After EPIC

At the Los Angeles municipal elections last week, candidates of the End Poverty In California party took a terrific beating, won only four out of 18 contested offices. From San Francisco the conservative Chronicle sardonically observed that in the city where EPIC was founded a year ago the voters were apparently tired of "magic hocus-pocus." But undaunted Upton Sinclair, emerging from several weeks' confinement in a sanitorium, declared: "The outcome of this election will not affect in the least our plans to spread the EPIC movement throughout the country." He promised that an EPIC convention in Los Angeles this week would prepare to put a national ticket in the field next year.

Whether or not EPIC was a going or gone concern, last week's election served to turn the nation's eyes back to the Golden State. What had happened since those hectic days last autumn when fey-eyed Gubernatorial Candidate Sinclair had half the people in his State, and not a few outside, scared to death of his political Utopia (TIME, Oct. 22)? More specifically, what had happened to Republican Frank Finley Merriam, the champion who defeated him?

When Upton Sinclair was campaigning on his EPIC program of State Socialism, panic-stricken capital started flying out of California, the motion picture industry cried "Confiscation!" and announced it would move to Florida if Sinclair won, and the San Francisco Argonaut wailed: "The catastrophe of Sinclair's election would be drastic enough to overthrow all that is fine and good and stable in California life!"

Last week cries of the same distressed timbre were howling around the head of victorious Governor Merriam. The army of itinerant jobless from other states, first attracted to California by EPIC's glittering promises, had mounted to 75,000. Agitator Harry Bridges, the tough little Australian who promoted the San Francisco general walkout, was busy agitating longshoremen's strikes. Closer to home, Opposition legislators were bent on starting a move to have Governor Merriam recalled as soon as the six months' legal period of grace had elapsed following his inauguration. But the biggest headache of all for Governor Merriam was the problem of raising funds to meet the $347,000,000 California budget, swollen by mounting relief costs.

Frank Merriam is a moon-faced lowan who crept into Sacramento as Lieutenant Governor in 1930, succeeded to the Governorship when "Sunny Jim" Rolph died last year and black-jacked California's influential Republicans into nominating him against Sinclair by threatening to withhold State troops from the San Francisco strike last summer. He is an arch political trimmer, paying harmless lip service to the Townsend Plan and at the same time complaining to his capitalist supporters that he is surrounded by fanatics. But even Frank Merriam could not trim the fact that California desperately needed revenue.

To raise this revenue the California Legislature has under consideration a State income tax stiffer than any other in the land. Basic schedule is 33% of the Federal rate. But severe levies on unearned increment jack up the rate in some brackets as high as the Federal tax. The "radical" Assembly, where a small bloc of EPIC legislators controls the Democratic minority, passed the tax bill recently, 70-to-5. Even though a safely conservative Senate was expected to modify the measure, Governor Merriam has come in for a prodigious amount of kicking around by the Hearst Press (whose master at San Simeon would be caught squarely by the tax), industrialists and rich folk in general. Screamed the Hearst San Francisco Examiner last week: "Extortionate and confiscatory taxation will mean . . . devastation of business, paralysis of industry. . . ." Again the motion picture industry has threatened to move out, and assorted tycoons are talking about emigrating to Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, anywhere. Two nationally famous Californians have grown particularly articulate. Wrote Novelist Charles Gilman Norris (Bread, Seed, Pig Iron) in a letter which was printed in California papers of the sympathetic Hearst chain.

"It may or may not interest the legislating gentlemen assembled now in Sacramento to know that the minute the proposed State Income Tax becomes law, my wife, Kathleen Norris, and myself will put both our homes--the one in Palo Alto and our ranch near Saratoga--up for sale and move out of the State. There is no alternative for us. We pay 52% of our income now to the Federal Government at Washington and under the proposed State Income Tax Law, we shall have to pay an additional 18%, so that out of every dollar we earn from our writings, 70-c- will go out in taxes! . . .*

"No doubt there are some people in this State who still go to New York and possibly to Paris to buy their clothes. We don't. We buy them and everything we need and want right here in San Francisco. Mrs. Norris gets all her dresses, hats and personal clothing at either I. Magnin & Co. or at Ransohoff's. Gentlemen, close our account.

"Drive us out of the State, gentlemen of the legislature! You can drive us out physically, perhaps, but you can't drive our hearts away, and the time will surely come when the right-thinking people of California will drive you out of office! In the fall of 1920, I remember exclaiming joyfully: 'California, Here We Come!' Now it is: 'California, Here We Go!'"

The Argonaut simultaneously performed a miraculous journalistic somersault. The paper which had hailed Governor Merriam last autumn as "a symbol of strength, progress and stability of traditional growth" now declared: "Would Upton Sinclair have done worse in the gubernatorial chair than the man who defeated him? It may well be doubted. He might even have done better, for he has an atom or two of genius in his composition while all one can discern in Merriam is cobwebs from an empty skull. Heaven help us before we perish from the folly of having chosen such a man as Governor!"

*The San Francisco News went to algebra to discover that if the Norrises pay 52% of their annual income to the Federal Government, that income must be "in the neighborhood of $200,000 a year," that the proposed State tax would reduce their net to $60,000--"really a shame."

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