California Climax

(See front cover) California is a phenomenon as well as a state. Its soil rises to the highest point in the 48 United States (Mt. Whitney, 14,496 ft.), sinks to the continent's deepest dimple (Death Valley, --276 ft.). In the fragrant gloom of Sequoia National Park indigenously grow some of the world's hugest trees; yet most Californians rest under the shade of the transplanted Australian eucalyptus. Across the State's deserts, prospectors still ride dusty, neat-footed burros, while at Santa Monica mechanics in the Douglas plant build some of the world's fastest passenger planes. To California William Randolph Hearst brings Old World treasures by the carload; at his San Simeon estate third-rate cinemactors sleep in Cardinal Richelieu's ornate bed. In California lunch rooms are built like igloos, puppies, derby hats. At California Institute of Technology work Nobel Prize-winning Geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan and Physicist Robert Millikan. California has more medical quacks than any state in the Union. It righteously keeps Tom Mooney in jail at San Quentin, kneels prayerfully at the feet of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson in Los Angeles. California blinks its eyes from the glare of kleig lights in hysterical Hollywood, is lulled by the mission bells of Santa Barbara. Anything can happen in fabulous California. What will happen in California on Nov. 6 is an enormous question mark placed at the end of a tense and terrible political campaign which will reach its climax on Election Day. Not only will California then choose a new Governor but all the rest of the country will be supplied with a gauge to measure the size and significance of the New Radicalism. Rarely has a state campaign evoked more national attention than that of Upton Sinclair of Pasadena and his plan to "End Poverty in California" which he calls EPIC and Publisher Hearst calls Ipecac. No politician since William Jennings Bryan has so horrified and outraged the Vested Interests. Those whose stakes in California are greatest hold themselves personally responsible to their class throughout the nation to smash Upton Sinclair. They hate him as a muckraker. They hate him as a Socialist. They hate him as an I. W. W. sympathizer. They hate him as a "free love" cultist. They hate him as a Single Taxer. They hate him as an atheist. And last week they hated him most of all because he was bent on becoming a confiscationalist. How It Started. More than a year ago Upton Sinclair sat down in his study to write a pamphlet called I, Governor of California And How I Ended Poverty. In it he presented his EPIC Plan. In substance it carried the far-flung Western barter-group idea one step further by making it an agency of the state. He proposed : 1) A public body called California Authority for Land (CAL), which would appropriate land which was idle, foreclosed, or to be sold for taxes, turn it over to colonies of unemployed for cultivation.

2) California Authority for Production (CAP), which would be "authorized to acquire'' factories where unemployed would make products to exchange with CAL.

3) California Authority for Money (CAM), which would issue script to facilitate barter between CAP and CAL, and bonds to acquire factories and land.

4) Abolished would be the State's 2 1/2% sales tax, taxes on homes and ranches occupied by the owners and assessed at less than $3,000.

5) Imposed would be heavy taxes on inheritances, incomes, public utilities, banks, unimproved land.

6) Pensioned by the State at $50 a month would be all widows with dependent children, invalids, needy persons over 60 who had lived in California three years.

In Southern California, a prime hot house for odd schemes, EPIC received its full share of attention from Theosophists, spiritualists, vegetarians. Populists, Single Taxers, Rosicrucians, crackpots, faddists and cultists of every sort. But it would not have survived a season had it not also made a strong appeal to California's desperate 425,000 unemployed and their 800,000 dependents. EPIC clubs sprang up overnight until by last week they numbered 1,000. And Upton Sinclair found himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Governor. "I found I was not getting anywhere as a Socialist," explained he, "and so I decided to try to make progress with one of the two old parties." The regular Democratic machine pooh-poohed Candidate Sinclair as a theoretical novice. Theoretical he was, but no novice; in the past 28 years he has run for Congressman in New Jersey, for Congressman, Senator and Governor in California. He has a face that looks like Henry Ford gone slightly fey, a pleasing voice, a wide smile and immense persuasiveness on the rostrum. He hitched EPIC to the New Deal, implied Rooseveltian approval. Too late Senator William Gibbs McAdoo rushed Wartime Propagandist George Creel into the breach. At the primary last August ex-Socialist Sinclair trounced Democrat Creel by nearly 150,000 votes, received a majority over all eight of his opponents, polled the largest Democratic primary vote of any candidate in California history. Democratic registration outnumbered the Republican total for the first time in nearly 60 years.

