May 2, 1950: The Smathers Smears -- Real and Otherwise

 

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.

June 9, 1954: The Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (left) and Roy Cohn

June 9, 1954, 70 years ago: Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, goes too far, and the country sees it, and sees him for what he really is: A liar and a bully.

McCarthy was a Marine tail-gunner in World War II, although stories of his heroism appear to have been exaggerated, including by himself. In 1946, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, and the 1st 3 years of his term (1947, 1948 and 1949) were unremarkable.

But at a "Lincoln Day" speech in Wheeling, West Virginia early in 1950, he held up a piece of paper he claimed was a list of employees of the U.S. Department of State who were active members of the Communist Party. He would repeat this charge many times, but the number would change: Sometimes, it was 205; others, it would be 57; sometimes, another number.

It made McCarthy a national celebrity, at a time when most U.S. Senators were not well-known outside their respective home States. This was before 24-hour news networks, before C-SPAN, before social media.

Conservatives jumped to his support. Liberals said he was wrong, even lying. Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block, who signed his cartoons "Herblock," created the term "McCarthyism," in his "tower of tarbuckets" drawing.

But that was in The Washington Post, a liberal newspaper in those days. Most of the media of the time, dominated by newspapers, was overwhelmingly conservative, pro-business and anti-Communist. McCarthy was exactly what they were looking for. The new "Red Scare," following the earlier one of 1919 and 1920, was on.

The Republicans made big gains in both houses of Congress in 1950, and won control of both houses in 1952, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President in a landslide. But even Eisenhower had to take a back seat during the '52 campaign: He had heard McCarthy make a false charge against General George C. Marshall, and ripped McCarthy for it face-to-face.

But a Republican official told "Ike" not to defend Marshall in his speech in Milwaukee, because it would make McCarthy look bad in his bid for a 2nd term. Ike dropped the mention of Marshall, McCarthy was re-elected, and Wisconsin, not really in doubt for the Republicans that year, was won by Ike.

After his Inauguration, though, Ike was determined to keep an eye on McCarthy. And when McCarthy convinced Karl Mundt of South Dakota, another "Red-baiter" and the Chairman of the Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations, to hold hearings on Communist influence in the U.S. Army, the Army's greatest living ex-officer, Eisenhower, was furious, and invoked executive privilege when McCarthy demanded documents from the U.S. Department of Defense. But, as it turned out, Ike would not be directly involved in McCarthy's downfall.

On March 9, 1954, CBS News broadcast See It Now, hosted by Edward R. Murrow, who decided to expose McCarthy by broadcasting film footage of him telling bald-faced lies, and then exposing said lies. It was devastating, and it began McCarthy's fall.

In 2005, the film Good Night, and Good Luck (titled after Murrow's signoff) dramatized the broadcast and the events leading up to it. After an early screening, some people said the actor playing Senator McCarthy seemed too mean, like too much of a bully. There was no actor: They used actual footage of McCarthy, to better make the point of how bad McCarthy was -- just as Murrow did.

One week later, on March 16, 1954, what became known as "the Army-McCarthy Hearings" convened. Starting on April 22, 2 American TV networks began broadcasting gavel-to-gavel coverage. One, the DuMont Network, was already in financial trouble. The other, ABC, the American Broadcasting Company, had begun as a radio subsidiary of NBC, and broadcasting these hearings made them a major network for the first time. DuMont was probably doomed anyway, and ABC took their place in the "Big Three" alongside NBC and CBS.

Throughout the hearings, McCarthy issued charge after charge, and so did the man hired as legal counsel for the Committee, Roy Cohn. A whiz kid with a keen mind and a nasty disposition, he had graduated from law school at Columbia University when he was only 20 years old, and had to wait until his 21st birthday to be admitted to the New York State bar. He was appointed to the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, and served as the main prosecutor for atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

That got the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who recommended him to McCarthy. Now, only 27 years old, Cohn was the most famous lawyer in the country, and could have had a big career ahead of him had he not been Jewish. (Jacob Javits was in the House of Representatives for New York at the time, and was elected a U.S. Senator in 1956, but was never seriously considered for the Presidency.) But, unknown to the general public, Cohn was gay, and had this been exposed at the time, it would have destroyed him.

Things came to a head on June 9. Joseph N. Welch, a prominent attorney from Boston (and, it should be noted, a Republican), was senior counsel for the Army. McCarthy claimed to have a list of 130 "subversives" working in defense plants. Welch challenged McCarthy to give that list to the Defense Department and the FBI "before the Sun goes down."

McCarthy knew that his list was bullshit. And Welch knew it. And McCarthy knew that Welch knew it. So McCarthy went on the attack, saying that Welch should check on Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch's firm. Fisher had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a group that Attorney General Herbert Brownell had called "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party" in America.

Welch had wanted Fisher on his team for these hearings, but asked him if there was anything in his background that McCarthy could exploit. Fisher admitted that he had once belonged to the NLG. Welch knew this would be bad, and kept Fisher in Boston.

Welch responded to McCarthy's invocation of Fisher:

Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

McCarthy kept up the attack, but Welch shut him down: 

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Welch decided that he had had enough, and told Mundt, "Mr. Chairman, you may, if you wish, call the next witness," got up, and left the Senate Caucus Room, which burst into applause.

McCarthy was damaged, perhaps beyond repair. But it wasn't over. Another member of the Committee was Stuart Symington, Democrat of Missouri. He knew the Pentagon, because he had been Assistant Secretary of the Army during World War II, and was named the 1st Secretary of the Air Force when it was split off from the Army in 1947.

Elected to the Senate in 1952, he already had ambitions. His name was placed in nomination for President at the Democratic Conventions in 1956 and 1960, but he didn't get very far either time. As a sports note, despite being from St. Louis, he was a vocal proponent for getting a new baseball team for Kansas City, the Royals, after the Athletics moved in 1967.

Symington suggested that maybe some members of McCarthy's staff might be subversive. McCarthy called him "Sanctimonious Stu," and said, "You're not fooling anyone!"

Symington came back, and said, "Senator, the American people have had a look at you now for six weeks. You're not fooling anyone, either."

Symington was right: In January 1954, the Gallup polling organization had McCarthy with a 50 percent approval rating, with 29 percent disapproving. When the hearings concluded on June 17, it was 45 to 34 disapproving. And the hearings didn't expose one single Communist or other subversive. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy.

For those of you who are Yankee Fans: A man named Joe McCarthy managed the Yankees from 1931 to 1946, winning 8 American League Pennants and 7 World Series. However, he and the Senator appear not to have been related.

Aside from the name, the only thing that manager Joseph Vincent McCarthy and Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy seem to have had in common is heavy drinking. And even that didn't affect them the same way: The Senator died from cirrhosis on May 2, 1957, less than 3 years after this confrontation, at the age of 48; while the manager lived to be 90, long enough to see the Reggie Jackson Game.

June 19, 1953: Julius & Ethel Rosenberg Are Executed

June 19, 1953, 70 years ago: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, husband and wife, Americans convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union, are executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, Westchester County, New York. Julius was 35 years old, Ethel was 37.

They were the 1st American civilians to be executed for treason during peacetime. The Korean War was in its final days, and North Korea was receiving aid from the Soviet Union, as well as from China. But there was not then a declaration of war between America and any nation.

Millions of people around the world wanted to believe that they were innocent. Many others believed that, even if they were guilty, they should not receive the death penalty. But many others believed that spying for the Communists deserved the death penalty. Some people suspected that the desire to believe them guilty, and worthy of execution, was motivated by anti-Semitism.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, declassified documents showed that Julius was a courier for American atomic energy secrets, and Ethel was a recruiter, including of her brother, David Greenglass, who ratted his sister and his brother-in-law out to save himself from "the chair." The real villain of the story, Greenglass served nearly 10 years in prison, and lived until 2014.

The Rosenbergs had 2 sons, left orphans. They were adopted by Abel Meeropol, a songwriter who had written Billie Holiday's anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" and Frank Sinatra's anti-bigotry song "The House I Live In." Both sons are still alive, and retired from careers as college professors: Michael Meeropol, age 80, economics; Robert Meeropol, 76, anthropology. Each of the brothers has 2 children.