How They Killed Upton Sinclair

Abstract

On August 28, 1934, Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle and forty-six other books, won the Democratic primary for governor of California, defeating the favored gubernatorial candidate of the party regulars, George Creel, by 150,000 votes and accumulating a larger vote total than his eight competitors combined. He had campaigned on a program to End Poverty in California-dubbed EPIC-at the core of which was the premise that the great number of California farms and factories that lay idle in the Depression had failed because they were devoted to for profit. Sinclair proposed to integrate the farms and factories into a system of colonies committed to what he called production for use; the unemployed would consume what they produced, and any surplus in one colony would be exchanged for surplus goods from others. The rest of the EPIC program comprised a medley of redistributive measures, including a progressive income tax, steeper inheritance taxes, property tax exemptions for owner-occupied homes and farms valued at less than three thousand dollars, and a pension of fifty dollars a month for, among others, all needy people over sixty who had resided in the state at least three years. With some half a million Californians unemployed, the EPIC idea had spread like fire in the chaparral, and nearly fifty EPIC-backed candidates had won Democratic party nomination for seats in the state senate and assembly. Sinclair's primary victory stunned much of the state's political establishment and sent a shiver through its body politic. Although Republicans had won every governor's race in California since 1899, the number of registered Democrats there had been rapidly overtaking the number of registered Republicans and, not least because of EPIC enthusiasts, the Democratic party rolls had swelled by 350,000 in the first six months of 1934 alone. Some 25,000 more votes had been cast in the Democratic primary than in the Republican one. Moreover, Republican votes were expected to go in the general election