(See front cover)
Florida is a fabulous place, a low-lying (max. elev. 325 ft.) peninsula full of paradoxes and contrasts, great banality and great excitement. It offers to the observer hurricanes and breathless heat, some of the world's healthiest fish and scrawniest cattle, the unbelievably hard living of the Everglades and the unbelievably soft living of Palm Beach. Every year 2,000,000 visitors drive, ride, sail and fly there to see such divergent sights as the matchless Rubens collection in the Ringling Art Museum at Sarasota, the barbarously gaudy architecture of Hollywood, the flowerlike flamingos in the infield at Hialeah and the old people quietly dying in their rattan chairs at St. Petersburg. Florida is bounded by the utter reality of the bean fields around Lake Okeechobee, and the utter unreality of the skyscrapers over Miami.
No community so rich in the stuff of life could fail to provide a political scene of more than common interest and activity. True to form, with the Democratic primary elections a fortnight away, last week the Florida peninsula was restlessly ending a notably lively three-cornered fight for the nomination which would mean the occupancy of Claude Pepper's U. S. Senate seat. For the past six weeks, Messrs. David Sholtz, Mark Wilcox and Claude Pepper, as well as two other minor candidates whose names not even many Florida voters knew, had been touring Florida's sticky villages and sun-blistered swamp towns, its resort cities and its inland flatwoods, to an accompaniment of loudspeakers, floodlights, bad cigars and baby-kissing such as to challenge the memory of the State's oldest inhabitant. The windup found the candidates characteristically occupied.
¶ On the west coast, a large sound truck equipped with a gramophone & amplifier nearly deafened the citizens of Pensacola with the Dipsy Doodle. This was the preface to an address by the State's onetime (1933-37) Governor Sholtz in which that dignitary found occasion to remark: "Either the Junior Senator is telling a deliberate untruth or he doesn't know what he is talking about." ¶ In Frostproof, near the State's centre, Representative Wilcox informed an audience that he was "a better friend to the old people than those who give them lip service in Florida and never mention their cause in Washington." ¶ To the north, on the road between Kissimmee and St. Cloud, a motorcade of some 50 cars met the State's Junior Senator Pepper, escorted him with honking horns to St. Cloud's city limits where he was met by the town's band and drum corps. From St. Cloud, the motorcade, swollen to 250, followed the Senator around Polk County through Davenport, Haines City, Auburndale and Winter Haven to Bartow where Claude Pepper climaxed a typical day by announcing to a crowd of 2,000 that he would vote for the Townsend plan even if the President vetoed it.
Issues. Politics in Florida are relatively simple. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination gets the job. The issues in the Florida primary race are not complex either. They are three: