A Socialist Who Nearly Won "The Campaign of the Century"

 If you are growing fascinated by Upton Sinclair and/or his wildly influential 1934 campaign after viewing David Fincher's Mank:  Here is a piece I wrote three years ago, connecting him from 1934 to Bernie Sanders today.   You can read about my award-winning book here or order print or e-book here.

 

A famous longtime Socialist,  the white-haired maverick led a grassroots movement to unexpectedly challenge the Democratic party establishment in a raucous primary campaign.   His opponent was a well-known pillar of the party with many years on the national stage and as an official in Washington who was the natural frontrunner.   He and others within the party admitted that they rather liked the challenger, and that many of his ideas were good ones, but wildly impractical; and as the the Democratic nominee, he would drag the party down to certain defeat in November, even with a mass movement behind him.    If nothing else, the "Socialist" tag would doom him, even with a liberal Democrat presently in the White House.

We are talking, of course, of fears about Senator Bernie Sanders--but also, famed muckraking author Upton Sinclair.    In Sinclair's case, the campaign was for governor of California.   The amazing grassroots movement was known as EPIC, for End Poverty in California.  And, surprise, Sinclair would win the Democratic primary, in a landslide.  His campaign would become one of the most influential of the century, echoing down to this day.      

The year was 1934; the president was Franklin D. Roosevelt. The economic crisis FDR faced was far worse than what America confronts today, but some similarities exist.   Sinclair was not Bernie Sanders, but his campaign provides many lessons for Sanders supporters and opponents--and media analysts--today.

Of all the left-wing mass movements that year, Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) crusade proved most influential, and not just in helping to push the New Deal to the left. The Sinclair threat—after he easily won the Democratic gubernatorial primary—so profoundly alarmed conservatives that it sparked the creation of the modern political campaign in America. Profiling two of the creators of the anti-Sinclair campaign, Carey McWilliams would later call this (in The Nation) "a new era in American politics—government by public relations." It also provoked Hollywood’s first all-out plunge into politics, which, in turn, inspired the leftward tilt in the movie colony that endures to this day. 

Back in the autumn of 1934, political analysts, financial columnists and White House aides for once agreed: Sinclair’s victory in the primary marked the high tide of electoral radicalism in the United States. Left-wing novelist Theodore Dreiser wrote a piece for Esquire declaring EPIC "the most impressive political phenomenon that America has yet produced." The New York Times called it "the first serious movement against the profit system in the United States."

Sinclair lost in November, but the inspiring success of his mass movement basically created the liberal wing of the state’s Democratic Party, which  endures to this day.   (My book on the 1934 race, The Campaignof the Century, winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize, has been published in new print and e-book editions.)

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Nearly three decades after his classic novel The Jungle (1906) exposed dangerous and abusive conditions in the meatpacking industry, Sinclair decided, "You have written enough. What the world needs is a deed." Sinclair, who had moved to California in 1916, had written dozens of influential books while finding time to spark numerous civil liberties and literary controversies, get arrested and become perhaps the best-known American leftist abroad.

He had twice run for governor of California on the Socialist line, to little avail, but the election of FDR in 1932 encouraged him to give the Democrats a whirl. While he backed the New Deal, he saw that it did not go nearly far enough. Hugh Johnson, who ran Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, had allowed big business to subvert its codes, and a national textile strike loomed. Nearly one in four people was on relief in New York, with the numbers only slightly better in many other large cities. Adequate relief payments and some form of social security were promised but still unrealized.

So the country’s best-known member of the Socialist Party switched his affiliation to Democrat and used his pen one more time, writing and self-publishing a sixty-four-page pamphlet, I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty. Then he set out to make his fantasy true.

Although Sinclair could draw thousands of votes on name recognition alone, he considered a grassroots movement his greatest hope. Thousands quickly rallied to his cause, organizing End Poverty League clubs across the state.

