ROBERT GARDNER -- The Verdict

The current election for the nation’s president has had some highs and

some lows. As I write this, they are still fighting over the result in

the courts, which is why many are heralding this as one of the more

exciting elections.

It’s certainly not because of the candidates. For that, we can look to

California’s past.

In 1934, we were in the bottom of the Great Depression. Paint

everything gray. Unemployment was rampant, banks went belly up, families

lost their savings. There were soup kitchens, people were hungry, and

there was a general sense of hopelessness. It was a time of great social

unrest with labor strife in the fields and on the waterfront, a period

that gave birth to various ideas of how to cure this great national

disaster.

In California, there were the followers of Dr. Francis Townsend, a

retired physician who sold real estate in Long Beach. The Townsend Plan

was for all old people to be paid $50 a month in scrip that had to be

spent during the next 30 days. The details were a little fuzzy but

included a stamp tax. Shades of the Boston Tea Party. The state also had

the Allen Brothers with their program of “Thirty Dollars Every Thursday.”

California had been strongly Republican since the days of Gov. Hiram

Johnson, but there was a division between the so-called Progressive

branch -- followers of Teddy Roosevelt -- and the conservative branch --

followers of William McKinley and William Howard Taft. The Progressives

outnumbered the conservatives and elected San Francisco Mayor “Sunny Jim”

Rolph as governor. As a sop to the conservatives, they chose the drab,

colorless but staunchly conservative Frank Merriam as lieutenant

governor.

To the dismay of the Progressives, Gov. Rolph died in office, and

Merriam completed the term. When it was up, the conservatives nominated

him to run for the next term. The Progressives couldn’t stomach more of

Merriam, so they nominated a young Los Angeles lawyer, Raymond Haight,

but both candidates were basically mainstream.

Not so with the Democrats. Their candidate reflected much more of the

turmoil of the time. To the horror of conservative Democrats, Upton

Sinclair won the Democratic nomination in the primaries. A registered

socialist, he was the author of books revealing the sordid underbelly of

the capitalistic system.

He ran on a ticket he called End Poverty in California, or EPIC, which

combined several rather startling concepts aimed at quick and ready

answers to society’s ills, most notably “technocracy,” which was

socialism with a quirk. The quirk was that this socialistic society was

to be run by engineers. Why not? Engineers could build dams and bridges.

Why not let them build a better world? The logic was inescapable.

Sinclair also espoused the Utopian Society, which combined pure

socialism with some rather quirky mystic rites, somewhat comparable to

those of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was a vicious election. Poor Sinclair had his ardent supporters,

but his somewhat goofy ideas scared the hell out of a lot people. The

press, with a leg up from the movie studios, did a number on him, but it

was still going to be close. No one, pundit or non-pundit, tried to

outguess the result until the last vote was counted.

When it was, Gov. Merriam won with more than 1 million votes, but

Sinclair was right behind him with more than 900,000. Raymond Haight

trailed with 300,000.

It didn’t end up in the courts, but it was an exciting election.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge. His

column runs Tuesdays.