Nominee & Platform. Two days after his nomination, Sinclair lit out for Hyde Park to receive the congratulations of a highly embarrassed President. Like the fabled Dutchman and the non-stop salt machine, the President was discovering that his New Deal liberalism was undamming an undisciplined torrent of independent Leftist movements all over the country: Huey Long's Share-the-Wealth Clubs, Prestonia Mann Martin's "Commons & Capitals," Dr. Francis Everett Townsend's pension scheme (TIME. Oct. 15). There was an EPIW in Washington. Some 200,000 persons were said to be enrolled in the Utopian Society. If this sort of thing kept on, conservatives predicted that they would probably be clinging to Franklin Roosevelt as the last man left in the country to defend property rights and the capitalist system.

Nominee Sinclair wrapped his long radical arms around President Roosevelt, emerged to beam at reporters: "I talked with one of the kindest and most genial and frank and open-minded and capable men I ever met. . . . We folks out in California speculate as to what he is doing and how much he knows about it. I am very happy to tell the people of California that he knows."

Stopping off in Manhattan, he triumphantly appeared at the office of his new political chief, No. 1 Democrat James Aloysius Farley. Mr. Farley told him to call him "Jim." Then down to Washington marched Upton Sinclair to be welcomed by such socially-minded members of the White House inner circle as Harry Hopkins and Secretary Wallace.

As a result of his Eastern junket, word was spread through the Democracy that genial Mr. Sinclair could be "handled." Told off to do the handling in California were Messrs. McAdoo and Creel. At the Democratic State Convention the party platform failed to mention the name EPIC, made no commitments as to the Sinclair proposals for land colonies, scrip, bond issues, high income taxes or pensions. EPIC was emasculated save for pledges to put the unemployed to work at productive labor, enabling them to produce what they could consume; to put the State's credit and resources behind cooperative self-help groups; to exempt from taxation the first $1,000 assessed valuation of homes and farms occupied by owners; to repeal the State sales tax, substituting income and increased bank and inheritance taxes. Having done the best they could to make EPIC palatable to the rank-&-file of the party, Messrs. Creel & McAdoo ducked out of Sinclair's victory banquet. Mr. Creel headed for Washington, Mr. McAdoo for Mexico. Neither has gone back since. The Democratic State Chairman washed his hands of the whole affair.

Immediate Epic. Left to his own poliical devices, Nominee Sinclair began a behind-the-hand campaign to assure his loyal following that EPIC was still there. He brought out another pamphlet called Immediate Epic. Still intact on the back cover was original EPIC.

Such tactics sent a thrill of fear through conservative Californians. Since the August primaries, reported San Francisco financial houses fortnight ago, State, county, district and city bonds have shrunk $50,000,000 in value, with State bonds showing a 6% decline, while bonds of Missouri dropped 1 1/2%, bonds of Illinois less than 1% in the same period.

Aware that his CAM bond issue was hopeless at this time, Nominee Sinclair proposed, instead, to levy a tax on industrial corporations and utilities to raise ''$5,000,000 or $10,000,000" to prime his EPIC pump. He proposed to go to a man with an idle dress factory, for example, rent his plant for tax-receivable paper for three years, retaining the executives at their old salaries. Unemployed would be put to work making dresses for other unemployed, who would in turn be set to work as soon as possible in other factories or on the land. But between the Governor's inaugural in January, and the harvesting of the new cooperative crops, the unemployed would have to be fed. So farmers would be asked to trade their surpluses for warehouse receipts good for taxes and for manufactured goods. The original EPIC state scrip notion was modified, since Mr. Sinclair admits his lawyers would have difficulty finding a way to circumvent Section 10, Article I of the Constitution, which reserves for the Federal Government the sole right to issue money.

