Claude Pepper (8 September 1900-30 May 1989) was a US Senator from Florida (D) from 4 November 1936 to 3 January 1951 (succeeding William Luther Hill and preceding George Smathers) and a member of the US House of Representatives (D-FL 3) from 3 January 1963 to 3 January 1967 (succeeding Robert L.F. Sikes and preceding Charles E. Bennett), from FL 11 from 3 January 1967 to 3 January 1973 (succeeding Edward J. Gurney and preceding Paul G. Rogers), from FL 14 from 3 January 1973 to 3 January 1983 (preceding Daniel A. Mica), and from FL 18 from 3 January 1983 to 30 May 1989 (preceding Ileana Ros-Lehtinen). He was known as a spokesperson for left-liberalism and for the elderly during his long service in the US Congress.
Biography[]
Claude Pepper was born in Chambers County, Alabama in 1900, and he taught law at the University of Arkansas before becoming a lawyer in Perry, Florida. He served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1929 to 1931, and he served on the Florida Board of Public Welfare from 1931 to 1932 and on the Florida Board of Bar Examiners in 1933. He was unusually articulate and intellectual, collaborated with labor unions, and led the left-liberal faction in the US Senate during his time in the Senate from 1936 to 1951. Pepper was known as a leading New Dealer and a close ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he lauded the Soviet Union for giving freedom, recognition, and respect to its people, for allowing for democracy to grow in the late 1940s, and for outlawing racism. In 1950, he lost re-election due to his support for the USSR, but he was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1962, serving until his death in office in 1989. He was nicknamed the "grand old man of Florida politics" during his lifetime, and President Ronald Reagan awarded him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.