by Jim Newton
In those fervid days, those who came to California to take the measure of its politics and anxieties were sometimes aghast at what they found. Lorena Hickok was an insightful reporter who had made her mark with the Associated Press but left the agency when her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt reached the point that she was forced to choose between that relationship and journalism. Picking Roosevelt, Hickok then joined the administration and was given the job of chronicling the living feel of the Depression for the director of FDR’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Harry Hopkins. Hickok visited some of the nation’s most desperate communities, and on June 27, 1934, she came to Los Angeles. She arrived expecting to find “the blackest spot in the United States” in terms of the relief problem.39 Hickok’s initial impression was that conditions in California might actually be improving. It took just days to change her mind. On July 1, 1934, she wrote to Hopkins after a trip to the Imperial Valley, southeast of Los Angeles. “I returned late last night from a three-day trip into the desert,” she began. “The impressions I have brought back with me are somewhat confused and not too cheerful. They consist of heat, depression, bitterness, more heat, terrible poverty, confusion, heat again, and a passionate longing for some sort of orderly plan for procedure.”40 Traveling through California’s Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys that summer, Hickok winced:
I believe there is some sort of state law in California compelling growers to provide some sort of decent housing and sanitation for the seasonal workers they employ. If there is, it is disregarded. These laborers move in with their families, thousands and thousands of them, living in colonies of tents or shacks built of cardboard . . . with no sanitation whatever. . . . There was a good deal of sickness in some of the camps last winter. They were fertile territory for the Communists.41
In political terms, what Hickok found and what the San Francisco strike proved was the collapse of California’s already shaky political and social center. The tensions between labor and management, between farmers and workers, between the rich and the poor had always tugged at California’s middle. Hiram Johnson had patched them briefly by chasing out big business on behalf of small business, but his reforms had provided political reform and social respite, not genuine social or economic change. Now the social order was challenged by right and left, and the center gave way.
It was in that moment of collapse that Upton Sinclair pressed his campaign. He capitalized on the listlessness of the Democratic Party and reached around it to engage those same desperate people whose plight Hickok documented. Through those months, no other Democrat declared against Sinclair, and few took seriously a campaign with virtually no institutional support—newspapers belittled his effort, Democratic Party leaders ignored it. It was not until late spring that the official Democratic Party awakened to the Sinclair candidacy. Desperately playing catch-up, the Democratic field closed in July with eight candidates, the most notable among them Sinclair; George Creel, a crusading writer who had managed propaganda efforts for Woodrow Wilson and who had attempted to mediate the San Francisco maritime strike; and hotly anti-Communist Justus Wardell.
The furious politics of that summer culminated on August 28, when Sinclair not only won the Democratic primary but also lapped the field. The same candidate who four years earlier had received 50,000 votes for governor as a Socialist now tallied 436,000 as a Democrat. His finish exceeded that of all other Democrats combined, and represented nearly 100,000 votes more than Merriam, the state’s newly ascended but incumbent Republican governor, polled in his primary. By nightfall of the following day, the state Republican Party and some of its Democrats were plotting the end of Upton Sinclair. To accomplish it, they realized, would require a bipartisan effort, one built around fear of Sinclair, since support for his opponent, Merriam, would be hard to muster. It would require new political faces, untainted by Merriam or the politics that Sinclair was challenging. It would require, among others, Earl Warren.
