14 Epic
I
I come now to one of the great adventures of my life: the EPIC campaign. There had come one of those periods in American history known as a “slump,” or, more elegantly, a “depression.” The cause of this calamity is obvious—the mass of the people do not get sufficient money to purchase what modern machinery is able to produce. You cannot find this statement in any capitalist newspaper, but it is plain to the mind of any wide-awake child. The warehouses are packed with goods, and nobody is buying them; this goes on until those who still have money have bought and used up the goods; so then we have another boom and then another bust. This has gone on all through our history and will go on as long as the necessities of our lives are produced on speculation and held for private profit.
Now we had a bad slump, and Franklin Roosevelt was casting about for ways to end it. In the state of California, which had a population of seven million at the time, there were a million out of work, public-relief funds were exhausted, and people were starving. The proprietor of a small hotel down at the beach asked me to come and meet some of his friends, and I went. His proposal was that I should resign from the Socialist Party and join the Democratic Party, and let them put me up as a candidate for governor at the coming November election. They had no doubt that if I would offer a practical program I would capture the Democratic nomination at the primaries, which came in the spring. I told them that I had retired from politics and promised my wife to be a writer. But they argued and pleaded, pointing out the terrible conditions all around them; I promised to think it over and at least suggest a program for them.
To me the remedy was obvious. The factories were idle, and the workers had no money. Let them be put to work on the state’s credit and produce goods for their own use, and set up a system of exchange by which the goods could be distributed. “Production for Use” was the slogan, and I told my new friends about it. They agreed to every one of my suggestions but one—that they should get somebody else to put forward the program and run for governor.
I talked it over with my dear wife, who as usual was horrified; but the more I thought about it, the more interested I became, and finally I thought that at least I could change my registration and become a Democrat—quietly. It was a foolish idea, but I went ahead; and, of course, some reporter spotted my name and published the news. Then, of course, Craig found out and I got a mighty dressing down.
A great many people got after me, and the result was I agreed to run for the nomination at the primaries. I didn’t think I could possibly win, and I was astonished by the tidal wave that came roaring in and gathered me up. I had no peace from then on; I carried the Democratic primary with 436,000 votes, a majority over the total cast for the half dozen other candidates.
So I had to go through with it, and Craig, according to her nature, had to back me. She would hate it for every minute of the whole campaign and afterward; but once I had committed myself, I was honor-bound, and quitting would be cowardice. There are no cowards in Mississippi.
II
Some months earlier I had made the acquaintance of a young man of some wealth who had established a Bellamy Society and had printed an edition of Bellamy’s charming Parable of the Water Tank. Now I went to him and served notice that he had to be my campaign manager. I don’t know what his wife thought of that, but I know that he dropped everything and gave his heart, his mind, and a lot of his money to that tremendous political fight. Richard S. Otto was his name, and the name of the movement was EPIC—End Poverty in California. It was a wonderful title, and went all over the world.
We had moved from our Long Beach cottage back to Pasadena, and now we had to move from Pasadena because so many people had got our address and gave us no peace. We bought on mortgage a home in Beverly Hills, where we fondly thought we could hide. I had an elderly woman secretary, and was using her little front room as an office. Now Dick Otto moved the EPIC movement into that little front room, and presently the elderly secretary had to find a new home and leave the whole cottage to EPIC.
It wasn’t long before Dick had to hunt up a bigger place; he moved three or four times and at the end leased a whole office building. People came from all over the state, and brought funds when they had any; if they had none, they offered their time, often when they had nothing to eat. The movement spread like wildfire—quite literally that. The old-men politicians were astonished, and the newspapers, which had kept silent as long as they dared, had to come out and fight it in the open.
As for me, it meant dropping everything else, and turning myself into a phonograph to be set up on a platform to repeat the same speech in every city and town of California. At first I traveled by myself and had many adventures, some of them amusing, others less so. I had an old car, which had a habit of breaking down, and I would telephone to the speech place to come and get me. Once I was late and was driving fast, and I heard a siren behind me; of course, I stopped and told my troubles to the police officer. He looked at my driver’s license before he said anything; then, “Okay, Governor, I’ll take you.” So I rode with a police escort blazing a mighty blast and clearing traffic off one of the main highways of central California. The phonograph arrived, and the speech was made!
I am joking about its being the same speech, because as a matter of fact something kept turning up and had to be dealt with. Our enemies continually thought up new charges, and I had to answer them. I would try to get them to come and debate with me, but I cannot recall one that ever accepted. That doesn’t mean that I was a great orator, it simply means that I had the facts on my side, and the facts kept on growing more and more terrifying. The Republican opposition had no program—it never does, because there is no way to defend idle factories and workers locked out to starve. We have the same situation now, as I write, in 1962; but we don’t quite let them starve, we give them a stingy “relief”—and they can thank EPIC for that, though they do not know it.
III
Self-help co-operatives had sprung up all over the state, and of course that was “production for use,” and those people automatically became EPIC’S.
