FLORIDA: Anything Goes

The great game of politics was being played without benefit of rules in Florida last week, and the knee-action and eye-gougings could be felt from Pensacola to Fort Lauderdale. Fast-talking George Smathers had learned the art of campaigning from Senator Claude Pepper. Running against the master (TIME, April 3), he showed that he had learned how to pour salt in Pepper’s old wounds. Fishing out an old newspaper clipping at every campaign stop, Smathers read Pepper’s reported 1946 advice to the U.S.: pray for Joseph Stalin because he is; the kind of man Americans could trust.

“Did you pray for Joe Stalin today?” Smathers would ask his audiences, and the angry “noes” sounded like votes. Pepper in turn called attention to Smathers’ birthplace in Atlantic City, N.J., denounced him as a damyankee intruder. To which Smathers would answer that he himself was a University of Florida graduate, while Pepper deserted his native state to go north to Harvard. “Felix Frankfurter had nothing to do with my education,” boomed Smathers. “Alger Hiss is no classmate of mine. I don’t travel under the Crimson banner of Harvard.”

Smathers was capable of going to any length in campaigning, but he indignantly denied that he had gone as far as a story printed in northern newspapers. The story wouldn’t die, nonetheless, and it deserved not to. According to the yarn, Smathers had a little speech for cracker voters, who were presumed not to know what the words meant except that they must be something bad. The speech went like this: “Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy.”