Let me tell you about Claude Pepper.

He was a legend on Capitol Hill because he served in the Senate.

Came back to the House and then rose from where he was in the House, which you don't start at the top.

And he rose all the way up to the top to become the chairman of the Rules Committee and also the chairman of the Committee on Aging.

But he did it in a really lovely way.

I mean, he was very gentlemanly.

He was courtly, he was smart.

He was kind to people, and he was able to maintain that demeanor, that because it was him throughout all these tough battles that he had and minimum wage and Social Security that he led on developing the Cancer Institute.

Well, that was his baby as well, protecting Social Security.

And.

Medicare.

Two of the key programs of FDR.

I mean, the New Deal meant a lot to Claude Pepper, and Lend-Lease was a part of the New Deal.

So he's just like a walking history man and, of great significance in our country and during that period of time.

So it was just a really honor to be able, in the same building with him so long to be working with the committee.

Claude Pepper was the eldest son of Lena and Joseph Pepper.

He was born on September 8th, 1900, in Camp Hill, Alabama, which is in northern central Alabama.

His parents were sharecroppers.

He would work in the fields with his father.

It was around this time that he, according to his own personal legend, started developing his skills as a public speaker.

He would recite Bible verses, poems, sing songs to his father, and their fellow sharecroppers.

And it was here that pepper began to develop his consciousness, or the everyday working American.

Of his calling.

He graduated high school, at the age of 17. and he briefly taught English there before matriculating to the University of Alabama in 1920.

Graduates from the University of Alabama in 1924 and then, based upon the strength of him being briefly enrolled in the ROTC, right before World War one.

he uses, the early iteration of the Montgomery GI Bill to attend, law school at Harvard University.

when he went to Harvard, he writes in his autobiography, that he was fully expecting to have to fight the Civil War all over again.

being from the South, especially the rural South, he expected to face prejudice, from his classmates in the north.

But when he got there, he found that that was not at all the case.

they were very opening, very welcoming to Claude.

and that was also a very defining moment in his life because, it shaped how he viewed, life outside of the South, and he, began to feel like, America was a place where we were all in it together.

and that is where he started adopting that, policy, into his future politics.

Talking about his early beginning, when he was ten years old, he carved in a tree where he lived in Alabama.

Claude Pepper, United States senator.

That was his dream and aspiration when he was a ten year boy.

And he did live it.

He did live to become a United States Senator.

His younger years definitely had an influence on how he viewed, elder care and elder rights.

After graduating from Harvard University.

Claude briefly taught at the University of Arkansas before moving to Florida in 1927.

It was there that he began to pursue, his goal of becoming, politician.

Because the family was so poor growing up and that he pulled himself up from nothing and worked his way through college.

And then he started practicing law and earn some money.

He moved the whole family from Alabama down to Tallahassee.

He always credited his education as the biggest turning point in his life.

He was exposed to more thoughts.

The senator had a number of wonderful people in his life, and the most wonderful person in his life, of course, was Mrs. Pepper.

He met Mildred Pepper in Tallahassee when he was the United States Senator.

He was walking down the halls of the Capitol on Monday, and he said, this beautiful, beautiful woman, the most beautiful I've ever seen, came walking down the hall.

And it was Mildred.

And he absolutely just fell in love with her.

And, and they married.

And she was a wonderful strength to him throughout his whole career.

He ran for and was elected to the state legislature in 1929, where he proposed piece of legislation that would grant fishing licenses to, Florida residents 65 years or older for free.

So it was there that he really began to value older Americans.

I think he learned that from his parents.

he ran for the legislature, and he was elected.

He was not reelected for the very first time, for the very simple reason that the legislature wanted to condemn Mrs. Roosevelt, because she had a black lady to the white House for tea.

And the legislature was up at that time, you know, quite backward in their thinking, you know, not very progressive.

And they thought that was very offensive.

And so they wanted to special condemnation resolution or something of that nature.

And Claude Pepper voted against it, so he lost his election.

But what happened after that is a tremendous lesson for anybody who wants to go into politics.

He didn't want to go back in the legislature.

He wanted to do what he carved on a tree in Alabama.

He wanted to be Claude Pepper, United States Senator.

So he ran for the United States Senator, and he lost.

He lost his first election for the United States Senate.

So years went on.

He still wanted to be a United States senator.

So he ran for the United States Senate again.

