Florida’s Loopy Politics, From Pepper to Martinez

Florida’s reputation for electoral eccentricity is well earned. For proof, look no further than a pair of fascinating new books from University Press of Florida, both of which recount tales of brutal campaigns and flawed candidates. One is a present-day cautionary tale of ambition and naiveté; the other is a look back at a legendary 1950 race that may have been the loopiest of all.

Immigrant Prince: Mel Martinez and the American Dream, by Rollins College Professor of Politics Richard E. Foglesong, is a sympathetic biography of Orlando’s Mel Martinez, a Cuban immigrant who rose to the region’s highest elective office, Orange County Chairman, before becoming Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under his mentor, President George W. Bush, and later a U.S. senator and general chairman of the Republican National Committee.

A feel-good story? Early on, yes. But Martinez, driven by a genuine desire to serve but flattered by sharp operators who saw in him an entrée to a lucrative voting bloc, allowed his compelling personal story to be co-opted in an effort to lure Hispanics into a Republican “big tent” that existed only in strategy memos.

In the end, a man Central Floridians had come to know as an amiable but effective pragmatist was refashioned by Karl Rove and other Bush insiders as a far-right ideologue who accused his senatorial primary opponent, conservative former U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum, of being “the new darling of the radical homosexual lobby” because he had supported hate-crime legislation. Even many Republicans cried foul.

Sent to Washington after a cliffhanger of an election in 2004, Martinez soon embarrassed himself and his party by circulating on the Senate floor a confidential document suggesting ways in which Republicans could use the emotionally wrenching case of Terri Schiavo – the woman whose husband sought to have her feeding tubes removed after she had been in a permanent vegetative state for 14 years – as a wedge issue against Democrats.

Martinez blamed his staff, and Foglesong appears to give him the benefit of the doubt. Still, despite his political blunders, Martinez was asked by Bush in 2006 to chair the RNC. The rookie senator demurred, but, according to Foglesong, the president insisted. “You don’t need to be an attack dog,” Bush said. “Besides, you don’t need to do it for long. Just show the right face for the party and raise some money.”

Ironically, Martinez was truly brought low when he courageously tackled one of the few issues about which he was honestly passionate: immigration reform. And his downfall was hastened not by his opponents but by his erstwhile allies – the conservatives who had previously jockeyed to pose for pictures with their new Hispanic friend.

Martinez jumped into the fray when a bill co-authored by Sens. John McCain and Edward Kennedy, which would have provided legal status and a path to citizenship for the approximately 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants, failed. The immigrant senator, whose moral authority on the issue was unassailable, worked to craft a bipartisan compromise.

Right-wingers pounced, with Sen. Jim DeMint, the South Carolina firebrand, declaring that anyone backing the efforts of Martinez and others had “declared war on the American people.” The statement infuriated Martinez, who had lived the American Dream and whose patriotism was intense and sincere. “I will never forgive him for those remarks,” Martinez told Foglesong.

But it was DeMint, not Martinez, who spoke for the rank-and-file. A bill Martinez co-authored with Sen. John Kyl of Arizona, a fellow Republican, went nowhere.
Martinez left his RNC post in 2007 and announced the following year that he would not stand for re-election in 2010. Ultimately, he resigned his senate seat a year early.

If Foglesong’s admiration for his subject is sometimes reflected in his prose, it’s understandable given the back story. Martinez came to the United States at age 15 under the auspices of Operation Peter Pan, a resettlement program run by the Catholic Church. Speaking virtually no English, he was placed with Anglo foster families in Orlando and attended Bishop Moore High School.

Martinez earned an AA degree from Orlando Junior College before attending Florida State University, where he majored in International Affairs and attended law school. He married his high-school sweetheart, Kitty, and made his mark as a successful trial lawyer and an effective civic leader. As Orange County’s highest-ranking elected official, he was tapped to co-chair Bush’s Florida campaign in the 2000 election.

Immigrant Prince tells an intriguing, only-in-America tale in a breezy, readable way. Locals will enjoy the cameos made by familiar movers and shakers as Martinez navigates his way through Orlando’s somewhat diffused power structure and finds his place within it.

