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4) Abolished would be the State's 2½% sales tax, taxes on homes and ranches occupied by the owners and assessed at less than $3,000.
5) Imposed would be heavy taxes on inheritances, incomes, public utilities, banks, unimproved land.
6) Pensioned by the State at $50 a month would be all widows with dependent children, invalids, needy persons over 60 who had lived in California three years.
In Southern California, a prime hot house for odd schemes, EPIC received its full share of attention from Theosophists, spiritualists, vegetarians. Populists, Single Taxers, Rosicrucians, crackpots, faddists and cultists of every sort. But it would not have survived a season had it not also made a strong appeal to California's desperate 425,000 unemployed and their 800,000 dependents. EPIC clubs sprang up overnight until by last week they numbered 1,000. And Upton Sinclair found himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Governor. "I found I was not getting anywhere as a Socialist," explained he, "and so I decided to try to make progress with one of the two old parties." The regular Democratic machine pooh-poohed Candidate Sinclair as a theoretical novice. Theoretical he was, but no novice; in the past 28 years he has run for Congressman in New Jersey, for Congressman, Senator and Governor in California. He has a face that looks like Henry Ford gone slightly fey, a pleasing voice, a wide smile and immense persuasiveness on the rostrum. He hitched EPIC to the New Deal, implied Rooseveltian approval. Too late Senator William Gibbs McAdoo rushed Wartime Propagandist George Creel into the breach. At the primary last August ex-Socialist Sinclair trounced Democrat Creel by nearly 150,000 votes, received a majority over all eight of his opponents, polled the largest Democratic primary vote of any candidate in California history. Democratic registration outnumbered the Republican total for the first time in nearly 60 years.
Nominee & Platform. Two days after his nomination, Sinclair lit out for Hyde Park to receive the congratulations of a highly embarrassed President. Like the fabled Dutchman and the non-stop salt machine, the President was discovering that his New Deal liberalism was undamming an undisciplined torrent of independent Leftist movements all over the country: Huey Long's Share-the-Wealth Clubs, Prestonia Mann Martin's "Commons & Capitals," Dr. Francis Everett Townsend's pension scheme (TIME. Oct. 15). There was an EPIW in Washington. Some 200,000 persons were said to be enrolled in the Utopian Society. If this sort of thing kept on, conservatives predicted that they would probably be clinging to Franklin Roosevelt as the last man left in the country to defend property rights and the capitalist system.
Nominee Sinclair wrapped his long radical arms around President Roosevelt, emerged to beam at reporters: "I talked with one of the kindest and most genial and frank and open-minded and capable men I ever met. . . . We folks out in California speculate as to what he is doing and how much he knows about it. I am very happy to tell the people of California that he knows."