After three years the State was to vote on EPIC's retention. If the vote was favorable the hired factories would be bought outright by the State. That it would be favorable, Mr. Sinclair had no doubt, since he believes Depression will then be as bad as ever and ''workers would soon be clamoring to enter our system.''

The revived Sinclair EPIC, rising from the ashes of the Democratic convention, drove his opponents to fresh despair while his naive economic reasoning infuriated them. To them, there seemed to be no effective way of bridling this evangel of nonsense. What Mr. Sinclair proposed to do, as they saw it, was to plant a system of Red State-ownership in California, expand it, without limit, until it crushed private enterprise. EPIC, Mr. Sinclair pointed out, could also stand for "End Poverty In Civilization."

There was cold comfort in the thought that, if elected, Mr. Sinclair would not have a legislative majority at Sacramento to execute his ideas. Under Republican Hiram Johnson, California enacted in 1911 the system of initiative & referendum. To initiate any legislation, all that is required is the mandate of 8% of the voters in the previous election. Mr. Sinclair, his eye already on this device, estimates the required number at 160,000, which he can drum up in a week by ordering each of his 1,000 EPIC clubs to get the signatures of 160 voters. He is confident that any majority which would elect him would support any legislation he may choose to write into the statute book by means of the initiative & referendum. California has a strong tradition of passing important laws by the mandatory referendum, most famed being the exclusion of Orientals from owning or leasing property, voted in 1920.

Before Immediate Epic was promulgated, William Gibbs McAdoo tried to soothe his fellow Californians' rising hysteria from the vantage point of distant Washington. Said he: "This 'wolf scare' doesn't frighten me at all." But California property owners were now thoroughly alarmed. As capital continued to emigrate, bums, panhandlers, tramps and just plain jobless continued to immigrate across the State borders. All over the State Motor Vehicle Department clerks reported an influx of travelers with suitcases or blanket rolls who said they heard there was going to be "plenty of work in California" for unemployed. The State's gamblers had their money on Sinclair. "The gamblers know," observed the EPIC nominee.

Opposition to the Sinclair candidacy was focused on the plump, round-faced and by no means inspiring person of Republican Frank Finley Merriam. A small-bore, Iowa-born politician who was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1930, Frank Merriam of Long Beach became Acting Governor when "Sunny Jim" Rolph died last June. The San Francisco general strike and a shrewd stratagem won him his nomination for the coming election. Prior to the strike, onetime Governor Clement Calhoun Young had been assured Republican support by no less a faction than Herbert Hoover & friends. When big industrialists began to beseech Acting Governor Merriam to send troops into San Francisco, he replied that it would ruin him politically. One by one the potent Young backers agreed to switch their strength in the primary to Merriam. Not until he had corralled most of the Young following did Acting Governor Merriam order his militia out.

Lacking personal appeal or popularity, Acting Governor Merriam has been a trial to Richard W. Barrett, his northern California campaign manager. Under the direction of this San Francisco attorney, Acting Governor Merriam has been taken to football matches, photographed talking to deaf mutes through an interpreter. And last week at Los Angeles he made his first campaign speech, lifting a phrase from the first citizen of Palo Alto: "Human misery should not be made a laboratory for experimentation by even the most well-meaning of theorists."

The Merriam forces were straining every resource last week to beg, borrow or steal the voting strength of a Progressive candidate named Raymond LeRoy Haight of Los Angeles. He polled 85,000 votes on the Republican ticket, has a clean record, is a sworn foe of corporate interests. Most of his votes would go to Merriam if he withdrew. But Progressive Haight, who is only 38, seemed quite willing to have Acting Governor Merriam defeated and put aside, on the theory that by 1938 the electorate's disgust with Sinclair will give Haight a real chance of election.

