Pepper taught law at the
University of Arkansas (where his students included
J. William Fulbright) and then moved to
Perry, Florida, where he opened a law practice. 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. 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 (Florida has no
poll tax) 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. 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".
Communist allegations Regarding the
1950 Florida Senate election, President
Harry Truman called
George Smathers into a meeting at the
White House and reportedly said, "I want you to do me a favor. I want you to beat that son-of-a-bitch Claude Pepper." Pepper was defeated in the primary by Smathers.
Law practice Pepper returned to law practice in Miami and Washington, failing in a comeback bid to regain a Senate seat in the 1958 Democratic primary in which he challenged his former colleague,
Spessard Holland. However, Pepper did carry eleven counties, including populous
Dade County where he later staged a remarkable comeback.
U.S. House In 1962, Pepper was elected to the
United States House of Representatives from a newly created liberal district around Miami and Miami Beach established due to population growth in the area, becoming one of very few former United States Senators in modern times (the only other examples being
James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. from
New York,
Hugh Mitchell from
Washington,
Alton Lennon from
North Carolina,
Garrett Withers from
Kentucky, and
Magnus Johnson from
Minnesota) to be elected to the House after their Senate careers. (
Matthew M. Neely from
West Virginia and
Charles A. Towne from New York via Minnesota were also elected to the House after their Senate careers, but they had been elected to the House before their Senate careers as well.) Pepper remained a member of the House until his death in 1989, rising to chair of the powerful Rules Committee in 1983. Despite a reputation as a leftist in his youth, Pepper turned staunchly anti-communist in the last third of his life, opposing Cuban leader
Fidel Castro and supporting aid to the Nicaraguan
Contras. Pepper voted in favor of the
Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and
1968, and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. Pepper was the only Representative from Florida who voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. alongside other dignitaries In the early 1970s, Pepper chaired the Joint House–Senate Committee on Crime; then, in 1977, he became chair of the new
House Select Committee on Aging, which became his base as he emerged as the nation's foremost spokesman for the elderly, especially regarding
Social Security programs. He succeeded in strengthening
Medicare. In 1980 the committee under Pepper's leadership initiated what became a four-year investigation into health care scams that preyed on older people; the report, published in 1984 and commonly called "The Pepper Report", was entitled "Quackery, a $10 Billion Scandal". In the 1980s, he worked with
Alan Greenspan in a major reform of the Social Security system that maintained its solvency by slowly raising the retirement age, thus cutting benefits for workers retiring in their mid-60s, and in 1986 he obtained the passage of a federal law that abolished most mandatory retirement ages. In his later years, Pepper, who customarily began each day by eating a bowl of tomato soup with crackers, sported a replaced hip and hearing aids in both ears, but continued to remain an important and often lionized figure in the House. In 1988, Pepper sponsored a legislation to create the
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Enacted during his final term, the NCBI has revolutionized the exchange, sharing and analysis of genetic information and aided researchers worldwide to achieve advances in medical, computational and biological sciences. Pepper became known as the "grand old man of Florida politics". He was featured on the cover of
Time magazine in 1938 and 1983. During this time, Republicans often joked that he and
House Speaker Tip O'Neill were the only Democrats who really drove President
Ronald Reagan crazy. ==Personal life and death==