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Dave Sholtz, from Yale and Daytona Beach, utilizing the advantages of not having served in Congress, tries hard to give his audiences the impression: 1) that he and Franklin Roosevelt are political cronies, and 2) that he takes orders from no one but his own constituents.
When the campaign began, all three candidates by tacit consent tried to shun the one big State issue which might have made the campaign more complex: the trans-Florida ship canal, which north Florida wants, and south Florida fears. But by last week. Claude Pepper, deciding most of his votes will come from north Florida anyway, told citizens of that section he was strong for the canal, accused Messrs. Sholtz & Wilcox of "pussyfooting."
"Claude Pepper, United States Senator" are words that were inscribed in the bark of a tree at Camp Hill, Ala. by Claude Pepper in 1911. He was then ten years old. After nursing his ambition while working as a farm helper and in an Alabama steel mill, stoking furnaces at Alabama University, boning through Harvard Law School where he graduated in 1924 and starting a law practice in Perry, then in Tallahassee, Claude Pepper set out to realize his goal by running for election in 1934.
Defeated then by 4,050 votes, he was chosen to serve out the unexpired term of Florida's late Senator Duncan U. Fletcher in 1936. In Washington, Claude Pepper distinguished himself by a strict adherence to all policies and projects suggested by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A stocky, black-haired young man, whose earnest, grey-eyed face is disfigured by pockmarks, he speaks with more sincerity than eloquence, convinces his listeners of his utter honesty when he says: "It is time someone in authority got in to do some fighting for the poor white man in the South. I have been fighting and will continue to do so, regardless of political consequences."
Florida primary campaign began at about the same time as the big-league baseball training season last March, moved in the opposite direction. All three candidates began speaking in the north, on the theory that the south half of the State was too busy to think about politics until the tourists left by April 1. Arriving early in March in Tallahassee, where he and his pretty young wife used to have a suite in the Emilie at the Quintuplet Apartments, Senator Pepper was promptly laid low for two weeks by an attack of grippe. Net consequence was to give a head start to his energetic rivals.
Claude Pepper's votes next week will be drawn, generally speaking, from Florida's few liberals and its many poor. Sectionally, he is strongest nearest home, in the north.
Claude Pepper on Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "I have sincerely and conscientiously tried to uphold the hand of the man who was trying to help you and whom you chose to serve as your leader by a three-to-one majority. Friends, I am proud of my record in Washington. . . ."