For nearly a century in Florida and throughout the South, election
to the United States Senate virtually guaranteed a lifetime
position, especially if you were a Democrat. Certainly no
Republican candidate stood a chance in the general election, and it
was nearly unthinkable to imagine a serious challenger emerging in
the primary. Claude "Red" Pepper first ran for the U.S. Senate in
1934. Though unsuccessful, despite allegations of voter fraud, he
won a special election two years later after both senators from
Florida died in office. Reelected to full terms in 1938 and 1944 as
a vigorous supporter of the New Deal, he had every reason to
suspect the seat was his indefinitely--or at least until he decided
it was time to seek higher office. Pepper saw himself as the
national heir to Roosevelt's foreign policy; he encouraged
cooperation with the Soviet Union, our World War II ally, and
actively worked to defeat Truman's presidential nomination in 1948.
After nearly fourteen years in office, Pepper had earned the enmity
of the president, alienated most of his colleagues in the senate,
and aligned himself with the ultra-left-wing politics of Henry
Wallace. Still, in the entire history of the state, no sitting
Florida Senator had ever been voted out of office. However, the
political world was changing, and it was the right-leaning
"Gorgeous" George Smathers, not Pepper, who recognized and took
advantage of this fact. Smathers fought a vicious, bare-knuckled
campaign, employing ferocious and divisive attacks against Pepper.
He helped make "liberal" anathema to aspiring southern politics,
and was the first of a new breed of conservative
politicians--though not yet Republican--to rise to power.
Eventually the era would be named for a junior senator from
Wisconsin, but it was Smathers who first successfully employed the
strategies of McCarthyism to unseat an incumbent. He was so
successful, in fact, that before the general election Smathers had
to reassure President Truman and other potential supporters that
his loyalties did, in fact, lie with the Democractic Party. His
resounding victory inspired others--including Richard Nixon and
Barry Goldwater--to adopt similar tactics in their senatorial
campaigns. It also helped set the stage for the complete reversal
of the political power structure that had ruled the South since the
end of Reconstruction. Red Pepper and Gorgeous George is a
fascinating look at the campaign that changed everything in
Florida--and the South. It is also a shocking, sobering reminder
that, despite introducing the phrase "hanging chad" to the national
lexicon, the 2000 presidential election was merely the second most
important national election to take place in the state.
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