The Republicans consolidated their torn ranks slowly after the primary but evidently with more effect than the Democrats did. Beside his own 346,000 primary votes, Acting Governor Merriam could count on most of the 385,000 cast for ex-Governor Young and John R. Quinn, chairman of the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors. That total of 731,000 roughly equaled the Sinclair 446,000 primary vote and George Creel's 288,000, although many a Creel follower would not vote for Sinclair. Primary figures, however, could not possibly tell the story because hundreds of thousands have subsequently registered to vote Nov. 6. This whopping registration was due in no small part to the activities of alarmed businessmen, many of whom sent their employes out to register with the understanding that if they balloted for Sinclair on election day they were voting away their jobs.

Apart from raising an estimated $1,000,000 and enlisting the solid support of the California Press, the tactics of conservatives have proved largely negative. In self-defense, Acting Governor Merriam espoused, under his breath, the Townsend Plan, a wild-eyed scheme to pay oldsters $200 a month with the understanding that each month's pension be spent in full within 30 days. But nobody took him seriously. Big drive of the "nonpartisan" Stop Sinclair movement took the form of a blizzard of pamphlets proclaiming: "Out Of His Own Mouth Shall He Be Judged." Material was culled from Author Sinclair's iconoclastic shelf of writings over a period of 30 years. These were sorted and directed toward groups in which they would do Sinclair most harm : Catholics, Christian Scientists, Mormons, University of Southern California alumni, Parent-Teachers Associations, etc. Sample: "Christianity has been . . . the chief of the enemies of social progress. . . . We should break down the Catholic machine, and not all the priests in the hierarchy should stop us. . . . It is these [Catholic] societies which . . . are pushing and plotting ... to have Catholics in charge of police and on magistrate benches so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished. . . . Christian Science is the most characteristic of American religious contributions. Just as Billy Sunday is the price we pay for failing to educate our baseball players, so Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy is the price we pay for failing to educate our farmers' daughters. ... In all the world it would not be possible to find more naive nonsense than the Mormon mythology. . . ." (The Profits of Religion) All this was most bewildering to that great mass of impressionable Midwestern settlers in Southern California.* Southern California is a bourgeois paradise. Few sections of the U. S. offer cheaper food and housing. It is the perfect setting for Utopia. And EPIC is nothing if not Utopian. In spite of the revelations about Mr. Sinclair's past beliefs, therefore, political observers last week were ready to concede him Los Angeles and the Southern part of the State, look to hard-headed San Francisco and the conservative north for Merriam strength. "Poor Relation." Prime epithet used against Upton Sinclair is that he is "an agent of Moscow." Fact is, Upton Sinclair is as American as pumpkin pie. His great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair was a naval officer who fought in the war with Tripoli. Seven other seagoing relatives joined the Confederate Navy. His maternal grandfather, John S. Harden, was Secretary & Treasurer of Western Maryland Railroad. A sister of Upton's mother married John R. Bland, founder of U. S. Fidelity & Guaranty Co. and one of Baltimore's richest men. In Baltimore, Upton Sinclair was born 56 years ago last month. His father was a ne'er-do-well traveling salesman, much addicted to the bottle. The spectacle of his ''good and gentle-souled father" drinking himself to death made Sinclair a life-long Prohibitionist. Nor does he use tea, coffee, tobacco. He came by his radicalism early. Writes Author Sinclair in his autobiographical American Outpost: "Floyd Dell . . . asked me to explain the appearance of a social rebel in a conventional Southern family. I thought the problem over, and reported my psychology as that of a 'poor relation.' It had been my fate from earliest childhood to live in the presence of wealth which belonged to others." The family moved to Manhattan, where Upton put himself through Columbia as a special student by writing boys' adventure stories for the pulp magazines under the names of "Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, U. S. A." and "Ensign Clarke Fitch, U. S. N." In 1900, when he was 22, he married Meta Fuller, whose father was a newspaperman, whose mother was an old friend of Mrs. Sinclair's. They had a baby at once but the parents separated them until Upton could make enough to support his wife. Not until 1903 did the young Sinclairs set up housekeeping--in a tent in a grove of trees outside Princeton, N. J. They had a $1-a-day subsidy from a Socialist friend to keep them alive until Sinclair wrote the first of his unfinished Civil War trilogy, Manassas. They lived there three and a half years. The winters were bitter. In the summer there were mosquitoes. It was a wretched, lonely life for Meta. Since another baby would be disastrous, they had agreed to live like "brother and sister." One night Sinclair awakened to find his wife sitting up in bed getting ready to shoot herself through the head with a pistol. In such an atmosphere was born the author's impression of Princeton in The Goose-step. Manassas, the author's fourth book, was no more successful than the first three. Then for the first time in his life Upton Sinclair had a little luck. He got a publisher to send him out to Chicago to investigate working conditions in the packing industry. The result was The Jungle, the biggest literary bomb burst since Uncle Tom's Cabin. Sinclair made $30,000, a huge name for himself as a muckraker. President Theodore Roosevelt wanted him on the commission which laid the groundwork for the Meat Packing Law of 1907. Sinclair refused, but kept the pot boiling to such a pitch in magazine articles that President Roosevelt testily wrote Sinclair's publishers to "tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while."