Our opponents would not debate; however, there were challenges from the audience, and now and then I would invite the man up to the platform and let him ask his question and present his case. That was fair play, and pleased the audience. There were always communists, and several times they showered down leaflets from the gallery. They called EPIC “one more rotten egg from the blue buzzard’s nest.” (The “blue buzzard” was the communists’ name for the New Deal’s “blue eagle.”) When the shower fell, I would ask someone in the audience to bring me a leaflet, and I would read the text and give my answer. It was a simple one: We wanted to achieve our purpose by the American method of majority consent. We might not win, but if we cast a big vote we would force the Roosevelt administration to take relief measures, and we would have made all America familiar with the idea of production for use; both these things we most certainly did.
That campaign went on from May to November, and the news of it went all over the United States and even further. We had troubles, of course—arguments and almost rows at headquarters. I would be called in to settle them, but all I told anybody was to do what Dick Otto said. That brave fellow stood everything that came, including threats to kill him. There was only one thing he needed, he said, and that was my support. More important yet, he had Craig’s. She never went near the headquarters, but when I was on the road, she spoke for me—over the telephone.
Sometimes she went to meetings that were not too far away. She always sat back toward the rear and was seldom recognized. At the outset of the campaign, at a meeting in a church, she observed that everybody sat still, and it occurred to her to applaud something I had said; instantly the audience woke up, and the applause became continuous. That was a trick she did not forget.
We had an eight-page weekly paper called the EPIC News, and I had to write an editorial for it every week, and answer our enemies and keep our organizers and workers all over the state alive to the situation. Sometimes Craig wrote for that.
A big advertising concern had been hired to defeat EPIC. They made a careful study of everything I had written, and they took passages out of context and even cut sentences off in the middle to make them mean the opposite of what I had written. They had had an especially happy time with The Profits of Religion. I received many letters from agitated old ladies and gentlemen on the subject of my blasphemy. “Do you believe in God?” asked one; and then the next question, “Define God.” I have always answered my letters, and the answer to question one was “Yes,” and the answer to question two was “The Infinite cannot be defined.” There wasn’t the least trouble in finding quotations from both the Old and New Testaments that sounded like EPIC, and it wasn’t necessary to garble them.
IV
When we carried the primaries, we were the Democratic Party of California, and under the law we had a convention in Sacramento—the state capital. I remember that Mrs. Gartz came with us to that convention. Craig had been too busy to manage her now, and another lady as large and stout as Mrs. Gartz had gotten hold of her. This lady had herself nominated as EPIC candidate from her assembly district; also she had a son and was frantically beseeching me to make him state commissioner of education. She owned a half-dozen houses in California and rented them, and had the wonderful idea that all homes should be exempt from taxation. Poor Mrs. Gartz never knew what was being done to her, and at the convention I had to tell those two large ladies to go back to their seats and let me alone. The upshot was that Mrs. Gartz’s daughter took her for a trip around the world until the EPIC nightmare was over.
Halfway through the campaign I wrote a little dramatic skit called Depression Island. I imagined three men cast away on a small island, with nothing to eat but coconuts. One was a businessman, and in the process of trading he got all the coconuts and trees into his possession. Then he became the capitalist and compelled the other two to work for him on a scanty diet of coconuts. When the capitalist had accumulated enough coconuts for all his possible needs, he told the other two that there were “hard times.” He was sorry about it, but there was nothing he could do; coconuts were overproduced, and the other two fellows were out of jobs.
But the other two didn’t starve gracefully. They organized themselves into a union and also a government, and passed laws providing for public ownership of the coconut trees. The little drama carefully covered every point in the national situation, and nobody in that EPIC audience could fail to get the idea.
A group of our EPIC supporters in Hollywood undertook to put on the show in the largest auditorium available. I went to see Charlie Chaplin, who said he would come and speak at the affair—something he had never been known to do previously. I remember trying to persuade several rich people to put up rent for the auditorium. I forget who did, but there was a huge crowd, and nobody failed to learn the geography lesson—location of Depression Island on the map.
V
In the month of October, not long before election day, I made a trip to New York and Washington. I stopped off at Detroit and visited Father Coughlin, a political priest who had tremendous influence at that time. I told him our program, and he said he endorsed every bit of it. I asked him to say so publicly, and he said he would; but he didn’t. He publicly condemned some of the very things he had approved, and he denied that he had given his approval.
In New York, of course, there were swarms of reporters. EPIC had gone all over the country by that time. I had an appointment with President Roosevelt at Hyde Park. It was five o’clock one afternoon, and some friends drove me up there. The two hours I spent in the big study of that home were among the great moments of my life. That wonderfully keen man sat and listened while I set forth every step of the program, and he checked them off one after the other and called them right. Then he gave me the pleasure of hearing his opinion of some of his enemies. At the end he told me that he was coming out in favor of production for use. I said, “If you do, Mr. President, it will elect me.”
“Well,” he said, “I am going to do it”; and that was that. But he did not do it.
I went to Washington to interview some of Roosevelt’s cabinet members and get their support if I could. Harry Hopkins promised us everything in his power if we got elected. Harold Ickes did the same—the whole United States Treasury, no less. Also, I spent an evening with Justice Louis Brandeis—but he couldn’t promise me the whole Supreme Court.
