Socialism which was creative is stunned, and Communism, which is the sabotage of civilisation by the disappointed, has usurped its name and inheritance … The new Marxist Socialism, therefore, with its confident dogmas, its finality and hardness, its vindictive will, developed an intensity and energy that drowned and almost silenced the broader, more tentative, and scientific initiatives of the older, the legitimate Socialism. Communism, with its class-war obsession, ate up Socialism.3
The socialism of Sinclair and Wells was “progressive”—the term means social change by progressive stages of education and gradual political conversion, as opposed to the violent revolutionary change sought by Marxist theory. Progressivism fit very comfortably with the liberal orientation of the Democratic Party platform; Sinclair switched his party affiliation on September 1, 1933,4 changing his techniques, he said, but not his principles: “I found I was not getting any where as a Socialist,” he explained to an unbylined journalist for Time magazine, “and so I decided to make progress with one of the two old parties.”5 “What we want and must have is a movement based upon American conditions and speaking the American language.”6 He would campaign on a statewide version of a people’s cooperative program advocated by Governor Olson of Minnesota.7 Sinclair called his program EPIC—“End Poverty in California.”
The EPIC plan called for the State of California to use its credit to buy up repossessed and abandoned factories and farms and employ the hundreds of thousands of out-of-work men. Their first job would be to produce the goods they needed to live. Anything they produced over subsistence, they were welcome to sell on the open market. Governor Olson’s version would phase out private firms and all production for profit; Sinclair acknowledged that his EPIC Production-for-Use colonies would probably outcompete private production, but he stopped short of open advocacy of replacing capitalism altogether.
Traditional businessmen, already hard-hit by the collapsing economy, hated the idea of state-financed competition. But something had to be done: the problem of “relief” was overwhelming the resources of the state. As the Depression closed down industries all over the country, desperate families pulled up stakes and went west looking for jobs. By 1934 there were a million unemployed in California. Sinclair’s EPIC plan would make the relief problem self-liquidating at a start-up cost of $300 million. Sinclair called it “relief to end relief.”
The ordinary citizens of California supported EPIC with its sane, commonsensical “Production-for-Use” (and not for profit) motto. Relief to end relief sounded like just the solution California needed. But the newspapers in the state, all loyal to the traditional business interests upon whom they depended for advertising, ignored Sinclair completely; few would even acknowledge EPIC activities.
Sinclair started a newspaper of his own in December 1933 to get his message out. Every week he wrote an editorial for EPIC News, and then a series of pamphlets explaining the EPIC program.
The Democratic Party grass roots turned out in 1934 in support of EPIC. Just four years earlier, Republicans had outnumbered Democrats in California by a margin of three to one; Sinclair’s EPIC effort registered 330,000 Democrats, bringing the Democratic Party into parity with Republicans for the first time in California history.
And just in time: in July 1934, just as Heinlein’s Colorado mining venture was collapsing, California’s Governor Frank Merriam called out the National Guard to put down the Maritime Strike in San Francisco after the San Francisco police had intervened against the striking Longshoremen’s Union, using clubs, the new tear gas, and even guns. The strikers fought back with guns and clubs of their own and called a (successful) general strike in San Francisco.
The Longshoremen’s Union strike made national, and then international, headlines (and eventually made it into the history books). Liberals and progressives were outraged: conservative Republicans were making war on American citizens.
By August 1934, the Heinleins must already have been planning to return to Leslyn’s home base in Southern California when his medical retirement came through. They arrived on August 8, three weeks before the Democratic Party primary. Apparently they had not moved their voter registration to Colorado: they were eligible to vote in the primary on August 28, 1934.
The voters surprised everyone: not only was Sinclair nominated for the governorship, there were nearly fifty successful EPIC and EPIC-supported candidates for the state legislature. Sinclair’s nine months of outreach to the grass roots had convinced the new Democrat voters—and a good number of Republicans, as well—that he was no wild-eyed radical, but an honest man reasonably trying to find a humane solution to keeping their unfortunate neighbors alive without taxation eating them alive. Hundreds of chapters of Sinclair’s End Poverty League sprang up throughout California—each an entirely local effort supported and directed by local residents.
