The Claude Pepper Museum in the Pepper Center contains an exhibit that portrays Senator Pepper being hanged in effigy. It exposes many young visitors to the museum to the history of Senator Pepper's impact on the events surrounding World War II. Pepper, a United States Senator in 1940, sat on the Foreign Relations Committee and, at one time, was the sole proponent on that committee of aid to the allies.
Ms. Joan E. Denman, a graduate student in History at Florida State University, engaged in research in the Pepper collection during 2000. It resulted in an excellent paper that illuminated Senator Pepper's role in conscription and aid to Britain. So excellent was Ms. Denman's paper that she was invited to present at the 2000 World War II Conference at Siena College in New York.
She wrote: "Claude D. Pepper, as a young United States Senator from Florida during 1938-1940, served as one of the most vocal advocates for conscription and aid to Britain...Pepper's aggressiveness in promoting his belief brought public attention to interventionist ideas. It also put him in the national spotlight as he faced the wrath of isolationists, the highpoint being when the right-wing Congress of American Mothers hung him in effigy in August 1940."
The Pepper Foundation encourages research in the collection housed at the Pepper Center in Tallahassee. It believes that there is much to be learned from it, not only about Senator Pepper's role in political issues and world affairs that spanned most of the last century, but about the history of the United States.