But this time nobody ran.

And Claude Pepper ran for the United States Senator and won.

And that started his great career of 16 years in the United States Senate.

With things like the wage and hour bill.

Minimum wage, I think, will always be a hot button issue in this country.

I feel like it was a problem in 1938, when minimum wage was less than $0.25 an hour.

And a lot of people forget that what Claude was fighting for and what his colleagues in the Senate were fighting for, was a 25 cent minimum wage for people.

That conversation, I don't think, will ever cease to be relevant.

And I think that Claude pushing for that and making it a central plank in his platform of service to be there for the American working person to value their contributions to the American fabric.

I think, will always be relevant, and we'll always be able to look back and point to Claude as one of, as one of the architects of of that change.

So he was born in 1900.

So we can always sort of track how old he was by what year it was that he was working on.

It's he was elected to the Senate in 36.

He was 36 years old.

Around that time, he was a supporter for sort of national health insurance, and, and for, for pensions.

You know, part of that came from his support for labor unions.

You know, he was always sort of interested in making the lives of, of people easier.

And he was one of the first supporters of the of the wage and hour bill, which gives us the minimum wage bill today, but also the maximum hours that people can work.

because as you may know, back during that time, there wasn't that and people would work for low wages in, in, in very bad conditions for a very long periods of time.

Sweatshops, you might call it.

So, you know, he started out in his career was always sort of looking for the betterment of people, again, with health care and others.

That's just something that he just continued to do throughout his career.

And in the 30s and 40s, he was known as red pepper.

And that was an honorific because he was a very passionate public speaker.

And this is one of the things that endeared him to President Roosevelt so quickly, was because he knew that he could count on Claude, to advocate for New Deal legislation in the South, which in the 1930s and 40s was far less progressive than it is today, or I think it has been at any point in American history, peppers involvement with the minimum wage and hour bill.

So he started shortly after he was elected to the US Senate.

Pepper was brought on to help pass the Wage and Hour bill in 1937 38.

He was tabbed by Roosevelt as an individual who was in support of workers rights, so he became very involved with the passage of that bill.

He was really like a protege of FDR and met with him all the time.

And he came up with this deal for Lend-Lease.

Americans did not want to get involved in the war.

You know, it was not on our continent.

We don't want him to get involved.

And uncle had been over there right before the war, had seen Hitler.

He had visited with Stalin.

He knew all the players, and he knew that was coming.

He and the president they came up with as America made plans that would listen to England and eventually the Soviet Union.

And as new planes came off, they play some.

Claude and Mildred went to Germany in 1938.

It was for the purpose of a foreign relations trip, where he and Mildred were to just really observe what was going on in Nazi Germany at the time.

Told me an interesting story about how he was in a restaurant with his wife and, Hitler walked in with, with his troops, his dogs, and everybody in the restaurant stood up.

And they didn't, Claude and Mildred said, and he said that once Hitler sat down, he looked.

He kept looking at me, looking at us at the table, looking at us, trying to intimidate them.

They were able to see Hitler speak, at one of the Nuremberg rallies.

And as someone who was, identified as a strong, public speaker and order, Claude very quickly saw how dangerous Hitler was as a public figure, someone that could galvanize and mobilize large amounts of people through, really, the vilification of of minorities in Germany.

And this terrified him.

he came back to the United States and immediately began dispatching telegrams to Senate colleagues and colleagues in the House, stressing the importance of gathering and sending weapons and material to the allies to keep Germany at bay.

He was very concerned about the fact that many Americans at the time had taken an isolationist stance.

he felt that the best way to stop Hitler and the axis powers was to get involved.

Any man who's not blind should be able to see that this movement, which is now in progress, is not just the European war, it's a worldwide crusade, a world shaking revolution.

That's what Hitler called it.

That's what Mussolini had to branded.

That's what they have characterized it as being from its very inception.

I happened to be present in 1938 at Nuremberg, at the Great party Congress there, when Hitler himself bestowed upon a body for safekeeping the sword, the jewels, and the crown of Charlemagne, who at one time had an empire that stretched all over the continent of Europe.

The Lend-Lease bill, which would eventually become the Lend-Lease act in late 1930s America.

The best way to help at the time, and it really contributed to what would become the American war effort.

It helped re-energize American industry, you know, with the downside of the fact that, you know, it moved the country closer to the brink of war.

He was unfortunately proven right on December 7th, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

And I think that without his work, to promote and eventually pass Lend-Lease, we would have been, as a country, in a position where we were far less prepared than than we already were.

The people have a sort of a psychic sense of faith somehow they're not always articulate, but they have very clear vision.

And today, the people of Saint that nothing we can do is so dangerous as to do nothing.

With things like Lend-Lease, we can see the spirit of that legislation still in effect today.

When you look at the United States's support of Ukraine, and its conflict against Russia, I think that that definitely would have been something that Claude would have been definitely for and supported.

One of Claude Pepper's greatest achievements, which was Lend-Lease, which is very similar.

What we're trying to do with Ukraine today.

Right.

We're trying to give them the weapons to fight.

Claude Pepper was a politician who was keenly aware that not every decision that he made was going to be a popular one and was actually very much in favor of Americans voicing their, you know, agreement or displeasure with, actions, you know, legislation that he worked on or his colleagues worked on.

behind us.

We have a key example of that.

This, is a diorama scene depicting Claude's hanging in effigy outside of the US Capitol building, in August in 1940, by the Congress of American Mothers and the Gold Star Mothers of America.

The image, that you see behind me was recreated from one that was published in an edition of the Washington Evening Post.

Pepper kept everything, be it, a cartoon that praised him or lampooned him or an effigy.

we still have the original effigy in the holdings, and I think that he was, on some level, happy that Americans were, exercising their right to protest.

The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was intended to take aim at the discriminatory and racist practices that were openly rampant, in the United States at the time.

Being informed by his time in the Senate, Pepper resolved to vote in favor of civil rights legislation whenever he saw it.

The Civil Rights Act was met with a great amount of pushback.

It was passed within a decade after the Brown versus Board of Education decision, which called for the integration of public schools.

Pepper was very keenly aware of the fact that racism and racial prejudice were huge problems, especially in the state of Florida, he was alone in the congressional delegation from Florida to vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but was able to successfully lobby a number of his congressional colleagues.

One of them was Dante Fassel, also from South Florida to voting yes for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So he really did try to take his follies and turn them into something good through his legislation and through not only realizing the ills of racism and white supremacy, but trying, as an older American, to to act against that.

And I think set an example for his contemporaries and those that would come after him.

We have a large amount of, constituent correspondence in his congressional papers from citizens, much of it against passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Pepper was no stranger to receiving correspondence from his constituents that urged him to vote against progressive legislation.

That fear of losing political office was very much with him when he was advocating for the Civil Rights Act, but he knew that it was an integral piece of legislation that had to pass.

He knew that without some sort of reckoning on racial injustice, America was never really going to advance as a society.

And I think that was definitely key into why he was such a supporter of the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act to pieces of legislation that were very important to him, because he knew that they were going to have meaningful and immediate impacts, on people's lives, which, of course, they did.

Claude's legacy is to remind younger Americans that one day they, too, will become older Americans.

Pepper was someone who was very self-assured, very confident in what he wanted to get out of life.

From a young age, he knew that he wanted to be, a politician who operated on the national stage in his time at Harvard was where he started keeping his journals.

And he writes, you know, very frankly, that he wants to be someone of National import.

He wants to help Americans, but also wants to, make an impact on society.

And I think that younger Americans can take from that is that there is never a bad time to get involved.

When you see things around you that you feel need changing.

Pepper very much did that.

He looked at the way that working Americans were treated.

He looked at the way that minorities were treated in the South in the 40s and 50s, and decided that he was going to speak, you know, with his legislation, the way he voted.

And I think that would be the lesson that he would want younger Americans to take away from his career.

And so open to everything.

And he he wasn't the kind of politician that talked about himself.

He would always want to talk about you or what you're doing.

The thing is, he always when he walked in a room, he would want to know something about everyone.

He looks you in the eye, he touches your arm, and he knows something about you, or he's going to make you feel like he knows something about you.

And that was on the.

Floor as he got older, became very convinced of the fact that a person's age was not correlative to their usefulness to society.

It was of paramount importance to him to communicate to Americans that just because a person was older or not, as spry or as quick on their feet as they once were, that did not mean that that person could not meaningfully contribute to American society with regard to Medicare and Medicaid.

Both of those pieces of legislation are still very relevant.

They're being contested to this day.

