A great article on Upton Sinclair’s run for the California governorship and the manipulation and control of the public by “the haves” at the expense of everyone else — by Greg Mitchell.

How Media Politics Was Born

To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign

by Greg Mitchell

The American political campaign as we know it today was born on August 28, 1934, when Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author and lifelong socialist, won the Democratic primary for governor of California. Sinclair’s landslide primary victory left his opponents with only ten weeks until election day to turn back one of the strongest mass movements in the nation’s history. Extraordinary campaign tactics were clearly called for, and the Republicans pioneered strategies against Sinclair—including the first use of motion pictures to attack a candidate—that have now become the norm in the age of television.

“The Republican success,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has observed, “marked a new advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor.” In another two decades, according to Schlesinger, “the techniques of manipulation, employed so crudely in 1934, would spread east, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.”

Today television commercials make and break candidates, and campaign coverage by the media has a significant impact on public opinion. Substance sometimes appears to count for little, and image for almost everything. It is little wonder that image makers, not experts on the issues, now dominate campaign staffs. It all started fifty-four years ago in California.

In September 1933 Upton Beall Sinclair, the author of The Jungle and more than forty other books, decided to run for governor of California. The amiable, fifty-four-year-old Pasadena resident had run for governor twice previously, both times on the Socialist party line, where he hadn’t won more than sixty thousand votes. This time, however, he was going to run as a Democrat.

After living in California for nineteen years, Sinclair had come to believe that the state was “governed by a small group of rich men whose sole purpose in life was to become richer.” The result of their rule was “hundreds of thousands driven from their homes” and “old people dying of slow starvation.” Most of the land in California, he believed, had been “turned over to money-lenders and banks.” One in four residents of Los Angeles was on relief, receiving an average of four and a half dollars a month, and Sinclair was not confident that President Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration was going to remedy that. After registering as a Democrat, Sinclair began his pursuit of the governorship, intending to win this time.

There were few original planks in Sinclair’s platform, but to his followers he was a prophet. To Time magazine he was an “evangel of nonsense” who “horrified and outraged the Vested Interests.”

“All my life,” Sinclair once boasted, “I have had fun in controversy.” His 1906 documentary novel The Jungle had led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Years later he had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He later won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was nominated for a Nobel Prize by, among others, John Dewey and Bertrand Russell. He was friends with leading thinkers of his day, playing the violin with Albert Einstein and tennis with the radical poet and editor Max Eastman. Charlie Chaplin considered him one of his political mentors. “Practically alone among the American writers of his generation,” the critic Edmund Wilson observed, “he put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them.” Next to Debs and Norman Thomas, he was the most famous socialist of his time.

Sinclair was five feet seven inches tall. By 1933 he had thin, graying hair and wore the pince-nez that would make him easily caricatured during the campaign. To Frank Scully of Esquire he was a “skinny, middle-aged keypounder looking like a carbon copy of Woodrow Wilson that got left out in the rain and shrunk.” His closest friends—and his bitterest enemies—called him Uppie.

“We must summon the courage to take the wild beast of greed by the beard,” Sinclair wrote in his campaign manifesto, I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty. By early 1934 thousands of Californians, many of them on relief, were responding. Sinclair’s rallying cry was End Poverty in California, or EPIC for short. Chapters of his End Poverty League sprang up throughout the state.

Then, as now, California was a caldron of extremes. It had the most left-wing ACLU chapter in the country and the strongest Ku Klux Klan presence outside the South. Strikes by California farm laborers in 1933 were the first in the United States. The state—a land of promise gone especially sour in the Depression—was ripe for EPIC’s soak-the-rich philosophy. Sinclair called for a huge increase in inheritance and property taxes, an unheard-of “steeply graduated” income tax, fifty-dollar-a-month pensions for the needy and the elderly, and the return of foreclosed farms and houses to their original owners. But the heart of his program was a proposal to put the jobless to work in idle factories and on unused farms. “Land colonies,” complete with kitchens and dormitories, would be established. They would trade what they produced with other EPIC enclaves.

There were few original planks in EPIC’s platform. Sinclair had merely adapted ideas from economic salvation plans already put forward by such national leaders (or demagogues) as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin. The local press poked fun at the EPIC plan, but thousands of Californians embraced it, creating what Turner Catledge of The New York Times called “the first serious movement against the profit system in the United States.” By primary day there were a thousand EPIC clubs across the state, and the campaign’s tabloid newspaper, the EPIC News, had a circulation approaching a million copies weekly.

Sinclair spoke to overflow crowds in high school gyms, open fields, and arenas. Observers likened EPIC rallies to religious revivals. Time called Sinclair an “evangel of nonsense,” but to his followers he was a prophet, even a savior. His framed portrait hung in their homes. On primary day, in late August, Upton Sinclair received more than 430,000 votes, a total greater than that of all his eight Democratic opponents combined. “Congrats on nomination,” the politically obsessed poet Ezra Pound wrote from Italy. “Now beat the bank buzzards and get elected.”