Note to Sanders and his supporters: a detailed, step-by-step plan—"a way out," as Sinclair put it—and a steely will help. Recall the absurd limits and confusion of the Obama healthcare bill and then consider this promise: "End Poverty in California." It doesn’t obfuscate, qualify or compromise (at least in advance). And it doesn’t include an addendum, "if only we had the money or GOP support."

Sinclair, in a nutshell, outlined a classic production-for-use plan, where all of the unemployed would be put to work in shuttered factories or on unused farms, with goods traded, providing necessities. No one would go hungry or homeless. The elderly and infirm would get relief or pensions. Co-ops would receive state aid. Another plank in the platform: open up discarded studio lots and help out-of-work movie people make their own films. Naturally, this caused most of the Hollywood studio chiefs to threaten to move their operations to Florida.

Many who sympathized with Sinclair—including his friend McWilliams, the young California writer and future Nation editor—found some devil in the details, but the candidate promised to junk what didn’t or couldn’t work.

A pen his only weapon, Sinclair led an army of crazed utopians, unemployed laborers, Dust Bowl refugees and all-purpose lefties to take on "the vested interests." He noted, "Our opponents have told you that all of this is socialism and communism. We are not the least worried." I, Governor became the bestselling book in the state. EPIC clubs kept popping up like mushrooms, funded largely by bake sales, rodeos and rallies; and a weekly newspaper, the EPIC News, reached a circulation of nearly 
1 million by primary day in August 1934.

Sinclair swept the Democratic primary. Dozens of EPIC candidates also won races for the party’s nod for the State Senate and Assembly, including Augustus Hawkins and Jerry Voorhis, both future Congressmen. "It is a spontaneous movement which has spread all over the state by the unpaid labor of tens of thousands of devoted workers," Sinclair noted. "They were called amateurs but they have put all the professional politicians on the shelf." All that stood between EPIC and the governor’s mansion was a hapless GOP hack named Frank "Old Baldy" Merriam, who had become governor after the death of "Sunny Jim" Rolph.

Where did FDR stand? A few days after winning the primary, Sinclair took a train east to meet with the president at Hyde Park, under the glare of national press coverage. The White House was torn. Sinclair was a true radical and a loose cannon. Roosevelt and his political director, Jim Farley, feared that the president, already accused by the right of being a socialist—led by Father Coughlin, the Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh of his day—could not afford this taint. Those tilting to the left, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, were far more enthusiastic about EPIC. And then there was the rather significant matter of Sinclair being the party’s nominee in a year when controlling a major statehouse was vitally important. FDR believed the greatest challenge for the head of a democracy was not to fend off reactionaries but to reconcile and unite progressives.

During the Hyde Park meeting FDR suggested that "experiments" within the overall New Deal framework could be valuable. Sinclair was elated, but the president held off any public endorsement.

Meanwhile, EPIC organizing surged in California. The number of local chapters was now more than 800, and circulation of the EPIC News reportedly hit a staggering 2 million. Black precincts that had reliably voted Republican (the legacy of Lincoln) now split down the middle. Even a few Hollywood screenwriters, such as Dorothy Parker, who normally kept their politics under wraps in the right-wing movie colony, spoke out for Sinclair. So did Charlie Chaplin.

But "the vested interests" organized the most lavish and creative dirty-tricks campaign ever seen—one that was to become a landmark in American politics. There’s far too much to describe in this limited space (it’s the focus of my book), but it involved turning over a major campaign to outside advertising, publicity, media and fundraising consultants for the first time. What was left of the official GOP campaign was chaired by a local district attorney named Earl Warren.

California’s newspapers, led by William Randolph Hearst and Harry Chandler, covered only Merriam’s activities, while mocking Sinclair day after day with quotes from books and novels taken out of context. (Chandler’s Los Angeles Times referred to Sinclair’s "maggot-like horde" of supporters.) Hollywood moguls, besides threatening the move to Florida, docked most employees a day’s pay, giving the proceeds directly to Merriam’s coffers. Millions of dollars to defeat Sinclair poured in from business interests across the country, all off the books. And then there were the attack ads (i.e., newsreels) shown in movie theaters around the state, created by the saintly film producer Irving Thalberg, causing near-riots in some places.  (You can watch excerpts and other vintage video here.) 