It was a campaign not just to defeat but to destroy Sinclair. It had many tentacles, and Sinclair proved singularly vulnerable. In Hollywood, movie titans were perturbed by his policies—especially his plans for a state-run movie studio—and they also took his challenge personally, in part because of his authorship of Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, which Sinclair self-published in 1933.42 Although just one entry in Sinclair’s extensive list, the book contained much for Hollywood to abhor. It excoriated the financial interests behind the movies, and sneeringly reviewed some of the industry’s captains. It also was laced with passage after passage that seemed to reveal in Sinclair a vulgar anti-Semitism. The book opened with a description of Fox’s “good Jewish nose” and went on, in “reel” after “reel” (Sinclair’s name for the chapters of the book), to suggest that the Jewishness of Hollywood was corrupting, even evil. Sinclair described one figure as “what is known as a ‘Kentucky colonel’; he was born in that state, and does not mention that he is a Jew unless you cross-examine him about it.”43
As Sinclair’s candidacy gained momentum, Hollywood, under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer, moved to protect itself, most notably in the form of a mendacious and effective series of “newsreels” that characterized Sinclair supporters as bums and Communists. Movie theaters were then owned by the studios, and the studios in 1934 ordered them to play the newsreels. In those clips, an interviewer purported to survey Californians on their political views. An elderly woman in one complained that she was voting for Merriam because she could not afford to lose her house. A threadbare man speaking in a distinctly foreign accent, by contrast, said he was for Sinclair. “Vell, his system worked vell in Russia, vy can’t it vork here?” he asked.44 One piece of footage showed derelicts disembarking trains as they arrived in California, flocking in search of Sinclair’s Utopia. The ruse was exposed when viewers recognized some of the bums as Hollywood actors and figured out that the “newsreel” was in fact a discarded piece of footage from a Hollywood picture. The state’s major newspapers were united in their opposition to Sinclair, however, so the truth got little attention.
In the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune, the assault on Sinclair was daily and unyielding. In the Los Angeles Times, it was spiteful. Particularly effective was a series of front-page boxes, each excerpting some offensive piece of Sinclair’s work, though often glaringly out of context. The excerpts ran a few sentences each, beneath a common headline announcing “Sinclair on” the day’s topic—Education, say, or Marriage or Religion or any of his various targets in his many books. Those excerpts were backed up by scathing coverage of his plans and merry attacks on his missteps. On September 26, for instance, Sinclair responded to a question about whether his plan would attract the unemployed to California. “I told Harry Hopkins, the Federal Emergency Relief Administrator, that if I am elected, half the unemployed of the United States will come to California, and he will have to make plans to take care of them,” Sinclair responded.45 He recalled saying it with a laugh. Reported as serious, it became an anvil around his candidacy. The Times ran it on page 1, under the headline “Heavy Rush of Idle Seen by Sinclair,” and reproduced the quote as: “If I’m elected Governor, I expect one-half the unemployed in the United States will hop the first freights for California.”46 Only that day’s other major news story, the pending arraignment of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, kept Sinclair’s comments from getting even bigger play. The Times and the rest of the anti-Sinclair camp made up for that over the next weeks, as they returned to that remark again and again. Billboards and mailers repeated it, and the newsreel shots that featured bums flocking to California were specifically intended to remind viewers of Sinclair’s ill-considered prediction.
Sinclair was a fat target for political attack, but Republicans, in order to wage their campaign well, needed a more presentable front man than Merriam provided. As the campaign reached its critical point, they found him. On September 24, Joe Knowland wrote to a longtime friend in
Southern California, C. C. Teague, to compare notes on the effort to put down the EPIC and its standard-bearer. In his letter, Knowland remarked that he and other Republican leaders, without the consent of Merriam, had settled on a new leader. Earl Warren would now run the party—specifically because he was just what Republicans needed to answer Sinclair. “Earl represents the younger group, and is a man of splendid character,” Knowland wrote, adding that he was “the kind of leader we could well put to the front this year.”47
Warren needed no persuading. Though he bore no personal grudge against Sinclair, the novelist’s candidacy struck deeply at Warren’s sense of order. Sinclair belittled marriage and religion and the clubby gatherings of the well-connected. Those were Warren’s friends. Sinclair spoke to desperate working people and offered to upend society on their behalf; Warren came from people invested in society and appalled by upheaval. Yes, Warren was a Republican and Sinclair a Democrat, but that was not their fundamental difference. Sinclair had been a Democrat for less than a year, and Warren was a Republican mostly by chance. What separated them was their regard for order: Sinclair mocked it; Warren protected it. So Warren assumed the leadership of the California Republican Party and served precisely the function that Knowland had envisioned: He gave the Republican campaign a solid, credible spokesman, a new and persuasive voice.
