At the Los Angeles municipal elections last week, candidates of the End Poverty In California party took a terrific beating, won only four out of 18 contested offices. From San Francisco the conservative Chronicle sardonically observed that in the city where EPIC was founded a year ago the voters were apparently tired of "magic hocus-pocus." But undaunted Upton Sinclair, emerging from several weeks' confinement in a sanitorium, declared: "The outcome of this election will not affect in the least our plans to spread the EPIC movement throughout the country." He promised that an EPIC convention in Los Angeles this week would prepare to put a national ticket in the field next year.
Whether or not EPIC was a going or gone concern, last week's election served to turn the nation's eyes back to the Golden State. What had happened since those hectic days last autumn when fey-eyed Gubernatorial Candidate Sinclair had half the people in his State, and not a few outside, scared to death of his political Utopia (TIME, Oct. 22)? More specifically, what had happened to Republican Frank Finley Merriam, the champion who defeated him?
When Upton Sinclair was campaigning on his EPIC program of State Socialism, panic-stricken capital started flying out of California, the motion picture industry cried "Confiscation!" and announced it would move to Florida if Sinclair won, and the San Francisco Argonaut wailed: "The catastrophe of Sinclair's election would be drastic enough to overthrow all that is fine and good and stable in California life!"
Last week cries of the same distressed timbre were howling around the head of victorious Governor Merriam. The army of itinerant jobless from other states, first attracted to California by EPIC's glittering promises, had mounted to 75,000. Agitator Harry Bridges, the tough little Australian who promoted the San Francisco general walkout, was busy agitating longshoremen's strikes. Closer to home, Opposition legislators were bent on starting a move to have Governor Merriam recalled as soon as the six months' legal period of grace had elapsed following his inauguration. But the biggest headache of all for Governor Merriam was the problem of raising funds to meet the $347,000,000 California budget, swollen by mounting relief costs.
Frank Merriam is a moon-faced lowan who crept into Sacramento as Lieutenant Governor in 1930, succeeded to the Governorship when "Sunny Jim" Rolph died last year and black-jacked California's influential Republicans into nominating him against Sinclair by threatening to withhold State troops from the San Francisco strike last summer. He is an arch political trimmer, paying harmless lip service to the Townsend Plan and at the same time complaining to his capitalist supporters that he is surrounded by fanatics. But even Frank Merriam could not trim the fact that California desperately needed revenue.