If the prevailing nastiness of modern media-driven politics leaves you with voter’s hangover-disaffected, nauseated and vaguely guilt ridden-then by all means consult a copy of “The Campaign of the Century.” Greg Mitchell’s exhaustive account of California’s 1934 gubernatorial election is hair of the dog in hardcover. It won’t heal you, but it may make you feel less miserable.
Mitchell’s message is simple: things could be worse. They were much worse in 1934, when Upton Sinclair, muckraking author of “The Jungle” and a lifelong socialist, ran as a Democrat against the lackluster Republican incumbent, Frank Merriam. Sinclair pledged to honor the Democratic Party platform and sought in vain to strike an alliance with the Roosevelt White House (FDR, busy contending with his party’s ornery right wing, couldn’t be bothered with the leftist Sinclair). But California’s vested interests-including quite a few Democrats-were not won over. Panicked by his promises to tax the wealthy and attack privilege, Sinclair’s bipartisan opposition-everyone from William Randolph Hearst to Louis B. Mayer to Aimee Semple McPherson-mounted a Red-baiting, dirty-tricks campaign that cast Sinclair as the virtual inventor of communism, atheism and free love.
Most notorious were a series of phony newsreels, uncredited but in fact the work of MGM studio hands under orders from Irving Thalberg, the boy-wonder production chief known for his quality movies. The first two short’s purported to be objective man-on-the-street interviews about voter preferences, although the Merriam supporters were all respectable looking, while the Sinclair people looked like bomb throwers and lunatics. The most devastating of these phony shorts used stock footage and back-lot fakery to show an army of bums descending on California in anticipation of Sinclair’s generous relief programs. Presaging Lee Atwater by 50 years, Thalberg defended his propaganda by saying, “Nothing is unfair in politics.”
Not surprisingly, Merriam defeated Sinclair decisively, although a number of candidates who espoused his End Poverty in California program (a sweeping proposal involving barter and communal living) were elected, and the Republicans’ control of state politics was forever shaken. Most important, the 1934 race marked the first time a statewide campaign was run largely by outsiders-people from public relations, advertising and, anticipating television by two decades, the movie studios. At a stroke, the blueprint for modern politicking was drafted.
The pity is that Mitchell hasn’t done a better job telling this fascinating story. He substitutes windy anecdotes for analysis in a bloated book that could be cut by a third. Still, this is an absorbing tale. To read “The Campaign of the Century” is to understand how the business of electing officials began to get so colossally out of hand.
