Claude Pepper: From Red Pepper Defeat to Champion of Older Americans

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Claude Pepper was born in rural Alabama, the fourth child of farming parents whose first three children died in infancy, and worked cleaning hats, teaching school and in a steel mill in Ensley. In the Student Army Training Corps at the University of Alabama during World War I he suffered a double hernia lifting ammunition crates, and the resulting veterans' benefits paid for Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1924. He practiced in Perry, Florida, won a Florida House seat in 1928, opposed Governor Doyle Carlton's austerity cuts, and lost renomination in 1930. In 1936 he won a special election to the U.S. Senate, where he became a leading New Deal ally of Franklin Roosevelt, fought the poll tax, yet joined the 1937 filibuster of an anti-lynching bill.

After meeting Joseph Stalin in 1945 and praising Soviet leadership, and trying in 1948 to replace Harry Truman on the ticket with Dwight Eisenhower, Pepper faced a 1950 primary against George Smathers, whom Truman encouraged. Smathers circulated a 49 page pamphlet, The Red Record of Senator Claude Pepper, and Pepper lost by more than 60,000 votes. He moved to Miami and in 1962 won a new House seat, becoming a strong opponent of Fidel Castro and the only Florida House member to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As chairman of the House Select Committee on Aging from 1977, he fought health fraud aimed at seniors and helped end most mandatory retirement ages.

• A 1943 British intelligence assessment called him a "thoroughly opportunist politician" used by Roosevelt to float trial balloons.
• His 1984 committee report exposed a $10 billion health fraud industry selling fake arthritis and cancer cures.
• He worked with Alan Greenspan on the 1980s Social Security compromise that gradually raised the retirement age.
• In 1988 he sponsored the law creating the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
• George H. W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May 1989; he died four days later at 88 and lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda.