
Claude Pepper was born on a farm near Dudleyville, Tallapoosa County, on September 8, 1900, to Joseph Wheeler Pepper and Lena Talbot. Claude was the oldest of four children, with brothers Joseph B. Pepper and Frank W. Pepper and sister Sarah E. Pepper. After graduating from high school in Camp Hill, he taught school in Dothan and worked in a steel mill in Ensley. As a college student during World War I, Pepper served in the Students Army Training Corps. He graduated from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in 1921 and received a law degree from Harvard University in 1924. After teaching law at the University of Arkansas for a year, he was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1925 and set up a practice in Perry, Florida, with the goal of entering politics. His practice prospered, and he helped his parents send his brothers and sister to college.


Pepper's new brand of liberalism bridged the New Deal and Cold War eras by emphasizing national defense and economic security as a rationale for social spending. He fought for legislation to establish a minimum wage and an eight-hour workday for workers, abolish the poll tax law to end discrimination against poor and African American voters, and mandate equal pay for women. 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, Vice President Henry Wallace, with whom he was active in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
During the postwar years however, Pepper's popularity declined as a result of his public support for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his continued advocacy for organized labor and a variety of federal programs that many considered "radical." Labeled "Pink Pepper" by the Saturday Evening Post and "Red Pepper" by his enemies, his involvement in a campaign to nominate General Dwight D. Eisenhower over President Harry Truman just before the 1948 Democratic convention diminished his party standing, and he lost his re-election bid in 1950 to Democrat George Smathers. One factor in Pepper's defeat was his unpopular stance on civil rights issues. He was alone among Southern members of Congress in supporting Truman's civil rights program, but declared that it was false to say Truman proposed abolishing segregation in the South. After leaving the Senate in 1951, Pepper practiced law in Washington, D.C., and Tallahassee and Miami, Florida.
In 1962, Pepper was elected to the House of Representatives, where he helped pass the 1963 Health Professions Training Act, which provided the first large-scale direct federal aid for medical education. He also chaired the House select committees on aging and rules, and established the House Select Committee on Crime in 1969, which he presided over for six years. The committee held hearings and introduced legislation to fight illegal drugs, organized crime, securities fraud, and prison disturbances. Pepper also introduced and pushed through Congress a bill in 1970 authorizing the Federal Aviation Administration to install metal detectors at all commercial airports in order to prevent hijackings.

Pepper died May 30, 1989, in Washington, D.C. He was honored by lying in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda and was buried at the Oakland Cemetery in Tallahassee, Florida. In five decades of public service from the Roosevelt to the George H.W. Bush administrations, Claude Pepper remained one of the most stalwart and influential New Deal liberals, and, along with Hugo Black and Lister Hill, represented the South's political legacy of progressivism.
Additional Resources
Danese, Tracy E. Claude Pepper and Ed Ball: Politics, Purpose, and Power. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Pepper, Claude, with Hays Gorey. Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Additional Resources
Danese, Tracy E. Claude Pepper and Ed Ball: Politics, Purpose, and Power. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Pepper, Claude, with Hays Gorey. Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.