First Lame Duck

Claude Pepper's mother once said of him: "He began to talk when he was nine months old and he's been talking ever since." But last week Senator Pepper was not talking very much. Democratic voters in Florida's primary had made him the 81st Congress' first lame duck.

Pepper began talking politically some 16 years ago. Born on an Alabama farm, a graduate of the University of Alabama and Harvard Law School, he had migrated to Perry, Fla. with the land boom. In 1934 he ran for the Senate, was beaten, but two years later talked Florida voters into electing him to the unexpired term of a Senator who had died.

In Washington he raised his molasses-smooth, Dixie-thick voice for old-age pensions, WPA, wage and hour laws. He became an accomplished wangler of federal funds. He rode blandly along on Franklin Roosevelt's coattails. He was resourceful in debate, and sometimes brilliant. He could spread demagoguery like warm butter on hoecakes. Florida re-elected him twice, and he began to look like a permanent fixture in the U.S. Senate.

Reds' Friend. But whatever else he was, Claude Pepper was not permanent. He began to skid. He skidded with Henry Wallace away to the far left. He became an apologist for Russia's foreign policy. He went abroad, called on Stalin, promptly urged that the U.S. advance Russia a $6 billion loan. He proposed that the U.S. "destroy every atom bomb we have" and all atomic facilities. He sometimes out-talked even Wallace in denunciation of the U.S.'s toughening foreign policy.

Then he dropped Wallace and the Progressive Party, and still not warming to Harry Truman, came out for Dwight Eisenhower in 1948. When Eisenhower declined, Pepper announced his own candidacy. "This is no gesture," he said grandiosely. "This is a fight." But the fight was just talk. The fall of 1948 saw him campaigning earnestly for Truman. And the election of Truman saw Pepper tucking himself safely back in the Fair Deal nest.

Hot & Clear. He wiggled up so close to Harry Truman that opponents could not hit him without splashing the President. This was the situation when the Florida primary (equivalent to election) rolled around this spring. Harry Truman had no love for Pepper, but he certainly did not want to see Pepper dumped. The man who rose to challenge Pepper for his Senate seat (his spring was young Congressman George Smathers, who could talk just as fast, and talked like a conservative who would not fit too neatly into the Fair Deal side of the Senate. Smathers was Pepper's protege. When Major Smathers came home from the Pacific war where he had served as a ground officer with a Marine bomber squadron, Pepper had helped send him to Congress in 1946. Running against Pepper, Congressman Smathers had changed his old Fair Deal tune: he was for the Taft-Hartley Act, for economy in Government, against socialized medicine. Smathers had plenty of conservative money behind him. He went up & down the state reminding voters of Pepper's old Red and pink friends. It was a hot, clear fight--with plenty of low blows from both sides.

Harry Truman kept the outward appearance of aloofness from the battle. But White House Adviser David Niles went to Florida to give Pepper help and counsel. C.I.O.'s P.A.C. moved into the state to rally the Negro vote. Negroes, registering in greater numbers than ever before, voted in some precincts 10 to 1 for Pepper, but it was not enough. Rural Floridians turned out to vote in force against Pepper. Smathers won by a decisive margin of more than 60,000 votes.

Republicans joyfully saw the result as a harbinger of a national conservative trend. Administration forces tried to tell themselves that the Communist issue had beaten Pepper, not the Fair Deal. On-the-scene political writers mostly believed that while the Red attack had something to do with it, what had really beaten Pepper was FEPC and the segregation issue. Whatever Floridians had in mind, they had put a semicolon, at least, to a long, loquacious and erratic career.

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