Sinclair knew that to become the first Democratic governor of California in more than thirty years, he would need the support of national Democratic leaders, especially of President Roosevelt. A few days after winning the primary, Sinclair journeyed to Hyde Park for a two-hour conference. The President offered no endorsement, saying he was staying out of state politics. Privately Roosevelt told his aides that “it looks as though Sinclair will win if he stages an orderly, common sense campaign but will be beaten if he makes a fool of himself.”

Sinclair’s impending victory in the nation’s sixth-largest state became big news nationally. H. L. Mencken wrote that Sinclair, who “has been swallowing quack cures for all the sorrows of mankind since the turn of the century, is at it again in California, and on such a scale that the whole country is attracted by the spectacle.” Will Rogers observed that if Sinclair could deliver even some of the things he promised, he “should not only be Governor of one state, but President of all ‘em.” Theodore Dreiser called Sinclair “the most impressive political phenomenon that America has yet produced.”

But Time, hinting at what was to come, declared: “No politician since William Jennings Bryan has so horrified and outraged the Vested Interests. … They hate him as a muckraker. They hate him as a Socialist. … They hate him as a ‘free-love’ cultist. … They hate him as an atheist. …” On Wall Street the market value of the twenty top California stocks dropped 16 percent following Sinclair’s nomination.

Sinclair’s friends started calling him Governor, but the title still belonged to a Republican party stalwart named Frank Merriam. The Los Angeles Times, backing the incumbent, declared that the Merriam-Sinclair contest “is not a fight between men: it is a vital struggle between constructive and destructive forces.”

California’s conservative leaders had not taken Sinclair seriously until it was too late to save the Democratic party. Now the whole state was up for grabs, and they would not make the same mistake again. “Those whose stakes in California are greatest,” Time noted, “hold themselves personally responsible to their class throughout the nation to smash Upton Sinclair.” A new kind of political campaign was about to begin.

…

 by Seth Sandronsky

Music superstar James Brown’s influence was widespread. Count me in as a longtime fan of his. Brown’s recent passing marks the end of an era.

What I wish to add to the many accolades and tributes to him is just this. His song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” during the freedom upsurge of African Americans nearly four decades ago had an impact that, I think, is being sidestepped. This says more about commentators than Brown. Allow me to explain.

The lyrics in his 1968 song that I note aptly described the conditions of black workers. They were laboring for low wages. Their employers’ idea of upward mobility was a cruel hoax in ways big and small.

Paul Street is the author of many books, articles, speeches, blogs, reviews, and book chapters. The opening excerpt from his most recent ZNet commentary: 

I keep having the same two crazy dreams. I’m just not sure what they mean. In the first dream, George W. Bush becomes obsessed with disproving the charge that he’s a “chicken hawk” – a military hawk who has never seen or experienced military action and its terrible consequences. He has a vision from God. It comes to him in prayer. He orders his staff to call up the Pentagon and arrange for him to be flown to Iraq to participate in a night patrol. “Make it a dangerous one,” he says. He reaches into his bottom desk drawer for a bottle of whiskey.

“This will show the world I’m not a wimp like they said my Dad was,” Bush thinks to himself. “Hell, I’m going to lead this SURGE myself.”

The Army sets him up with a unit three miles outside the U.S. base in the Iraqi town of Ramadi. He climbs into a moderately well-armored Humvee. Ten minutes into his adventure, with sweat pouring down from under his helmet and the smell of bourbon on his breath, the Decider hears a loud explosion.

Everything goes quiet and numb. His head is swimming. There’s a bright shining light. Soldiers and medical staff are yelling, but he can’t hear a word they’re saying. Everyone around him is staring at him in horror. Some are looking down to where his legs used to be. Bush looks down himself and sees two bloody stumps. “It’s so unreal,” he thinks, “why don’t I feel anything?”

He starts to lose consciousness but is jolted back awake by a sharper pain than he ever knew existed. He looks over to see a badly injured soldier. The soldier couldn’t be more than 18 years old. He’s lost half of his face.

…

by Saba Naqvi Bhaumik

Roy’s causes have all landed her in conflict with the Hindu Right that freely bandies the phrase ‘anti-national’.

Following Convictions

by Craig Crosby 

(also see Five Who Remade American Culture, by Victoria A. Brownworth)

“The most I had ever done was very conventional actions toward change, like writing letters,” said McGarvey, a senior environmental policy major. “I had not done any kind of social protest. I was a little dubious about what would happen. It was a lot more than I had hoped for. I was very surprised.”

EFFECTING CHANGE

McGarvey’s experience is exactly what Unity College associate professor Kathryn Miles had in mind when she first developed the focus for the fall semester’s American literature class. From Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau through speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” the students read the best-known literature of social protest and civil disobedience ever written in this country.

More than just reading, however, the 18 students in Miles’ class had to identify an issue, develop plans to effect change through an act of protest and then carry it out. Some chose well-traveled roads, such as the war in Iraq, while others were moved by the more obscure, such as a Maine law that prohibits owning exotic reptiles.

The project was designed to let the students put into practice the philosophies they read in the books, Miles said. McGarvey, for example, based much of her protest on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which King writes, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust law.”