I addressed a luncheon of the National Press Club, and that was an interesting adventure. There were, I should guess, a couple hundred correspondents of newspapers all over the country, and indeed all over the world. I talked to them for half an hour or so, and then they plied me with questions for an hour or two more. I was told afterwards that they were astonished by my mastery of the subject and my readiness in facing every problem. They failed to realize the half year of training I had received in California. I can say there wasn’t a single question they asked me that I hadn’t answered a score of times at home. I not only knew the answers, but I knew what the audience response would be.
I had all the facts on my side—and, likewise, all the fun. I can say that EPIC changed the political color of California; it scared the reactionaries out of their wits, and never in twenty-eight years have they dared go back to their old practices. The same thing can also be said of civil liberties; they have never dared to break a strike as they did at San Pedro Harbor before our civil-liberties campaign in the early twenties.
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labor and the pains are vain!
In the last few days of the campaign, Aline Barnsdall, a multimillionairess, came to Craig and told her she had decided to put ten thousand dollars into the fight. Craig told her to take it to Dick Otto, and needless to say she was welcomed at headquarters. Among other things we did with that money was to put on a huge mass meeting in the prize-fight arena in Los Angeles. I had never been in such a place before and have not since. Speaking from the “ring,” I could face only one fourth of the audience at any one time, so I distributed my time and spoke to each fourth in turn. There were four loudspeakers, so everybody could hear, and the audience enjoyed the novelty. The speech was relayed and heard by an audience in the huge auditorium in San Francisco; so I dealt with the problems of southern California for a while and then with those of the north.
I remember on the afternoon before the election a marvelous noon meeting that packed the opera house in Los Angeles. Our enemies had made much of the fact that the unemployed, otherwise known as “bums,” were coming to the city on freight trains looking for free handouts. This had been featured in motion pictures all over the state and had front-page prominence in the Los Angeles Times. I told the audience that Harry Chandler, owner of the Times, had himself come into Los Angeles on a freight train in his youth. I shouted, “Harry, give the other bums a chance!” I think the roar from the audience must have been audible as far as the Times building.
No words could describe the fury of that campaign in its last days. I was told of incidents after it was over. A high-school girl of Beverly Hills told me of being invited to the home of a classmate for dinner. The master of that home poured out his hatred of the EPIC candidate, and the schoolgirl remarked, “Well, I heard him speak, and he sounded to me quite reasonable.” The host replied, “Get up and get out of this house. Nobody can talk like that in my home.” He drove her out without her dinner.
Another woman in Hollywood, a poet rather well known, told me of a businessman she knew who had made his will and got himself a revolver, and was going to the studio where I was scheduled to speak on election night; if I won he was going to shoot me. I did not win, and in my Beverly Hills home that night a group of our friends, including Lewis Browne, sat and awaited the returns. Very soon it became evident that I had been defeated, and Craig, usually a most reserved person in company, sank down on the floor, weeping and exclaiming, “Thank God, thank God!” Our dear Lewis, whom she knew and trusted, came to her and said, “Its all right, Craig. We all understand. None of us wanted him to win.”
Many people rejoiced that night, and many others wept; I was told that the scenes at the EPIC headquarters were tragic indeed. I won’t describe them, but will take you back to that old home in Greenwood, Mississippi, where an elderly judge sat listening to his radio set. It was Craig’s Papa, the one who had “overspoke himself” a little more than twenty years earlier. He had owned a great plantation, much land, and two beautiful homes. He was the president of two banks, vice president of others—one of which he had founded; and in all of them he was a heavy stockholder. The panic had come, the banks had failed, and under the law he was liable to the depositors up to twice the amount of his own holdings. It had wiped him out.
I had warned him of what was coming. I had warned his son, Orman, who also was a lawyer and ran the law business that had been his father’s. Orman had replied, “To show you how much I think of your judgment I will tell you that I am buying a thirty-thousand-dollar property.” That may sound ungracious, but it wouldn’t if you knew Orman, who was a great “kidder.” He bought the property on credit, and he was in trouble too.
Interesting evidence of the respect in which Leflore County held “the Judge”: the people who took over his homes did not let him know it; they let him use both houses for his remaining years. I suppose they did it by a secret arrangement with Orman; anyhow, he was there in his Greenwood house, with his large gardens. All his Negroes were dependent upon him; they worked the gardens and lived on the food—corn and beans, tomatoes, and milk from the cows.
Such was the situation when the Judge sat at his radio set, listening to the news of the California election. It should not surprise you to learn that he was hoping for his son-in-law’s victory, and disappointed at his son-in-law’s defeat.
He was a proud old gentleman. With Craig’s approval, I had sent him a check for two hundred dollars—and that check was in his pocket, uncashed, when he died. But one other gift he did accept. One of his daughters wrote that his greatest trouble was that he had nothing to read. I was taking some fifty magazines, and still do. Every week, after I had read them, my secretary would bundle them up and mail them to the Judge, and it touched our hearts to hear of his pleasure.