The Effigy

Claude Denson Pepper rose from a farm in Alabama to a seat in the U. S. Senate. Last week he attained a kind of final eminence. He was hanged in effigy on Capitol Hill.

His progress to this distinction began only 39 years ago. He was probably the ugliest little squirt in Chambers County, Ala., where he was born. A skin disease pocked his face. His body was small, his complexion an unlovely red. His father was a farmer, none too well off, and Claude went to work when he was a boy. He taught grammar and high school, worked in a steel mill, rolled coal and ashes in a power plant to buy food during his first half-year at the State University. Then he got a job running a dining hall, thankfully gave up manual labor for life. But he still worked hard, made the track team and graduated with honors, went on to three years at Harvard Law School.

He taught law at the University of Arkansas, set up practice for himself in Florida in 1925. When he was 28 he was on the State Democratic Committee, stumped for Al Smith, and rated a letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936 the death of Florida's old Senator Duncan Fletcher gave Claude Pepper the chance he had wanted since he was a boy. He ran (without opposition) for the unexpired term, got reelected, for a full six years, in 1938.

An early assignment to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the friendly interest of Arkansas's late Joe Robinson, a trip to Europe and one look at Hitler rounded Claude Pepper into what he was last week. He was still conservative in his dress, sometimes forthright, sometimes grandiloquent, in his speech. He was not well liked in the Senate, had no great influence there. Yet he had a certain importance. His importance was due less to him than to his colleagues: of the 96, Claude Pepper was the only one whom Franklin Roosevelt considered anywhere near fit to expound the Administration's foreign and defense policies.

Claude Pepper brought to this task a consuming conviction that Adolf Hitler was out to destroy U. S. Democracy. Senator Pepper therefore believed that the U. S. should do everything practicable to destroy Hitler first, told the Senate so nearly every working day. Up to last week, he had not come out for declaring war. He had been for 1) maximum aid to the Allies; 2) sending U. S. military planes to the British; 3) sending destroyers to the British; 4) giving President Roosevelt any powers necessary to mobilize the U. S. for defense; 5) conscription.

Last week Claude Pepper got more attention than usual. Swarming over Capitol Hill were women who called themselves variously the "Mothers of the United States of America" and the "Congress of American Mothers." They surrounded Claude Pepper in a Senate reception room, shrilly denounced him for espousing conscription, later strung up a coconut-headed effigy of him from a tree in the Capitol Plaza. Of their number also were nine black-veiled women who sat in the reception room adjoining the Senate chamber day-in-&-day-out, warring on Senate nerves. Capitol police presented the effigy to the original Claude Pepper, who then got off one of his few short speeches: ". . . These women, like all other Americans, are sincere in their patriotism . . . their hanging me in effigy is a splendid demonstration of what we all desire--freedom of speech and freedom of action. . . ." Generous Mr. Pepper later thought things over, solemnly informed the Senate next day: ". . . Sometimes we do not know when we are being made the instruments of sinister forces, designed to accomplish not good but evil. . . ."

But his strongest words last week were against the forces of delay in the Senate. Montana's Wheeler, West Virginia's Holt, Michigan's Vandenberg, Clark of Missouri, a loud handful of their supporters continued to berate conscription, rehearse all the arguments that they had used for three weeks, delay a vote. They barely allowed time for the Senate to turn from the conscription bill to authorize the President to call out the National Guard and reserves (a step which will mean something only if the Army gets enough men for the Guard to train).

By week's end, the opposition tactics looked so much like a filibuster that only the oppositionists pretended it was not. Claude Pepper wearied of watching the feckless days pass, said in measured words to a half-empty Senate: "We look back now at the Chamber of Deputies in what was France. They debated; they haggled; they equivocated; they controverted; they hesitated, and they politicked a little, they thought of the next election, and they lost dear France. . . . If we are not willing to make up our minds that we are facing a new kind of a war and a new kind of a world, then I venture to predict, sadly, that we are going to lose that kind of a war and our kind of a world."

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