But it’s difficult to read Immigrant Prince without thinking of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the Frank Capra film in which Jefferson Smith, a squeaky-clean small-towner played by Jimmy Stewart, is appointed to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate, thanks to a corrupt political machine for which he is expected to toe the line. Smith, however, surprises his cynical patrons by refusing to be manipulated.

Knowing in advance how Mr. Martinez’s Washington excursion turns out, it’s a bit unsettling, early in Immigrant Prince, to read about the initial meeting between Martinez and Bush. “Stick with me,” the president tells Martinez, “and you’ll go places.”

Red Pepper and Gorgeous George: Claude Pepper’s Epic Defeat in the 1950 Democratic Primary, by UCF history instructor and magazine editor James C. Clark, is a lively examination of one of the most notorious U.S. Senate contests in modern politics.

The book was originally Clark’s doctoral thesis, but with a journalist’s flare – he spent more than 25 years at the Orlando Sentinel before editing Orlando Magazine and Winter Park Magazine – the author captures the divergent personalities of Pepper, the feisty but erratic New Deal liberal, and George Smathers, the rabid anti-communist crusader who took him down.

This epic clash has assumed mythic proportions, at least among political junkies. However, even if you’re not particularly interested in politics, you may have heard of the campaign in which one candidate railed to rural audiences that his opponent was “a shameless extrovert” whose sister was “a known thespian” and “performed the act in front of paying customers.”

The accuser is said to have been Smathers, who allegedly sought to win votes from the intellectually challenged by portraying Pepper, a three-term senator, as some sort of degenerate.

Such a comical accusation was never made, but the vitriolic, red-baiting tactics used by Smathers were adopted by Richard Nixon, then a California congressman, in his U.S. Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he accused of communist sympathies by describing her as being “pink, right down to her underwear.”

The 1950 campaign also presaged a shift in Southern politics away from liberal populists like Pepper and toward conservative ideologues like Smathers. (Both Smathers and Pepper were Democrats, but in the early 1950s there were few Republicans in Florida, and the winner of a Democratic primary was the de facto winner of a statewide election.)

Clark begins by telling the story of Pepper, born to a poverty-stricken family on a small farm near Dudleyville, Ala. He later attended the University of Alabama and Harvard Law School. He moved to Florida in 1925, opening a law practice in Perry, and by 1928 had been elected to the Florida House of Representatives. He won, Clark says, by pointing out that the incumbent had failed to vote on a bill requiring farmers to dip their cattle to remove ticks.

On his second try in 1936, Pepper won a special election to the U.S. Senate, where he allied himself with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and advocated a foreign policy based on friendship with Russia. Stalin, he believed, was “a man Americans could trust.”

That view would come back to haunt him, as would his reluctance to support Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election. In fact, Pepper had briefly tried to challenge Truman for the Democratic nomination, an act that enraged Truman and made Pepper something of a laughingstock.

Still, Pepper had no reason to think his U.S. Senate seat was endangered in 1950. After all, no sitting Florida senator had ever been voted out of office. He hadn’t counted on New Jersey-born George Smathers, a child of privilege who was a sports star and student-body president at the University of Florida, where he earned a law degree and helped run Pepper’s 1936 campus campaign.

In his subsequent job as assistant U.S. Attorney for Florida’s Southern District, Smathers prosecuted a number of high-profile cases, often involving “sex, greed and attractive women,” notes Clark.

As handsome as Pepper was homely, Smathers – a Marine Corps captain during World War II – returned from overseas and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1947 as a moderate and an anti-communist. He ran against Pepper in 1950 at the behest of a vengeful Truman.

When the campaign begins, Clark’s book picks up considerable speed. “For every one of you who wants to preserve our great American heritage, the time has come to take off your coat and join our holy crusade to preserve America for honest-to-God Americans,” Smathers told audiences, sounding not unlike many national political candidates of today.

Clark devotes the better part of a chapter tracking down the origin of “the speech” in which Smathers is said to have made allegations of thespianism and extroversion, and concludes that the whole thing was probably a joke started by a Pepper aide or a pair of out-of-town reporters.

Pepper, of course, lost the race. But he was later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Miami area and became a respected advocate for elder issues. When he died, his body lay in state for two days under the rotunda of the U. S. Capitol, the 26th American so honored.

Red Pepper and Gorgeous George is  meticulously researched, as an academic work should be, but also genuinely entertaining and a must-read for anyone who thinks Florida politics only became weird recently.