Decency and Vision Made Claude Pepper a Congressional Maverick

The grateful eulogies are being said for Claude Pepper, the 88-year-old Florida congressman who passed away this week after one last and stoic fight with age and disease.

At his death, as in most of his life, Pepper was refusing to go gently, and in his nearly half century of battle in public service, there was usually a redeeming lesson for the rest of American politics and politicians.

Now that he is gone, of course, we can see how rare he was in the Washington of the 1980s. It is not only that Pepper’s long and devoted efforts now mean a saving Social Security check every month for tens of millions, or the rescue of millions more from catastrophic medical bills.

By his work, too, he died a shining exception amid the pervasive scandals and venality of a money-crazed Congress. Unlike too many of his colleagues, Pepper’s monument was not the store of his political action committee money or the slickness of his outside deals, but something distinctly out of fashion in this age of un-ethics--the simple substance of his legislation and achievement, the power and security he gave not to himself or his cronies, but to the people he served. What a mockery to his peers that a man of such decency and vision was to the end regarded as a maverick on Capitol Hill.

Claude Pepper was always ahead of his time, they are saying in the tributes. That was plain enough in his early advocacy of the rights of the elderly in a society commercially and culturally obsessed with youth. The diminutive country lawyer saw clearly the needs--and the looming demographic and political force--of older Americans at the close of the 20th Century.

What may be less evident now is the sheer sweep of his history, how long he was trying to explain what so few others understood. As a senator from Florida in the 1930s, Pepper foresaw, too, the throbbing new South and fought the privilege and poverty that shackled his state and region. In the late 1940s, he courageously resisted Washington’s mob psychology of the encroaching Cold War and tried to temper the headlong chauvinism of both the Republicans and his own bellicose Democrats.

For all that, he paid dearly. Financed by Pepper’s wealthy enemies, fueled by the hysteria of the times, a one-time protege, George Smathers, defeated Pepper in the Democratic primary in 1950. It was one of the classic Red-baiting, ignorance-mongering campaigns of American history. Smathers called him the “Red Pepper” and his Social Security legislation “the spiraling spider web of the Red network.” Benighted rural audiences gasped as Smathers told them in shocked tones that Pepper’s sister had gone off to the big city and become a “thespian,” or that Claude himself had been known to practice “celibacy” before he finally got married.

Not that Pepper himself was always free of the poison or paradox of the moment. While a Populist of sorts, he was also one of the Southern brakes on the New Deal, cautioning Franklin D. Roosevelt to go slow on some of the measures Pepper himself introduced. An instinctive opponent of the nearly ruinous rivalry with the Soviet Union, he nonetheless schemed to enlist as a Democratic presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as a Republican President would institutionalize the Cold War.

Though personally unprejudiced, Pepper could readily accommodate to the racism of his constituency. “If they can’t make a black out of me,” he said woefully in the 1950 race, “they want to make me a Red,” and then proceeded to mouth his devotion to white supremacy.

Like Arkansas’ William J. Fulbright and others, Pepper was part of that tortured modern tradition of our Southern politicians, men spiritually and politically riven between statesmanship and the backwardness of their constituencies.

Yet in the end, it was Smathers and the ignorant gasps that were forgotten and Claude Pepper really triumphed after all. He lived to see most of his programs realized and to see the beginning of the end of the long-Thermidor in relations with the Soviet Union.

There is even a nice irony in who he was and whence he came--that out of the bleak scenes of deprivation and misery in the Southern hills of his childhood there emerged such idealism and compassion. Claude Pepper’s is one of the noble threads of the era, a reassuring example as our leaders tumble in disgrace. Like some of those 19th-Century congressional legends we celebrate in history books, this small figure with the big nose and deceptive drawl turns out to have been one of our giants.