Arriving in Los Angeles on October 5, Warren warned that Sinclair’s election would represent the end of civilized democracy in California. And he pounced on Sinclair’s prediction that the unemployed would flock to California. “Without waiting for his election, the unemployed and penniless are coming in droves now, and if the movement gains proportion it can’t be stopped,” Warren said. “They will keep on coming without rhyme or reason. I regard that as the great menace of the situation.”48
Thus engaged, Warren stumped hard for Sinclair’s defeat. He gave regular press conferences and issued a stream of statements predicting doom for the state if Sinclair took office. He managed, however, to keep his head. As the election grew nearer, Warren’s statements became more hyperbolic, but he took great care to avoid any appeal to partisanship. “This is no longer a campaign between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party of California,” he said on October 15. “It is a crusade of Americans and Californians against Radicalism and Socialism.”49 A week later, in his first-ever statewide radio address, Warren again reached out to Democrats, acknowledging as he did the oddity of his message:
I am by a strange twist of fate appealing with equal force to Democrats and Republicans to join in the common cause of rescuing our state from the most freakish onslaught that has ever been made upon our long established and revered American institutions of government in the history of our country . . .
This is not a partisan campaign. It is not a contest between Democrats and Republicans. . . . [It] is a simple issue between those who believe in the Constitution of the United States and in our Democratic institutions on the one hand and those who would destroy both in favor of a foreign philosophy of government, half socialistic and half communistic. . . . The battle is between two conflicting philosophies of government—one that is proud of our flag, our governmental institutions and our honored history, the other that glorifies the Red Flag of Russia and hopes to establish on American soil a despotism based upon class hatred and tyranny.50
Nor were Warren’s efforts confined to public appeals. Seeking to build Democratic opposition to Sinclair, Warren arranged for a series of secret payments from the state Republican organization to a Democratic front group, whose headquarters happened to be just down the hall from the GOP offices at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. The full extent of Warren’s support for the Merriam-Hatfield Democratic Club is not recorded, but the general chairman of that group wrote to Warren on October 31, 1934, thanking the Republican chairman for the latest weekly check and expressing confidence that, because of his support, the club was sufficiently funded to make it through election day. At the conclusion of the campaign, the chairman, J. Pendleton Wilson, cabled Warren his appreciation: “The Democrats of California have been proud of the privilege of serving with you in accomplishing a patriotic duty.”51
Warren also lent his support to voter-suppression measures intended to intimidate Sinclair supporters. Through late October and early November, Warren received house-by-house tallies of Alameda voters whom Merriam alleged were illegally registered, and in his capacity as Republican chairman, Warren chastised Sinclair for relying on what Warren described as illegal voters. “My personal respect for Upton Sinclair has abated since he has denounced efforts to purge the rolls,” Warren said. On October 25, Warren, who still held the elected position of Alameda County district attorney, called on all state and county political leaders to join in the effort to “strike the spurious registrations from the records” and suggested that evidence of such fraud be submitted to district attorneys, himself included. 52 The following day, Warren proposed for a statewide conference to purge voting rolls “so that these frauds could be stamped out and that voters not properly qualified shall be kept from the polls.”53
For Warren, aggressiveness was not to be confused with partisanship. He understood that asking voters to reject Sinclair because he was a Democrat could easily backfire, so Warren fended off attempts to rally Republicans as Republicans. On October 29, with National Republican Chairman Henry P. Fletcher preparing to go on nationwide radio, Warren telegrammed to warn him against invoking partisanship in the California governor’s race. “The gubernatorial campaign in California has been organized along non-partisan lines and large number of Democrats have joined with us in support of Gov. Merriam,” Warren wrote. “Our campaign is now in satisfactory condition. We hope that no partisan mention will be made of California’s situation in your broadcasts.”54
On Election Day, Merriam tallied just over 1.1 million votes, outpolling Sinclair’s 879,000. A third candidate, Raymond Haight, received 300,000 votes, enough to keep Merriam from being able to claim a majority for his candidacy. Sinclair was exhausted and now rejected. On Election Night, he arrived at a Beverly Hills radio station as the ballots still were being counted, and angrily discovered that Merriam already was there. Sinclair refused to join his rival on the radio, but spoke after Merriam finished. “My face burns when I think of the lies and forgeries circulated by men with millions to spend to defeat me,” he told that night’s audience. “But it won’t go on. Be of good cheer. We’re not going to stop. This is only one skirmish, and we’re enlisted for the war.”55 Warren, his work completed, was more restrained. He wired his congratulations to Merriam and then went quietly back to work.