In time, there would be two thousand chapters, and the End Poverty League paralleled the Democratic Party’s local club apparatus as a shadow organization. EPIC News grew a reader base of two million (in a state whose total population at the time was six million).
The morning after the 1934 Democratic primary, the state’s major newspapers—all controlled by conservative Republicans—raised an alarm. The Los Angeles Times railed against Sinclair’s “maggot-like horde of followers.” 8 After a statewide radio address explaining the essentials of EPIC to the voters, Sinclair boarded a train to Hyde Park, New York, to get Franklin Roosevelt’s endorsement and then on to Washington, D.C., to discuss EPIC and the New Deal with key figures in the administration.
Under ordinary circumstances, the Democratic National Committee would automatically endorse the party’s nominee in California—but these were not ordinary times. President Roosevelt had spent a great deal of political capital getting his New Deal program legislated, and he was politically vulnerable at the moment.
When faced with a political hot potato, Roosevelt’s personal style was to temporize, do nothing to cut down his options, and let things sort themselves out. He had a pleasant meeting with Sinclair and vaguely suggested he might have something to say to Sinclair’s taste in one of his monthly radio talks late in October. Sinclair was not experienced enough to realize that he had been put off: he thought Roosevelt was offering to endorse the EPIC candidacy. He went back to California to face the storm, for the political establishment in California, Democrat as well as Republican, was determined to get Sinclair at all costs. Democrats even set up pro-Merriam organizations within the Democratic Party. And the party fund-raisers stayed away in droves.
EPIC had been self-funded from the grass roots up; it would continue as it had begun. Sinclair charged seventy-five cents for admission to their rallies (the equivalent, in 1934 dollars, of two pounds of butter, a pound of beef, or four gallons of gasoline, or, another way of measuring it: dinner for a family of three or four), and each ticket holder was pledged to bring in ten more. This was something people wanted, and they would support it with their Widow’s Mites if necessary. Sinclair also passed the hat in audiences gathered to hear live broadcasts of his radio speeches. It was nickels and dimes—but nickels and dimes were the people’s voice.
Both Robert and Leslyn were radical liberals who might have gone to work for Uppie (as the newspapers labeled him when they were forced to notice him at all) in any case. But the unfairness of the opposition must have rankled. Anybody in downtown Los Angeles, where EPIC had its headquarters, could see “Red Dollars” passed from hand to hand—fake dollar bills printed in commie red ink and labeled “SincLIAR,” issued by the “Uppie and Downey Bank” (Sheridan Downey had beat William Jennings Bryan, Jr., for the Lieutenant Governor’s race and so was Sinclair’s running mate). That might have been amusing in a heavy-handed sort of way, but the film studio heads Jack Warner and Irving Thalberg threatened to move the film industry out of state if Sinclair were elected, and that was obvious foolishness: they had too heavy an investment in land and capital in Southern California to just up a
nd abandon. By mid-September, this was being acknowledged even by studio flacks, who were trying out the alternative notion that the film industry might simply collapse if Sinclair went into competition, making films with the unemployed.
Late in September, the Los Angeles Times escalated its attacks on Sinclair: the paper began running a daily front-page bold-outlined box with the most extreme quotations the editors could find from Sinclair’s inflammatory writings, sometimes liberally altered or taken out of context, in an effort to discredit him with conservative voters. Many of the quotes were taken from his 1917 diatribe against the Catholic Church, The Profits of Religion. At first Sinclair was delighted: there is a saying in the PR game that any publicity is good publicity. But after a few days he got it: “It is impossible,” he said on seeing one particularly outrageous quote, “that the voters will elect a man who has written that!” It gradually became clear to Sinclair that if he were defeated, the main reason would be that he had written too many books, too sarcastically.