And that's something that I think the quad would kind of be surprised at.

he would certainly be ardently fighting to keep Medicare and Medicaid in place and working to service the Americans that that, legislation was intended for with respect to Claude's, policies and beliefs on the elderly and how they should be cared for and looked after.

I think a lot of that came from his own personal experiences with his family.

He watched his father die before his time because of a lack of medical advances.

In the 70s, when he was in Congress, he was, picked to lead, the House Select Committee on Aging and Elder Care, which was a position that he took very seriously.

He and his congressional colleagues would work tirelessly to evaluate the state of elder care in the United States, seeing the mistreatment that so many elder Americans, were receiving.

Really real woke.

That passion that earned him the nickname Red Pepper.

When he was in the Senate.

Just seeing the inequalities that existed were enough to inspire him to pursue acts of legislation like Medicare and Medicaid.

And part of my long career in Congress had been building a failed Social Security system.

Social security is one instance still where most women receive life and men.

I want the equal rights Amendment ratified to help elderly women get a fair share of Social Security.

Showing your state legislators vote on the era.

Tell them a vote for the Equal Rights Amendment is a vote for the elderly women of America.

In 1979, Claude lost his wife, Mildred, to esophageal cancer, and this event, much like the loss of his father, sort of put him in a mode to find solutions for how he could turn his own personal loss into ways to help the American public.

One of the ways that he did this was, seeking, support from his congressional colleagues to establish what would become known as the National Institutes of Health.

These organizations are spread throughout the country, and many of them are dedicated to finding treatments and cures for things like cancer, mesothelioma, illnesses that affect the elder populations, and the populations of the infirmed, in the United States think that he did this knowing that the work at these institutions would then directly benefit, the American people.

Looking at today's political climate, Senator Pepper would be somewhat crestfallen, feeling a little unsure of what was going on as a politician.

He certainly had his share of political adversaries and enemies, but knew that at the end of the day that they were there at the behest of the American people.

I think that seeing the partizanship and division today would make Claude sad, for lack of a better term.

I think that work here, he would be working tirelessly to find common ground between politicians from either party, knowing that, you know, that sense of togetherness is really what's going to to propel people forward and create that legislation that is going to help the everyday American ever knew that Partizanship was probably one of the fastest ways to kill any meaningful legislation that could help Americans.

And so he constantly strove to reach across the aisle and not only to get to know his colleagues, as you know, fellow senators and congresspeople, but to befriend them, to know them who they were as people, and in doing so, forge better working relationships with those on the Hill.

People should study Claude Pepper to learn about sort of one person's journey.

from an early age that had an idea.

Claude Pepper always believed that he was going to be involved in public service.

Well, I think public service is very important.

And so for that reason, young people should sort of realize that people who do it well are people who really believe in it, that they're not doing it because of their vanity or, you know, it's great to be popular or for whatever other reason or, you know, to be sort of committed to wanting to sort of better society.

You know, today somebody might think that sounds hokey or something, but it's really something.

And we really need that in our government.

The exhibit behind me, is the last exhibit that's featured in the Mildred and Claude Pepper Museum.

It depicts Claude, in the well of the US House of Representatives in December of 1988, where he would have given his final speech in office.

This was the day that he gave his speech, where we have the text reading above the entrance to the museum, where it says, what have I done today to lighten the burden upon those who suffer?

This was Claude's sort of operating philosophy throughout his career, when he would craft a piece of legislation, when he would sponsor legislation, had a committee.

It was very much all done under the auspices of doing something good for the everyday American person.

In his development, youthful development and developed.

As a man.

I would have to give a great deal of credit to his mother because he mentioned the wisdom that, she provided him.

And one of the things I clearly recalled him saying was, my mother always said to run with the best people.

Well, Claude Pepper lived by that throughout of his life.

He not only ran with the best people, he ran with the most important people in the world because he was one of them.

I think that I phrased his legacy many years ago, when I was sitting across from him in the desk in his office, when I said a great campaign slogan is Pepper helps people.

And that's exactly what he did throughout of his life.

He used to say in the speeches at the end, he used to say, well, when you go to sleep at night, you should really pause and think to myself, what have you done today to help somebody?

And he used to say that a lot, you know, and he really was great at helping people.

And I was playing a little song, but it ain't very long about letting a farmer would know his tone and why it was.

I never could tell if all that young man was all white.

And while that young man was always well.