Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1988 by Timothy Noah

Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century.

Claude Pepper, Hays Gorey. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $17.95. A month after Black Monday, while congressional and White House leaders held an "economic summit" to reduce the deficit, 87-year-old Rep Claude Pepper swore his opposition to including Social Security cuts in the package. Pepper threatened to use his power as Rules Committee chairman to force a separate vote on the issue. Although Social Security was one program that could stand to be cut because it fails to distinguish between rich and poor recipients, the summit left it alone. The paltry $30 billion in budget cuts that the summit finally produced can be blamed largely on Pepper's unfortunate influence.

Pepper's career in politics reflects the best and worst of the New Deal. His unbending opposition to means testing or even taxing Social Security benefits is the New Deal's worst legacy: mindless support for expensive government programs without concern that benefits be targeted to those in need. But as a senator from 1937 to 1950, Pepper showed what was noblest in the New Deal: passionate commitment to the down-and-out. Pepper sponsored the first minimum-wage, maximum-hours bill; he sponsored bills to expand government research to fight disease through the National Institutes of Health; and he helped Franklin D. Roosevelt kill tax breaks for the "economic royalists." Such positions were risky for a southerner, but Pepper was committed to helping the afflicted and opposing privilege. When World War II approached, Pepper showed he was also eager to fight Nazis: he bucked Senate isolationism by sponsoring the first Lend-Lease bill.

It all came crashing down at the height of McCarthyism in 1950, when Pepper was labeled "Red Pepper" for meeting with Josef Stalin and allowing himself to be photographed with Paul Robeson and Henry Wallace. Opponent George Smathers told audiences that Pepper had learned the law under the "crimson of Harvard." Pepper also was made to suffer for his advocacy of socialized medicine and his failure to oppose civil-rights legislation. In an unusually ugly campaign year (Richard Nixon used similar tactics against Helen Gahagan Douglas), Pepper was sent into humiliating exile.

When he returned in 1963, it was to the House, not the Senate. Pepper's defeat had not sapped his energy; to this day, he is a forceful and shrewd legislator. But it's possible he lost some of his never. Pepper fervently denies that his role as broker for the elderly reflects his Florida district's gray constituency. (He also takes exception to accusations that his support for Nicaraguan "freedom fighters" reflects the growing number of Cubans in his district.) To be fair, Pepper has supported senior citizens throughout his career: the first bill he sponsored as a young Florida state legislator exempted the elderly from a fishing license fee, and Pepper championed the fledgling Social Security program in the late 1930s, before it became a sacred cow. The book's most intriguing revelation is that Pepper used to argue with his wife about "my continuing closeness with the family" (that is his mother and father), who lived with the young Peppers. This may suggest a more subliminal explanation for Pepper's devotion to Social Security at any cost. He remembers what a drag it was keeping the old folks in the spare room.