Then, on September 24, EPIC got its first positive press coverage: The Huntington Park Signal broke a story about the anti-Sinclair propaganda campaign being mounted by the California Newspaper Publishers Association.
But external enemies was not Sinclair’s problem: on a train trip back from a rally in San Francisco, he told reporters he expected half the unemployed in the country to come to California if he won. The Los Angeles Times led with the story in the morning editions on September 27: EPIC was going to double the population of the state by attracting bums. Sinclair tried to spin it less damagingly, quipping, “For the first in history the Los Angeles Times is willing to state the number of our unemployed, and even to exaggerate it!”9 He added that what he meant was that the unemployed always came to California in the winter—there was less chance of freezing to death. But it didn’t help.
The anti-Sinclair campaign was escalating and getting more vicious: newly settled down in an apartment at 905 North La Jolla in what is now the City of West Hollywood, Robert and Leslyn must have received one of the direct-mail circulars ridiculing the “SEPTIC Plan—Soak Every Possible Taxpayer in California.” Robert was probably at home, sick with what he was afraid might be a relapse of TB. If he got out at all, he might have seen for himself anti-Sinclair forces downtown, shoving cards into people’s hands printed with a poem titled “The Ipecac Plan: Out of the Moscow Medicine Chest.”
That might have been the final straw for Robert Anson Heinlein: he decided to put his socialist principles to work for the faith-of-his-father Democratic Party. Late in September, he volunteered and wound up at the main Los Angeles office, the headquarters for the entire statewide EPIC campaign.10
Heinlein must have caused something of a stir in the always shorthanded EPIC main office: after a short interview, “to my utter amazement and confusion, I found myself in charge of seven precincts.”
The dirty anti-Sinclair campaign continued to escalate: on October 4, the California Real Estate Association held its annual convention in Santa Barbara and abandoned its thirty-year tradition of political noninvolvement. H. G. Wells, a few years before, had praised the trend toward these semiprofessional organizations as part of the socialist-progressive “rephrasing of human life.”11 Now, the Realtors’ president, Robert A. Swink, declared war on Sinclair. First, he set up a “Merriam for Governor” organization and prepared to print four hundred thousand posters and bulletins as part of a massive campaign of disinformation: “Sinclair will seize homes; warn clients to not look at homes until after November election.” The situation was so desperate, Swink told them, that their only option as True Americans was a selfinduced real-estate crash—their own Valley Forge. The next morning, the Los Angeles Times struck the same pseudopatriotic note in an editorial titled “Stand Up and Be Counted.” EPIC, the Times said, represented “a threat to Sovietize California.” Defeating Sinclair was the plain patriotic duty of every Californian.
Calling on phony patriotism to misrepresent and crush liberals and progressives must have turned Heinlein’s stomach—but it may also have given him an idea: there was no reason he could not sell real estate.12 It would be an ideal solution to his job problem: he could work for himself—and it would be at least a minor help to the EPIC campaign to get the truth to prospective buyers.
The trouble with a career in real estate was, of course, the same as everyone’s troubles: it was the middle of the Depression, and real estate wasn’t moving. With the help of his Navy pension, he and Leslyn could survive while the business was ramping up—and work very, very hard at EPIC. He borrowed money wherever he could and juggled his debts to keep himself and Leslyn afloat.13
President Roosevelt’s monthly Fireside Chat on September 30, 1934, made no mention of EPIC or Production-for-Use. A nerve-racking textile workers’ strike had just been settled, and he called for a truce between Capital and Labor while the New Deal’s NRA agency sorted things out.
EPIC needed that endorsement: by the middle of October, United for California was mailing half a million flyers and brochures targeted by issue to every household in the state and producing radio programs designed by the advertising firm of Lord & Taylor.
Louis B. Mayer at the MGM studios—he was also the state Republican Party chairman—levied a “Merriam Tax” on every studio employee. The big stars were sent a blank check and told to make it out to one of the anti-Sinclair front organizations; the technical and administrative people were simply docked a day’s pay.