FDR, displaying an Obama-like tendency, waited, refusing to make a bold move to help Sinclair ward off the savagely unfair assaults. As a result, Sinclair fell behind in the polls—and then the president was advised to not endorse a probable loser. Farley sent an emissary to California to strike a deal with Merriam: if the GOP governor promised to back the New Deal down the road, the White House would remain silent on Sinclair.

The EPIC fervor continued right up to election day. Activists, looking at their numbers and energy, were certain their candidate would prevail. Sinclair, in fact, would receive almost 900,000 votes, twice the total ever for a Democrat in the state, but would still finish about 200,000 votes behind Merriam. Revealing the true strength of the grassroots movement, however, two dozen EPICs won election to the state legislature, including Hawkins and Culbert Olson. 

The legacy of the EPIC campaign?  For one thing, Merriam did go on to embrace much of the New Deal, providing at least some fresh help for suffering Californians.  Responding to the Hollywood moguls' outrages, actors and writers turned left and feverishly bolstered their fledgling guilds, with longstanding effects still seen today.  

On the national scene, Sinclair’s strong showing encouraged Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson to predict an agrarian revolt that would bring down "the profit system," and five left-wing Congressmen called a conference to explore a third-party bid. Lewis Schwellenbach won a Senate contest in the Northwest on the End Poverty in Washington platform. The La Follettes and their Progressive Party pretty much took over Wisconsin, where a modern maverick, Senator Russ Feingold, faces a tough re-election fight this year.

Emboldened by the results of the midterm elections and Sinclair’s strong showing, Harry Hopkins near the end of 1934 proposed a comprehensive program, dubbed End Poverty in America, which the New York Times said "differs from Mr. Sinclair’s in detail, but not in principle." Along with other popular movements—from the Townsend Plan pension crusaders to Huey Long in Louisiana—EPIC exerted a leftward pressure on the New Deal, strongly influencing FDR’s groundbreaking legislation on Social Security and public works. The "Second New Deal," which also included the Works Progress Administration and National Labor Relations Act, would be more prolabor and antibusiness than the first.

A lesson for today? Mobilizing to prove grassroots support for a "radical" option usually produces positive results, even if that’s not certain immediately. It wasn’t exactly an EPIC movement, but as Ari Berman showed in his book Herding Donkeys, Howard Dean’s 2004 race for president—and the once-mocked "fifty-state strategy" he carried out as Democratic Party chief two years later—led to Obama’s election in 2008. Berman also pointed out that part of Obama’s problem was that as president he ignored much of his grassroots operation, once in office.

Revealing another typical result, the EPIC campaign split over whether to remain in the election business or align with the co-op movement and other groups outside the party system. When Sinclair returned to writing books, the End Poverty League and the EPIC News slowly declined, revealing the dangers of depending too much on one inspiring figure to lead a mass movement. Of course, we saw this years later with Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, not to mention with Ross Perot and his "movement."

Still, a backlash against the GOP tactics in the ’34 campaign helped push Culbert Olson to election in 1938 as the state’s first Democratic governor in decades—defeating Merriam by 200,000 votes. Olson hired Sinclair’s pal McWilliams to direct the state immigration and housing agency.

Many years after the Sinclair race, McWilliams remarked that he still came across EPIC cafes "in the most remote and inaccessible communities of California" and EPIC slogans "painted on rocks in the desert, carved on trees in the forest and scrawled on the walls of labor camps." While he questioned Sinclair’s ability to govern, he hailed his "conviction that poverty was man-made, that you didn’t need it."

This is perhaps the greatest message of the EPIC campaign, but are Democrats listening today in Washington?  And as the Sinclair campaign showed, the Republican reaction to a popular grassroots campaign would be truly frightening.

Surely, the EPIC crusade of 1934 was one of our greatest moments. But the eternal debate—work within or outside the two-party system?—continues, as well it should.