Birth of Media Politics

By: Greg Mitchell A lengthy, and quite unexpected, feature on my old friend Upton Sinclair turned up in The New York Times today, a tribute to his ?Lanny Budd? series of novels by Julie Salamon. She recalls first coming across the eleven volumes, written mainly during the 1940s, at the age of 12 back in Ohio, and only recently rediscovering them. While the piece, of course, recognizes his most famous book, ?The Jungle,? it does not mention the most exciting and bizarre ?muckraking? episode of his life, his nearly successful campaign for governor of California.

Well, it does, sort of. The photo of Sinclair on the front page of the Weekend Arts section that accompanies the story comes from 1933, the caption notes. But it does not reveal that the photo, taken on the porch of his temporary home in Beverly Hills (he normally lived in Pasadena) was snapped during his race for governor.

The caption for another photo of Sinclair on the jump page indicates it was taken in 1942, but this is plainly wrong. That portrait was already widely reprinted during the 1934 campaign.

Still, I'm pleased that good old Uppie is getting some prominent attention, if partly for self-serving reasons. I wrote a book about the epic 1934 race, ?The Campaign of the Century,? published by Random House in 1992. A musical (yes, you read that right) based on the book will be featured in The New York Musical Theatre Festival this September, starring Tony Award winner Michael Rupert as Uppie.

But no, old as I am, I did not know Sinclair personally, although I did interview his son and many others associated with him.

So, to put my own spin on the Sinclair revival, here is a short narrative on that 1934 campaign, revealing that newspapers played a pivotal role in what I called ?the birth of the modern media campaign.?

On August 28, 1934, Upton Sinclair swept the Democratic primary for governor of California, and all hell broke loose, across the state, then across the continent. On the day after, the Los Angeles Times, under Harry Chandler, 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 the movie studios threatened to move back east if Sinclair took office.

But Sinclair, author of "The Jungle" and dozens of other muckraking books, had created a crisis not just for his home 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: before Arnold, before Sonny, before Ronnie.

The prospect of a socialist governing the nation's most volatile state sparked nothing less than a revolution in American politics. With an assist from Hollywood, and leading newspapers, Sinclair's opponents virtually invented the modern media campaign.

It marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, "in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor," Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has observed. In another twenty years, these techniques would spread east, "achieve a new refinement," Schlesinger added, "and begin to dominate the politics of the nation."

The 1934 governor's race, in short, showed the candidates the way from the smoke-filled room to Madison Avenue, from the party boss to the "spin doctor."

Media experts, making unprecedented use of film, radio, direct mail, opinion polls, and national fund-raising, devised the most astonishing (and astonishingly clever) smear campaign ever directed against a major candidate. "Many American campaigns have been distinguished by dirty tactics," columnist Heywood Broun commented, "but I can think of none in which willful fraud has been so brazenly practiced."

It mattered little that Sinclair's opponent, Governor Frank Merriam, was an "ox," as Westbrook Pegler put it or, in the words of Mencken, "a hack politician of the hollowest sort."

The political innovation that produced the strongest impact was the manipulation of moving pictures. Alarmed by the Sinclair threat, MGM's Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg produced fake newsreels, using Hollywood actors. W.R. Hearst helped distribute them. For the first time, the screen was used to demolish a candidate, a precursor of political attack ads on television.

At the same time, Sinclair's candidacy bewitched and bewildered President Roosevelt, less than two years into his New Deal and still struggling to achieve his aims. If he endorsed Sinclair, FDR's critics would accuse him of supporting socialism; if he didn't endorse his party's candidate, some of his friends might call him a coward. Mencken said he preferred Sinclair to Roosevelt and hoped Upton would win, for "it is always amusing to see a utopian in office."

Throughout the autumn this drama (often a circus) played out across California, with everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Ty Cobb taking part. No institution dishonored itself quite like the California press, dominated by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the Hearst papers, north and south. One anecdote that illustrates this:

In October that year, The New York Times' star reporter Turner Catledge (later top editor of the paper) came to California to cover the campaign. Naturally, he hooked up with the Los Angeles Times' bad-boy political editor Kyle Palmer, who pretty much ran the state and every four years selected its chief executive: hence his nickname, "The Little Governor."

The L.A. Times had been lampooning Sinclair in word, deed, and political cartoon for weeks on an unprecedented scale. To add insult to injury, Palmer was advising, even writing speeches for, Sinclair's opponent. Over dinner, Catledge asked Palmer why the paper refused to be fair and balanced in covering the campaign.

"Turner, forget it," Palmer replied. "We don't go in for that kind of crap that you have back in New York-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."

And so they did. Sinclair's huge lead evaporated (especially after those fake newsreels hit the screen), FDR refused to save him, and Governor Merriam won re-election. And a newspaper man, Kyle Palmer, continued to rule California politics for decades.