George Smathers
May 2, 1950, 75 years ago: The Democratic Primary is held in Florida. With the Republican Party then having very little standing in the South, winning this Primary is, as the saying goes, "tantamount to election."
Born and raised in Alabama in 1900, Claude Pepper served in World War I and graduated from the University of Alabama and Harvard Law School. He established a legal practice in Florida, and in 1936 won a special election for the U.S. Senate in that State. He was re-elected in 1938 and 1944, and was up for election again in 1950.
Born in 1913 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, George Smathers was the son of a Floridian, who moved the family back to Miami. He graduated from the University of Florida and served in World War II. In 1946, he asked Pepper for help getting elected to Congress. He got it, and won.
How did Smathers thank Pepper? By opposing him in the 1950 Democratic Primary, and running an incredibly dirty campaign, based on the current anti-Communist "Red Scare." He opened his campaign on January 12, with a speech at Kemp's Coliseum in Orlando, accusing Pepper of being "the leader of the radicals and extremists," an advocate of treason, and a person against the constitutional rights of Americans.
Pepper had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1945 and, after meeting Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, declared he was "a man Americans could trust." Additionally, Pepper supported universal health care, sometimes referred to as "socialized medicine." Pepper's opponents called him "Red Pepper," and widely circulated a 49-page booklet titled The Red Record of Senator Claude Pepper.
Smathers accused the "Northern labor bosses" of paying black people to register and vote for Pepper. That accusation turned out to be true: Unlike Smathers, a traditional Southern "Dixiecrat" who favored segregation, Pepper did not. But neither did he openly oppose integration and interracial marriage, and so the Florida media claimed he supported them. Orlando Sentinel publisher Martin Andersen published a doctored photograph of Pepper shaking hands with a black woman in Sanford.
In its April 17, 1950 issue, Time magazine, then run by archconservative Henry Luce, published a story about a speech Smathers had given many times in rural parts of Florida. It became known as "The Redneck Speech":
Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, he has a brother who is a known homo sapiens, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.
Here's a question: Presuming that the charges against his brother and his sister were true -- and they were -- what did that have to do with his qualifications? Basically, the only thing this paragraph said that reflected badly on Pepper was the nepotism, which was also true. The problem was, people heard the words, and, not fully understanding them, compared them to words they did know, and were horrified, to the point where they couldn't possibly vote for Pepper.
The quote was a fake: Smathers never said it. He was happy to accept the benefits of it, but he never said it. No newspaper in Florida ever mentioned the speech. Smathers offered $10,000 -- about $135,000 in 2025 money -- to anyone who could prove he said it.
When the Primary was held on May 2, Smathers got 387,315 votes, to Pepper's 319,754. Percentage-wise, it was Smathers 54.8, Pepper 45.2. It was a landslide.
Seeing this, a Republican activist in California spoke to Representative Richard Nixon, who was running for the State's Senate seat against Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, and told him that a publication like The Red Record would be useful against her.
The California Republican Party printed up 500,000 copies of "The Pink Sheet," listing reasons why Douglas was a Communist sympathizer, or a "pinko," rather than an outright Commie, or a "Red." Most of the reasons were ridiculous, including her support for blacks and Jews. Nixon called her "The Pink Lady," and said, in language that was a bit over-the-top for 1950, that she was "pink right down to her underwear." He won, with 59 percent of the vote -- but she gave him the nickname that would stick to him for the rest of his life: "Tricky Dick."
Smathers won the general election against the Republican nominee, Miami-area attorney John P. Booth, with 76 percent of the vote. He was re-elected in 1956 and 1962, all the while playing the "Dixiecrat," opposing civil rights legislation. Smathers did, however, vote for "socialized medicine" in 1965, when it was called Medicare and Medicaid.
Smathers was a close friend of John F. Kennedy, and served as a groomsman at his wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953, and that's the nicest thing I can say about this bum. He was also a friend of Nixon, sold his Key Biscayne house to him (where Nixon said he was when he found out about the Watergate break-in), and introduced Nixon to his infamous Florida friend Bebe Rebozo.
Like a lot of corrupt conservatives, George Smathers became a lobbyist after leaving Congress, because that's where the real money is. He died in 2007, at the age of 93, having never had to pay the $10,000 bounty on proof he gave "The Redneck Speech."
His son, Bruce Smathers, was elected Florida's Secretary of State in 1974 and 1976. He ran for Governor in 1978, losing the Democratic Primary to Bob Graham. In 1986, Graham won the Senate seat that had been held by Claude Pepper and George Smathers. (And, in between, by Republican Edward Gurney from 1969 to 1975, by Democrat Richard Stone from then until 1981, and the by Republican Paula Hawkins.)
Incredibly, Pepper did manage to come back, getting elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, supporting civil rights legislation, and, recognizing that his Miami-area district had a lot of retirees, became Congress' foremost champion of Social Security and Medicare. From 1983 to 1989, he was the Chairman of the Rules Committee, making him, arguably, the 2nd-most powerful member of the House, behind the Speaker.
By the time of this 1983 cover,
Henry Luce had been dead for 16 years,
and Time had gotten considerably more liberal.
Or, to put it another way: Had Pepper won in 1950, he might have lost in the Eisenhower landslide of 1956, and not recovered. Or, if he had won again then, the shift of the South might have doomed him in 1962, or 1968. He would never have become Senate Majority Leader, and if he had risen to the Chairmanship of a powerful Senate committee, he would have lost that in an election. And even if he got elected to the House later on, he wouldn't have become the Congressman he became.
Today, Claude Pepper is fondly remembered as a great public servant, while George Smathers, when he is remembered at all, is remembered for evil stands that he took, and an evil speech that he never gave. In other words, in the long run, not only was Pepper better off for losing that 1950 election, but he was better off than the man who won it.
Pepper died in office in 1989, at the age of 88, having outlived a lot of those retirees. But in the special election that followed, his seat was won by a Republican, Cuban exile Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. It was a harbinger of Florida's lurch to the political right. Today, a white politician in Florida is likely to be a Republican, and so far to the right as to make Smathers look like Pepper by comparison.
Florida has grown so much that Pepper's District was the 3rd when he first won the seat, but is now listed as the 27th. Today, it is represented by a Republican woman of Cuban descent, María Elvira Salazar, who had long been a news anchorwoman for a local Spanish-language TV station.
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