“Now, more than ever, we can’t have higher education in a high tower,” Miles said. “I really wanted them to do something to make a difference. I feel like we don’t have the luxury of keeping academia abstract. I feel like we have to apply it and do something. I think that, by and large, we as a culture, and this age group, tends to be fairly politically apathetic. Sitting back and complaining is just not an option.”

 On Apocalypto

Juan Santos

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it’s “pure, amoral sensationalism.”

Despite its extreme brutality Apocalypto isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.

The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of Apocalypse Now!, there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.

Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.

Making Stones Weep

by Ron Jacobs

Susan Abulhawa’s novel, Scar of David is a profoundly beautiful story. Set in Palestine, this novel transcends the particular history of the Palestinian people since their expulsion from their lands while simultaneously remaining firmly rooted in that experience.

by Julian Brookes at Mother Jones

This past year the site spawned two books—one, “Mission Unaccomplished”, a collection of interviews Engelhardt did with an assortment of writers (and not only lefties) whose thought he admired, the other, written by former federal prosecutor and Tomdispatch star Elizabeth de la Vega, building a legal case that Bush & co. engaged in a conspiracy to “deceive the American public and Congress into supporting the war.” In his introduction to the collected interviews, “Mission Unaccomplished,” Engelhardt writes, “I saw my mission, modestly accomplished, as connecting some of the “dots” not being connected by our largely demobilized media, while recording as best I could the “mission unaccomplished” moments I felt certain would come,” and this statement stands as a pretty good summary of what Tomdispatch has achieved over these past five years.

The FBI campaign against John Lennon

by Jon Wiener

A Conversation with Chuck D and Brother J

Blood Diamonds and Why I Disagree With Russell

And more….

Interview with Marie Virolle and Aïssa Khelladi

World Literature Today

July/August 2006 issue

 by Michael Toler

Though it sounds almost obscene to say that the violence tearing Algeria apart in the 1990s could be a source of inspiration or trigger for creative writing, in a certain sense it was. Once again, a generation of great writers would emerge out of conflict to create a powerful, evocative body of literature that alternately served as a primal screen denouncing terror and barbarism, a means of grappling and coming to terms with the situation, and a vehicle for imagining a better world. This was not only the case with literature but with other forms of art as well. For example, it was during this period that raï and other forms of Algerian popular music exploded onto the world stage. Perhaps one of the most productive incubators of this new literary talent was a tiny publishing house (an apartment, really) in Paris called Marsa Éditions and the cultural review it publishes: Algérie Littérature/Action. Two people, with a modest budget and a passionate commitment to the task, marked out a space to which writers and artists flocked to raise their voices in favor of a free and pluralistic Algeria. The efforts quickly attracted positive attention, and the publication has since become a journal of record for Algerian literature and art. Many of the artists they were first to publish have seen their work find its way into major publishing houses, and AL /A’s founders are now working to revitalize the Algerian literary scene back in Algeria. In this interview, the editor and director of the journal, Marie Virolle and Aïssa Khelladi, tell the story in their own words.

A list at World Literature Today, compiled by David Shook 

“What makes books — and with them writers — so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?”

— Gunter Grass
1999 Nobel Prize acceptance speech

World Literature Today — Censorship issue

Where is the Iraqi War Literature?

By Nazim Muhanna

Damascus, Asharq Al Awsat – With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed, the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with it. Some attribute this absence to the obscurity of the events taking place, while others fear that their expression might be misconstrued as advocating or commemorating the dictator’s bygone era [by writing against the occupation]. So many different reasons all converge into one question: Where is the Iraqi war literature? What is the cause behind this indifference and when will the pens start to actively recount all that is taking place? How is it that the 33-day war in Lebanon acted as a catalyst that inspired artists to express themselves staging plays, setting up exhibitions and publishing books, whereas Iraq has endured three years of seemingly endless suffering and yet has nothing to show for it? Throughout the centuries, writers, artists and intellectuals have played a major role during times of war. Some glorify heroes and leaders, some express their suffering and outrage while others try to make sense of the events taking place.

by Felicia R. Lee 

In a “Washington Diarist” feature that was to be posted last night on The New Republic’s Web site, tnr.com, and published in the magazine’s Dec. 25 issue, Mr. Crowley says he is the victim of “a literary hit-and-run” because of a 3,700-word article in The New Republic in March.

In that article he accused Mr. Crichton of being “a menacing figure” because he uses his “potboiler prose” to advance causes now dear to Republicans. Mr. Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic and writes primarily about politics.

A New Generation of Nigerian Novelists

by Donna Bryson

“Conflict and corruption, exile and loss. The new novelists chronicling modern Nigeria and its place in the world shy from none of it.”

Les Mis more relevant than ever….

by Jonathan Warman

Film Gives New Meaning to “Watch What You Eat” 

by Trevor Owens Hornet:

Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” is now 100 years old. Published in 1906, the novel upset so many in Washington, that President Roosevelt helped enact the Food and Drugs Act that year.

“Fast Food Nation” stands a chance of creating a similar fervor, but America is a lot bigger than it was in 1906, and corporations much more powerful; the battle is definitely uphill.

Great article by Jeremy Harding on Palestinian novelist Elias Khoury.