(See front cover) California is a phenomenon as well as a state. Its soil rises to the highest point in the 48 United States (Mt. Whitney, 14,496 ft.), sinks to the continent's deepest dimple (Death Valley, —276 ft.). In the fragrant gloom of Sequoia National Park indigenously grow some of the world's hugest trees; yet most Californians rest under the shade of the transplanted Australian eucalyptus. Across the State's deserts, prospectors still ride dusty, neat-footed burros, while at Santa Monica mechanics in the Douglas plant build some of the world's fastest passenger planes. To California William Randolph Hearst brings Old World treasures by the carload; at his San Simeon estate third-rate cinemactors sleep in Cardinal Richelieu's ornate bed. In California lunch rooms are built like igloos, puppies, derby hats. At California Institute of Technology work Nobel Prize-winning Geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan and Physicist Robert Millikan. California has more medical quacks than any state in the Union. It righteously keeps Tom Mooney in jail at San Quentin, kneels prayerfully at the feet of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson in Los Angeles. California blinks its eyes from the glare of kleig lights in hysterical Hollywood, is lulled by the mission bells of Santa Barbara. Anything can happen in fabulous California. What will happen in California on Nov. 6 is an enormous question mark placed at the end of a tense and terrible political campaign which will reach its climax on Election Day. Not only will California then choose a new Governor but all the rest of the country will be supplied with a gauge to measure the size and significance of the New Radicalism. Rarely has a state campaign evoked more national attention than that of Upton Sinclair of Pasadena and his plan to "End Poverty in California" which he calls EPIC and Publisher Hearst calls Ipecac. No politician since William Jennings Bryan has so horrified and outraged the Vested Interests. Those whose stakes in California are greatest hold themselves personally responsible to their class throughout the nation to smash Upton Sinclair. They hate him as a muckraker. They hate him as a Socialist. They hate him as an I. W. W. sympathizer. They hate him as a "free love" cultist. They hate him as a Single Taxer. They hate him as an atheist. And last week they hated him most of all because he was bent on becoming a confiscationalist. How It Started. More than a year ago Upton Sinclair sat down in his study to write a pamphlet called I, Governor of California And How I Ended Poverty. In it he presented his EPIC Plan. In substance it carried the far-flung Western barter-group idea one step further by making it an agency of the state. He proposed : 1) A public body called California Authority for Land (CAL), which would appropriate land which was idle, foreclosed, or to be sold for taxes, turn it over to colonies of unemployed for cultivation.
2) California Authority for Production (CAP), which would be "authorized to acquire'' factories where unemployed would make products to exchange with CAL.
3) California Authority for Money (CAM), which would issue script to facilitate barter between CAP and CAL, and bonds to acquire factories and land.