Colonist. No sooner had Upton Sinclair pocketed his profits than he embarked on his first Utopia, the Helicon Hall Colony. Site was an expensive Mission-type building at Englewood, N. J. above the Hudson, which had been erected for a boys' school. Radical literary folk were welcomed, the idea behind the establishment being bonhomie and laissez faire. Sinclair Lewis went down from Yale to tend the furnace. Englewood, then as now a tycoons' home ground, took an instant dislike to the Helicon Hallers and their host, who used to go around the town in old corduroys, flannel shirt and sandals. The place burned down one March night in 1907, killing a drunken carpenter. An arson charge was brought against Sinclair, but subsequently dropped. And the New York Press inspired Sinclair's The Brass Check, when it developed the yarn that Helicon Hall had been a "free-love" colony.

Upton Sinclair has never broken himself of the colonizing habit. He went to Single Tax colonies at Fairhope, Ala. and Arden, Del. In 1909 it was "Physical Culture City" at Battle Creek, Mich., a health centre run by Bernarr Macfadden. At Battle Creek, discontented Meta Sinclair met Poet Harry Kemp, with whom she eloped two years later. And at Battle Creek, Upton Sinclair met his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, daughter of a wealthy judge of Greenwood, Miss. When they were married in 1913, Judge Kimbrough, who had no more use for a Socialist than for a Republican, turned his daughter's picture to the wall.

Publisher. With his wife's financial assistance, Upton Sinclair moved to California in 1915 and set up his private publishing business. Publisher Sinclair now keeps an active list of 42 of his books, tracts, plays. He is often called the best selling U. S. author in Europe. The U. S. S. R. alone has bought some 3,000,000 copies of Sinclairiana. Indeed, Upton Sinclair still believes that a befuddled Nobel Prize Committee had him in mind when it gave the 1930 literature award to onetime Furnaceman Sinclair Lewis.

He has tried all the known diets to rid himself of nervous dyspepsia: vegetarian, raw meat, raw vegetables, nuts. milk. But he could probably subsist on publicity alone. It is meat and drink to him. He is not much of a businessman. In one breath he says that his publishing business brings him in more than the $10,000 salary of California's Governor. In the next he swears he has less than $150 in the bank. Fact is, the Sinclairs are still floundering in insolvency as a result of financing Director Sergei Eisenstein's Thunder Over Mexico, Upton's last interest before founding EPIC.

Man. To be a national sensation once more is felicity's zenith for Upton Sinclair, a fact which neither his enemies nor his friends have properly assayed. He is not a crackpot, but he is inordinately vain. He has not made a livelihood of scandalmongering; he has written because he was hurt. He is not an atheist; he is disgusted by commercialized religion. He is "not a "free-love"' cultist; he is an ascetic. His soft manners, his kindly eye, his intense, humorless and uncritical idealism, his obsession with the struggle of Labor and Capital for the fruits of Industry mark him for the archetype of old-fashioned Socialist. Yet the Socialists have outgrown him and Grade A radicals believe that if EPIC is given a trial, its failure will set U. S. radicalism back 50 years.

*Of these it is estimated that 125,000 are native-born lowans alone.

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