page_title: Claude Pepper
section_title: U.S. House
hierarchical_section_title: Claude Pepper / Career / U.S. House
caption_attribution_description: en:Claude Pepper, Florida Senator. Oil on canvas, Marshall Bouldin III, 1985, Collection of U.S. House of Representatives
context_page_description: Claude Denson Pepper was an American politician of the Democratic Party, and a spokesman for left-liberalism and the elderly. He represented Florida in the United States Senate from 1936 to 1951 and the Miami area in the United States House of Representatives from 1963 until 1989.
  He was the last serving member of Congress born in the nineteenth century.
  Born in Chambers County, Alabama, Pepper established a legal practice in Perry, Florida after graduating from Harvard Law School. After serving a single term in the Florida House of Representatives, Pepper won a 1936 special election to succeed Senator Duncan U. Fletcher. Pepper became one of the most prominent liberals in Congress, supporting legislation such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. After World War II, Pepper's conciliatory views towards the Soviet Union and opposition to President Harry Truman's 1948 re-nomination engendered opposition within the party. Pepper lost the 1950 Senate Democratic primary to Congressman George Smathers and returned to private legal practice the following year.
  In 1962, Pepper won election to a newly-created district in the United States House of Representatives.
context_section_description: In 1962 Pepper was elected to the United States House of Representatives from a newly created liberal district around Miami and Miami Beach established due to population growth in the area, becoming one of very few former United States Senators in modern times (the only other examples being James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. from New York, Hugh Mitchell from Washington, Alton Lennon from North Carolina, and Garrett Withers from Kentucky) to be elected to the House after their Senate careers. (Matthew M. Neely from West Virginia was also elected to the House after his Senate career, but he had been elected to the House before his Senate career as well.) He remained there until his death in 1989, rising to chair of the powerful Rules Committee in 1983. Despite a reputation as a leftist in his youth, Pepper turned staunchly anti-communist in the last third of his life, opposing Cuban leader Fidel Castro and supporting aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Pepper voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
  In the early 1970s, Pepper chaired the Joint House–Senate Committee on Crime; then, in 1977, he became chair of the new House Select Committee on Aging, which became his base as he emerged as the nation's foremost spokesman for the elderly, especially regarding Social Security programs. He succeeded in strengthening Medicare. In 1980 the committee under Pepper's leadership initiated what became a four-year investigation into health care scams that preyed on older people; the report, published in 1984 and commonly called "The Pepper Report", was entitled "Quackery, a $10 Billion Scandal".
  In the 1980s he worked with Alan Greenspan in a major reform of the Social Security system that maintained its solvency by slowly raising the retirement age, thus cutting benefits for workers retiring in their mid-60s, and in 1986 he obtained the passage of a federal law that abolished most mandatory retirement ages. In his later years, Pepper, who customarily began each day by eating a bowl of tomato soup with crackers, sported a replaced hip and hearing aids in both ears, but continued to remain an important and often lionized figure in the House.
  In 1988, Pepper sponsored a legislation to create the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).  Enacted during his final term, the NCBI has revolutionized the exchange, sharing and analysis of genetic information and aided researchers worldwide to achieve advances in medical, computational and biological sciences.
  Pepper became known as the "grand old man of Florida politics." He was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1938 and 1983. During this time, Republicans often joked that he and House Speaker Tip O'Neill were the only Democrats who really drove President Ronald Reagan crazy.
caption: Portrait of Pepper in the Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives
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