Sinclair’s strong showing and the respectable turnout for Haight helped doom Merriam to a short life at the top of California politics. Republican strategists recognized that he could not carry the party forward and began to search for a new leader. The victory was, as Warren noted the day after the election, “a progressive victory . . . non-partisan in character and . . . consistent in every respect with the highest ideals of our American form of government.”56 Merriam was no Progressive—he never would be. Earl Warren was.
Warren’s role in the Sinclair campaign seemed consistent with his prosecution of the IWW, his membership in the Native Sons, and his friendship with Joseph Knowland. To friends as well as critics, Warren appeared firmly set on the much-traveled path to Republican leadership in California, one vested in the state’s business and propertied interests. In fact, however, Warren was subtly creating his own way, under the aegis of the Republican Party but not in its thrall. Warren’s actions were taken not so much in defense of the Republican Party as in defense of what he saw as California’s faltering political center. Since Sinclair offended not Warren’s sense of partisanship but rather his belief in order and reason, Warren struck back in alliance with the state’s right wing. Still, Warren did not oppose Sinclair because he was a Democrat; he did so because he believed—and his friends believed—that Sinclair was a radical.
/> ONCE SINCLAIR was finished, the new state Republican chairman turned at home to the Point Lobos prosecution, still then under way, and within state political circles to the effort to defeat Roosevelt’s reelection. Both undertakings helped affirm for California’s Republican leadership, principally the Chandlers and Knowlands, that Warren was trustworthy. In 1936, as Republican chairman, Warren sealed their loyalty by leading the California Republican Party through a duel between former President Herbert Hoover and self-appointed Republican newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst.
Since his defeat in 1932, Hoover had sulkily returned to Palo Alto, where he plotted a return to national politics. As the party’s nominal leader, Hoover was hard to ignore, but more astute observers realized that his smashing by Roosevelt and association with the Depression made Hoover a sure loser. When he began campaigning to head the California delegation to the 1936 Republican National Convention, party insiders did their best to cut him off.
Hearst, meanwhile, was a latecomer to California politics and to the Republican Party. He had supported FDR in 1932 but quickly lost patience with the president, and now, four years later, schemed to defeat him. Hearst, whose newspaper empire had major outlets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, realized he would have a difficult time winning for himself, but signed up Governor Merriam to head his delegation, reasoning that Merriam would give him a figurehead through which to control the California delegation. Those two camps—Hoover’s and Hearst’s—united the opposition, especially the balance of California’s Republican newspaper baronage. The Chandlers and the Knowlands, as well as their counterparts at the San Francisco Chronicle, could not stomach the ascent of their rival, Hearst, nor could they sanction defeat of the party in order to gratify Hoover. Together with a new moderate group of Republicans known as the California Republican Assembly, they backed a proposal to send an uninstructed delegation to the convention—that is, one that could vote its will, without allegiance either to Merriam or Hearst. The threshold question of who should run that delegation was answered easily enough. They chose Warren.
