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After three years the State was to vote on EPIC's retention. If the vote was favorable the hired factories would be bought outright by the State. That it would be favorable, Mr. Sinclair had no doubt, since he believes Depression will then be as bad as ever and ''workers would soon be clamoring to enter our system.''
The revived Sinclair EPIC, rising from the ashes of the Democratic convention, drove his opponents to fresh despair while his naïve economic reasoning infuriated them. To them, there seemed to be no effective way of bridling this evangel of nonsense. What Mr. Sinclair proposed to do, as they saw it, was to plant a system of Red State-ownership in California, expand it, without limit, until it crushed private enterprise. EPIC, Mr. Sinclair pointed out, could also stand for "End Poverty In Civilization."
There was cold comfort in the thought that, if elected, Mr. Sinclair would not have a legislative majority at Sacramento to execute his ideas. Under Republican Hiram Johnson, California enacted in 1911 the system of initiative & referendum. To initiate any legislation, all that is required is the mandate of 8% of the voters in the previous election. Mr. Sinclair, his eye already on this device, estimates the required number at 160,000, which he can drum up in a week by ordering each of his 1,000 EPIC clubs to get the signatures of 160 voters. He is confident that any majority which would elect him would support any legislation he may choose to write into the statute book by means of the initiative & referendum. California has a strong tradition of passing important laws by the mandatory referendum, most famed being the exclusion of Orientals from owning or leasing property, voted in 1920.
Before Immediate Epic was promulgated, William Gibbs McAdoo tried to soothe his fellow Californians' rising hysteria from the vantage point of distant Washington. Said he: "This 'wolf scare' doesn't frighten me at all." But California property owners were now thoroughly alarmed. As capital continued to emigrate, bums, panhandlers, tramps and just plain jobless continued to immigrate across the State borders. All over the State Motor Vehicle Department clerks reported an influx of travelers with suitcases or blanket rolls who said they heard there was going to be "plenty of work in California" for unemployed. The State's gamblers had their money on Sinclair. "The gamblers know," observed the EPIC nominee.