Not all the stars went along. Katharine Hepburn made the news by resisting (though her father stated in a filmed interview that she would never consider voting for Sinclair). Jean Harlow and James Cagney (who styled himself a “professional againster”) refused point-blank. Cagney told EPIC journalist Frank Scully that if Mayer forced the issue, he would donate a week’s pay to Sinclair.
Merriam himself had almost nothing to do with any of the activities on his behalf: he was regarded even by Republicans as a windbag without any personal charisma, and the anti-Sinclair forces didn’t want Merriam anywhere near their carefully crafted campaign. Already Republicans around the state were saying they would “hold their noses and vote for Merriam.”
Outside of California, things were not so grim. When the October 17, 1934, issue of Time magazine came out, Upton Sinclair was on the cover, dukes up in a boxer’s stance. The interior article was more or less fair. The vested interests hate him, Time said: “Fact is, Upton Sinclair is as American as pumpkin pie … an ordinary old-fashioned socialist who looks like Henry Ford gone slightly fey.”14 On October 22, EPIC News was able to lead with an endorsement of Sinclair from President Roosevelt’s main political “fixer,” James A. Farley. President Roosevelt still hadn’t said anything. The next day (October 23, 1934), Heywood Broun, another writer for the Scripps-Howard papers, denounced the dirty tricks and “willful fraud” of the anti-Sinclair forces in The New York World-Telegram. The New York Times sent Turner Catledge to cover the campaign from California. Catledge could not find a single mention of EPIC events in the Los Angeles Times and asked the Los Angeles Times’s political editor, Kyle Palmer, why that was. “We don’t go in for that kind of crap you have in New York,” Palmer told him, “of being obliged to print both sides. We’re going to beat this son-of-a-bitch Sinclair any way we can. We’re going to kill him.”15
Heinlein was elected to the West Hollywood Democratic Club’s board of directors. West Hollywood was then just a political subdivision—a subdivision of a subdivision, since Hollywood is also just a geographical area in Los Angeles. His new, higher-profile position put him in contact with local Hollywood celebrities. He had known many stars and studio personalities socially from his days on Lexington and was not overwhelmed by celebrity—but trying to run an active political organization was an entirely different matter: people like James Cagney and Dorothy Parker (he had met her in New York four years earlier but did not then come to know her well) were laws unto themselves. Sometimes he must have longed
for the simpler certitudes of the merely corrupt Pendergast operation.
United for California was the real powerhouse of the anti-Sinclair forces. It had collected a war chest estimated at $7.5 million—a sum fabulous and almost unbelievable in politics in 1934—and was spending it lavishly, erecting two thousand highway billboards, mailing out millions of pieces of direct-mail advertising targeted to groups as well as individuals, creating and sponsoring radio programs, and mounting lawsuits. United for California filed a lawsuit alleging that huge numbers of the new Democratic voter registrations were fraudulent.
Roosevelt’s October Fireside Chat came and went, with no mention of Sinclair or Production-for-Use. Sinclair never got an endorsement from President Roosevelt (since the New Deal was going to go through with or without California’s support). James Farley rapidly backpedaled from his endorsement.
Heinlein’s hands-on political experience was based in Kansas City’s ward system, and his manual of grassroots politicking, How to Be a Politician, shows the legacy of Jim Pendergast: the most essential element in a successful political organization, he said, is direct personal contact.16 EPIC workers should walk the precincts in the district, talking with every single voter in every house. That personal contact could be the tiny nudge that would push an uncommitted voter over to their side. The schedule was multiply redundant where he could manage it, and Heinlein indicates in his advice to aspiring grassroots politicians that he oversaw the canvass himself, from the field, as he knew you can’t manage effectively when your people know they have to do the drudge work you are not willing to do yourself. There is no substitute for pushing doorbells.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 22
