A new film about ’30s Hollywood reminds us of the first truly modern campaign—whose target was California gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair.
Six weeks later, on August 28, 1934, Upton Sinclair swept the Democratic primary, defeating George Creel (Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda chief during World War I), and all hell broke loose, around the state then across the continent. The Los Angeles Times denounced Sinclair’s “maggot-like horde” of supporters, and the Hearst press was no kinder. Earl Warren, the Alameda County district attorney, warned that the state was about to be overcome by communism, and movie moguls threatened to move back East, probably to Florida—hell, there was already a city named Hollywood there—if Sinclair took office.
Sinclair, author of The Jungle and dozens of other books, had created a crisis not just for his state but the entire nation by embracing FDR’s New Deal while also leading a grassroots movement called EPIC (End Poverty in California). “Upton Sinclair has been swallowing quack cures for all the sorrows of mankind since the turn of the century,” his friend H.L. Mencken explained, “is at it again in California, and on such a scale that the whole country is attracted by the spectacle.” Sinclair was also California’s first celebrity politician, long before Ronald Reagan. 515504750
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.”
The prospect of a socialist governing the nation’s most volatile state sparked nothing less than a revolution in American politics. Media experts, hired by the GOP or newly-formed front groups such as United for California and the California League Against Sinclairism, made unprecedented use of film, radio, direct mail, and opinion polls. National fund-raising reputedly produced a record $10 million, and off the books.
