pepper recalls. "They wanted to destroy me, and just about did."