Justice for All (17 page)

It did. The crescendo of the Great Maritime Strike occurred in early July 1934, in the form of a series of bloody, spectacular, and theatrical confrontations movingly reconstructed in Kevin Starr's
Endangered Dreams
. On July 3, thousands of longshoremen and 700 policemen faced each other at San Francisco's Pier 38, where police had forced their way in the day before and symbolically restored the port to the employers. The police clanked open the pier doors just after noon. As thousands watched, police escorted five trucks along the waterfront, protecting their cargo from the angry dockworkers outside. The police cordon was intended to agitate, and it succeeded. By midafternoon, the two sides were at war, giving vent to decades of anger and desperation. Longshoremen hurled bricks and pavement, and helmeted police swung clubs and fired gas and bullets. The battle raged and spread for days. Sixty-four people were injured and two strikers died as San Francisco was engulfed in the worst labor violence it had ever experienced.
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Merriam, meanwhile, declined to declare martial law, but delivered troops to San Francisco to secure state property along the waterfront. At his instruction, the 40th Infantry Division of the California National Guard took up positions in The City, and held the areas around Fisherman's Wharf, while two regiments claimed property along the Embarcadero. By mid-July, more than 4,500 soldiers were ensconced in San Francisco, their guns and bayonets symbols of where the state's sympathies lay.
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Labor recognized the force arrayed against it, and opted to shut The City down rather than to challenge the army in combat. At their call, a general strike closed San Francisco from July 16 through July 18. Through those eerie days, San Francisco lay quiet, its normal bustle tamped down by force of labor's will.
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Finally, on July 18, labor's organizing council narrowly approved a motion to lift the general strike, and order began to return the following day. Streetcars resumed operation, and all workers other than Teamsters returned to their jobs. The
San Francisco Call Bulletin
, its pages sighing with relief, observed a “ground-swell indicating return to work.” “Expect S.F. Peace in 24 Hours,” the newspaper headlined to an exhausted, tremulous city.
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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.
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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.”
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Traveling through California's Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys that summer, Hickok winced:

 

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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: